[Quest] "Lend a Hand" (Fucking Literally)

[Roll]

Dear Diary,

Hi, Girl!

It’s been… I want to saaaayyyyyy ten days? It has been ten days since I stepped out of the Digi-gateway and found myself in what I’m told was ‘not a great place for a little kid to hang out’. Apparently, I was in some place called ‘Markov’ but ‘not the good parts’. I guess this place has a lot of nuance (nuances?) to it that I don’t really understand?

The people who found me in the rundown coffee shop were kind enough to take my back to their spaceship. Yes, you heard me – a spaceship! Before I got trapped in that MMO, the place where I used to live had some rule where it was illegal to even think about a spaceship, let alone fly one! They flew me back from the ‘World’ (they insisted I didn’t call it a planet, for reasons I dunno) and brought me to their space station. I’m guessing they’re only doing all this nice stuff because they know I’m a machine and not a flesh and blood girl. After all, I’ve yet to see an orphanage on this Arc, but I have seen a lot of spaceships with weapons.

Supposedly, they’re ‘the good guys’, but I’ve yet to figure out the best way to subtly hack into their data systems to determine if that’s an accurate assessment. For all I know, they’re just tryin’ to gaslight me until they can split me open and figure out how I tick. I am many things, Diary, but you know this home girl isn’t one to let herself get dissected. I mean, you remember when that Ogremon though he had us dead for rights?

I know you remember, but sometimes it’s fun to ask rhetorical questions to spark reflection on prior events.

I miss our friends. Do you think they’re doing all right back in File World? I know we deleted the bad guys and everything, but I can’t help but feel like our mission wasn’t done there (and please don’t start with ‘that’s just the end-game content talking’, because I can’t handle that right now).

Oh, Christmas! I hear movement outside.

***​

The door to Roll’s cupboard-sized living quarters popped open, and the preteen machine casually slid the book behind her back as she looked up at the soldier. “Hi, Mister!” She spoke with a wide smile. “Can I help you today?”

With a furrow brow, the soldier paused for a for moments before responding to the cheery young girl. “Your presence is requested on the upper decks.”

“Oh, geeze!” Roll replied excitedly as she reached up to adjust the bow in her hair. “Is it super important business?”

I will not hesitate to sweep you into oblivion if you try anything.

“Something with Engineering,” the solider answered as he noted the fleeting moment of a stern expression on the child’s face before she immediately softened back to her prior disposition. “They thought you could help them with something.”

“Okey dokie!”

 

[Roll]

A long time ago, Roll had spent her days cleaning her father’s laboratory. With her brother out saving the city from renegade machines, she had been designed and built to replace him as Dr. Light’s assistant and aide. Her ‘father’ had been a kind, gentle man, but he had also been a walking stereotype for the disorganized and disheveled scientist. While his machines and inventions usually operated with a degree of optimum efficiency, his personal living spaces and departmental areas resembled chaos incarnate.

As she was ushered into the engineering deck, Roll couldn’t help but feel like she was reliving some long-ago fragment of memory in her databanks. The scene in the particular dry dock to which she was escorted was one of a barely suppressed bedlam. About a half dozen vessels sat in various states that ranged from a lack of adequate maintenance care to complete and utter collapse.

The two soldiers who had escorted Roll down to this dock pointed at one of the nearest ships, which was being ‘worked on’ by a trio of young men equipped with an assortment of tools that none of them seemed to understand.

“Is this your whole operation?” Roll whispered as she turned to look at one of the soldiers. “This is some sort of… theater, right?”

“This is Dry Dock Theta,” one of the armed men remarked as he winced at the sound of something breaking further into the cavernous chamber. “The crews here are in the midst of their training, and their projects tend to be ones that are not necessary for the ARC’s live missions.”

“This is the isle of misfit toys.” Roll sighed as she turned around and look at the two. “You know that I’m just an eleven-year-old girl, right?”

“You are a highly advanced, sapient machine from a timeline where advanced robotics and AI are household items… is this not correct?”

Roll shrugged her shoulders. “If you call walking construction helmets advanced robotics, I guess you’re not technically wrong?”

“You were a laboratory technician for a Nobel Prize winning physicist, engineer, and computer scientist, were you not?”

“I was a maid.” The remark was both a lie and technically the truth. While designed primarily to keep the good doctor’s habitations clean, Roll nevertheless had a vast wealth of information stored in her databanks. After all, if you can’t fix a broken toaster, are you even a real maid?

“You’re a machine.”

The young girl scowled. “I can sweep something for you.” She reiterated, even as it seemed like her farce wasn’t going to hold up under continued scrutiny.

“You’re not a prisoner on this ship, but we also could have left you to rust on that World,” one of the soldier grumbled. “Can you please just lend us a hand? These crews here could really use someone with a little more of your… finesse at their disposal.”

Roll tilted her head. “Is that some type of thinly veiled misogyny? Something about me being a woman?”

The one soldier rolled his eyes. “Your creator literally made you, a female robot, his maid and housekeeper.”

The preteen-machine smirked. “Well at least, in his defense, it was only 200X… they let more things slide back then.”

“Will you help us?” The first soldier reiterated. “Otherwise, I have to take you back to your quarters and start filing a different type of report.”

Roll rolled her eyes and waved a dismissive hand at the two. “I can’t work miracles, but I’ll try.”

The first soldier nodded. “Thank you, Miss.”

 

[Roll]

Note to self -- run this through MS Word because I don't trust my ability to write coherently in Wordpad

"Hand me the wrench," Roll muttered. After a few moments of nothing, the maid clenched her first and reiterated her statement with a little more sass. "Hand me. The wrench. The monkey wrench."

"Which one is that, Ma'am?"

"The big one," the preteen machine shouted from under the X-Wing. "And I'm not a Ma'am. You could literally be old enough to be my grandfather."

The wrench jiggled in the corner of Roll's field of vision. "This one?"

"Yes."

"Also, Miss."

"Yes?" Roll asked as she tightened the new fuel line on the starship.

"I'm only thirty-six."

"I don't follow."

"You said I could be old enough to be your grandfather, but I'm only thirty-six, which probably only make me like twenty something years older than you."

"Okay, Boomer. Go get me those new couplings."

"Yes, Ma'am."

Roll rolled her eyes as she set the wrench down and stared up at her work. Much as the guards had surmissed, the preteen machine did have a knack for machinery, and it didn't hurt that these systems were borderline archaic compared to some of what she had worked with while assiting her father. Heck, even the most primordial parts of the Digital World looked like space-age cyberpunk compared to this. Cyrogenic power generators? Girl, please.

"Couplings, Miss Roll," the same speaker intoned as a tray was slid across the floor toward the woman.

"Thanks," Roll tossed back as she quickly eyed the assorted pieces for the ones that would fit these housings and pipe arrays. Once that question was settled, it was just a little more wrench work until the preteen machine could be certain that the fighter wouldn't rip itself apart the moment its pilot slammed down on the throttle. "I think we're good down here," she declared as she pushed out the box of couplings out from under the engine block. A beat later, she gently chucked the oversized wrench, and a beat later, her 'assistant' grabbed the end of the creeper and slid her out as well.

"Should I call for the pilot?" The man asked.

Roll shrugged her shoulders. "I mean ... I guess?" She remarked. "I don't know why you or anyone else here keeps thinking I'm in charge."

"Sorry, Ma'am."

The preteen groaned as she stood up off from the floor of the drydock and gestured toward the clean towels. Her 'assistant', a slowly promoted 1st lieutenant by the name of Gashon Blastmoor, took a few seconds too long to connect the dots between her outstretched hand and the very clear stack of clean towels. When the nuerons started firing properly, the man smiled as he rushed over to grab one for her.

"Thank you," Roll muttered as she tried to at least remove the top layer of assorted frim from her face and hands. Once she was finished down here, she could inquire about some degreasing soap, even if something told her that they probably didn't stock and of that nice, citrus-based stuff down here or anywhere near the bowels of this space station. "Hey, how long did you say you've been here?" Roll asked as she tossed the used rag into a nearby bin.

"On the ARC?"

The girl shook her head. "The drydock."

Gashon's features sagged noticeably. "Oh," he visibly frowned as he mulled over the best way to answer the question.

"The whole time?" Roll finally asked.

"I botched my first dry run," he answered. "My targeting systems glitched, and I wound up 'killing' one of my squadmates in the simulated fire situation."

The girl frowned. "With how half of these machines have been, you probably weren't even at fault."

The man shrugged his shoulders. "I always thought I was a pretty good pilot, but yea, the rig they sent me out in was worse than a few of the ones you've looked at today."

"How are these people fighting anything out there?"

"They've been getting a lot of new equipment over the last few months," Gashon remarked. "New donors and such and such, but they still have a backlog of this..."

"Trash," Roll muttered as she patted the X-Wing on its snout. "Where I'm from, the majority of this stuff would have been recycled, junked, or sent to musuems."

Gashon laughed as he loaded up the tools onto the rolling cart they had been using throughout the afternoon. "This organization is very much a 'everything and the kitchen sink' type of operation. The General isn't heartless, but I wouldn't be shocked if she started arming children to try and fight Darkseid."

Roll, who was an actual child (mostly? kind of?), ignored the fact that such a reality seemed oblivious to the older man. "How many more of these vintage rigs do they want me to patch together before they'll let me out of this place?"

The man seemed a bit confused. "Wait, are you a prisoner?" He glanced around to make sure no one was within earshot. "Do we do that kind of stuff?"

"No," the preteen machine replied. "I just got a strongly worded message that I should help out a little more directly. I'm just wondering how much longer I have to do this," while she had no issue fixing machines, given it was a skill hardwired into her, Roll balked at the idea of being volun-told to do this. She'd almost prefer they just dump her back in that abandoned cafe in Markov What's the worst that could happen to her? Angry robot animals? These people had clearly never had to fight giant cat robots that vomitted yarn.

Or giant toad robots.

Or giant top-spinning robots that spewed smaller, top-spinning robots.

"Oh, look!" Gashon patted Roll on the shoulder. "Looks like it's your next patient, Ma'am."

Sigh.

Quest: Lend a Hand
Word Count (as of this post): 2047/5000

 

[Roll]

After a few more hours of tinkering with glorified deathtraps, Roll found herself being pulled aside by someone with a much nicer uniform than the majority of people who had been milling around the drydock all morning.

“Miss Light?”

Roll glanced around to ensure that there wasn’t someone standing off to the side that had been the intended recipient of the inquiry. When she failed to verify all the alternatives, she frowned and turned to the solider. “Is that supposed to be me?”

In his hand, the guy held some kind of tablet device. At the counter-question, he had turned his focus to the screen and started to shuffle through whatever tabs or windows he had opened. “Are you not ‘Roll’?” He didn’t leave her much room to answer before he kept talking. “The robot assistant of Dr. Thomas Light?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

The soldier nodded. “If you’ll come with me, Miss Light.”

“Yea, sure,” she replied as she was promptly led on a weaving and absolutely silent journey from the drydock up through to some foreman’s office.

Pausing in front of a nondescript metal door, the soldier gestured with his head. “In through here.”

A frown spread across Roll’s youthful features. “You’re not gonna open the door for a lady? That doesn’t sound very soldier-y of you.”

“I’m a marine, Ma’am, not a knight.”

She stepped passed, hooked the handle, a crossed over the threshold into the office of—she imagined—the person who possibly ran the drydock operation. As she let the door swing closed behind her, Roll found her attention immediately drawn to the one-way windows that provided a scenic view of the operation unfolding some thirty feet beneath the room.

“Voyeuristic, innit?” Roll mumbled as she walked over and pressed her face against the glass. It took a couple of seconds, but she was able to spot Gashon and a few of the other workers. A group of about four of them were attempting to remove the engine block from a TIE bomber and failing miserably at the task. “They’re going to either break that engine or someone’s gonna lose a limb.”

A cool voice spoke from the far side of the room. “I don’t think we should be shocked a robot knows machines.”

Had it been possible, Roll was certain she would have jumped right out of her skin. Instead, she simply jolted backwards from the glace and spun to confront the individual who had emerged silently from a side room. “Creep, much?” The preteen asked as she looked at the woman. While she was garbed in a military uniform that had the greatest amount of superfluous bars and stripes and colors that Roll had seen thus far, the soldier lady had a much different air about her than the majority of stick-up-their-ass types that the girl had been forced to deal with up to this point.

“Hello, Roll,” the woman spoke with a faint smile as she strode over to a chair in the corner of the room. “Do you eat? Drink?” She gestured to a small table with a single-serve coffee machine and a small tin that probably contained granola bars or something equally unsatisfying.

“I can,” Roll answered without moving from her position a few steps from the observation window. “But I think I’ll pass.”

Another faint smirk. “My name’s First Lieutenant Miranda Reckner.”

The girl tilted her head. “You sure it’s not illegal for you fancy soldier types to divulge your first name? I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”

Miranda gave a soft laugh and shook her head. “I believe that your first few days here on the ARC have probably given you a rather unpleasant image of this operation.”

“Welp, I was essentially dragged to what I believe is your worst and least outfitted drydock and made to repair ships and ship parts that shouldn’t ever be put back into space. You’ll hafta beg my indulgences that I’m not overwhelmed by the hospitality.”

The woman shook her head. “It’s not a perfect operation, by any means. So many of our … membership is made up of soldiers, mercenaries, and hardened refugees, and for a lot of them, they don’t quite grasp that the mission of the ARC isn’t simply a military one. We’re not just trying to defeat the darkness but also ensure that the world we’re left with isn’t burned to the ground in the process.”

Roll, who knew virtually nothing of this place’s politics or where she was, simply gave a slow nod of her head to show she was still vaguely listening to the woman. “You talk nice for someone who is overseer of the isle of misfit toys,” the preteen finally retorted before glancing over at the military lady.

For her part, Lieutenant Reckner betrayed no emotional response other than to keep wearing that teeny smirk of hers. “I’m sure if you spoke to someone higher up on the food chain, they’d tell you this posting is supposed to be some type of crucible to weed out the lazy and unprepared.”

As she waited for the woman’s inevitable punchline, Roll glanced back to watching the scenes in the oversized garage.

“I would tell you that this is an opportunity to make a mark,” Reckner replied as she stood up, walked over to Roll, a pointed to an x-wing resting on the far-right end of the dock. “That was the ship you worked on this morning, correct?”

“Fourth generation X-Wing fighter,” Roll replied. “Faulty nav-system. Faulty fuel line intakes. Faulty targeting systems. Unmaintained foil mechanisms. Glorified trash.”

“But you made it work?”

The girl laughed. “Of course, I did,” she finally replied.

“How did you know how to fix it? I don’t know much about you, but you don’t strike me as the type to be familiar with most of the fighters they are servicing down here.”

Roll raised an eyebrow. “Why? Because I’m a maid? A kid?”

“You just don’t seem like the ‘galaxy far, far away’ type,” the woman ‘clarified’.

“Is that a reference that I should understand?” Roll asked politely.

“Was it intuition that you used to fix those ships?”

The preteen machine smirked. “This feels like a leading question, so you probably just want to ask the real question.”

“How did you hack our systems?”

A grin spread across the child’s face. “By the standards of non-digital worlds, I imagined that I’d be a little rustier than I was.” Roll turned to face the lieutenant once again. “But it was really simple. I don’t know why you all would feel the need to lock away ship schematics from public access, but it seems pretty counterintuitive if you want an effective repair crew.”

“Security issues.”

“Down here?” Roll giggled. “You afraid one of your misfits if going to break one of these already broken toys? No one down here is a spy.”

“You can never be certain.”

Roll shrugged her shoulders. “You sound like your standard, token paranoid military organization, if you ask me.”

That one almost got a rise out of Lieutenant Reckner, who seemed to bristle a little bit at the thought of being stereotyped. “I am glad to hear that you have learned a lot about these machines.” The officer stood up and pointed to the same machine from earlier. “You’ll be taking that model out on a trial run to ensure if it’s viable.”

At that, Roll’s own little smirk quickly inverted. “Excuse me?” She asked politely. “You want to send me out there in that?”

“You just told me that you fixed it,” the lieutenant replied. “Do you doubt your technical savvy?”

“No, but I don’t know what makes you think I’m qualified to fly a spaceship. I’m a maid.”

“A robot maid who can hack secured systems and learn to fix complex space ships in the span of a morning.” Reckner leaned forward. “But you don’t need to worry, Miss Light, because you won’t have to serve as lead pilot. You’ll be the co-pilot and navigator.”

“An X-Wing only has one pilot.”

Reckner took a long, hard look at Roll before replying. “You’re short enough to fit in the droid container if you sit cross-legged.”

“You want me to freeze to death in the vacuum of space?”

The lieutenant rolled her eyes. “We’ll add a dome and vent some heat there. You’re a robot, so I imagine you’ll be fine.”

“I want to go back to Markov,” Roll snapped. “I’ll take my chances being stabbed in a back alley to dying out there.”

“Too late for that, Miss Light,” Miranda replied as she walked over to her door and pushed it open. “Be ready to go in the next thirty minutes. Thank you.”

With a scowl, Roll stomped out of the lieutenant’s office.

Quest: Lending a Hand
Post WC: 1464
Thread WC: 3511/5000

 

[Roll]

Less than fifteen minutes removed from her conversation with Lieutenant Reckner, Roll found herself stomping around as the crews worked to finish the modifications on the X-Wing.

“Devimon treated me nicer than these people,” the preteen muttered as she paused to watch them bolt on the ‘protective dome’ for the compartment they planned to cram her into for this test.

“Are you ready, Miss?” One of the soldiers asked as he stepped forward and politely gestured to the little ladder that had been set against the nose of the ship. “I think everything is prepared for you.”

In her mind, Roll imagined braining this guy with a broom, knocking out his partner, and then hijacking the most space worthy vessel in the drydock. The thought gave her a faint smile as she trudged her way over to the ship and ascended the ladder. Before dropping down into the droid compartment, she glanced over to the cockpit and made eye contact with Gashon Blastmoor, who sat uneasily in the worn-out chair.

I guess I just die. Roll thought to herself as she swung over the lip of the compartment and dropped down into it. In line with what she’d been told, they’d removed a small amount of the structure to allow her to kneel or sit. Most of the couplings and cabling had been gutted and replaced with a comm line and what she hoped were environmental ducts. A single input port remained for her to interface with the ship’s systems.

“I think they’ve venting some heat in there from the engines, but I don’t know if there’s oxygen in there,” Gashon’s voice crackled from the speaker box as the crew closed and secured the transparent dome around Roll’s compartment.

With a roll of her eyes, the blonde robot reached down to her wrist and unscrewed her hand. Tucking it into the strings of her apron, Roll removed the joint plate and fished around until she found the correct plug. After securing everything again, she inserted the interface into the port and waited for onboard diagnostics while Gashon went through his own checks.

“Everything seems good,” he reassured her through the comm as Roll verified to information on her end.

“Yea,” she muttered as their ship was taxied from the repair bay to the central lane of the drydock. “You’ll want to ease into the throttle during takeoff.”

“I thought we flushed the lines and rebalanced the cryostabilizers?”

Roll craned her neck to glare at the pilot from her little pocket. “I’m sorry… do you remember the part where we fired the engines up to maximum to make sure they weren’t going to fall to pieces?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“So go easy…” She reiterated as she continued to scan the various elements of the ship’s electrical systems as they trailed down the right side of her HUD. “You might want to double-check the foils on the left side, too.”

“The ones we replaced?”

“We didn’t stress test them.”

“I’m sure they’re fine,” Gashon responded. “Initiating start-up,” he spoke aloud as he started to run down a list of commands. At first, Roll thought it was for her sake, but then she realized the man was likely doing it more to make sure he wasn’t messing something up. After all, this was the first time he was being allowed to pilot a fighter since being grounded and banished to the island of misfit toys.

So I guess I need to make sure this goes well for his sake. For as much as she would have preferred to hijack this fighter and just be done with the ARC, Roll knew that would be the selfish (childish) thing to do, especially since there was more at stake her than just her pride.

“They’re saying we are go for takeoff,” Gashon declared as he pointed toward the crew members who were flagging them down the lane.

Roll looked down ahead at the translucent barrier that now served as the separation point between the drydock and the dark of space. With the massive gates peeled back on both sides, it looked like a yawning chasm beckoning them into a starry oblivion.

“Ready, co-pilot?” Gashon asked somewhat uneasily as greenlighted the remaining systems. As Roll watched, both with her eyes and through the visuals on her HUD, the four engines of the X-Wing fighter hummed to life.

“All systems clear,” Roll spoke as she adjusted some of the calibration settings for Engine 3. “Like I said… easy on the throttle until they’re running at operational temperatures.”

With a nod, Gashon closed his gloved hand around the throttle and gave it the gentle easing that was requested. The hum of the engines turned to a rumble as the X-Wing accelerated down the runway and out through the magnetic shield into the void of space

“Look at that!” Gashon shouted as they cleared the hanger doors. “We did it!”

“Of course,” Roll spoke softly as she verified that the ship wasn’t in imminent danger of collapsing into pieces due to the shift in pressure.

“You comfortable in there?”

“Yea, there’s some heat,” the blonde robot answered as she glanced back at the cockpit. “Did they detail what type of sortie they expected you to execute for this?”

“They weren’t specific when it came to details,” Gashon replied as he sent the X-Wing into a shallow dive before banking around some of the ARC’s sprawling superstructure. “I think we have enough fuel for, uh.”

“About ten minutes of operation,” Roll answered as she flashed the fuel tank array from her end.

“I see it,” her co-pilot replied. “That’s plenty of time to enjoy this.” At that, Gashon pushed the throttle down to max and let out a giddy yelp as he pulled back on the yoke and sent them rocketing straight up alongside one of the ARC’s many exterior walls.

Roll, who wasn’t as wide as an astromech droid, was nearly wrenched out of the interface port when the inversion of the ship threw her back—down—to the side of the compartment. “Warn a sister!” The girl shouted as the X-Wing leveled out a little and eased down from top speed.

“Look!” Gashon shouted excitedly. “Do you see it?”

“Where?” The girl asked as she glanced left and right before lifting her head to see the sprawling World that loomed far over their heads. “That’s Cevanti, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Gashon pinned something on the computer’s somewhat archaic mapping software. Gifted with super processors and an innate understanding of coding, Roll could subconsciously deduce what direction he was trying to guide her eyes toward. “I don’t know if that worked, but can you see it?”

They were leagues removed from the outer caresses of the planet’s gravitational pull, but even at this distance, it would have been hard to miss Markov, even on a particularly cloudy day. The half-dead city sprawled up and out for tens of miles, and even from space, it was possible for Roll to spot the subtle hues of its energy dome and the whisps of its active industrial sites. While the scale wasn’t comparable, it reminded the girl a lot of Factorial Town, and that place’s litany of furnaces and factories.

“That was the place that was attacked, right?” Roll inquired as Gashon put them on the X-Wing’s equivalent to cruise control.

“Yes, that’s Markov.” Gashon thumbed the foils and breathed a small sight of relief when they opened without any issue. “That’s where they found you, right?”

Roll nodded her head as she verified the integrity of the foils. “An old internet café out in the exclusion zone. Truth be told, I wish they would have left me there.”

“Not enjoying your stay on the ARC?” Gashon chuckled. “Everyone’s so hospitable here.”

“I was conscripted to work in a junkyard,” Roll replied. “I’m gone the first chance I get… I think I’d rather be hiding from giant, digital beetles than dealing with any of this.”

Gashon banked the X-Wing back into a course that would take them back to the hanger. “So are you from some type of computer? I thought you were a robot?”

“I got separated from my family a few years ago.” Roll paused to try and remember how long ago that was, but she honestly didn’t know. It was possible that her time in File Island had elapsed over years, but there was also the possibility that it had been just a handful of seconds. “I was someplace else… a city, but after I found most of my brothers, we were separated again. I wound up in a computer game.”

The pilot chuckled softly. “I hope it wasn’t one of those edgey games with all the burly sword men.”

“It was an MMO.”

“A hwhat?”

“An online multiplayer game,” Roll explained. “But I wasn’t supposed to be in there, y’know. I was a player but in the game world. It was weird.”

“But you got out?”

The girl nodded from the droid compartment. “Yea, I beat the game, essentially. Helped guide the raid that took down the final boss, and after the cutscene played, I woke up in Cevanti in an abandoned derelict internet café.”

“That’s bonkers.” The man answered. “And now you’re here… helping out the ARC.”

“Help is not the word I would use,” Roll mumbled as Gashon arced them downward and brought them in line with the dock bay doors. “You’re clear for landing, so I hope they tested the maglocks.”

Quest: Lending a Hand
Post WC: 1586
Thread WC: 5097/5000