RVR4|Chapter 10: Cici's Request (Patreon)

Author's Note: Yes, I know I forgot to schedule this one. I wasn't happy with the original and rewrote it.

Yuki wouldn't let go of her shotgun.

She had it across her knees when Tess and Marcus came into the workshop that morning, and Asha had to pry it off her before she could get at the brace. Yuki watched it go with more concern than she'd shown for her collarbone.

"I want to see if the skill reloads both barrels. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to find out."

"Find out with pistols." Asha worked her fingers along the bone. "Right hand only unless you really need it. I can't use [RAPID MEND] on you again for a bit, yeah?"

Breath hissed through Yuki's teeth. Tess dropped her toolbag on the nearest bench and started rifling through it, which was easier than watching Asha's thumbs.

"We can go down whenever you're ready," she said into the bag.

"She's ready when I say." Asha sat back. "Bone's mostly better, but it's going to take a day before it's whole. Skill can only do so much. The rifle and the shotgun stay up here."

Mikhail collected both long guns. Yuki's eyes followed him all the way to the rack across the room.

"You can look at them from there," he told her, hooking a stool over with his boot. "If you're good, I'll flip them over later so you can see the other side."

Yuki scoffed and sat. "Then I'm going to need heavier rounds for the pistols," she told Tess. "Something that'll get through plating. Any ideas?"

Tess had several, none of them quick. She wrote it on the job list inside the parts cabinet. Marcus eased onto the bench behind her and poured coffee from the thermos he'd brought. Bee had spent the walk over catching him up on the last two days, and she hadn't finished.

"Everyone has recovered overnight," Bee said from the workshop speaker. "Ten AP each for Petra, Mikhail and Yuki. Fifteen for Tess."

"And me!" Cici was bouncing around Marcus's heels. "I am fully charged!"

Petra came through the door with a vibroblade already in her hand. "I want to try my skill. Like, really badly. Who wants to watch?"

Sara met her in the doorway with a datapad and backed her into the room without touching her. "In a moment. Vex's inspection request arrived first thing this morning. He has asked to come to the house. Your father is keeping him on a call about the east gate, which needs nothing. He is trying for a later date."

Tess stopped with the cabinet open. "He's coming back?"

"He is asking to, and we think he wants to meet with you again. I will tell you when Amos has a day. We are running out of time."

The list had project notes and half a dozen ideas on it. After Yuki's injury, their timeline had been extended, and Tess wasn't sure what to do next.

Tess sighed and joined Petra. "Alright, let's go see your fancy new skill."

Out on the training ground, someone had placed a large chunk of scrap plasteel across something like a sawhorse.

Petra grinned at Tess as the others followed, including Sara. "Everyone stay behind me. Five AP is going to be awesome, I just know it."

Holding her vibroblade low, she planted both feet and swung with both hands, as if the blade had grown heavier.

Tess almost missed it. The air bent and shot out from the slash, across the training yard toward the plasteel. The top half of the slab slid sideways along the cut, scraped, and dropped to the ground with a thud. Past it, a bright diagonal scar opened on the boundary wall.

"Oh. Yeah, that'll do." Petra ran for the fallen piece, laughing, and caught Mikhail's sleeve on the way to drag him along. "Look at that. Look how perfect the cut is."

He crouched and ran his hand across the smooth surface of the cut. Then he looked at the wall. Sara was also looking at the wall.

"Oops," Petra said. "Well, now Father has something real to talk to the auditor about, I guess."

Petra wobbled on her feet, and Mikhail had to steady her.

"I'm fine. Five AP is just a lot." She swallowed, and then laughed. "The Alpha isn't going to stand a chance against that."

Cici waited until they were back in the workshop and Tess had shut the door. Then she planted herself between Tess and the bench.

"I want to know what Structural Modification inside my chassis can do. Is now a good time?"

Tess had meant to do this last night, before the charging pad and bed became the only things either of them wanted. She crouched, and [EVALUATE] opened the chassis up.

·········································COMPANION UNIT TC-847Designation: Therapy Class CompanionLoot Seed: 0xA84Status: OnlineHardware: OperationalPower: 10.0 / 10.0 AW — SufficientUser Tech Skill: 12·········································Companion Protocols ...... Online [Tech 4]Environmental Awareness .. Online [Tech 3]Autonomous Navigation .... Online [Tech 4]Behavioral Adaptation .... Online [Tech 7]Loyalty Binding .......... Online [Tech 3]Structural Modification .. Available [Tech 11]·········································

Available. Tess followed the connections out from that row. Assemblies she'd always taken for bracing were folded, not fixed, and now they had somewhere to go.

"Your frame changes," she said. "Your joints, the plates along your back. It runs on your own power once I turn it on, and you can come back to this shape." She rubbed a thumb along the seam behind Cici's ear. "I don't think I can influence it. I can just turn the system on for you."

Cici was quiet a moment. "Would I be able to help more with it? I don't mind scouting and holding the door, but there has to be more I can do."

Tess traced the assemblies a second time. "I think so. We'd have to test it."

Cici leaned into her hand. "Then I'd like to. Please."

Tess spent one AP through [INTERFACE] and took her hand away as something heavy shifted under it.

"Oh!" Cici said. "I can see many options. I don't like any of them. One moment while I write my own."

Cici's forelegs lengthened first. Her chest dropped between them and her back legs spread to take the weight. Plates lifted along her spine. Two housings rolled out of her flanks and locked forward, each ending in a grooved barrel. She stared down one side, then the other, turning so far that Tess had to shuffle out of the way. A new line appeared under her power readout: a remaining-runtime estimate.

"I have guns now!" A jingle played.

Petra was on the floor beside her before Tess could get up. Cici tried to show her both barrels at once, backed into the bench, and started wagging her tail. The whole back half of her swung with it, and a jar of washers rolled toward the edge before Mikhail caught it.

"Sorry! I wanted you to see. It says they are called coilguns and use ammunition." Cici turned to Yuki. "Quick! I need some ammunition."

"You have gauss cannons!?" Yuki practically shouted. "Can you even stand properly?"

Cici considered her feet. "Hmm. I am working on that."

Her back feet shifted and split open on a black layer inside, and her paws became wheels. Then she rocketed around the room like a runaway car, slammed into a tool cabinet, and fell over.

"I think I should practise somewhere bigger," Cici said as her body shifted back into its normal form. "Don't laugh at me! I have guns now!"

Tess had both hands on her knees and couldn't stop laughing. "Let's see if we can find you something to load into them first."

The private lift took them down to the staging room, where Yuki laid two sidearms on a crate. Asha watched her draw and holster twice before nodding. Yuki emptied the first pistol into the wall, holstered it, and emptied the second. Then she drew the first again, glanced at it, and showed Tess the magazine. Full.

"Oh, I can use this," Yuki said. "Costs AP, but I don't have to do any of the fiddly bits one-handed." Her other hand drifted toward the second holster. She looked at Asha and pulled the hand back. "I know. But I'm not going to be nearly as useless as I thought."

Cici was next. The iron slugs Tess had fabricated slammed into the wall and left a network of spider-web cracks.

"I very much enjoy this," Cici said, and fired two more rounds into the wall, which did even more damage.

Tess used [EVALUATE] to measure the power draw with Bee. "About fifteen minutes from full if you shoot like that. And you've only got so many rounds."

"I can stop between things," Cici said. "I... guess I don't have to shoot all the time."

"We'll need to bring your charging pad and hook it up to a capacitor," Tess said.

Mikhail threw his shield onto Petra a few times, experimenting, while Yuki collected her magazines.

"How far can you get from the shield before it snaps back?" Yuki asked.

"About five meters, I think," Mikhail said.

"So you'll be keeping it on Tess basically the entire time we're fighting, right?"

Mikhail shrugged. "Probably, yeah."

"Not gonna happen," Asha said. "You are up front with the Princess. Yuki and me hang out back with her. Worked last time, works this time."

"I will also hang back with Tess," Cici said. "Fulfilling my role as a companion unit!"

A jingle played, but instead of her usual pleasant beeping, it was a speedy riff on a grinding electric guitar. "Oh, I liked that one!"

"Okay then," Yuki said, turning to Petra. "I doubt it, but do you feel any stronger, or is that skill any easier to use?"

Petra shook her head. "Nope, I can feel the Aether is... there? But it's faint."

Yuki walked to the elevator and beckoned her towards it. "Let's go see if it's any better on Floor 2. There's a lot more down there."

Petra got up and joined her. "Be right back," she said.

Tess took the opportunity to sit down against a capacitor and dig out a protein bar she'd bought from a vending machine in Sector 7. It tasted awful, and she wasn't even sure how long ago she'd bought it. She kept eating it anyway.

BEE: That bar expired seven months ago.

"You don't know that."

BEE: I can read the wrapper from three different angles.

Tess took another bite. Across the room, Mikhail had sat down with his back to the lift doors, exactly where he'd sat last night, and was working through a sleeve of crackers. He held one out without looking. She traded him half the bar for it, and he chewed twice, considered, and handed the rest back.

"That's... really bad."

Asha dropped onto the crate beside Tess, took Mikhail's half, and popped it into her mouth. "The expired ones are the best," she said.

The lift chimed before anybody could process that. Petra came out first, holding a length of steel rebar with a kink in the middle, and Yuki came out right behind her, shaking her head.

"You did not bend it," Yuki said. "It was already bent."

Petra walked straight past her and held the bar up. "Hey, Mikhail. I bend steel now."

Mikhail took it, turned it over, and handed it back to her. "Congratulations. I remember my first bar."

"Yeah, okay," Petra said, sitting on the floor next to Tess and still grinning. "It's real. Down there, everything's boosted. I'm faster, I hit harder. I could feel the air, like it was helping me."

"And your skill?" Tess asked.

Petra's grin slipped a little. "Still five. I guess it has to get a lot thicker than that before it gets cheaper." She looked at her hands. "And it all dropped off the second the lift came up."

Tess looked at the MK-VII clipped to Petra's harness. The crack in the housing had grown since she'd last looked, a dark line running from the emitter mount halfway to the edge.

"Give me that," she said.

Petra unclipped it and handed it over. "It works fine."

"Yeah, until it doesn't." Tess ran her thumb along the crack. "I'll go up and take a look at it."

"Alright," Petra said. "I think we're done here anyways."

The workshop had gone quiet by mid-afternoon. Yuki was asleep sitting up on the couch, the way Asha had told her to, and Cici was curled on the floor beside her with one ear twitching.

Tess had the MK-VII open on the bench. [EVALUATE] laid the damage out for her: severe stress through the housing and substrate, all of it from plasma. She couldn't make it a plasma shield like Mikhail's, but she could at least fix it.

The very first fastener she tried was stripped. In fact, all of them were, and the driver in her toolbelt wasn't going to get them out.

"Aw, come on," she muttered.

Marcus had been watching from the next stool with his coffee. He set the cup down, reached into his bag, and put a case on the bench beside her. Tess knew it before he opened it. She'd carried it home from Vera's herself not long ago.

The plasteel tools sat in their foam, every one of them clean.

"Use those," he said.

"Dad, those are yours."

"They were mine. I sold them to keep the lights on, and Vera gave them back so you'd have something decent to work with." He nudged the case toward her. "They've been sitting in a drawer at home since. Your mom and I always said we'd stop needing tools like these. Open a shop, fix somebody's heater when it broke." He shrugged. "You did open the shop. You're just fixing bigger things than heaters."

Tess picked up the driver. It bit into the ruined fastener as if it had never been damaged, and the fastener came out in a few turns.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's nice."

Marcus smiled into his coffee.

After that the work went fast. She lifted the plate, sanded the crack back to bright metal, and filled it. Then she cut a brace from scrap plasteel and fitted it across the inside of the housing, so the next hit would spread out instead of running straight down the old line. The precision plasteel tools did exactly what she asked and nothing else. She'd forgotten what that felt like.

Mikhail came in halfway through and stood at her shoulder without saying anything. When she seated the brace, he let out a breath.

"It was in my family a long time," he said.

"I know." Tess closed the housing and spent one AP through [INTERFACE] to settle the field back onto the new frame. The emitter came up clean, and the charge indicator ran steady along the edge. "It'll still only take a hit or two before the shield dies, but at least the emitter won't split in half."

"That's more than enough," Mikhail said. "Petra's already dodging bolts. Now I'm not even sure she'll need it."

Petra had come in behind him. She held out her hand for the shield, and Tess gave it to her.

"Thanks, Tess," she said, hooking it onto her harness. "And you're not wrong, Mikhail. You'll see."

The door opened again. Sara came in with her datapad, and she didn't sit.

"We could not delay him further," she said. "Auditor Vex is coming tomorrow morning. He has asked to see how the team trains."

Nobody said anything. Tess glanced toward storage room three and the private lift inside it, and she saw everyone else look that way too.

"Once he is here," Sara said, "only the Founders know when he leaves. I will not open that lift while he is in the house." She looked at each of them in turn. "If you are going down, it has to be tonight."

Yuki pumped a fist in the air, then winced. "When do we leave?"

Tess loaded the plasteel tools into her toolbelt, replacing her old, weathered ones. Cici had lifted her head off her paws and was watching her.

"Okay," Tess said, fastening her toolbelt back onto her waist. "We fix the node tonight."