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The Resistance base was in absolute chaos.
Soldiers ran panicked up and down the halls, shouting to each other as they passed, a sense of urgency thundering in the air with the many footsteps that shook the sturdy frame of the building to its foundation. And in all the commotion, nobody even knew what the hell was going on, but in a corner of the base, farthest from the scene of hysteria, a stern, but very uneasy Ciel had Alouette cornered.
“They were on my desk,” she breathes out, trying to keep her tone even and the worry out of her voice. It wouldn’t do to freak out and make the situation any worse when it was already comfortably bad enough. “The crystals were on my desk this morning. They were in my lab when I left them, and when I came back they were gone. I know it couldn’t have been anyone else.”
The reploid girl shuffles her feet and fixes her gaze on the plush animal clutched sheepishly to her chest, avoiding the question. Ciel resists the urge to pinch the bridge of her nose as she lets out a deep, annoyed breath. Stay calm. Think. Analyze the situation and the solution will appear when the pieces are all laid out. Just THINK and don’t PANIC.
Finally Alouette pipes up nervously, “I didn’t mean to! I didn’t think you were gonna use ‘em for anything! He just looked so tired and he doesn’t eat much so I thought he’d forgotten and-” she’s stammering now, eyes welling up with tears (who decided that should be a standard reploid feature anyway? It makes her cave every single time).
Ciel sighs again. She’s just a child, she couldn’t have known.
"Alouette, listen to me… Zero wasn't designed to operate with this much excess energy, but his build is too efficient to waste it. If you gave Zero all of the crystals that were on my desk he’s probably going to be in High Output mode for a week. "
Alouette glances back down at her shoes. Sorry, but clearly not that sorry.
“Oops.”
-
Ciel hears the loud BANG while she sprints down the hall, intent on providing some damage control. She slams on breaks when she hears Cervaus’ following cry of- “Oh please, oh God. Somebody come help me here!”
It takes her approximately three seconds to reach the Laboratory door, and an additional two to throw it wide open.
Inside is chaos. Papers litter the floor, many of the filing cabinets lining the walls have been upended and one of the recharge pods has been knocked over, the force of which having apparently unplugged it if the mess of dangling wires and pipes where it likely used to be was any indication. Ciel spots Cerveau sitting in the middle of the mess, frame shaking and eyes glued to the ceiling. She follows his gaze upwards and-
Ah.
“Zero,” she says, as calmly and softly as she can manage. “Zero, come down.”
He doesn’t come down. He just stares at her with wide, dark eyes. He looks like an even bigger mess than the one he’s made of the Laboratory. His armor is scuffed and dirty, likely from the mission he’d just returned from hours earlier, his hair is puffed up and agitated, and his pupils are unnervingly huge. If Ceil had it in her for smart remarks she would have joked about how he looked like a startled kitty.
‘Kitty is right,’ she thinks to herself. ‘Just a naughty kitty that got into too much catnip and made a ruckus.’
“He won’t come down…” Says Cerveau, still warily watching him from his spot on the floor. “I’d left the door open and he just came barreling in, knocked over the cabinets, jumped off of the pod over there and grabbed onto the pipes up there,” he waves a hand in Zero’s direction and Zero’s eyes follow the movement from his perch. Ceil doesn’t dare laugh. She wants to, but she doesn’t.
“He’s just running on increased output,” she tries to explain, keeping her eyes on Zero as he crawls a bit higher, eyes still trained on the two of them. “Alouette gave him some supercharged energen that I’d been experimenting with and didn’t realize what it would do to his system. He’s… Probably not dangerous right now. Just a little overwhelmed.”
“Probably?!” Cerveau hisses, slowly getting to his feet, but avoiding any sudden movements. “He’s been on a rampage for over two hours! I heard the yelling from the hallway, I haven’t seen the mess hall yet but I really don’t think I want to.” Ciel thinks she can imagine it without an eye-witness account, but their attention snaps back to the ceiling when they hear Zero leap from the pipes.
“Shit!” screams Cerveau as the deadliest warbot known to mankind crashes to the floor just inches from his left foot and makes a precise lunge for the door. In a matter of seconds the tornado of red and gold has ripped past both of them and thundered down the hallway, eliciting more shrieks of surprise from the soldiers undoubtedly trying to scramble out of his way.
Ciel and Cerveau both stare after him as the papers he jostled aloft in his wake settle back to the floor. In the calm after the storm a single thought passes silently between them.
Oh. God.
-
He’s in the hangar, by the sound of it. Lots of scraping metal and shrill yelling give his position away as Ciel barrels through the open door, panting at the effort of chasing him down, but she nearly doubles over in painful laughter at what she finds.
Zero is, quite literally, bouncing off the walls. His powerful frame is bounding across the enormous room effortlessly to kick off the far wall, back to the floor, then up to the opposite wall, and then back to the far wall again.
Ciel really does try to keep from making an undignified noise, but it’s just so difficult when Zero is doing wild backflips over a row of cargo transports and the nearby soldiers are staring at him with some mix of awe and ‘this is weird, this is so weird SHOULD WE BE WORRIED??’ in their eyes.
Ciel’s amusement dampens a bit when Zero makes a wild leap onto the hangar door and leaves quite a few noticeable dents as he scrambles up it on his way to the rafters. If this keeps up he’s going to break something. Well, additional somethings, at least.
“Zero!” she calls, trying to draw his attention onto her and off of just how high he could potentially climb . His head whips in her direction, eyes wide and crouching like an animal on a questionably sturdy I-beam. “Please come down,” she implores, holding her hands behind her back like she always does when she asks him for favors that she knows he’ll agree to.
He watches her for a moment. Quietly. Thoughtfully. Ciel thinks he might ignore her like he did Cerveau before she sees him move. He’s gathering himself up in a new position; spine arched, hands tightly gripping the beam for support, feet planted-oh no. She reconsiders her request a nanosecond too late as he’s wiggling his hips like a cat. Ready to pounce.
“Don’t you da-”
He launches himself right at her with a kick that buckles the beam he had just been perching on a moment before. She barely manages to stumble backwards just in time as his nearly indestructible metal body connects hard with the floor, leaving cracks in the concrete just inches in front of her. Somewhere, in the back of her less rattled mind, she knows he would never have hit her, zooted on energen or no, but in the front of her mind she’s cursing up a storm and calling him every colorful variety of “stupid jerk bastard” she can think of.
Her ass hits the floor and her thoughts switch gears in time to realize that the force of his landing actually knocked her back and now he’s standing over her with wild eyes and wild hair and oooooh shit.
He really does look like a mess. He’s standing still, though likely not for long, and she can hear his core desperately whirring as his vents struggle to pull in enough air to cool his supercharged systems. If he hadn’t just knocked her on her butt like a rude bastard she might have felt bad for him.
Well, she still does. A little bit.
They stare at each other, Ciel thinking as fast as she can while he’s not ripping through their very precious (and very limited) supply of equipment like a whirlwind on a caffeine kick, trying to focus on something other than the inevitable collateral damage and come up with a solution.
The problem; he needs to burn off the excess energy. But how? And where? If left to his own devices he might just shake the whole base right off of its foundations and they can’t have that. They’d lose their one foothold in the war against Neo Arcadia and be put at an irreconcilable disadvantage. Not to mention; Elpizo would be pissed and Ciel would really prefer not to have to deal with that .
He’s starting to shake from the effort of standing in place, his core apparently doing its best to launch him into orbit the longer he remains stationary and Ciel knows she’s out of time. She opens her mouth to tell the bewildered soldiers to open the hangar doors to let him outside where there are fewer things to break and just pray he’ll eventually come back and not crash hard after his systems finally work out the last of the energen. But, before she can make a sound she stops, her eyes fixed on Zero’s chest. There’s a red dot on the center of his jacket. It’s glowing.
They’ve both noticed it.
It doesn’t move, but Zero’s eyes, somehow, get even wider.
Without warning it shoots off across the floor and Zero makes no delay in tearing after it like a wild animal, scrabbling at the floor with his fingers as it zips back and forth across the concrete. Ciel stares. All her previous thoughts and ideas completely forgotten. Her mind? Utterly blank.
A delighted giggle soon snaps Ciel out of her daze and she glances back towards the door. Alouette is standing there with a spare laser sight in her hands, gleefully wiggling it and cackling hysterically as Zero leaps after the point on the ground. “Get it, Zeze! Don’t let it get away!”
Clearly, Zero has no such intention as he chases the dot clear up the opposite wall when Alouette angles the sight higher. Jesus.
Ciel watches the spectacle with a vague sense of awe and respect for Alouette’s resourcefulness. Only the mind of a child could produce such a simple, elegant, and ridiculous solution. Still, she’s going to have to get better about keeping her research materials out of reach from now on. Both from curious, but well-meaning reploid children, and warbots, too trusting of curious, well-meaning reploid children.
-
Zero does, eventually, crash. Alouette ran him ragged in a couple short hours and by the time the energen excess had truly burned out of his system he’d collapsed bonelessly into a stray pile of rubber hoses and stayed there, perfectly motionless, until a few brave souls worked up the nerve to pick him up and move him to a recharge bed that would give him the proper amount energy this time.
The base gets cleaned up, and by the time Zero blinks awake the next morning nearly everyone (with maybe the exception of Elpizo) had collectively decided that the whole ordeal was a just laughable, good natured incident. No big deal. A bit exciting, and one they wouldn’t soon forget, but no big deal nonetheless.
Zero himself doesn’t seem to recall any part of ‘The Incident’, but Ciel suspects that’s a bluff. She knows Zero well enough by now to know that, despite his cold demeanor, he’s actually a bit sensitive when it comes to his reputation (which only serves to make the whole situation even funnier in her opinion).
Life moves on, new orders are issued and new missions assigned. Zero comes and goes, and Ciel continues her research into an alternative energy source (needless to say; she scraps the enhanced energen idea). She suggests aloud one day, while Zero is keeping her company in her lab between missions, that when she finds a new energy alternative, they should call it “Zero Zoomies.”
The look of sheer horror and revulsion he gives her is enough to send her into uncontrollable hysterics.