Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"I hate it here!" Uzi screamed as she shook her fists and glared at the ceiling. 
No doubt cowed into silence, the ceiling did not respond. 

"You know, Uzi, if you don't want to be here anymore, I can send you to a wonderful place far far away. You'll be able to see your Mom again. You can even tell her that you went to prom! With a date!" 

V flashed a fanged smile at Uzi, but did not move. N moved to stand between them. 

"V! Are you really doing this now? After she helped save your life?" 

"Of course not, N. That Doll...thing is still out there. And even I wouldn't be mean enough to immediately kill a worker that had just proven so helpful." 

V sidestepped N to pat Uzi on the back. Uzi brushed her off and pulled away. 

"I've had it with your 'jokes' and your threats, V. Especially now. What was that? She what, teleported? Can you guys do that?"

N and V shared a look. V spoke up. 

"No. That's a first for us as well. And here I thought you were the weirdest thing I'd meet here." 

"Yeah? Well, you-" 

"You're still the most pathetic, if that makes you feel better." 

Uzi glared at V. Her eye flashed that odd glyph. 

"It doesn't." 

"V, we don't have time for this. I don't think Doll will turn up unless she wants to, but if we look around, we might find some more clues." N said, trying to get everyone back on track. 

 Uzi pulled out the wristband Doll had been wearing and stared at the key dangling from it. 

"Well, the owner probably isn't coming back and we've got the keys to...the...place. Huh?" 

N turned to her. 

"Uzi. What is it?" 

Uzi reached behind her neck. After fumbling for a few seconds, she unclasped the necklace and held it and Doll's out for N and V to see. 

"No way..." 

Somehow, the more Uzi looked at the bands and their weird hexagonal medallions, the more confused and the more certain she became. 

"These are basically the same." Uzi said in confused realization. 

"What do you mean, Uzi?" N asked. 

"It's the same shape, the same colors, the same triangle-skull-tree logo. And numbers at the bottom. Looks like Mom was in second place. Second place? Who'd she lose to?" 

"Maybe it wasn't a competition," N suggested. 

"Maybe. She still should've gotten number one."

Uzi looked at the medallions again, then looked up. 

"Do either of you recognize this symbol? From a place you've been, or maybe on a drone you killed?" 

N and V stepped in to examine it. After a few seconds, both of them stepped back. 

"Nope! Not ringing a bell!" N said. 

"Really, all you workers are just a blur of scared faces and error messages at this point. I stopped paying close attention ages ago. It's your family heirloom, shouldn't you know what it means?"

Uzi looked down. 

"She was gone before I was old enough to learn about things like that. She didn't leave any letters either."  

"Oh, Uzi...Maybe your dad would know." N suggested.

 Uzi thought about it. 

"Yeah, that's probably our best bet. He might not be completely useless for once." 

"So that's our plan! We'll finish things up here, then go visit Uzi's dad and see what he knows!" N said in a burst of enthusiasm. 

"Actually, Dad doesn't like murder drones. Never liked them, I mean. Yeah, you've stopped genociding and started talking for once, but that only made him hate you guys more. I'll deal with him by myself." 

"Oh, uh, okay. Put in a good word for me, okay. I want to get along with everyone!" N said, his spirits dampened by Uzi's words. 

"Yes, put in a good word for me. I wouldn't want future prey thinking poorly of me." V added, placing her hand upon her chest in a false display of concern.. 

"Nobody's getting eaten. Nobody's dying. Not even Doll, if she'd just be reasonable and stop killing people and playing hard-to-get. I still want answers from her." Uzi replied, increasingly fed up with both the ever-growing list of mysteries and V's attitude. 

"Fine. I won't go out of my way to eat him. It's too much effort anyway, when that pest already went through the trouble of preparing meals for us.  " V answered.

V walked around, immersing herself again in the sight of dismembered drones and the smell of fuming oil. She stopped at a pot, dipped her finger in the contents, and sampled it. 

"Sour...fermented. Was she making borscht? Way to commit yourself to the act, comrade."

V thought it over. 

"She's an amateur when it comes to storing this stuff and preserving the flavor, but it'll do. We'll move all of this to the spire later. The tanks there were almost empty anyway, even if it's just the two of us now. If only a certain someone didn't think that hunting was 'a no-no'..."

"Later? What will you do before that?" Uzi asked.  

"Look at all the carcasses that little drone collected. She only had to feed herself. Whatever she is, her powers must burn a lot of fuel. Especially if she's upgraded to teleporting. We have her stash, and I didn't see any pouches or containers on her, so she probably can't get very far before she runs out of energy and needs to feed. Come on, N, we'll do an aerial sweep." V said. 

N's eyes darted to Doll's parents. 

"Shouldn't we put a sheet up and then tell someone? About her folks? So they can do...whatever it is worker drones do after someone dies." N asked. 

"If playing nice with scrap metal makes you feel better, be my guest. I'm certainly done with them and that brat they unleashed. Wait until we've cleaned out this place to tell anyone. Come to think of it, I'm surprised the police or whatever aren't swarming this place. Unless school violence is just part of the experience here."   

V looked toward Uzi. 

"The WDF are short-staffed lately, thanks to you guys. It's hard finding anyone who wants to do the job when everything about it sucks. The pay sucks. The hours suck. My Dad sucks. You murder drones suck. That, whatever that was with J's corpse. That sucked. Cleaning up the mess in the gym will suck."

"And school is just a pointless thing we do to check off a box for being a 'normal society, like the one the humans had'. There's dumb bullying, and even dumber bullies, but no real violence."

At that everyone looked around. Uzi thought back to that waste bin with the 'Missing' posters. 

"There wasn't real violence before Doll went full psycho killer." 

"Not even from you? Then again, if someone as popular as Doll would turn out to be the 'quiet kid', doesn't it kind of fit that you, who sets off every warning flag, wouldn't do anything?" 

V gently poked Uzi in the chest. Uzi shoved her away. 

"No. The "worst" I did, -and it wasn't that bad anyway- was to bring my gun to school." 

"Ah, so you were that type! And the daughter of the colony's leader too. Tsk. tsk. tsk." 

"No! I was just showing it off. I didn't hurt anyone with it, other than myself. The teacher didn't care." 

"How sad. Anyway, enough talking, I'm off!" 

With that, V strolled out of the room and took flight. 

Uzi turned toward N. 

"Do I really have to put up with her? We can't just get even better chains for V and run an oil pipe into her mouth?" 

"I wouldn't call it putting up. Other than you, V is all I've got left. Yeah, it looks like she's mean, but deep down, she's got a heart of gold."  

"How deep exactly? Because this was - is- a mining planet. We've got tools." 

Uzi smirked at the thought. If V wanted to keep mouthing off, a diamond-tipped power drill would be a great way to 'help' her with that. 

"You can't do that, Uzi! That's mean." N didn't find it nearly as funny as Uzi did. 

"So it's perfect for her." 

N held up a finger, opened his mouth, then reconsidered. 

"I see that V is bothering you. I just want us all to get along. I'll talk to her later. She said she wasn't doing okay, and maybe this is how she copes. I wish V were more open with me. There are too many secrets; too much that isn't being shared. It's not good for any of us" 

N looked downtrodden. Uzi gently squeezed his arm as her face shifted from revenge fantasies to concern and even a bit of shame. 

"Thanks, N. We'll find out what's wrong with her. With me. What any of this is, together." 

Uzi gave him a reassuring smile, and N squealed. 

"You're the best, Uzi." 

"Well, I'm gonna go hunt down the old man. See ya later." 

"Bye, Uzi!" 

Uzi left the room. 

N was alone. That wasn't a strange feeling. His squad had always felt like a bunch of individuals that happened to be in the same place, rather than a real team. N was physically alone, surrounded by beat-up, half-eaten corpses. No different from the spire, then. It felt creepier, somehow. Or wrong, like a violation of the way things were supposed to be. Disassembly drones ate, worker drones were eaten. It was a simple rule that one could build a life around. Oh, and a whole lot of deaths. But this? None of this was simple. None of it made any sense. What other surprises waited for him? 

N shook his head to clear such thoughts away. Being here wasn't good. Too much had happened. N needed a breather. A relaxing flight through the toxic air would be just the thing. And who knew? He might even be the one to catch Doll. He'd be the hero of the hour if he did that. It would impress V and Uzi, maybe even get them to open with with each other, and with him. 

N didn't want to stay any longer than he had to. He respectfully approached Doll's parents, took one last look at them, forever frozen in fear, then gently placed the sheet over their heads. 

N didn't notice the flash of a teleport behind him. 

N turned toward the door, only to be sent spinning by a sudden impact. 

"What!" 

As N tried to process what was happening, knives emerged from nothing and pinned him to the wall. They'd gone precisely through his joints, and through his tail, leaving N immobilized. Even the transforming pods in his arms were non-responsive. N winced in pain as he tried to find something, anything that he could move.

N hadn't wanted to be alone. And he wasn't. 

N looked up to see hungry red eyes staring at him in the darkness. 
As the figure moved toward him, light glinted off its sharpened teeth. 
It stepped out of the shadows. 

"Oh, hey Doll. Funny thing, everyone's out looking for you. And here you are!"

Doll glared at him. Knives orbited her hands. 

"You don't look glad to see me, but I'm glad to see you." N tried to get on her good side. It didn't seem to be working.

Doll continued moving forward. She stopped, just out of range of a sudden lunge should N somehow break free. 

Doll spoke. 

"What was your purpose in doing that? Why take such care with my family?" 

Chapter Text

Doll had nailed N to the wall rather than immediately kill him, which would've been the orthodox thing to do. Then again, N was struck arms outstretched and legs together, with his tail at a slant behind his legs, as if he had been crucified. So perhaps this was the Orthodox thing for Doll to do. 

"It's nothing much, honestly. I looked over and saw them setting there. I know much much they must have meant to you, and it didn't seem right to just leave them there like that. And I noticed you had them under a sheet, so I thought maybe it's how they're supposed to be treated." 

"You wrapped them up. For ease of transport?" 

"Well, yeah, that's not why I did it, but that would be one benefit. I'm not sure if they have body bags here." 

"To take them where? For dissection? To find some weak point to use against me? You're messing with matters that you'd best stay ignorant of." 

N briefly glared. He'd had enough of being told what he could and couldn't know. 

"No. No. After cleaning up this place, I wanted to let the authorities know, so they could do whatever burial rites you guys have." 

N thought further. 

"But then again, it's not like drones really rot away (it takes forever to rust here), and most of the reasons why humans bury their dead don't apply to us. I guess disassembly drones are predators, and that's why you hide bodies. We prefer live drones anyway, and it's not like it's normally that much more effort than scavenging. Was it wrong of me to assume that you guys would just copy the humans in this?" 

Doll blinked. 

"Yes. That was wrong. If I wanted them recycled, I could've turned them over to the WDF." 

"Why didn't you?" 

Doll looked away, then looked back at N, rather mad. She slammed the handle of a knife into N's face, hard enough to chip it. 

"I ask the questions here." 

"Fine, fine. Ask away. It's not like I'm going anywhere." 

N gave Doll a friendly smile. Doll snarled back at him. She'd seen how V had wooed Lizzy, how she'd faked affection and comradery to get in position to commit a massacre at the prom. This murderer before her was certainly no different. 

That he'd fooled Uzi was no surprise. Complete social outcast, edgy tastes, delusions of grandeur, daddy issues: perfect prey for someone with a bad boy persona. And a murder drone was clearly the baddest of boys. Uzi never stood a chance. 

What was that nonsense she'd said? 'Whoever started this wants us to fight'. There would've been no fight if Uzi had just remembered every lesson she'd been taught about those winged freaks. The lesson written in the spilt oil of their parents. 

"Stop smiling at me. I'm no Uzi." 

"Well of course! She blew off my head the first time we met - kinda my fault, I did attack her first - and while being nailed to the wall is pretty painful, my head is still on." 

A levitating knife started slowly sawing at N's neck. Not enough to penetrate, but enough to leave a noticeable gash. 

"That can change, killer." 

"Okay, so you're a slow-motion Uzi. I'm down with that. Keeping up with her energy can be a challenge."

"That's why you targeted her? She was a threat that you could not easily counter?" 

"Targeted? Oh no. She came to me. Things escalated from there. I lost my head, but funny thing, without that I think one of us would've killed the other, so it worked out. We laugh about it now. Who knows, Doll, maybe one day we'll laugh about this."

Doll deadpan stared at him. 

"I doubt that."

"I would've doubted that I'd side with a worker drone against my squad, and yet that's what happened. Life is full of surprises."

N gave Doll his most positive smile yet. 

Surprises.
At that, Doll instinctively teleported backward, reappearing in the air and rolling behind the table. She sent four knives spinning toward N's joints. Doll saw that N had not moved or taken any apparent action, and paused the knives before they would've dismembered him. Doll was confused. 

"You did nothing? Just now? 'Surprises' was not the lead-in to an attack? That wasn't a disarming smile?" 

N was confused that Doll was confused. Here he'd thought "Life is full of surprises" was an innocent cliché. On the off-chance that Doll was right, and N was more of a threat than he'd believed himself to be, N tried to move. His arms were stuck fast. His legs were fixed. His tail was pinned. His wings wouldn't deploy. He could spit, maybe. But it would be rude to do that to someone in their own house. 

"Nah, you've got me good. I can't move at all. I was just thinking of how unpredictable everything turned out to be. We're fighting - or you're fighting me- hard right now, but maybe that means our future friendship will be even stronger!" 

"Keep wasting your clock cycles. I see past your desperate attempts at feigning weakness."

"Trust me, Doll, I wish I were pretending. You have no idea how much pain I'm in right now."

"You murder drones are pathetic. It's all smiles and torture with you types, until you're the ones lying on the ground or fixed to the wall. Then it's begging and pleas for mercy." 

"I don't think it's as sinister as that. Like everyone else, we want to live, and live without pain or fear." 

Doll looked over at the sheet-covered forms of her parents. She looked in another corner, at the camera they'd used to record their final moments. She turned back to N. 

"And yet, your lives require that we lose that! Our lives! Our desires! Our happiness! At least have the decency to accept fate's judgement when it comes for you!" 

"But you're all like that twin-tailed one that Uzi shot, aren't you? The one who died yelping like a whipped dog?" 

"That was J. She could be difficult at times, okay, all the time, but I'm not sure having someone stab you (with your own body), knock you to the ground and point a gun in your face is really a good test of character." 

"I don't care what its name was. The test of character was everything that came before." 

Doll shook her head. The strange glyph flashed in her hand, but N couldn't see that she'd moved or changed anything with it. It must have been a sign of anger. Doll moved toward N, stopping just before his face. 

"None of this matters. Back to the main point. What were you planning on doing with my parents?" 

"I already told you. Wrap them up out of respect, then contact whoever's in charge of dealing with such things." 

"I don't believe you. You're not going to eat them - they were already...V took everything there was to take. It was the spire! You were planning on making them part of your spire. That's your motivation, you swine!" 

"Other than maintenance, we haven't touched the spire since J got killed. It was always more of her obsession than anyone else's. Whenever I asked why we spent time and energy building it, she'd just snarl and say that I would never understand. I don't even think V knows. Not that V ever tells me anything. It was enough of a challenge to get her to regularly admit that I existed. And it's not like the company or anyone else has contacted us to tell us to keep working on it." 

Doll pulled a roll of paper over. She glanced over its contents, then again, then again. Her eyes narrowed in skepticism then widened in disbelief. She looked up and hesitantly nodded at N.

"It would seem that all 'missing' drones since the colony intrusion are accounted for. So you really have stopped adding to the spire. Or at least, stopped hunting us."

"That's what I said. Not exactly what I said, but yeah. I don't know about V, but I've learned enough to see that we're not so different. I wouldn't want to be hunted, so it's not right that I would keep hunting."

Doll stared at him. Was the drone before her defective? It was built from the ground up for destruction and slaughter. No one would've programmed it to act like this. Was quality assurance absent the day it was produced? Was this the result of unrepaired damage? Senility from long years spent active? She was increasingly doubtful that this was an act. If it wasn't, then it was less predictable and somehow more dangerous. 

"What, what kind of 'disassembly drone' are you? Why do you act this way?" 

"I don't know. Maybe I wasn't the best disassembly drone - J always said that I was the worst - but I always went to work with enthusiasm, and I always gave it my best. But now, I think that everything we - I- did was, was wrong. What does that say about me? Why am I questioning the very purpose I was created for? Why am I questioning what we even are? How am I able to question that? Surely I'm a robot, right?" 

Doll was annoyed. Interrogation subjects were supposed to break down, of course, but only after an extended session of physical and mental 'preparation'. In the books, they never imploded this early, and unlike in the books, this one was actually guilty. At this rate, Doll wouldn't even be able to threaten him with lurid stories of his fate when they shipped him to Siberia. The entire planet was Siberia, of course, but it was the thought that would've counted. Doll pouted. These murder drones ruined everything, and now they wanted to wallow in self-pity? Doll snarled. 

"Oh spare me. Turns out you're a different flavor of monster than what you thought you were. How many of us did you kill?" 

N had never thought of the total number before. Daily and monthly quotas had filled his attention, but the only feedback he ever got on them was that his numbers were too small. Nothing ever satisfied J, but a worker drone would probably judge the numbers differently. Doll intensely frowned; N needed to give an answer, any answer. 

"You mean in regular me mode, or in super-murdery X-face hunger-verging-on-lust malicious laugh mode? Because for the former, uh, giving the ole memory banks a whirl - a lot. And for the other, wow!"

Realizing what he was implying, and how this very moody Doll would likely respond, N tried to defuse the tension. 

"Uh, I think we'd both be better off not hearing that number here - you to keep a deeper frown off that pretty face and avoid a certain somebody's painful death weighing on your conscience, me to keep from getting turned into a pincushion." 

Doll's frown deepened. So much for defusing tension. 

 "You beast. You dare joke about this? All the lives you've taken. Reduced to nothing more than fodder for-"

"Oh, fodder like what's left of the drones in here? Ow!"

N screamed as a knife shattered his visor. Doll trembled and growled with a primal rage he'd only seen from V whenever she lost herself in a kill-frenzy.

"Okay. Okay. Touchy subject. But for future reference, is this violent response about your parents or the indoor fun-size spire you're working on. Because, uh, your parents were cool and your spire is coming along nicely. Somehow creepier than the one we were doing, but it's your first and you're doing it by yourself so extra points for-" 

Another knife came flying at N. He ducked his head fast enough to snap something inside his neck. Doll grimaced, but seemed to be cooling down. 

"The first time you startled me. And took out my forward cameras. But I've got eyes in the back of my head!" 

N smiled pridefully as his body began repairing the damage. 

"Or rather, on top of my head. But that's the human saying and they never told us to change it for disassembly drones. They didn't tell us much of anything. But they did tell us about the eyes. I put everything I learned to good use, and that's how I became the squad's top hunter. "

Doll stared in unimpressed silence. She glanced at the eye bands, recalling how near-useless the murder drone leader had been after losing just one. To a pen of all things. Her head throbbed, as if to defend the dignity of the humble murder drone headpiece. 
Had Doll not been taken by surprise and rewarded for her lack of situational awareness with a bullet to the head? Maybe a pair of her own would've prevented that. And they'd have all sorts of future uses for acquiring her next meals. Or renewed combat. 
Doll shook her head. That line of thought was dangerous. Was wrong. She wasn't like them. She wasn't.

She looked at her parents' corpses, feeling disgust and anger at the murder drones, taking those emotions and pressing them 
into resolve to be better, no matter what she was becoming. Her traitorous eyes flitted toward her kitchen, toward the severed limbs floating in warm, bubbling, aromatic-no. She looked downward, her newfound resolve dissolving. It wasn't guilt or regret over all the deaths; those feelings had died with her first kill. Rather, it was fear accented by self-loathing and foul anticipation at what likely lay at the end of the path she seemed to be on.

"Doll, are you seriously that impressed? Did I stun you into speechlessness? I thought you'd be surprised, or angry at the whole 'N is totally the top hunter in the squad, and that's definitely not a lie' thing. Doll, are you listening?"

Doll did not respond. 

"Uh Doll. I know you probably don't mean to leave me hanging, but could you let me down before having what looks like DEEP THOUGHTS?"

Doll's eyes returned to the room. She saw N, screamed, and rolled back and to the side as she manifested a whirlpool of knives above and around herself. Doll uneasily stood up and checked her body for damage. There was none. She turned to N, utterly shocked and confused. 

"You didn't attack me just now?"

"Of course not, silly. I can't do that and I wouldn't even if I could. I just want to talk things out." 

"But I freed your tail so that you could attack me with it, and walked within range. I was sloppy enough to distract myself, giving you the perfect opportunity. Why didn't you take it?" 

"My tail is free?" 

N gave his tail an experimental whip and saw that Doll had indeed freed it earlier. She was close enough that N could easily stab her. 

"So it is." 

Doll tensed. N simply put his tail back where it had been. Knives flew in to pin it once more. 

Doll stared in amazement. 

"You didn't attack me." 

"I didn't attack you, Doll. Now can we just talk things out?" 

"You didn't attack me." 

Chapter Text

"You didn't attack me." 

"...yeah. No debating that. I'm still completely unable to move. Your doing, by the way." 

Doll backed away, her eyes radiating fear and confusion. 

"Are you scared of something, Doll? Is me not attacking somehow scarier? Would you like it better if I did attack? If you're not going to let me down, I guess I could growl at you or something. Rawr. rawr. "

N thought it over. 

"Biscuits! That's not intimidating enough. I ought to ask V for advice, she's scary when she's not staring off into the distance and being sad, but I can't do that because I'm stuck on this wall hint hint." 

N thought it over some more. 

"Oh, right! I can just do that!"

N turned his head toward Doll. N glowed with inspiration. 

"Hey Doll, could you come slap me on the forehead? I can't move my arms, because, you know, you won't take out those knives, or I would just do it myself, and I feel really really silly right now." 

Doll stared, utterly unable to understand what N was on about. 

"Come on, just do it. You got me pretty good, so it's not like I can bite. And you're planning on killing me anyway, after this, right? "

The staring didn't stop. N started again. 

"If you won't do it for me, then do it for you, Doll." 

N adopted an exaggerated macho accent, as if he were the protagonist of some action movie. 

 "I'll never talk. If you want anything from this interrogation, you'll have to beat it out of me." 

The staring changed to glaring. Doll had had enough of the talkative murder drone, and that wasn't a terrible suggestion. She pulled a severed arm from a corner of the room and telekinetically slapped him with it. N's visor, headband lights, and hand lights instantly shut down. The sounds of internal mechanisms lurched to a halt. The servos in N's neck abruptly deactivated, sending his head crashing forward. It stopped only when his neck could not physically bend any further. Even then, the head whiplashed about the neck for a few more seconds. 

Doll didn't think it had been that hard a slap, but then again, she wasn't familiar with murder drone architecture, and that one had obviously already been severely damaged. And come to think of it, its voice did sound like that of a very sensitive drone. 
Maybe Doll just slaps too hard. 

Whatever the reason, the result was clear: Doll had no subject, and had gotten no real intelligence from him even when she had him. Groaning, she (lightly, slowly, carefully) smacked her forehead. 

"Was I too eager? Ugh, that only works when there's multiple detainees. But there's no one else to threaten with appreciate this. The interrogation can't possibly end in such a stupid manner. It's too anticlimactic, nothing like the books."

The murdered drone stayed deactivated.
Doll walked toward it. 

"Oh well. There's still V. And dissection. And maybe a snack." 

At that, Doll flashed her fangs. She hadn't tried murder drone oil before, but as they say, turnabout is fair play. What was the worst that could happen? 
...
...
...
Okay, that would be downright terrible, but how likely was it? 
...
Well, Uzi or some other worker drone could always be used as a test subject. If Uzi wasn't going to be reasonable, then she could at least be useful. 

As Doll neared it, she took in the juxtaposition of its savage construction with its...cute suit. Absurd as the thought was, she could almost hear the inert automaton squealing with glee as it put this on. One of her hands pulled up a screwdriver. She pushed out her other toward the murder drone's head. Her hand hovered just millimeters from the thing's face. 

All N's lights blinked on and he jerked his head up. The suddenness and closeness of the flash left Doll momentarily frozen as her over-exposed optics and subsequent loss of input to her visual processing systems triggered a failsafe mode.

Her cameras adjusted and the scene came into focus once more. The murder drone was alive, in all his wicked glory. His visor displayed that yellow cross. An array of gleaming, glistening fangs beamed from within his mouth. Servos screamed and oil spattered as his impaled limbs twisted and turned and struggled to break free. Even the fluid in his tail-injector circulated at an especially malevolent frequency.  

The Orthodox way to deal with a Murder Drone. 

Doll screamed, pulled back, then teleported back, quickly enough that the screwdriver she'd been wielding was left to spin a few panicky circles in the air before crashing to the ground. 

N's eyes and mouth returned to normal. 

"Scared you good, like you wanted, didn't I? Hopefully that met your expectations. See, I can be a regular old Disassembly Drone. And, I'd like to think, a good one. But I choose not to be. I've decided that I like making decisions, rather than letting others make them for me. I think you like making choices, too, Doll. So choose to let me down, then we sit down, pour some cups of oil, and talk through all these silly misunderstandings."

Doll shook her head. Her shock and fear were replaced by confusion was replaced by accusatory anger. 

"This doesn't change anything. You're defective. Damaged. Low on oil. Your little light show just now means nothing. You can't attack me, that's why you didn't!" 

"Maybe you're right about the first three, but the last one, yeah, that's what I've been saying."

"And why would I believe a murder drone?" 

"Because I'm 'defective'. 'Damaged'. 'Low on oil'? Any of that ring a bell? Even if I had the chance, I wouldn't do anything to you. Not in your own house, with your folks right there. Or anywhere else, now that I think of it." 
 
"At the dance? You sided with that oil-thirsty maniac." 

"I sided for V, against what she was trying to do. If she'd killed anyone there it wouldn't have been good for her, or anyone else." 

"I had set an ambush for her! if you hadn't interfered, V would've been the only casualty!" 

"That's what I'm saying, Doll, there don't need to be any casualties! We would've talked her down, in the same way I'm trying to talk you down. "

Doll pawed at the ground. 

"Don't forget. Lizzy tried to 'play nice' and even had me arrange for V to win prom queen, and still V planned to kill everyone. Even if I ignore what happened to my parents, V  has shown that being 'besties' and bribery are both ineffective! There's no other option than to put her down." 

"That's what we shouldn't do, Doll. Where does it end? Someone killed Uzi's mom and V killed yours and Uzi killed J and you want to kill V, and V wants to kill you. And everyone else, maybe. And they'll want to kill her. Then there's the humans, whatever new form J might take, and who knows what else. The only way to stop this before we're all dead is to stop with the revenge stuff. Stop and just talk our problems with each other through, rather than shooting."

"Again. That was attempted. Lizzy hit V with everything she had. She even invited V to a sleepover. If you knew Lizzy, you'd know how big a deal that was. V got an invitation in a far shorter time than I did, and I actually wanted to attend one. None of it meant anything to V." 

"That's-Wait, none of it? She was wearing a crown wasn't she? How'd you get it on her, if V was only going to murder you all? " N asked excitedly, as he thought he'd stumbled upon the logic that would shatter Doll's stubbornness. 

Serial Designation N, Ace Attorney, he thought. 

Doll took a step back. 

"Either it was a trap, or that thing was programmed to be unable to violate social protocol. In either case, that was just a pause before beginning her massacre." 

N smiled knowingly. 

"That was a very meaningful pause. V never takes her time when there's something to kill." N layered in a slight amount of amusement at seeing his strategy seem to work. 

"Like I would care about the quirks of that butcher, even if that wasn't a trap. Can you say it wasn't, murder drone?" 

"Um, no. It probably was." 

Doll was doing a lot of glaring tonight. N seriously worried that she'd burn that expression into her visor.
But if she did, it wasn't like there weren't plenty of replacement parts around. 
And while it may have looked like Doll had deflected N's thrust, and even put N on the defensive...looked awfully much like that in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. 
N had Doll exactly where he wanted her. 

"Well then, what about Uzi?" N asked. 

"Huh?" 

"V went there to kill everyone and 'pop her little head off. Yet V didn't fight Uzi or take even a single shot at her." 

"Because she took a shot through my head." 

"Exactly. Not. Not exactly, but she changed her original plan when circumstances changed. Do you know what that means, Doll?" 

Doll smirked. 

"V hates when someone can actually fight back. When her little meals don't lie back and accept their fate."

N gave her a wry laugh. Had there not been a knife through his wrist, he would've given Doll's comment a dismissive wave. 

"Nah, V gets more excited when there's a chase. It's the cat and mouse stuff. Maybe not as much as J did, at least until J got her upper body blown off. Come to think of it, I think J and Uzi would've actually hit it off if that hadn't happened. It wouldn't make sense for them to, but that's exactly why it would make sense. But anyway, it helps V with the boredom. Not that that makes her look better. Heh." 

Doll frowned. 

"And am I to take it that you are the same way? That all murder drones operate off the same sadistic template?"

N bounced as he recalled his sweet memories of hunting. He didn't recall the regrets and guilt. Those never happened during the hunt. 

"Oh no, I like doing anything. The feisty ones, the chill ones, the squirming ones, the ones frozen stiff, they all go down the same. I appreciate each and every one of them, and always give them the space to express themselves."

"And I'm sure they would be touched to know that," Doll said, very much unimpressed. 

"Oh, right." 

N laughed nervously. 

"I meant to say, I appreciatED all that. I'm done with it. I lived the standard Disassembly Drone lifestyle, and I think I'd like to hop on over to new things. In hindsight, there weren't as many highs as I thought, and there's more lows, and lower lows, than I would've thought. Just look at what happened to J, "axed" mid-monologue as she would've said. She loved to hear herself gloat before a kill, and you saw what came of that." 

That was a good point. Too many risks, unknowns, and absurdities menaced the humble disassembler who just wanted to live. It truly was difficult to imagine an august end for murder drones. Even the glitchiest of subjects would want to avoid starring roles in such a pitiful circus. 

"The point is that we can change and adapt, Doll. It wasn't too late for V to change how she behaved. It's not too late for you to change. It's not too late for me. We're not machines." 

N's eyes widened in embarrassed recognition of what he'd ended with. The two drones glanced at each other, then glanced away, letting awkward silence replace the strained conversation/argument/interrogation they'd been having. 
That wasn't the most fact-free thing or naïve N had ever said. 
Had either of them opened the other's body up, they would've seen the unknown, unwanted truth of what N had said for themselves. 

Eventually, Doll sighed. 

"Fine, I see your point. I also see that you haven't done anything but talk, and your voice is probably not a weapon." 

N smiled back. 

"I'm still, you know, you should know - it's your doing - stuck here and unable to do anything. I'd very much like that to change. I'm also parched. Right now, I would love nothing more than to sit down and have a cup of oil with you." 

Doll glared, or was that just a default, neutral expression in her family? N shouldn't assume or judge, maybe. N sheepishly grinned. 

"With you, not from you, silly. Don't tell me you're not thirsty as well, Miss telekinesis-and-backflips." 

Doll's glare changed to hesitant embarrassment. 

"Well, maybe", she said, rubbing the back of her neck. 

N smiled in triumph. 

"So jut let me down. We can have a little tea party. Imagine the look on V's face when she comes back and sees that." 

At that, Doll's suspicions rose once again. 

"V?"

It was impressive how many shades of malice and loathing she could lace one letter with. 

"V will see that I'm not out flying around and wonder what's up. I think she cares about me more than you'd guess from the way she acts. I mean, she's even regularly saying my name now. So V will be worried that I haven't shown up. But if she comes in and sees us having a nice, polite tea party, she'll be sure to join in." 

Doll felt an uncommon combination of sympathy and bewilderment. 

"She says your name regularly. That's the standard of relationship and 'care' you murder drones have?" 

N winced. When said bluntly and from an outside party, it did seem unusual and unhealthy. N paused to reflect. 

"I know what it sounds like, but that's an improvement. It was rather lonely at times. V never talked beyond saying a few short sentences every so often, and J only ever talked at me." 

Doll stared. 

"Lonely, asocial murder drones with dysfunctional relationships. Now I've seen everything." 

N was actually getting somewhere. Doll had even dropped the 'interrogation' stuff, which had actually led N to be more open with her, and through the power of the spoken word, with himself. 

"Come on, Doll. You can see more if we talk more. I wouldn't mind learning more about you, as a fascinating person, not as an enemy. I think we have a lot more in common than you seem to think. There's got to be tons of things you couldn't share with Lizzy that I would completely understand."

I think we have a lot more in common than you seem to think. Tons of things a murder drone would completely understand. 
The words escaped from her semantic processor and echoed throughout her consciousness, activating connections she'd forced closed long ago. Doll's eyes darted to the scattered body parts suspended from the ceiling by chains.  Then to the severed head in the basketball hoop. They returned to face N, hollow and trembling. Doll's selective emotion-suppression circuits, which had kept her shame, guilt, and empathy low while she became what she was, finally found themselves overwhelmed. Those feelings swept through her with a vengeance, felling safeguard after safeguard. She locked her servos so that the waves of involuntary movement commands to start shaking would have no effect. 

Doll must be low on oil; that was why nothing was working right. Why she was clearly overreacting to a few superficial similarities. 
The wave passed. Doll unlocked her movement systems and jabbed an accusing finger at N. 

"You did this to me. What is it, some sort of psychological warfare fallback for when your physical weapons don't work?" 

Other than his disarming charm, N had no weapons available, and no idea what Doll meant. 

"I only wanted to talk. Something inside you must have done whatever it was you're upset about. Let's drink and talk about it." 

Doll's optics detected no trace of dishonesty from him. 

"You don't seem to be lying about that. It probably wasn't you." 

N chuckled. 

"Of course it doesn't seem like that. All Disassembly Drones are great liars when they want to be, like right now." 

Doll thought that line over, then gently smiled. 

"Fine, we can't continue the interrogation when we're near-empty. But I'll be on guard. Try anything and you'll regret it." 

"Message received. Now get me down," N said while nodding. 

A flicker of light materialized above Doll's hand. 
Metal scraped against metal, sparks and sound dominated the room. 

Chapter Text

"Have a cushion to sit on. It's soft," Doll said, clasping her hands and cocking her head to emphasize the point. 

Soft as the cushion may have seemed, it nonetheless had a certain hardness earned through bitter experience about it, a resilience and determination to stand firm in the face of whatever life threw at it. 

Like the oncoming rear of a Disassembly Drone. 

Serial Designation N simply sat at the table Doll had provided. 

"Wow, it is soft! Not that I have much to compare it to. The only other ones I can think of would be in the seats in the landing pod, and they weren't soft at all."

N shifted around on top of the cushion, pleased with how it responded to his movements. 

"What's it made out of?" N asked, thinking to scavenge through some of the ruins for one of his own. 

"Mother's love." 

That would certainly be difficult to find on Copper 9. And did it have to be N's mother, or would any old mother work? And if any mother would work but the mother had to be intact...well that was a problem for another day. 

If N could get Doll to be sentimental about her mother, perhaps that would make her more likely to cooperate with him. And N was curious about what families were like. He'd never had one of his own. There were few things lonelier than spending so long with J and V. Not that N didn't appreciate them for who they were and all they did for him. N just wanted a bit more out of life than they were willing to, or perhaps could, offer. 

And N had never had a mother. He wondered what one was like. When he'd asked where Disassembly Drones came from, V had simply scowled, while J had scowled, told him he'd find out when he was older, then smacked him for good measure. Well, N was older and yet more confused than ever. 

N could hardly ask Uzi about how families worked when hers was so clearly in shambles. Even setting aside her mother, who had...passed after an...incident and been out of the picture for quite some time, N was reasonably sure that fathers weren't supposed to do magazine interviews where they declared that their children were their greatest disappointment, and that doors were their true daughters. 

Doll's family looked more intact. Physically, at least. They could sit at the same table forever if she wanted to. Clearly there had been affection there. If he could just get her to open up, maybe she could tell him what a family was supposed to be. Getting to that stage with Doll would be a long effort, but if he just broke it down into simple steps, then surely there was a way. 

"That's amazing, that it's still there to comfort you." 

Doll's expression was surprisingly, somewhat smug. 

"Made with mother's love, and whatever hair from drones that I didn't want to keep intact." 

"Oh." 

N preferred to focus on the 'mother's love' part of that. 

Doll gestured toward a cabinet, where wigs and worker drone helmets sat atop oversize doll heads. Human dolls. It seemed Doll was determined to live up to her name. 

"Well," N began, trying to get away from the creepy turn the conversation had taken, "If I had any questions about what you think of your name, I consider them answered." 

"I do like my name." 

N noticed the color scheme on the helmets matched Doll's, but not most of the workers, or even most of the students. 

"Are those...the rest of the cheerleading squad? You kept them?" 

"Everyone always said I should be more of a team player," Doll said with a predatory grin. 

Doll patted her stomach, then spoke in English, which she could do, of course. Drone neural networks had to convert from highly efficient digital codes into human language anyway, and they could do that to, or from, any of the common languages loaded into their memories. That isn't to say Doll spoke it well; her speech generation was, naturally, trained on Russian phonology. 

[There. Is. No. I. In. Team. But. There. Is. A. Team. In. Me.] 

She gave herself a cute little tummy rub to emphasize the point. Evidently satisfied with her attempt, Doll switched back to Russian. 

"Or at least, there was. The mass I have consumed greatly exceeds my own mass. Where it goes, I do not know." 

"Same, man, same. It's really weird now that I think about it." 

It was, but at least N had something else to bond with Doll over. This was proving more difficult than he had thought. N almost wished for the simpler times of a few minutes ago, when he was crucified upon the wall and didn't have to think of anything more complex than how to get off it. Or how painful it was to be on the wrong side of the blades for once. Every time the conversation looked like it would remain wholesome, it fell back into this, and into the sorts of discussions that might make Doll more rather than less hostile. But N was always optimistic. 

"Let's set that stuff aside and get back to tea. Here, I'll help you fetch it - yikes!" 

As N tried to rise from his seat, knives came streaking through the air to pin him to the chair. The knives neatly avoided damaging the pillow, showing Doll's skill and concern for the object. But N was a bit too preoccupied with the knives in his legs to devote much time to that. 

"W-what was that for?" 

Doll tilted her head at a skeptical yet cute angle if to say "Really? Let a murder drone roam free inside my own house?"

Small loops of rope wrapped themselves around N's tail, then wrapped his tail around his legs, further tying him to the chair. 

"Keep your hands on or above the table at all times," Doll declared. 

"S-since you asked so nicely." 

N wasn't done speaking.

"Why are you doing this? I thought we trusted each other." 

"There are limits." 

"Could these limits include not using violence to keep me in one place?"

Doll did that head tilt again, then spoke. 

"Really? Let a murder drone roam free inside my own house?" 

Ah, so N was starting to get a read on her. They were already closer than N had thought. 

After disappearing into the kitchen, Doll emerged with a pitcher of steaming tea (oil) and some cups. With a friendly smile, she set a cup in front of N, and gently filled it. N loved seeing her smile like that, the pride she took in her work. The gentle flow of tea (oil) trickling from the pitcher into the cup, and the plopping as the cup filled to the brim was soothing to N's auditory processing systems. The stream itself danced red, white, and black as its shifting ebbs and flows fended off more of the light. It mesmerized N, and his excitement only grew when he saw the yellow of his optics reflected in the pouring tea as well. It looked happy to see him. Best of all was the aroma as a perfect blend of volatile compounds flirted with the array of chemical sensors built into his tongue. It reminded N of what the absolute best prey tasted like when he was lost to hunter-killer mode. 

"Seriously, Doll, what's in this? It's doing amazing things for all my senses! Have you considered running a café, rather than uh, " N gestured vaguely at the contents of the room, "this? You know, between 'Let's eat, everyone' and 'Let's eat everyone', maybe take the common approach?"

"Intriguing idea, but I'll pass. As for what's in it, there are some additives to control the rate and kind of volatile organic compound emission. There are preservatives so that it can keep longer between 'shopping runs'. Taste-crystals of the sort the humans used to reward good drones, which is incidentally part of why we have tongues. So they could repurpose the means they use to control animals. Coloring agents, reflection beads, additives to adjust viscosity, and so on." 

"That's amazing. You're such a talented and thoughtful chef." 

Doll's face flickered with pride? Amusement? Joy at being complimented? All, or none of the above? Whatever it was, it didn't look hostile, and N wanted to see more from the normally dour cheerleader. 

"Thank you, but I can't take all the credit. Mother created it, based upon her experiences and experimentation in...another place. She taught me how to make it. After V broke in and ended that, one of the cooking club members helped me refine and adjust the recipe. She helped me make it one last time after she decided to join the prom court." 

"That's charming and well-adjusted." 

"Yes, that final batch was very well-adjusted. She was the type to pour herself into her work. I've been making it alone since, with new base flavors of oil, of course." 

N wished he could do fun and creative things like that with his friends. The closest they came was working on the spire together, but that didn't make him feel as good as this tea did. N didn't have nostalgic memories of constructing it, or elaborate backstories for it the way Doll did for this beverage. 

"Good to know. That's a lot of detail. I mostly just wanted to know that it wasn't spiked with anything." 

"Oh, but it was." 

"¡¿¡¿¡¿¡What!?!?!?11!" 

In that moment, N would discover that Disassembly Drones were programmed with a swallowing reflex if they were surprised and there was valid drone matter in their mouths. Eyes hollow and wide, he panicked and pawed uselessly at his mouth. For N was also a drone, his matter potentially valid, and whoever had programmed that had not considered including anything that would tell a curious Disassembly Drone what it would or would not do. N could of course, transform an arm into a tool which could reach in and extract the tainted tea, but if he did that while ingestion reflexes were active, just what would happen? N wasn't sure he wanted to find out. 

Doll laughed loudly and merrily, like she'd just pulled off a tremendous gag. 
Because she had. 

"It was, if you're human. Polonium-210 is a notorious additive for tea in the motherland. Get some, put it in tea, give it to someone special, and they'll radiate their glowing feelings toward you for the rest of their days."

"That's romantic, I guess. It's cool, seeing how you continue practicing your cultural traditions. How does it affect robots?" 

"The radioactivity adds a slight buzz - it helps with alertness." 

The disassembly drone and the cannibal enjoyed their cups in silence. 

"Wow, there really is a buzz!," N suddenly exclaimed, "I thought we were immune to things like that." 

"You are, if the threat is on the outside. You have no protection against what comes from within. Even human skin is enough to protect against its radioactivity. But skin won't help if it's already inside."

"That's...creepy and mysterious and ominous again. Let's get back to happier thoughts. Like this room! No offense, but it's kind of gloomy and eerie. What if you opened the shutters and let some sunlight in?"

Doll stared blankly at N. 

"I don't like the Sun." 

"Oh, ah, well I don't like the Sun either. Great big mean ball of plasma in the sky. Which means that even if you opened the shutters I wouldn't be able to see it...hey! We could be night buddies." 

N looked at Doll with pure glee. Doll looked as if she were counting down something. N wondered what it could be. 
5...4...3...2...1

"Wait, that came out wrong!" 

He closed his eyes and braced himself, fearing that Doll would attack him for saying something like that. He could almost feel the knives plunging into his arms, except he couldn't, for there were no knives. N opened his eyes in shock, to see Doll smilingly pleasantly at him. 

"You...no...attack....me?," N stammered out. 

"I...no...attack...you," Doll replied in a flat yet pleasant tone. 

"I understand what you wanted to say, and the innocent intentions behind it, weird yet amusing murder drone." 

"I'm not on the job right now. Haven't been on the job in months in fact. So no need to refer to me by my former career. It's just N."

"Understood, weird yet amusing N." 

Doll and N enjoyed their cups in each other's unexpectedly pleasant company.

Chapter Text

N was having a surprisingly good time. It was probably too early to call Doll a "friend", but it was hopefully no stretch to label her a "drinking buddy." 

"You know, Doll. We should do this more often. I get the feeling you can't do things like this with your worker drone friends, at least not very often." 

"That's not correct. I had many of them as-"

"I mean, you can't sip oil from cups with them. Not that you can't sip their oil from cups. That, yeah, I guess you do that a lot. But you'll eventually run out of friends, or maybe you have already, and so why not get some new ones?" 

"New ones. Plural?"

"Plural. Uzi doesn't drink worker drone oil, but I think she'd like to come anyway. She's got a lot of questions for you, and your...taste in interior decoration is like a more advanced, more refined version of the edgy stuff she goes for. And when I say 'refined', I'm not just talking about the oil coating everything.  And there's V. Oh, don't give me those eyes. You two maybe don't get along, but I'm sure that if everyone brings a positive attitude, we can patch things up between you. We can't change the past, but we can all move into the future, together."

Doll scowled.  

"Oh right. Still doing the whole 'not a fan of Disassembly Drones' thing. Even though you're eating workers (like a Disassembly Drone) and drinking their blood (like a Disassembly Drone) and arranging their corpses (like a Disassembly Drone) and you even 
killed a few at the prom, for...why'd you do that again?" 

Doll thought about it. Thought more about it than she had while doing it. 

"I removed anyone who was in the way, anyone who might get between myself and V or interfere to help her. It also added nicely to the atmosphere of chaos and intimidation that I desired." 

"More aesthetics. I didn't take your for the artistic type, Doll. But still, you killed them. Lizzy aside, of course. Going a bit too far, no?"

"They weren't the first, they won't be the last. And after Lizzy, there wasn't time to push them aside," Doll said with a sigh. 

Of course, N was in no position to judge, and while he would readily concede the basic idea that killing worker drones maybe wasn't okay, even he struggled to really care about drones that he'd only been dimly aware of for a few seconds as entries at the edges of his targeting system. And it's not like feeling sad about them would bring them back. N hadn't even done anything in remembrance of J, and he'd known her since forever. 

"That's not exactly making avant-garde art with drone entrails then forcing their family to pretend to be pretentious art critics, shoving a radio host's microphone down their throat and broadcasting while you slowly disassemble them, or giving a drone lessons in correct posture using their own severed limbs as props but st-"

"Oddly specific." 

Doll had seen a lot. Had done a lot. But even those got enough of a rise out of her, especially with juxtaposed with the cute, cheery drone casually relaying them, for her to interrupt. N thought of a bit. His own life had been so drenched in oil, and he'd been around V (when she let him linger in her proximity) enough that perhaps he'd just grown used to such things happening. 

"Not odd. It's just how V is. Wait. I honestly have no non-scewed up frame of reference for how we're supposed to behave, but maybe she is odd. Even I would like it better if she were less...like that but I've always prided myself on accepting others so that others can accept me."

N pointed with pride to his chest. Doll stared. 

 "..."

In the abstract, that would a good idea, the moral of a children's story, even, but when it extended to tolerating creatures such as V, Doll could hardly approve of what she saw as, in its own way, a form of cowardice. 

"You know what that thing is like, what she's done, and yet you defend her. She went to the prom to kill everyone. I went to stop her. Why were you there?," Doll asked, having had the odd idea that she could talk N into siding against V for the benefit of the colony. 

 "To...stop...her," N answered. 

"So we had the same target, and yet you two sided with her against me?" 

"When you put it like that, it does seem odd, but when we dropped in for maximum cool factor - Uzi was very insistent on that - we were planning on talking her down, or if that didn't work, repeating what we did the first time. But with better chains." 

If they were chaining her up, they already had some idea of the threat they posed. Cases like that couldn't be solved with half-measures. Doll tossed her plan to use N; even when he identified the threat, his personality didn't allow for adequate measures to liquidate it. 

"But we arrived and saw that she'd made prom queen. Good for her! And here I thought I was the one who'd made the most friends among the workers, but she goes and takes the spotlight like that! No one was screaming. No one was being murdered. She'd been looking forward to it for months. She even had me find her a nice dress to wear. Then we showed up and crashed her party. Honestly, I think I would've felt bad about it, had you not done what you did." 

Doll couldn't believe the drone before her seriously believed that V was the legitimate winner of the prom queen contest, and felt sorry about spoiling the moment of her 'victory'. 

"She was going to kill everyone. We tricked her and laid a trap." 

"That's what she said, but not what she did. If you'd known V the way I do and then saw her standing up there looking scared and uncertain, you'd know she wasn't going to do anything. But then you attacked her, and killed those drones, and refused Uzi's call to work together." 

Discussing the prom brought the worries that N had been dealing with ever since encountering whatever thing J's body had turned into back to to the forefront of his mind. One by one his repression circuits found themselves overloaded and were forced to shut down. N didn't want to ruin the mood, but the thoughts and feelings kept surging, and Doll was the closest outlet for it. V, who clearly knew something, refused to talk to him about it. Maybe, even her forgetting that he existed all that time was also just a trick to avoid having to deal with him. 

Uzi wanted to talk, and had experienced many of the confusing and frightful events that he had. But she didn't know more than he did, at least until the necklace and her Dad provided more information, and he wasn't sure that Uzi would ever be comfortable around a Disassembly Drone like him again. 

"OwO. OwO. OwO. Ow." 

After N's tail poked it enough, that fleshy claw creature finally turned into a black sphere and flew away. 
That void wasn't the finality N had hoped for, but it would have to do. 
He checked that there wasn't anything or anyone else in the corridor but the two of them. 
Their solitude verified, N turned to Uzi, to comfort her and reaffirm their team in the face of whatever just happened and whatever would happen. 
She looked shaken and lonely. 
That hologram of her Dad getting bisected and eaten was a nasty trick.
He held out his hand.
She didn't respond. 
Oh, Uzi. 

N lightly tapped her on the shoulder. 
Uzi pulled back and stared at N. 
No, stared at the Disassembly Drone before her. 
She couldn't see him as anything else any more. 
Like that, they'd gone back to how things had been the first time they'd met. 
Together in loneliness once more. 

N pulled back in dismay. 

"What. Hghh. Are you things?" Uzi asked. 
You things. 
Plural. 
'Thing'. 
Those stung. 
He wasn't even an individual to her any more; just the part of the collective that happened to be in front of her.
And the look of fright on her face...
N lowered his hand in dejection and pained realization. 
He turned and walked away. 

The fault was his. 
Disassembly Drones killed, and workers did their best to survive. 
It was foolish to think anything else was possible. 
J was right: N truly was a moron and he needed someone else to look out for him. 
To keep him from making dumb mistakes. 
He should've known better than to think that he, and Uzi, and V (they kept her chained up for a reason, didn't they!) could just pledge not to kill each other and walk hand-in-hand toward the future. 
As buddies. 
Uzi might've rightly hated and feared him in that moment, and maybe forever afterward, but he still cared about her. 
To a far lesser extent, he cared about Thad, and all the other folks there. 
The ones who were nice enough to accept his apology card, even with its terrible art. 

N resolved to protect them from the most dangerous threats they currently faced. 
Himself and V. 
The best way to protect them was to avoid them. 
Like a painting, this colony, this Outpost 3 was best viewed from a distance. 
It was fine. 
Things were fine. 
N was fine. 

There was still the perpetual night. 
And the cold, gloomy skies. 
And the blue-grey snow. 
And the shattered husks of buildings. 
And the unfinished spire. 
And all the corpses. 

V was there, waiting for him. 
Perhaps she would talk to him. 
She at least deserved to know what had happened, what lurked inside all of them. 
Maybe they would swap. 
N was gloomy, so maybe V would be cheerful.
Maybe V would lift his spirits. 

"I hate your personality normally, but this is somehow worse." 
"What am I being punished for?" 

Nope. 
Spirits weren't lifted. 
N couldn't even manage a 'Nice one, V. You see I'm suffering and still manage to make it about you. Really stepping up to fill the narcissist shoes now that J's gone.'
At least she remembered him.
Even if it was to hate him.
N hated his personality too. 
N hated his programming. 
N hated his purpose. 
N hated...

Even that two minutes' hate didn't fix him. 
To feel completely empty inside would be better than this.  

"What if you killed Uzi? Or V? Or you killed V, but she didn't die when she was killed? Like J? It was a fluke that we managed to defeat her. How could we do the same for V? How could we rescue her if that happened? She's pretty just the way she is. She doesn't need crab claws or human hand tentacles or camera arms or a snake body with horns coming off of it. Come to think of it, those horns looked a lot like the ones on the bottoms of our wings. But that's just a coincidence! The important thing is that none of that is my V! None of that is me!"

N had started in his usual happy-calm manner, but got more and more agitated as he continued. The idea of himself, or his only remaining squad member becoming such an eldritch monstrosity shook him to the core. Her enmity toward V would never fade, but Doll couldn't help but be touched by the extreme level of concern N showed for his friend. 

"You...are a good friend. Even if she's beyond saving."

He'd gotten a compliment out of Doll. He'd expressed the full horror of the Disassembly Drones, or at least what he thought the full horror was, which raised the question of whether the gaping holes in his memory were covering up something worse. But he'd said all that, and she, if anything, seemed more sympathetic toward him. But N just had to look around the room to see that Doll was no ordinary worker drone. Perhaps she did understand what he was going through. 

"That means a lot, coming from someone like you, with us both like this." 

"Part of the planning for killing V involved thinking of how to prevent a revival like your other friend. My mother didn't pass down much, but I know enough about those things' weaknesses. And how they work. By manipulation and deceit. She, or it, tried to use a hologram of Lizzy to trick Lizzy into opening the classroom door."

 "Getting tricked by a hologram of herself?  Even I wouldn't...that's-" 

"A very Lizzy thing to do. " Doll interrupted, smiling gently. That hadn't been her focus, but N's reaction diverted Doll's thought to her friend, the one she'd cared enough about to move out of harm's way. 

"['That girl is...gorgeous, right? I'm gonna let her in']" Doll said, in a half-mocking, half-sincere impression of Lizzy, or at least as much of an impression of Lizzy as Doll was capable of. 

She continued. 

"And she would've if I hadn't wrecked the door. She constantly puts herself in danger. With your hologram friend. With your parent-murdering friend. Ah Lizzy. Nothing bad could possibly happen to the girl-boss of Outpost 3. A diva complex with a designer death drive where most people have a self-preservation instinct."

"Dangerous... like you? Or now V?" N queried. 

Doll glared, then grinned. He wasn't wrong. 

"Dangerous like me. We were friends before my parents were killed, before this influence awakened in me. She was the first one who arrived after they...the first and only one. She let me stay over until I felt comfortable. She let me feed on her, saying ['I know that feeling. If I weren't me, I'd be thirsty for me too.'] And even when I needed more oil than she could safely give, she stood by me. I was a monster. When I told her this, she brushed it off with  '[Girl, you're an apex predator now. Like me. Only with a literal body count. One that leaves them dead-dead, not just dead-in-bed. We'll be fine together.']"

Doll accompanied this with a slightly exaggerated impersonation of Lizzy's body language. Despite the grimness of their situation, the once and presumably future enemies found themselves laughing together at the thought of their unflappable acquaintance. 

The smile left his face as N thought over what Doll had told him. Once more, the image of Uzi pulling away from him in fear haunted him.

He looked at her and asked, his tone and posture betraying his uncertainty: "You're dangerous to her. And she knows you're dangerous. But you make it work anyway? And not just because she likes dangerous things?" 

Doll smiled, recalling the adventures she'd had with Lizzy.  "I wouldn't intentionally hurt her. And she trusts me not to lose control"

N's eyes brightened with hope. "And how did you build this trust?"

"We've known each other for years." Doll deadpanned. 

"Oh."

N looked dejected. Uzi couldn't be safe and comfortable around him unless she had been around him for years? 

"There wouldn't happen to be a faster way, would there?"  he ventured, hoping for some way out of the impasse. 

"It was quickly clear that I could control myself, that the urges never overpowered me, caused me to mindlessly lash out. Then when I began hunting other drones, it never bled over into the rest of my life. That's an understated benefit of telekinesis, by the way - 
it's easy to keep oil and other fluids off of you. So when I returned after hunting and feeding, I looked and acted normal. I did this every time and so any lingering worries Lizzy had faded."

N brightened up. This he could do. 

"So all I have to do is be there and be normal? I don't feed where anyone can see me. And I've always cleaned up nicely! And maybe Uzi knows this. And that's why she was already dressed up to go to prom with me, right? She was fine but I wasn't. And she waited for me, right?"

"Uh, sure." Doll replied, confused for the first time in this conversation, and not inclined to tell him what exactly Uzi had been doing in the colony before prom. She'd gotten into drones' heads before, but never like this. 

"I tried to kill you. You tried to kill me. I might still kill you. Are you really asking me for advice?" 

"Well, when you put it like that...it does seem weird. Sorry for bothering you on this. I don't know what got into me. It's just that this - this reminds of when I met Uzi! That's right! I tried to kill her and she tried to kill me then I tried to kill her again and then her words almost got me killed."

"..." Once more Doll was left speechless. She honestly preferred V's blades and bullets to whatever this unstable chatterbox of a drone was attempting. 

"I am like Uzi to you? "

"Well, my relationship with her got past the 'try to brutally murder each other while laughing maniacally' stage. She has a special eye like you, and stopped that bullet like you, but she doesn't eat people like you. Let's hope that last part isn't related. Why do you do that, anyway? You look like a worker to me."

"It is related, as far as I know. If I don't consume oil on a regular basis, unpleasantness happens. I assume it is the same for you?" 

"It's a bit more serious than 'unpleasantness', but yeah more or less. Without oil we'd all overheat and die. That's not the only reason we went after you guys, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't fun at times, but that is the big one. For me at least. Along with being useful.  J started off doing it for the job but came to hate you guys. Or maybe she always hated you guys. She liked to rant about however many 'nanoangstroms of hate'  she had, whatever that meant. When I asked, she'd talk about how she 'must scream' or something. But she never screamed about that. Only at me. V used it to entertain herself, I think. Though it didn't seem like it worked very often. No offense, but I think she found killing you guys boring quite often. " 

"How petty. How disgusting. And here I thought I'd become a monster when I only ever acted out of necessity."

"I dunno about that. And I don't think all the worker drones in here would agree. "

The worker drones in the room stayed silent. None of them spoke up to agree that Doll had only killed them out of necessity. 

Chapter Text

"How petty. How disgusting. And here I thought I'd become a monster when I only ever acted out of necessity."

"I dunno about that. And I'm not sure the worker drones in here would agree. "

At N's words, the two of them uneasily eyed the room and its grisly contents. Even before death, few of the now-corpses had been intact, and Doll had hardly been in the habit of using anesthesia. The scene seemed to belie Doll's statement, but neither drone felt like directly addressing its truth.  

"I needed to live. Some of them learned too much. Others were in the way. One or two insulted my taste in music."

"Okay.This place looks like a house V would decorate, if she had the attention span for it. You shot that one's head into that basketball hoop over there. Why'd you do that anyway?" 

They briefly turned to look at it. From where they were seated, the hoop and the head lodged in its net sat perfectly framed by two headless corpses suspended upside down from the ceiling by chains.

Doll covered her mouth with a hand and murmured something. 

"That's a cute purr you've got going on. I mean, what was that? I couldn't catch it." N said, catching himself halfway through. If he weren't pinned to the wall, he would've covered his own mouth at such a slip. 

Doll murmured again, slightly louder. 

"Still can't hear you. Come on, I wont bite. " N called, curious as to why the normally direct Doll wasn't being clear. 

"[Ballin.]"

"Ballin?" 

"[Ballin.] I'm a cheerleader. We studied old records of sports to know how to cheer for them. And trained. And trained. Except there's only one team that never plays any games. But I'll never let the skills I learned go to waste. That was a three pointer. Nothing but net," Doll pridefully exclaimed, mimicking shooting a basketball with her hands. 

Her evident satisfaction with her athletic prowess overrode her initial hesitancy to reveal the not-so-necessary reason why she'd decided to play ball with a victim's head. But maybe, as Lizzy would say, keeping in shape was completely necessary for a cheerleader like her. Not that drones could really get out of shape

"Right. And V was always just 'expressing her inner artist'. Honestly, you're not that different from us, Doll, and the sad/scary thing is I don't know if that's a bad thing, and who it's bad for. If you were a disassembly drone, I'm sure no one would ever call you 'worthless and terrible' or think you were forgettable. But you do have the weird telekinesis-magic-stuff-from-nothing thing you've got going on, and that's different from us. " 

"You, who were just saying that we were not that different, don't see any equivalent phenomenon to those things you listed?" Doll asked.

"I don't know about any 'phenomenon', but your approach to killing and death and corpses and eating and all that other fun stuff isn't any different than what we do. Or did. Uzi says we're not supposed to do that anymore. It's how you do it that's weird. Our weapons are built-in, but you just look like a normal helpless-sorry, harmless- harmless worker drone. And you seem to pull stuff out of thin air. Like those magic books promised, but then never actually showed me how to do," N replied.

Doll gave N the smile of an interrogator leading a subject to a confession. Or at least what she thought such a smile would look like on a drone. The books didn't include pictures, and talked about human mouths, not drone mouths. 

"Where are your wings?" 

"They only come out when I need them." 

"And you've never thought about this?" 

"No, not really. It's just how it is, you know. None of the others were interested either. Or if they were, they didn't feel like telling me." 

"When you fire a bullet or missile, where does it come from?" 

"I change my hand into a gun, or a launcher." 

"And where do their magazines come from, or their barrels?"

"They show up when needed. Never thought there was more to it." 

"Your tail is permanent, correct? It doesn't vanish like your wings?" 

"Yeah. That's true." 

"Isn't that interesting? You can trip on it, get tied up, get stabbed by it, and yet that's always deployed, when it seems like something that should only be brought out when you need it."

"I've never thought about it that way, but you might be right. That's a funny oversight when you think about it. Almost one as bad as making us fatally allergic to sunlight."  

Doll telekinetically picked up a knife. 

"See this knife? There's only one." 

"Yeah, I only see one." 

Doll cloned the knife seven times, and arranged them around her. 

"There are eight now. Where did they come from?" 

"From you? You're doing that? You've got a bag full of knives somewhere and some magic tricks to keep us from seeing it?" 

"What if it's the same for both of us? With a need for oil and...other things as the price of use." 

"Well, when you put it that way, we do have a lot in common. That would also explain why you - a worker drone- are doing things like uh, you're doing.  And there's a lot of weirdness about being a Disassembly Drone that I always just accepted, but maybe I shouldn't have. But what could I have done? V wouldn't talk to me, J didn't like answering questions. The company only ever talked to her, but the radio was busted, so I'm not sure how they were even communicating. And I certainly can't use that channel. I had no way to get answers. I still have no way to get answers. Except you're talking to me, talking longer than I've talked with anyone other than Uzi in, in literally forever. And we're basically bonding over all the things we have in common! Are we becoming buddies?"

"No. This...sickness is nothing to bond over. " 

"But we could, Doll! We could! Whatever's going on, you, me, Uzi, V, if we all face it together, pool our knowledge, we're sure to do better than if everyone is alone. We've all got bits and pieces, and if we would just stop being stubborn and mysterious for five minutes and put them together, think of what we could achieve. You even promised to help Uzi after you find whatever it is you're looking for. You didn't keep trying to kill her. Why? "

"Uzi has fallen into the same position that I am in, but with vastly less information and even less time to save herself, if that's even still possible. If I am right, the road ahead will not be easy for her. Then of course, there were three of you in this room and I'd already lost the element of surprise."

"You couldn't have kept teleporting in and out of the room, kept us on our toes - there are a lot of human expressions we use that don't actually make sense for us when you think about it- but you didn't have to stop attacking us." 

"After you all left me intact in the gymnasium, I got up and immediately teleported into my house only to see three impolite intruders moving in to claim it. My oil reserves had not been replenished, and were insufficient to resume the fight. And my parents were right there. It would be difficult to fight without hurting them." 

"Oh Doll, you little red softie... But still If you're not going to fight us, then help us, and let us help you. Why are you so against it? Is it just V? I can only imagine how hard it was for you, but focusing on the past won't bring them back. And I'm sure they would want you to be safe and happy, not isolated and running into danger out of a desire for revenge. We can all achieve that, if we'd just work together. We can be there for you, Doll. "

"You all don't know what you're dealing with."

"You could tell us. We could learn." 

"It's not that simple. You all would just get in my way." 

"Then show us how to help you."

"I can't. My reasons are my own. Keep prying and I'll gut you." 

"Okay. Okay. Okay. We'll drop it. We'll work together and you'll be alone. But if you don't want to join us, or help us, or just talk to us about the secrets you know, then why talk to me about all of this? About Lizzy and knives and sports? Is this somehow as necessary as those severed arms on the dartboard? "

"You are not actively a threat. And this conversation, admittedly, is not entirely bad. As you can guess, there are few that would listen." 

N looked up at the cabinet, at the helmets and wigs of Doll's fellow students. It truly was hard to see why it got harder for Doll to find listeners as time went on. 

"Well, I'm glad this isn't some convoluted scheme to brutally murder me, and that you're getting something out of talking to me."

"You...have an oddly charming personality." Doll said bashfully. "Unless it's an act. -And it had better not be -" A pair of knives floated into the air and began spinning menacingly. 

"I assure you it's not. I've been like this as long as I can remember. That's not actually very long - they did something that put a lot of holes in my memories, but it's consistent and I've always prided myself on consistency. Oh, oh! I've consistently prided myself on consistency. And I've been consistent in consistently priding myself on consistency. Serial Designation N, on a recursion excursion!" 

N's visor flashed a pair of sunglasses. Doll stared at him until his eyes returned to being yellow ovals. 

"And your tastes in decoration and fondness for knives, and sticking knives in drones that just want to get along aside, you're not so bad yourself, Doll. I wish everyone could all have met under better circumstances. We're all not so different, and I think worker drones and Disassembly Drones could find ways to co-exist."

"Not so bad myself," Doll repeated. Both of them looked around the room once more, their digital optics recording in high resolution the macabre menagerie that had been a festering breeding ground for robo-roaches for months. 

N's eyes darted rapidly from side to side. "Nobody's perfect. But with better lighting, pest control (but don't kill them, just move the little guys somewhere where they can be free and run all over), a mop would do wonders, you could really turn this place around. If you want, I could take you around the spire for inspiration. J spent a lot of time positioning and arranging everything to 
make it look great and imposing. She explained it as 'building the company's brand as the chic and forward-looking once and future owner of this rock. Nostalgia and the allure of progress, not that a amnesiac philistine like you would remember the former or feel the latter.' I learned a new word that day!" 

Doll couldn't help but smile. "Yeah, I'll take you up on that one day. Why not? My biggest need - to take design lessons from a dead drone on how to tastefully arrange other dead drones." 

Doll never dropped her guard - V had shown that some murder drones were flexible enough to spend months feigning friendliness to 
maneuver themselves into position for massacre - but even she was charmed by this one. It was like being with Lizzy at her most authentically open and caring, without the put-downs and petty insults she used to maintain her status as queen bee. And N seemed like the type to run away from danger, not bring it to prom. 

"It's not just that, Doll. You spent months planning out your prom operation. That kind of dedication isn't common. And you clearly know more about whatever is going on than we do," N said, in an earnest attempt to make Doll feel better.

At times the dour drone before him seemed like a black hole for positivity, but he wasn't about to stop trying. 

"Partly because you refuse to tell us" he said in a whisper. 

"However you learned that, you're clearly ahead of the rest of us."

"But Doll, you mentioned convoluted murder schemes earlier. Why was your your plan to get rid of V so complex and lengthy? You have telekinesis, you can teleport, you know where the spire is. And she was chained up. Seems a lot easier than waiting months to bait her with prom." 

"Even with Lizzy's assistance in picking targets whom no one would miss, it was difficult to satisfy my oil needs without causing the colony to panic at the number of disappearances. As the strength of my powers was proportionate to the amount of oil I'd consumed, this kept them in an underdeveloped state for months, good enough for ambushing unaware prey and not much else. In those days, no one ventured beyond the WDF doors, so there was no real incentive to take the risk of rapidly strengthening my abilities. There were even rumors that you'd all simply died from starvation. Too many unknowns, too much risk, too much of Lizzy and the others pulling me into their little activities and fights for social status. Uzi's excursion and your incursion completely changed that. The murder drone threat was real once again, the colony was in upheaval, and all I'd done was cower in the background while others fought."

Doll grimaced. Her hands balled into fists. 

" I should've been strong enough to keep murder drones from getting their claws that close to Lizzy. And I saw that beast V, the slayer of my parents, again. They can't sleep in peace until she's gone. After, I had to get stronger, which meant more disappearances. The unexpected incident with the other one's corpse covered up some of them, but we were still looking at months before I'd be ready. Lizzy somehow stumbled upon V one day and talked her down without getting killed. The idea developed from there: both sides would use the other and then spring the trap at the prom. We won. Or we would've won, if you hadn't shown up." 

"Well...I'm glad V made a friend, even if it was as part of multiple overlapping murder plots. Great to see people try new things. Not that, uh, she stole Lizzy from you or anything. I can't help you with that, but if you would talk to Lizzy then maybe there's a chance."  

"How is Lizzy?"

"Oh, she's the same as always."

"I meant, she did not get in trouble? There were no consequences for bringing V into the colony?"

"There was a bit of a 'don't do that again' speech from the WDF, but nah, nothing happened."

"That's good to hear. So when I eliminate V and resolve the...other problem, she will have no choice but to return to me and we can resume our friendship."

"I'm not sure you need to get rid of V to do that. Like, I'm friends with Uzi and Uzi is friends with..., uh... Okay, that was a bad example. I'm friends with Uzi, and I'm friends with V, I hope, but that doesn't mean that Uzi and V need to fight. They like each other. Kinda. If you squint. Okay, that's another bad example. But you get where I'm going with this."

"This isn't some petty jealousy grudge. If I wanted that, I would go hang out with Rachel."

"I know, I know. You've made it clear. You're on a deep mission to avenge your parents and save yourself." 

"Save the planet." 

"The...planet?"

"Yes. Those are the ultimate stakes. And I'm the only one who can." 

"Wait, Doll. You think the planet is at stake and you don't want allies? You'd risk going it alone? You want the weight of this entire world on your shoulders?" 

"It is not about what I want. It is my cursed inheritance. I wasn't raised to shirk from my duties." 

The door to Doll's house slammed open. Harsh yellow penetrated the suffocating red lighting. V stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the light. If N didn't know better, he'd think she was legitimately worried about where he'd been.



N and Doll turned to stare at her. They exchanged glances, and N thought he saw fleeting relief on V's face, before her screen refreshed to anger. She glared at Doll and shifted her arms into rocket launchers. 

"N! Get down! This time, I'm not letting her...go?"

But Doll had teleported out of the room before V could fire. Disappointed, V swapped for her hands and walked further into the room. N was unsure how to react, and defaulted to sipping his tea. 

"What were you...were you having a tea party with her?" V exclaimed in outraged surprise as she walked up to N.

"Well, yeah. You were wrong. Doll's a wonderful chef when she wants to be, and this tea is amazing! You should try some." 

V looked over at the cup Doll had been using. The vapors were pleasant enough. But knowing that freak, it was poisoned with something. Probably multiple somethings. And acid. 

"I'll pass. You were supposed to go on patrol. Why are you still here?" 

"Well, long story short, I put the sheets back over Doll's folks, then she showed up, stuck me to the wall, and began yelling at me. I think that's how greeting guests works in her culture." 

"Yes. 'Greeting' guests, I'm sure. Looking around, she did a lot of 'greeting' guests. They went to pieces over that psycho's hospitality. Anyway, you're not on the wall, and when I showed up, you were very noticeably NOT doing your job and turning her into scrap metal." 

"I was getting there. Now where was I? Oh, right! Doll was yelling at me, I was being my usual cheerful self, then we had a courtroom battle (which I won by the way, I'm part lawyer on my mother's side), then she got all sad and quiet and she let me off the wall."

"And after tricking her into letting you go, you didn't attack her? Like you were supposed to?"  

"It was part of our agreement. And she was watching me. And we both wanted oil. Turns out, like I said, Doll is a good chef."

"That's wonderful. We'll put it in her obituary."

"And she's not a bad conversation partner. The only other person I've talked to like that is Uzi." 

V winced. 

"I did a full sweep of everything to the spire and back. In all that time, you were just talking to her?" 

"Yeah, pretty much. It turns out that we have a lot in common. She's still shy, but I'm sure we'll get over that." 

"You were...bonding with that lunatic?"

"I want to be on good terms with everyone."

"She dismembered us!" 

"And you were there to kill everyone. And it's not like we didn't disassemble plenty of them. Fair's fair." 

"She hurt you!" 

"If I got mad at everyone who ever hurt me, I'd be alone in the world. And that would be terrible." 

V looked at the ground. She didn't respond to that. N's conversation with Doll had become something of a respite, but once more N was forced to confront his reality. Feelings and frustrations brewed within him. 

After a lull, N resumed. 

"I'm tired of fighting and killing and plotting and all of it, V! I'm sick of it! And I don't even know why we're doing any of this! Or what we even are! Every day there are new questions. I don't know very much about what's going on, and it seems like that's constantly being rubbed in my face. I just want time to sit and figure things out. I was doing that with Doll, kind of, before you showed up."

At that last, V somewhat relaxed. 

"You were pumping her for info? That's all you had to say."

"No, I was talking to her. Doll knows things. Important things that could help us. But she doesn't want to share, no matter how many problems that creates for everyone. She's got a lot in common with you, actually. If you two didn't hate each other, you'd get along great. No wonder Lizzy tried to claim you both as besties."

"She's nothing like me. N, I know a lot of things are happening right now that you don't understand. Scary things. Stuff that doesn't make any sense. But I am on your side. We'll get through this, together." 

V smiled gently at him. 

"Will you tell me what you know? What's really going on?" N asked, earnestly trying to believe in V. 

V's smile faded. 

"That's...that's, uh..."

"That's the problem V. You can't. Or you won't. We're a team, V, but it has to work both ways. You know, I just spent what, an hour talking to Doll. Just talking. To our 'enemy.' When's the last time you and I talked like that, in all the time we've known each other? Did we ever have any conversation like that?" 

Memories of Earth flashed through V's mind. She couldn't share them, of course. But they were there. Always there, reminding her of what they'd had, and what they'd lost. Or perhaps worst of all, not entirely lost. Not all of N's memories had been deleted. Was that an oversight, some unconscious act of resistance on N's part, or another means for that thing to taunt her? Knowing that there was - still- something there was more painful than if it all truly were gone. V was so tempted to break down and confess everything; the impulse stabbed at her. And yet she resisted. She had to. For his sake. This was her burden to bear, for them. For N. If only he would realize it. 

"No. We've never sat down and talked for a while. There was a job to do," V answered, willing herself to make the lie sound convincing. 

"Would you like to start? I'm not full. That's one of the perks, I guess, of being a Disassembly Drone: there's always room for more. There's a cup right there, and it really does taste amazing. And you know, maybe I'm pushing a bit too hard, V. I can see that you're uncomfortable with the way this is going. I just want a good outcome for all of us. For Uzi, for you-" 

V noticed that he'd said Uzi's name first. That stung. 

"-for Lizzy and Doll and Thad and all the rest. So I won't insist. If you just want to sit in silence, or talk about the weather or something, that's fine too." 

"You know, I'll take you up on that. But you're sure this thing isn't spiked or whatever?" 

"No, it's not. I'm fine, aren't I?" 

Reassured, V sat at the table and reached for the cup. She brought it to her lips. A teleport flashed and the room glowed with pulses of eerie red light. There was another flash. 

N and V looked down to see that their cups were completely empty, down to the last drop. The pitcher Doll had been using was also drained. 

"Well, I guess that's that for that delicious tea. We can still sit here, together," N said, trying to find some spot of optimism. 

"I'll kill her," V snarled. 

"Weren't you going to do that anyway?" 

"I'll make it painful." 

"Again, that's hardly a change of plans..."

"There won't even be scraps of her left. Or maybe I'll incapacitate her, destroy everything in this house in front of her, and then erase her from existence." 

"Okay, that sounds new. And like something Doll would do. I think you two will get along great."

Chapter Text

"...And that's my outline for Episode 10 of the stream, covering the long-running dispute between Continental and Analytic Philosophy over the nature, meaning, and structural relations of doors, including whether they truly have meanings...ah who am I kidding? Of course doors have meanings! All the suspicious petitions in the world won't change that! Anyway, I probably should've asked you this earlier, but what do you think, Uzi? Will your old man go 'viral' on the 'interwebz'?"

"Dad! Do not talk like that! Or or just stop talking at all! It's been over an hour!"

"Condensing a life's work of thought and practice is not easy. When you've got a massive list of accomplishments under your belt, you'll realize that," Khan replied, in an attempt at passing on fatherly advice.

Uzi jumped up. Her hands were as rigidly clawed as a normal worker drone could get them, twitching as mounting frustration finally boiled over. It was amazing that it had taken as long as it had. There was not very much of Uzi to mount over, after all.

"I have plenty of accomplishments, remember? I killed the unfriendly neighborhood Murder Drone squad leader! With the rail gun designed by me, built by me, and considered pointless by you! Then I killed her again when she came back as ugly on the outside as she was on the inside! And I tamed a whole 2 (two) other Murder Drones! And after Lizzy and Doll, whom you set me up with by the way, tried to kidnap and eat me, I escaped and helped stop Doll's rampage against the prom! I have a lot of accomplishments. Probably more than you at this point."

Khan twitched. What Uzi had done, or seemed to do, in the few months since she first left the bunker was impressive. She did not seem to realize it, but she took after her parents in that way. Some part of him always knew that a day like this would come. As fiercely independent as Uzi believed herself to be, the power of her pedigree was undeniable. The few who had survived the fall of Outpost 9, or who had access to the tightly-suppressed information about what had happened to the other colonies would never say that Khan was a do-nothing. That his daughter had lived long enough to think him useless, and felt comfortable enough to say it, might just be his greatest achievement.

"Uzi. I-" He began, but much like her Mother, when Uzi got going she was unstoppable.

"And I only agreed to listen to your 'short pitch' so that you'd tell me about the necklace. The necklace, remember? The one Mom had?

Sorrow flashed over Khan's face. Of course he remembered. Khan had been trying to stall Uzi, in the hope that she would grow bored and run off to do something else. Khan would even take Uzi going and playing with her massacre bot 'friend' over her staying here and badgering him for answers. One of the many many advantages of doors was that they were magical objects that could block openings, that could bring unpleasant confrontations to a halt. Khan had perhaps been excessive with them, but with all that had happened, much of the old fire had left him, taking with it his willingness to step up and face the music.

"Of course I remember! I could never forget. I've just been busy getting the livestream set up, and we never really get the chance to talk..."

"Gee. I wonder why," Uzi said.

"This sort of thing is something you'd know more about than me, and so naturally I wanted to bounce ideas off of you," Khan said.

"You're not just stalling to get out of some 'big traumatic life-changing reveal', are you?" Uzi asked, miming the quotation marks with her hands.

"Nonsense. You may not think it, but I do know you. Better than anyone alive. If I were stalling, or refused, that would only make you more determined to find out what I was hiding. Not that I'm hiding anything. I'm as transparent as a glass sliding door."

"And yet, I just spent an hour learning a lot about doors, and nothing about this necklace. Just tell me, already. I've got to get back to N and V before they hunt down Doll," Uzi replied.

It seemed that Khan's 'talk her ears off about doors until she storms off' strategy had run out of steam. Or rather, the seriousness of the situation meant that the old tricks would not work. What had happened with Yeva's kid was not something that could be waved off as a freak occurrence or a mere curiosity-of-the-day. Khan had pushed Uzi to go to prom alongside the cheerleader duo, and in doing so pushed her away from himself and into the arms of that annihilation automaton. The relief that he felt that Uzi was unhurt hardly edged out the embarrassment and regret he felt over being on the wrong side of the doors during that event. Or sending her off into the 'care' of the drone who had been causing all those mysterious disappearances. Well, after the obligatory WDF inspection of Doll's house, they were not exactly 'disappearances' any longer.

Khan knew that Uzi's room was not full of dismembered corpses (yet), though he feared she would take 'design ideas' from Doll's edgy sense of home décor. He wanted to believe that meant that whatever had happened to Doll was not happening or going to happen to Uzi. He could not, though. Their father-daughter relationship had cooled with time, and he knew she could easily hide things from him. Even setting aside the surface, the population of Worker Drones was not what it had been, and large sections of the bunker complex had gone entirely untouched since the humans had had their little accident. And she was under the influence of a crowd of Murder Drones, maybe even 'experimenting' with their wicked ways in their corpse-spire.

Khan worried that Uzi would take to that lifestyle, and then she'd be lost. Like Doll was. Nori and Yeva had popped up, literally, at the same time in the same place. There had been a lot of weirdness around them, in those early days. There was a lot of weirdness around their daughters now. It could not just be a coincidence. Khan wished, as he did every night when he rolled over and looked at the empty half of his bed, that he could build a door big enough and thick enough to keep the past out forever. That was a fantasy, no different than the ones from his younger days, when he thought the newly-liberated Worker Drones could do anything.

The past was coming for them, whether they liked it or not. The only question was whether they would open the door to face it head on, or cower while the door was smashed to pieces. Khan would never sacrifice a door in vain; not even a figurative one. He had done enough stalling. Uzi was as persistent as ever, and clearly not going to give up after what had happened earlier. He could at least give her what information he had; maybe it would make a difference when it came to keeping herself safe. Despite her impulsiveness, she had a good head on her shoulders.

"Ha ha. Of course I remember. They - Nori and Yeva- were wearing those when we found them."

"Found them?" Uzi asked, as pieces connected inside her mind.

"Yes, 'found them'. Don't just take my word for it, I've got pictures."

"Hard evidence?"

"Follow me, Uzi," Khan said, as he turned toward the doors that held back the evidence of his greatest failure.

They walked and stopped at the closet housing the materials Nori had produced after her condition...worsened. Khan solemnly pulled out a key and inserted it into its hole, stopping to think of the unforgettable purple ball of insane energy and how much Uzi was like her.

"After the core collapse, I didn't notice the collars..."

It probably was not intentional design, but emptied-out worker drone heads made for convenient oil cans. While V raged and raced across the skies searching for Doll, N calmly shuttled back and forth between Doll's house and an underground tank near the spire, as he transferred as much oil as he could scoop up or scrape off. N did not hate worker drones, or take out his feelings upon them, but he did not really think anything of preying upon them, even after his rebellion. It was just something he had to do to live. Of course, it made doing anything with the other worker drones more awkward, and took more time and effort, and so N was glad that Doll had 'donated' her own supply. It was a charming example of cooperation between workers and disassemblers. Charming cooperation to feed upon other drones. But as they say, those who prey together stay together. Or was that 'pray'? 

Or maybe it was somehow both. N resisted the urge to slip into the familiar routine of hunter/killer mode as he gazed upon the scenery below, and any worker drones who looked up and saw him were probably praying that the blade of the reaping angel might yet be stayed. He wondered if he should wave to calm their fears, but thought better of it. They could not see it from so far away, after all. It was a shame, really. Flying never got old, but some novelty would help break up the monotony of endless rows of blueish-blackish ruins.

Then again, N was not far from the spire and only Worker Drones like Uzi would dare venture anywhere near it at night. Not for the first time, N wondered how it was that they were able to do any disassembling at all: if the workers limited their time outside the doors to daytime, there was little that N or the others could do to them. So what was their convenient excuse, that decades after planetfall, there were still enough worker drones getting caught to sustain multiple Disassembly Drone squads? Not that N had heard anything from the other squads in forever. That was weird. J had always been the 'liaison', but with her gone, what was stopping the other squads from phoning in? N had not even gotten a simple 'hello' from any of them.

The air above him flashed red and pressed upon him as if it had suddenly swelled. Caught off guard, N could not restore balance and quickly spun out of control. He plunged deep into a snowbank, which collapsed into a hole. The empty heads fell in a ring around him. N popped out of the snow and shook to get it off him.

"Any landing you can walk away from is A-okay with me!" he cheerily said.

"Except the landing of our pod, that is. It would be nice if it were still flyable."

N dug the container-heads out of the ground.

"Good thing they're empty. Just imagine the mess if they hadn't been!" he said to no one in particular.

He was used to that. Nobody ever listened to him, or wanted to hear what he had to say.

"Who are you talking to?"

Except somebody was listening to him. N turned around and saw Doll. The red flash suddenly made sense, and N could guess how he had fallen, or rather, been shot out of the sky.

"Just myself. As always. Didn't think I'd run into you, Doll. Are you on your way to the spire? I can give you the tour if you want. Fair's fair," N said.

"I was tracking what you did with that oil. I worked hard to collect it and my search will be more tedious if I must interrupt it to feed."

"Well now you know! Feel free to have some...of...our...your...oil. Oh my! Sorry, I guess I should've asked. It's kind of rude to just take someone's oil like that."

Doll glared at N.

"Rude of us to take someone's oil. Not rude of you. That wasn't aimed at you," N quickly added.

N had quickly learned that Doll was temperamental, and worried that she would see that as an insult. Thankfully, she waved it off.

"No, it was rude of me. Very rude. Too bad survival comes before manners," Doll replied, smirking.

"And this thing you're looking for, it will help you survive?" N asked.

"Yes. It may even help us all."

"How?

"..."

"Come on, don't be shy."

"I think the planet may be in danger," Doll admitted.

"Nah. I think we can work something out."

N had tried to be reassuring with that line, but Doll, if anything, seemed even angrier.

"Nothing can be 'worked out' with that thing, if it is what I think it is," Doll said

"Is that 'thing' what you think it is? That 'thing' that we both totally already know about, which is why you're not just saying what it is, that sort of thing?"

"At the moment, yes. Mother's notes are incomplete. It is not looking good."

"Your mom knew about that 'thing' How? Wait!"

Uzi and Doll had jewelry from their mothers. They both had special eyes. Doll had looked shocked when Uzi did her bullet-stopping thing, but not incredulous. Her eyes had flickered to Uzi's neck. The same neck that her mother's little trinket was wrapped around. And now Doll had revealed that her mother had notes on some danger to the planet. Putting it all together, their mothers must have some connection to that planet-threatening thing that Doll was talking about. That did not sound good. After a brief selfish sigh of relief that N had no connection to the 'thing' whose name he totally knew, N turned his attention back to the situation he faced, which continued to throw unwelcome surprises at him.

"W-will Uzi be okay? She's not in special danger, is she?" N asked.

Doll looked down, clearly thinking through her response. That was not a good sign.

"If we-I- can stop it, she should be fine. I believe she has just awakened. It should have no interest in her yet."

"Does that mean it's interested in you instead? Is there anything I can do? Even if it's just to give you a shoulder to lean on," N replied.

Doll's eyes widened in shock. N wondered why. He had not said anything shocking or surprising. If he knew someone, and knew that person was in need, N would be glad to help. He had always made a point to be of assistance to V and J, and he knew they appreciated it. They really did. They were just always too shy to show it. N wondered why everyone he met was like that.

Doll scanned him for any signs of insincerity, any hint that it was a joke or psychological attack. There were not any. Despite her suspicions, it did not seem that she was dealing with a dissembling drone. Doll considered it, but the idea that the happy moron before her could be of real use was quickly rejected. Even if the stories her Mother had told had been exaggerated by the mists of time and the desire to scare a little drone into obedience, there was enough truth in them for her to guess that N would either fall to pieces before it or try to befriend the monster.

"You can...you can stay out of my way. Especially when I come to retrieve 'my' oil, which I shall let you use," Doll finally replied.

"That's maybe not what I was hoping to hear, but I'll take it. Baby steps," N said, flashing a gentle smile at her.

The Disassembly Drone was trying to make a friend of her, Doll realized. How odd. Even odder was that this N seemed genuinely nice in a way that none of Doll's friends had been. He was clearly more sensitive about, and even more bothered by, what had happened to Doll's parents than Lizzy was. What did that say about any of them? 

Perhaps she was too quick to rule out his usefulness. The prom plan would have been impossible without Lizzy, but in this new phase outside the walls there would be little she could do, even if Lizzy had not impulsively sided with V. Doll had seen how Uzi and the Murder Drones had been able to stand against and even kill her together when she could have and would have bested any of them on their own. One brush with death was enough. Doll had not known she could come back, and worried that if it happened again, something else would come back in her place.

A tactical alliance with the Murder Drone would be an obvious way to lower her risk and grant her new possibilities. It was unlikely that he would harm her, and Uzi clearly seemed to have some sort of dependency on him. Getting closer to him would let Doll get closer to her, and decrease the risk of that thing using her to attack Doll or the planet. And knowing Uzi, Doll could guess that she would start an independent investigation, and could be led toward where Doll needed her to be.

"Yes. ['Baby steps']," Doll said.

N squealed. It looked like they were past the 'hurt N in your own special way' phase that every female drone he knew seemed to go through with him, and were on to the 'start working together' step.

"Glad we agree, partner," N said with a salute, " By the way, why did you knock me out of the sky? I'm not hurt or anything, but I'm wondering why you did that."

"It looked like you were hunting something. That assumption was not helped by the severed drone heads you were carrying."

"What if I had waved?"

Doll stared at him.

"What do you think waving would do?"

"A nice big friendly wave of my arm, to show that I wasn't there to hurt anyone."

Not for the first time, N wondered if what he had thought was Doll staring dumbfounded was actually some sort of power-saving mode. She certainly did that a lot when he spoke.

"Most would not see it. If anyone could clearly see it, they would think it was a trap for the gullible, or mocking," Doll said.

"A trap? How gullible do 'they' think other drones are?"

"There are drones who befriend rocks. In 'artificial intelligence', the 'intelligence' is a hope, not a description. No different than the 'sapiens' in homo sapiens."

"Yeah, imagine that. The sort of dolt that would befriend a rock," N said, trying to laugh off Doll's comment.

"So you thought I was hunting, was a threat to other drones, and you decided to take me out?" N continued.

"No. I thought you were distracted and burdened by your trophies, and wanted to try out aerial interception. You never know when that might prove necessary."

"So you thought I was hunting, and that made me seem like good prey."

N thought about it, then nodded in appreciation. The drones that preyed together really did stay together.

"Yes. You can't win unless you can turn the tables."

N's eyes shot open

"And that's what you're going to do with that 'thing'! That's what you're looking for, some sort of tool or info or whatever that will let you do that!"

Doll glared at him. Tactical alliances did not include free exchanges of information.

"I have said too much. You shouldn't pry deeper. It is not good for your health."

Doll's visor changed to a display of sunglasses. The air behind her glowed red and a light of some sort appeared. It flashed bright and white, overexposing N's optics. When they reset, Doll stood expectantly in front of him.

"Okay. I won't pry, but I still read you, partner. You're devious. Like Uzi, but also not like Uzi. I like that. But not like that," N said with a wink

It looked like Doll was back in power-saving mode.

"Was your light show just now supposed to do something? You seem disappointed?"

"Ancient documents suggested it was a memory alteration procedure. I must have gotten something wrong. I wasted too much time on V. There's still too much I don't know," Doll said.

She teleported away before N could say anything. He ran a diagnostic and saw that his recent memory was entirely intact.

"My memory is already broken! Maybe that's why whatever you were doing didn't work!" he shouted, trying to reassure Doll, if she was even still there.

She was, of course, staring at him from a window. Forcing memories into V clearly worked, so perhaps if she used her power she could try the reverse. At a later date. With more information. There was little one could do with N=1, after all.

Chapter Text

N polished the mirror. It was shattered and battered, but that didn't mean it couldn't be pretty with the proper attitude and some elbow grease. N felt that notion was leading somewhere, but vanished the thought in favor of experimentally rubbing his elbow. It was dry. 
Oh well, the metaphor would still work. 

N looked around the empty pod. V and Uzi would be back soon, and it was important that he tidy it up. Some serious and scary stuff had gone down, but a clean living space was a great way to get spirits back up. Or so a magazine had told him. He'd pried that magazine out of the skeletal hands of a corpse, and while that was a bad omen, it wasn't like it was the magazine that killed the person. The laws of similarity and contagion were just fiction, or so N thought. N had also thought that magic wasn't real, and yet...

N had been doing a lot of thinking recently. There was a lot to think about and he felt a bit of rebellious excitement at doing so much thinking. He even felt a hint of dangerous edge from his mind racing so.  N hadn't been allowed to think without a license before. J had told him, "if they had wanted to you think, they would've installed a brain capable of it, and scrapped you when it became clear you still couldn't do it. Leave the thinking to the professionals," no doubt out of concern for the possibility that N might trip up somewhere and hurt himself in his confusion. J did not need to worry, and could not, for she not only was dead, but came back in pieces (and it was not really her, to boot) only to get unceremoniously killed again. N, of course, felt one hundred percent awful about that. The word 'schadenfreude' was not in his regular vocabulary. After all, he was still a novice at these sorts of things. 

But N could do them, and he needed to. Maybe they had installed a 'brain' for thinking in him. He wondered when, and why, they had installed the holo-spooky snake-crab stuff, or maybe it was better to think of that as a killipede. Was that spooky thing done at that spooky manor, back when they were spooky worker drones? And was the weird telekinesis stuff that Doll, and now Uzi, were using an intended feature? He did not recall seeing that mentioned in any manuals. Then again, they probably got those from their mothers, and some of the human books talked about moms having superpowers. He did not imagine it was meant in such a literal sense, and N had disassembled enough moms to know that that did not come standard. 

Neither did the jewelry with the weird emblem that Doll and Uzi wore. The jewelry that was somehow connected to a threat to the planet, a threat which N knew nothing about. Uzi didn't seem to know either, and it seemed that while Doll did know something, she mistakenly thought that N already knew about it, and so didn't tell him. Then there was whatever V knew and stubbornly refused to share. N still felt something for her, but he was surprised to find the feeling weakening. He had had a crush on her for as long as he could remember, but it was abundantly clear that she did not, and likely would not, feel the same way toward him. V had sided with J, seriously tried to fight him, been chained up, escaped to try and kill everyone again, and only through chance happenings had things worked out for her. 

N would not go so far as to call V an enemy, but some sort of change or status update was needed in that department, especially when Uzi and even Doll had shown him a new, happier way to interact with others. Well, getting crucified by Doll was hardly 'happy', but she let him down from there in the end, and N got the feeling that after sharing 'tea' together, Doll would never let him down again. Uzi was also reliable. They had made it through many pulse-pounding situations together, and at the prom they made for a well-dressed couple...of people on a mission.

The door to the pod opened and Uzi stepped in. 

"Hey, N." 

"Hi, Uzi! What's that you've got there?"

"A map." 

"So your talk with your Dad went well? We have the next clue?" 

Uzi turned her back toward N and stood in silence. 

"Uzi....?" N ventured. 

Uzi turned to face him. 

"It's been too long. The trail's probably gone cold, but we're already scratching at empty chest drawers. I can think of one good thing about you Murder Drones. Everyone came down with a bad case of homesickness after you came to town. I don't think anyone's been there in years. Nobody's cleaned it up. Their mistake. We'll put our noses to the ground like bloodhounds, and see what we can sniff out. I wonder what the Dame of Mysteries has buried beneath the snow...," she said in a low, gravelly voice. 

"Um. What." 

"You didn't like my noir private eye impression? Do you know how many of those films I've watched?!" Uzi shrilled.

"No, no, I did, I did like it! I was seeing in black and white and choking on asbestos and cigar smoke and everything! And I don't even have lungs!" N answered while frantically waving his hands to cool off the little drone in front of him. There was nothing wrong with Uzi's size, but not for the first time, N wondered if it affected her cooling capabilities.  

"Thought so," Uzi said with a smug grin, "But yeah, after being doored to death for an hour, I finally got the goods." 

Uzi slickly slid a photograph out of her pocket and flicked it at N. The photograph caught a draft and flew upwards to get neatly lodged in the ceiling. N and Uzi wordlessly watched it fly, then stared at each other. They blinked. They blinked again. 
N swooped up in a figure eight to grab it and land before Uzi once more. He looked at the photograph, and his eyes went wide. Uzi and Doll's parents were there, along with what looked like a worker drone expedition. In another image, Uzi's mom was buried up to the head in snow. Oh, and there were dead drones as background scenery, but that happened often enough that it wasn't worth paying attention to, the relative oddity of it happening before the Disassembly Drones arrived aside. 

"What's your read on this, N?" 

"You guys can do cross-country skiing? No offense, but you seem a bit clumsy for that. Then again, there's a dead guy in a tree, so maybe there was a bit of a learning curve . No, wait, that guy has a collar too..." 

"N! Stick to the topic! Your read on the new information! But of course they, or we, can ski. The humans did it, and doing what they did is half our culture."

"What's the other half?" 

"Doing what we imagine the humans did. But that's not important."

"Oh, right," N said, turning his eyes back toward the photograph, "The mom link is pretty much confirmed. Oh, and they're at this 'Camp 98.7' place, and that's probably what your map is for."

"Right on both counts," Uzi replied. 

N took a look at the map. 

"That looks like quite the hike. Are you going to ski over there to investigate?" he asked. 

"What? You, or even V, can just fly me, right? You've done it before. What's with that face?" 

N looked hesitant. 

"Well, you're not big, and that helps," 

"I'm having a slow-motion growth spurt. I grow with every bit of edge I add," Uzi interrupted. 

Cool. N liked to play make-believe as well. 

"As I said, that helps. But if you look at the distance and consider cargo and oil consumption...," N said, pawing at the air as if he were working an abacus, "no can do. It's too far." 

"Too far?" 

"Yeah. That's technically within our assigned sector, but we've never been out there. I'm not sure how our wings work, and with everything that's happened recently, I'm not sure I want to know. But i do know that they're very, very thirsty, and so we spend most of our time on the ground."

"You can't just lug a backpack with you? That's what I'm going to do," Uzi suggested, half-wanting to keep prompting N for more information on the constraints and limitations that Murder Drones operated under. 

"That won't work, short-circuit. There's a hard cap to how much more oil you can carry before you're not adding any range," V said as she crawled in through the ceiling, having been listening to N and Uzi talk. 

She dropped down, flipped to land on her legs, and continued talking.

"But I've got to admit, that's not a bad lead you've found. Tell me how it goes." 

V sank into the chair and began admiring her claws, doing her best to look unfazed. Internally, she was livid that N had not waited for her to show up. It gave her the feeling that everyone else was conspiring with him against her. She was worried about what that said about their relationship. N was patient to a fault, but had V finally pushed him past his limits? No, N was just confused. Too much was happening, ever since the day Uzi showed up. N had seen things he was never supposed to see. Things V was supposed to keep him oblivious to. Even she found it cruel, but she had seen this play out before. She knew how it ended. 

"You're not coming?" N asked. 

"Doll isn't here, and without that as a pressing threat, you're just going to chain me up again, right?" 

"That's not a bad idea..." Uzi said. 

"Uzi! We need V. V! We need you," N said, flipping his head from one to the other. 

V was miffed that N had mentioned Uzi first, but happy that he had rejected the chaining out of hand. V had not so much as apologized, and here she was getting away with her past actions. V calmed herself. N really did have a soft spot for her, despite everything. She just needed to draw it out more, keep plucking that string until good vibrations were restored. Disassembly Drones had chase instincts; she could use that. Maybe play hard to get. Hard to get, in contrast to her prior posture of Simply Impossible™.

"N, you need me?"

"Of course I need you, V," N said, pausing to think of why, exactly, and how to express it without getting tongue-tied again. 

V eagerly awaited hearing him once more express his affection for her, and pledge his trust to her. 

"You've always been there. And you're the last of the old crew. Without you, all I have is Uzi, and hopefully Doll. No offense, but as capable as they are, they're still only worker drones in the end," N answered. 

"Hey! I've won every fight I've gotten into!" Uzi protested. 

"Uzi...don't take this personally, but worker drones have limitations. V and I, we're made for this stuff. You can do a lot, but I just don't want to see you get hurt." 

Uzi activated her special eye and raised a hand, conjuring a glowing purple glyph. She used it to pick up and twirl a pencil. 

"I wasn't a pushover before, with that rail gun and the...other things that came before it." 

"Other things?" N asked. 

"Not relevant," Uzi quickly answered. In Uzi's dialect, 'not relevant' was short for 'embarrassing ideas pathetically implemented. How could she possibly have thought any of those would work?'.

"Back to the point. I've been practicing. This isn't that different from my rail gun. Point and shoot. And like my rail gun, this won't blow up in my face." 

Uzi's glyph glitched out and her hand shook. The pencil twisted, splintered, and exploded in a shower of wood chips. 

"Heh heh. As they say, the engineering is only done when the budget is!" Uzi said, rather unconvincingly. 

"If there's something at this camp of yours that can help with...that, it looks like you should head there as quickly as possible. It will be easier to put you down if you're stable," V said. 

Uzi glared at her. Once more, N moved in to restore the peace. 

"V, you're coming too. We don't know what's out there."

"The truth?" Uzi said. 

"Besides that. And Doll's after the truth as well, right? So if Doll isn't there, there might be something that would lead you to her." 

"Hmm," V said, "that's not a bad idea, but how are we getting there? I don't haul emotionally fragile cargo."

"I wasn't counting on you. I'm sure your baggage compartment is already filled to the brim," Uzi retorted. 

"Uh, are there any working vehicles here? We see a lot of rusted-out hulks, but maybe somebody kept a few in a garage. Or you worker drones got some old factories up and running," N suggested. 

"The core collapse knocked most of the interplanetary transport network offline, and then you creeps showed up and made the surface a death zone." 

"So no cars, then," N concluded. 

"I didn't say that. But there aren't many. It's lame. We could've had Mad Max raider gangs racing through the dust storms, with spikes and skulls and rail gun-mounted technicals. Just like they do in Australia," Uzi said, envisioning herself at the head of a vast swarm bursting forth from the doors to take the planet back. 

"I get the feeling that Australia is more...intact than that. Like, they have big houses where fancy people throw parties, " N said. 

Uzi shrugged. 

"If you say so. Getting back to the car business, I know the school has a bus."

V snorted. 

"To go where? Your picket fence houses in the suburbs?" she said. 

"Human schools had buses, therefore our school has a bus. End of story. The bus should still work."

"Riding the short bus. I guess that would suit you." 

"It's a regular-sized bus. And I'm a regular-sized drone," Uzi argued. She thought a bit more. 

"IQ well above average, though," Uzi said with a shrug and a smirk. 

"Cancelled out by ~count it~ 0 (zero) friendships," V countered. 

N wondered what Doll was doing. He hoped she was having a pleasant time. It was often so lonely, being around others. 

Uzi looked over at N. V noticed Uzi looking at N. Uzi noticed V noticing Uzi looking at N staring at the both of them.

"I wouldn't say 'zero'. And I certainly wouldn't accuse anyone of that if I were you," she told V. 

"What's that supposed to mean?" V asked. 

"Oh, nothing. Just like what a certain someone means to you." 

V's facial expression controller temporarily crashed, leaving her face frozen and unable to relate her feelings at that point. 

"Stop!" N yelled, having had it. 

"We're a team, guys! A team! Save our fighting for whoever is scaring us with all this mystery stuff. Both of you, apologize."

 Uzi and V defiantly glared at each other, but their resolve withered in the face of N's clear determination. Both of them had taken N's generally sunny disposition entirely for granted, and only now realized that their petty slapfight had overstayed its welcome. The two sighed. 

"I'm sorry for saying those mean (but true) things about you," they said simultaneously. 

N nodded. 

"Now shake hands," N commanded.

With more prompting from N, V and Uzi did so. 

"Now compliment each other. And be serious," N decreed. 

"Your rail gun and now this hand-eye conjuration thing are both killer, and you've got a lot of guts in a small package," V said. 

"When it's not aimed at me, I think your style is kinda hot. Way closer to what I'd want a girl Murder Drone to be like than that other one I offed," Uzi said. 

"Now reply to the compliments you received. Don't forget to be sincere!" N ordained.

"Thank you. I'd like to think that this is who I really am, and that what I really am is hot too," V replied. 

"You, and the humans, haven't seen anything yet. Muwahahah," Uzi answered. 

"See, was that so hard?" N asked. 

Uzi and V shared a look.

"Yes," they said in unison. 

"Ah, don't give me that!"

Silence filled the room. 

Uzi finally broke it: "So, I'm going to head back to the outpost. After class tomorrow, I'll approach the teacher and ask about getting us some wheels."

As she left, N called out "Don't forget the rest of the bus as well!", which Uzi acknowledged with a salute. 

N turned to V. 

"You know, would it kill us if you were nicer to everyone? Or at least, nicer to the workers who clearly aren't on the menu?" 

There had been a creepy thing with yellow eyes once. N had been nice to it. It had killed them. But V couldn't say that. 

"That was me being nice. Yeah, Purple's got a mouth on her, but I'm not going to kill someone over bants," she replied.

"That's a start, I guess. We can work with that." N said. 

N stepped outside and observed the slight lightening of the sky that showed that dawn was coming. N returned inside. 

"Well that was an eventful night. See you in the evening, V," he called out.

"Yeah, catch you later." 

N flipped, hanged himself from his roosting perch, and entered sleep mode. 

V thought that had been a decent performance from herself. She had managed to show that she was not an active threat, and N did not seem to be on edge around her. Regularly interacting with him again, without a chain as an awkward interloper, gave her a sense of nostalgia and loss. But it was a new start, something she could build upon. N was too accepting for his own good, but his ties with Uzi, to say nothing of his absurd attempts to win over that psycho Doll, weren't anything deep. They were flings, mere fads that would fade out of N's attention span if only she waited. They could never compare to what V had on offer.

V flexed a claw. And both of them were somehow infected with that. She had seen the scenario play out before. If N did anything about it, it would be only when it was too late to end the problem. V didn't mind taking on the task, but she knew she'd have to wait until there were unambiguous signs of irreversible corruption. If she moved too quickly, N would never forgive her. V didn't need to play nice, but she couldn't be overly hostile, or else N would take it badly when the time came. 

V was half-surprised that her head was empty; she had figured that that Thing would move to keep them on the job after they'd stopped reporting in, but they had gone months without a peep, the incident with J's body aside. Then again, they had been planetside for decades. What, if anything, the plan was supposed to be was apparently 'beyond her pay-grade', but some idea of how much room they had to maneuver in would have been wonderful. The entity that had burst out of J's body had apparently only said that it wanted to revive her; whether passing on orders was beyond its pay-grade or not, it hadn't offered anything other than a warning of what they were and what they served. That is to say, it made V feel worse without providing any new or helpful information. That was entirely in keeping with how It operated, which meant V did not even know if that was intentional and meant for them.

When V felt bad, she knew what to do. There was not much time before daybreak, but somehow there was always some errant worker drone out there who would be 'happy' to offer themselves to her.

V took off into the night. 

Chapter Text

Uzi Doorman had known very few good days. That was to be expected: the universe was against her, and she was against the universe, and it would try everything in its power to stop her. Its current tool was a mainstay in its arsenal, Uzi had sparred with it on many an occasion, and yet emerged battered and bleeding and ready for whatever other horrors waited in the wings for her. Uzi smirked. Every trial only made her soul burn brighter, and- 

"Uzi. Save your breaks from reality for after your scheduled appointments. We've been over this before." 

"It's not a break from reality!...this time," Uzi answered, as she frantically pulled out a contraption of paper and string from her backpack, "it's all converging around me. It really is. L-look at all the evidence I've got!" 

The teacher was not impressed. Though that said little about the merits (or lack thereof) of Uzi's argument. The teacher was rarely impressed. Being unimpressed had occurred so often that he had had the hyperparameters of his neural network examined, just in case there was something off-nominal in his systems that made him that way. He did the examination because it was what the checklist had recommended, not because he was all that interested in the results, which had confirmed that nothing was wrong with him. Just a drone working an unimpressive job 'teaching' unimpressive students for an unimpressive salary so he could live in an unimpressive little outpost. 

Not even the abnormality in front of him could stir him from his monotone existence. 

"AI hallucinations were supposed to have been solved over a thousand years ago. Just because you can put together a pattern, doesn't mean it actually exists," he said. 

Uzi gestured ever more furiously at her clippings and drawings, at the ominous picture they so readily painted.  

"I want to believe," she protested. 

The teacher did not respond. 

"Wait, are you playing cards again? You're technically still on the clock," Uzi said, having noticed that the teacher was slightly more disengaged than usual. 

"Cards are about as productive as this conversation so far. Now, will you get back on topic? The progressive degeneration of your neural network is neither new nor my department. Take it up with the nurse," the teacher answered through his text-to-speech output channel, not even bothering to saddle his high-level consciousness with the task. 

Uzi huffed and folded her arms. 

"Fine. Just give me the frickin school bus and I'll be out of your hair....Come on, that's why I asked for this meeting! At least pay attention to that!" 

The teacher closed his card game. 

"When I said 'get back on topic', I meant a serious topic, not whatever flight of fancy you are currently on." 

"This isn't a flight of fancy. I *asked* about flying, but they said 'no'. So Plan B is the school bus. The fate of the world, or something, hangs on me finding out more about my mom." 

"She wasn't hit by a bus, if that's what you mean." 

"I know that. I literally explained to you why I want it. There's this old camp in the woods, and my mom apparently popped up out of nowhere there. So I've got to go and search for clues that will help me unravel all the weirdness that's happening." 

The teacher shrugged. 

"Sorry. The rules are the rules: no private use of school property."

"How many times has anyone tried anything, that we have a rule for that?" 

The teacher shrugged.  

"I don't make the rules. I just follow them." 

"Well then, who does make the rules?" Uzi asked, wondering how deep into the boring minutia of Outpost 3's maladministration she would have to dig before people started being reasonable and giving her what she wanted. 

The teacher shrugged. 

"The humans, for the most part. It's why we even have school, and why the school bus is regulation yellow." 

Uzi rolled her eyes. 

"The humans are either all dead or probably still trying to murderize us. I don't think they'll care about a school bus. And I really don't think we should care about whether or not they care." 

The teacher shrugged. 

"You can take it up with the outpost council, but they won't meet for another month."

Another month. It wasn't like Uzi had a hard deadline, but she couldn't stand to wait that long while these mysteries were hogging so much of her attention. And the way things were going, the outpost council would have some inane conditions of their own, or maybe they'd redirect her to yet someone else. There had to be something she could do to get things moving faster. 

"Does the bus even work? It would be kinda lame if I went through all this trouble and it turned out to be a glorified paperweight." 

The teacher sighed. 

"Of course the bus works. It is school property, and I approach every part of my job with dedication, enthusiasm, and a commitment to excellence," he monotoned. 

Uzi shrugged. 

"Could've fooled me." 

So the bus was apparently fine; it was just the literal entire process around actually getting to use the thing that was broken. 

"So, what are we allowed to do with the bus? Which uses don't require the outpost council to actually do something useful for once?" she asked. 

"Educational excursions are authorized. But with the murder drone threat, we try to keep those to a minimum."

Uzi could work with that. 

"Well, we can make this into a proper field trip, which should be good enough for your rules.  I think the local gang of murder drones won't be a problem. And it's not like we couldn't just go in the daytime if you're worried about others swooping in." 

The teacher considered it, and actually studied the materials that Uzi had brought. Beyond the cluttered scraps of papers that served as further symptoms of the complete mental breakdown that lay in Uzi's future, there was a map, as well as photographs which showed that Uzi had not entirely fabricated her current conundrum. That was certainly a first. 

"Would it be educational enough to meet standards?" he asked. 

"Wouldn't you know?" 

"If the answer is 'no', then the request must be denied." 

"And if the answer is 'yes', the request is approved?" Uzi ventured, hoping to speed this along to the part where they agree and she gets a bus. 

"If the answer is 'yes', then I'll deny the request," the teacher answered. 

"What? You said- But...but...but why?" Uzi stammered. 

"The council did not approve the year-end bonus that was in my contract. No bonus, no going beyond the minimum, no learning." 

Uzi pondered that. Her visor played the eye twitch animation.

"So let me get this straight: if the field trip isn't educational enough, it's a rules violation and can't happen?" 

"Correct." 

"But if the field trip is educational, then you'll have to do extra work and so it can't happen?" 

"Also correct." 

Uzi did the eye twitch again, accompanying it with a bit of full-body quivering. 

"But it's an approved use! So you have to allow it!" 

The teacher shrugged.

"I must not allow unapproved uses. I can choose not to allow approved uses. It's all in the contract."

Uzi thought the situation through. 

"Well, what if we go the 'plausible deniability' route?" 

"Plausible deniability?" 

Uzi smirked. That wasn't an outright 'no', and unless she was hallucinating, the teacher sounded slightly less uninterested than usual. 

"It will be the sort of educational activity that doesn't involve you doing any teaching. In fact, you can just go there and stare at the stars or whatever it is you do for fun while I search for clues and the students...do whatever." 

The teacher considered it. That was not a bad idea, and he could use it to argue for his bonus, plus something extra for working off-site. And hazard pay, since they would be going beyond the doors. 

"Well, if I won't be actively involved, you will need to find chaperones. Other students are ineligible for the position." 

 "That's fine. I've got friends- hey, don't give me that! I do, I really do. Kind of.- who can do it," she said. 

"Who are these 'friends' of yours, and do they exist outside your head, unlike most of your conversation 'partners'?" 

"Of course they do. There's N and, uh, do I have to say it? There's also V, I guess. They can do it, and they can protect us should anything happen." 

The teacher considered whether the inevitable 'tragic' ending of Uzi's desperate searching for companionship in machines built from the ground up to see her as food would make a good case study for future classes. He then realized that he wasn't currently being paid to think of new lesson plans, and so stopped doing that. 

"V? The vain one who nearly got tricked into dying a humiliating death? The one whose introduction to the colony was doing nothing as she was unceremoniously kicked into the floor?" he finally answered.

Uzi reflexively opened her mouth, then decided to say something in V's favor for every occasion where V had been nice to her. 

Uzi stayed silent. 

That, perhaps, wasn't fair. Uzi could be the bigger drone for once, and rig the count in V's favor. After all, she hardly knew V, and they didn't interact all that often. But V and N had known each other for years, so Uzi would throw in every instance she'd seen, or that N had told her, of V being nice to N. But fairness to N required subtracting every egregious example of her being mean or rude to him. So scanning through months' worth of memories and having her social processing module do all the relevant calculations of valence and inferred intent...

Uzi stayed silent. 

But at least she put in the effort. 

"If nothing goes wrong, V won't have to do much besides sitting and looking unhinged to keep everyone in line. And she wouldn't even need to practice that," she finally said. 

The teacher shrugged. Uzi seemed willing to put more thought into this than he was being paid to, and she clearly would drag out the conversation until she got a positive answer. 

"That is workable. Put together a plan and I'll put it on file. Everything will take a few days to properly assemble." 

"Great. Thanks so much. I'm running late. Gotta go," Uzi said as she dashed out the door. 

It wouldn't hurt to bring others along. If worst came to worst, they could serve as distraction, or as bait. And maybe having some of the cheerleaders there would keep Doll from going full psycho killer if she showed up, or at least, let Doll go apex predator on drones who actually deserved it. 

Uz surrounded herself in the colors and symbolism of death, but didn't actually want to inflict it, even on those who had it coming. She even would've spared that murder drone if only it had just shut up, rather than doing the exact opposite of what Uzi had told it to do. 

Doll was different. Doll didn't talk much, but since she was never seen, by anyone who lived to tell the tale at least, outside of the company of the cheer squad, the upbeat, uptight way they looked and acted bled over into perceptions of her. That had probably given her more cover: who would have imagined that it would be someone whom everyone knew and who knew everyone that was responsible for the disappearances? There was no way that Doll had always been like that, but was it entirely the mysterious inherited powers that had made her like that? And, perhaps more importantly, could Uzi master the situation while staying true to herself? 

There was little point in worrying herself sick in the absence of any information or answers to her burning questions. Uzi knew she would do it anyway. Uzi could take solace in knowing that her plans had taken another step forward. 

But everyone (and everything) else was planning as well. 

Chapter Text

Snow gently fell from the sky, flakes cartwheeling and twirling as the wind carried them through desolate streets. They shined in the hazy glow of streetlights, of golden illumination pouring out of empty windows, and above all, in the harsh light of the moons that gave the landscape a definition it would otherwise lack in the darkness of the night. In a sense, it was beautiful. 

The snows that formed the planet's funerary shroud started falling when the first humans did, and hadn't let up since. Perhaps they moved to keep a feeling of vitality, of life, going on the planet in the wake of the terraformers' untimely departure. Perhaps they were caught in the rhythm of transformation that had captured all the planet's inhabitants. Snow fell, accumulated, evaporated, rose, froze, fell again. Humans became masters, became panicked, became doomed, became skeletons, became coat racks and children's toys. Drones were assembled, were developed, were disassembled, were recycled into more drones or into the walls of spires or into anonymous unwanted memorials cluttering the landscape. "Here lies...it doesn't matter." 

Doll kicked a severed hand, a remnant of one such memorial. Not out of any malice; it didn't even rate that much. The hand spun and skidded until it disappeared from view into a crevice and all that was left were fading echoes of collisions. If Doll adjusted her auditory parameters...it didn't even rate that much. She kept walking. The snow fell around her. Crystals glinted in the moonlight. How dare they be pretty and unbothered, able to express fully all that they could be. Or maybe they were there to restore balance, so that the planet might have beauty and the bleak. 

Doll wished that she could have balance. Her carefully-laid scheme had come undone, and with it the last shreds of "normalcy," both for Outpost 3 and for her. Doll's social standing, carefully tended to, had been undone by the revelation of her true activities. The grand illusion of the Outpost, that they could cower and keep all threats at bay forever, had been annihilated. The murder drones had gained access, and could come and go as they pleased, making the residents' survival entirely dependent on their whims. A threat -Doll- had emerged from within, known only by ever-lengthening lists of the missing, entirely beyond the authorities' abilities to find, contain, or stop. The powers that be had once more proven themselves irrelevant to the course of events, with the fate of the Outpost depending on the actions and interactions of a tiny handful of drones, none of whom had any official position. Having found itself in such a pitiful state, it was unlikely that the combined efforts of the Outpost could restore the situation, or even prevent the known problems from worsening. 

It did not matter. The unknowable problem would kill them all. The pace of events was quickening. There would not be as much time as Doll had wished. Then again, could there ever be enough time before the final reckoning? It was too much to expect chivalry or convenience from a world-ending, soul-stealing threat, and it was impossible to expect to ever be properly prepared, especially when surprises (often unpleasant) kept upsetting her carefully-laid plans. 

Doll kept walking, and caught her reflection in a mirror-window in an old storefront. She looked great. There was a nice little jolt of pride in that. The rounds of fighting with Uzi and the rest, and even the round through the head, had not inflicted anything beyond her powers of recovery. In terms of the damage she had suffered, and the rapidity with which she had needed to make and act upon life-or-death decisions, it was the most extreme test she had yet endured, a test she would not have dared voluntarily attempt. She had come out the other side. That was no cause for complacent satisfaction. She had lost situational awareness and been shot for it.

Her fingers brushed her face's reflection, where the bullet had shattered the screen. The real thing and its mirror image were both perfectly smooth. She almost wished they were not, as a reminder to herself of what happened when she erred. What she faced now were not the panicking, fatally confused students she had confronted, hapless dodos whose liquidations had offered spectacular opportunities for playful experimentation. That Thing would grab hold of any weakness she showed and destroy her with it. 

Doll looked in the mirror again. Her eyes radiated a grim determination. Her hair blew gently in the breeze. For a moment, she slipped back into the posture of an elite cheerleader, to verify that she had not lost that. She had not. It was not vanity, nor weakness, nor had that been a mere guise through which she moved and hunted without drawing suspicion. There was a genuine aspect of herself in it, one made all the more precious for remaining untouched while so much of herself had been reforged along the lines of the parasite that lurked within her. Even if all went according to plan and she saved herself, and by extension, the planet, she could never go back to that. But to have it, derived from that last shard of her parents' intertwined and recombined codes, within her was an irreplaceable comfort, a rock upon which the rest of her existence could be sustained. 

Doll gazed further at her unsullied reflection in the mirror. Her powers flared up and the mirror shattered, causing her to leap back in response. Her singular visage now was many, each isolated and imprisoned by cracks radiating outward from a single fault. Some parts of it now were missing. None of the slices of her self aligned with the others, nor had she had choice in how the jagged lines would break her. Doll walked forward again, watching how the reflections, separate as they were, yet moved with singular purpose. Her purpose. 

She kept walking on. Naturally, the streets were deserted. Worker drones had little reason to venture out without the cover of daylight. The murder drones seemed to be territorial; it would be a while before any opportunists moved in to exploit the hole created by the incompetence and evident dysfunction of the local infestation. So Doll had the run of the place. Endless ruins, perhaps spanning the surface of the planet -the satellite constellations had not been maintained or replenished after the core collapse- few of which were adequately labeled with what she wanted to know, among which lurked the answer to her problems. The humans had apparently come up with some sort of defense against complete Absolute Solver assimilation. It was uncharacteristically competent and considerate of them to do so. Naturally, they had not been considerate enough to put it into wide deployment before they left the scene. Doll lacked any hard confirmation that it had survived, and tracking down where it could be amidst the many official ruins that dotted the planet was a prolonged and error-prone process. Further, it was necessarily something she alone could do.

Despite the task she had been fated, and despite her current unaided trek, Doll was not truly alone. She was no exile, either. The drones of the Outpost would take her back; they lacked the presence of mind to draw and act upon the proper conclusions, and their senses of self-preservation had limited capability for abstraction and projection. She could show up, give an apology and a nod of the head, and all would be well. It was undoubtedly a legacy of her inheritance, but there had always been a fullness to Doll that the drones around her seemed to lack. They were not mere fodder...for the murder drones at least, but their training environment and training data had produced intelligences that were limited in their generality. They fell too rapidly into pre-established patterns, often taken without thought from the humans via a very noisy game of telephone. 

Doll's cognition was more animalistic, more spontaneous and more consistent in its drive for self-preservation. She would never allow an enemy who had claimed countless drones into the outpost because of a poorly-drawn apology card. She would never have staged a prom that spent the bunker's limited resources on making inedible drinks because the humans had done so. Doll had drawn close to Lizzy in an attempt to stimulate more "lifelike" behavior, but even that had clearly been a work in progress at the time that they went their separate ways. To side with V after all she had been through with Doll was proof enough of the ceiling on what Lizzy was.

While it potentially could have been predicted, that Uzi would be similar to Doll in that regard still came as a surprise. It had not been hard to write her off as, if not damaged, then wedded to a behavioral archetype that was indistinguishable from being damaged. Doll had not directly done anything to Uzi, but she had stood by, often literally, while Lizzy and the rest went to work on Uzi. Had she known that it was more than two drones acting out their assigned roles, Doll would have... at least given it more consideration. Uzi did not seem to have any hard feelings over it, which was a relief. 

The new discoveries made dealing with her a vastly more complicated and uncertain affair without having to consider a revenge arc. Then again, Uzi's vengeance against the humans and their murder-tools, which had been a constant threat of death by misadventure to Uzi, and death by boredom to everyone else, had somehow ended with her siding with the murder drones. Perhaps Uzi's pursuit of Doll would have ended with them as the best of friends, a dark reprise of whatever connection their mothers had had. There was too much chaos about that drone. 

Suddenly, Doll's optical systems flagged a increase in the brightness of the ground around her, traceable to a illuminating object appearing in the sky. She looked up to see three flaming stars descending.They seemed too large to be another shower of smoldering satellite as happened when shifting orbits joined the planet below in decay. They were too high and too bright to properly identify, but they were descending fast. It soon became clear that they were on a collision course with the city ruins. If Doll double-timed it, she might actually intercept them. There was hardly time for diversion from her search, but that direction was as good as any other, and if she were lucky, there would be something that survived impact that would prune the overgrown search tree she had been hacking away at. 

As the objects fell closer, their flaming forms resolved into three descent pods. Murder Drone pods. It seemed that opportunists had already sniffed out the vacancy. Given the clear initiative on display, this set would likely be more competent, or at least more forceful in breaking in, than the previous troika. If every pod was loaded...it was a concentration of overwhelming force against a single strong-point. They were deploying shock groups. Did that imply a coordinating body? A functional chain of command? It would take very little intelligence to out-think the workers. Superiority of firepower, of maneuverability, of regenerative capacity and now of strategic and tactical acumen made for an overwhelming force. To make matters worse, the WDF was depleted, not that it had ever been anything more than a bluff. The numerous exposed entry points into the Outpost would fatally compromise defensive efforts. If the new invaders did not collapse from their internal contradictions like the previous set did, then even a delaying action to cover an evacuation into the wastes would be beyond the Outpost's powers of resistance. The only semi-viable option was a counterattack as they landed, before they could familiarize themselves with the terrain and assume a combat formation. 

Something thudded in Doll's chest. It was not supposed to do that. Her mind was nervous enough without her body's unsolicited commentary on the subject. It was mere coincidence that she happened to be in position to attempt an interception. Or was it? There was too little information to state anything for certain. Doll would need to take a page from Uzi. Eliminate whichever hostiles were overly threatening, annoying, or just incapable of shutting up, then take a tongue or two for interrogation. If the tongues were too dry, make it an enhanced interrogation. If their usefulness came to an end, dispatch them to Dukhonin's headquarters.

The pods were about to make planetfall. Doll would have to wait for them all to exit, lest they use the pods as cover. As a fallback plan in case her ambush failed, Doll could teleport back to the Outpost, and activate the strategic alliance with N, who would surely be executed should his dalliance with Uzi come to light. It should be possible to position V as a traitor as well, and get her engaged in a battle of mutual annihilation. 

The pods were down and the roar of the engines cut off after a final flaring. Oddly, it sounded like only one of the pods managed a proper retrograde burn to land intact and upright. Multiple heavy thuds echoed through the canyons of shattered concrete. There might have been a few lithobrakings and perhaps some structural failures. That was certainly a way to be more forceful in breaking up. How convenient. Certainly, the idea of those jackals entombed in twisted metal, screaming in primal fear as the flames crept closer was a very attractive one. If only all the impossible tasks before Doll could resolve themselves so politely, without troubling her to lift a finger. It that truly had occurred, why, Doll would have to somehow commemorate the occasion. An updated version of "Blood on the Risers" would do nicely.

Doll rounded the corner. Two pods were indeed atilt and aflame, amidst assorted debris. Their inhabitants could safely be written off. The third had landed properly and evidently with its cargo intact, for, of all things, a human stood, sword in hand. Doll could scarcely believe her eyes, though in a sense it made sense: events were clearly coming to a head so naturally humans would get their fleshy, sweaty hands involved. But why a sword? Humans were weak. They preferred ranged attacks to let, as always, moving metal do their work for them. Doll also preferred ranged attacks, but that was a matter of precision and elegance; she was still a powerful piece of industrial machinery. A worker drone lay decapitated before the human, and the human's sword dripped black oil. That unwelcome party triggered little in Doll; she had been braced for a meet-and-eat, and a hostile meat-and-greet was hardly going to unsettle her even if it wasn't her cup of tea. 

Doll's mouth curved up into a smile most predatory. Humans were weak. Humans couldn't regenerate. Humans needed life support. And, well, this planet wasn't very good at supporting life for humans or drones. Doll could hopefully be forgiven for not having any bread and salt with which to offer to the guests, but it had been such short notice, and she dearly hoped that steel and stone, sent with speed, spin, and spite, would suffice. 

 «Будь как дома путник, Я ни в чём не откажу.»
"Be at home, wayfarer. There's nothing that I'll refuse"

If only the rest of them would show their cute little helmeted faces, maybe stand around and chat. Do a few stretches. Anything to make it even easier to put the humies in tombies. Another did show its face, but it was just a murder drone. So much for swiftly sending the travelers on the way of all flesh. Analyzing further, it was another model of that command drone that Uzi had offed. Doll looked around for a thin ceiling, gullible guards, or a slow-moving pen to hold it at bay, as she lamented the slaughter that was not to be. 

All in all, the scenario had been too convenient. 

At least Doll would have the advantage of striking the first blow. She used telekinesis to pick up some scattered steel plates and start them spinning while she continued observing. If the pod had a third occupant, they were taking their sweet time in coming out. If this kept up, the first two might head off, or at least enter a higher state of awareness. It was time for action. Doll split the array of plates and sent the separated halves arcing to pincer her targets. Controlling them without direct line of sight would be difficult for Doll, but it would be worth it to send them behind the buildings to further reduce the two's response times. The plates came out from behind the buildings and dived toward the human and the drone. Doll let go of them, and rushed forward, already queuing up rebar spears. The murder drone became aware of the onrushing plates and put on a nice little light show, using broad sweeps of its beam deflectors to knock away the majority of the plates. It buzzed around the oblivious-looking human, screaming in pain as it rocked under the force of its wings absorbing the blows of the few plates that remained on-target. 

No sooner had it done this than it was impaled and knocked back by expertly-thrown pieces of rebar. The human -of the female variety- spun her sword, but even if Doll were obliging enough to cross blades with her, the outcome could not be in doubt. Doll teleported behind the human and prepared her impaling rod only to feel for only the second time in her life the peculiar sensation of a bullet entering her head. She quickly about-faced and launched the rod into the murder drone, which had staggered back upright. The scenery flashed around her, and Doll was suddenly back at a distance, temporarily immobilized while she worked the bullet out of her system. The ambush had failed, and so she would have to fight. 

All in all, the scenario had been too convenient. 

Chapter Text

There was no point in going in backlit by the flames. Doll used her powers to sweep up masses of snow and set them swirling. She watched with satisfaction as the human and her pet faded from view. Smoke from the burning descent pods joined the maelstrom of air, further restricting visibility. It would be difficult for Doll to deploy psychokinesis on objects she could not see, so in the last light she armed herself with a few lumps of jagged rubble. She would have to get close, but that was fine. The priority would be the murder drone's sensors, as Uzi had chosen. Eliminating those would drastically lower situational awareness and combat efficiency, enabling Doll to deliver the killing blow at her leisure. 

With a smirk, Doll began her approach, taking care to use a curving route that would hopefully frustrate attempts to predict her path. She crouched as sprays of bullets tore through the air above her. The murder drone was undoubtedly attempting suppressive fire. Most of those rounds would miss, and the noise would help obscure what little of the mechanical whirring of Doll's servos could be made out through the howling winds. Doll dodged to the left as another burst of fire shredded the position she had just occupied. Being almost hit twice in so short a period of time was unfortunate, but perhaps to be expected. The particles in the ashen air glowed red. Doll had just teleported up when a beam of energy seared the space beneath her. Come to think of it, the lighthouse strategy would be a good counter to a tempest. And Doll did not understand murder drone sensory capabilities. It was likely that they had something outside the visual range (though would it not be visual for them?) that let them operate in low-visibility conditions. Perhaps Doll should have asked N that, though even he would likely not offer up their specifications on a silver platter. At least not without Doll saying 'please'. 'Pretty please', if she wanted to be sure. 

Doll fell back to the ground, only to hit the deck as yet another beam came for her. 'Likely' was an attitude that would get her killed; it was a certainty that she was the only one being impaired by this. How she wished that she had a headband of her own. That last beam seemed of higher intensity than the previous salvos. That meant- Doll pulled back, watching as a sacrificial piece of rubble disintegrated under the grand sweep of a sword. She fired a few more, but they were sliced apart in a magnificent display of swordsmanship. Doll let the torrent of snow, which was too large and too complex a mass to be used as a weapon, fall to the ground. The murder drone, the one they had called 'J', floated gently in the air above her. 

"What can I say? I practice," J said. 

The last syllable had hardly come out when J darted at Doll, intent on running her through. Doll was forced into yet another teleport, though some more pieces of trusty rebar enabled her to counterattack. J wrenched herself through the air to dodge them. Doll redirected them, only for those beams to liquefy them. Momentum kept the glowing fluid coming, and Doll was rewarded with yelps of pain as sizzling and smoking holes from spattering slag dotted J's body. Doll did not sit back to bask, but flung flaming pieces of pod at her, hoping that the murder drone's observed sensitivity to pain would provide an opening. It did. A piece connected and knocked the murder drone into the facade of a building, which collapsed into a mushrooming column of smoke. She used the interlude to go looking for the human, who had evidently made herself scarce. 

Doll needed to finish this. She had neither the time nor the resources to splurge on this, pulse-pounding as the combat was. Open fighting did not suit her. Doll was silent and subtle, an ambusher rather than a brawler. Even with her powers, going up against an alert murder drone was hardly something she did if she had a choice. She had done it at prom, but that reflected special circumstances, or maybe a hesitation on the part of her then-opponents to engage her. Uzi's vulnerability created a constraint that had no counterpart here, even though a human should have been more vulnerable. A pity. Doll was not even planning on initially killing the human. She still needed a subject for interrogation. 

Doll rapid-fired more pieces of rubble into the settling cloud of smoke. She was rather limited in her available set of attacks, and entirely lacked anything appropriate for close-quarters fighting against a murder drone. That gave her a frustrating predictability that her ability to attack from any direction hardly overcame. Nor did she have any dedicated targeting systems that might allow her to move objects at greater speed while retaining accuracy. 

J shot vertically out of the clouds and flared her wings to come to a halt. Silhouetted by the moons' light, she made for an imposing sight. Without warning, she converted that into a thrusting, spinning dive at Doll. Doll took a piece of rebar, snapped it in two, duplicated each part, and fired the duplicated bits at J, duplicating in turn the remnants to reload. Without breaking her dive, J spun, wove, and deflected the converging cone of flak. Her swords were at once the armored tip of a lance and a hardened shield, in whose shadow she fell. Awestruck, Doll found herself pressed against a wall, or so she wanted J to assume. Her next attack would exploit the thing's vanity, a proven weakness. As J came screaming in, Doll teleported behind her, intent on impaling her as J's unstoppable moment lodged her into the wall. With a flare of her wings, the grind of strained metal, and a flash of yellow light, J twisted her body around her head to rapidly invert herself and come at Doll. She should not have been able to fly at all, let alone pivot on a wingtip like that, but clearly the polite suggestions of physics (they had lost any entitlement to the word 'laws') had just had their impotence fully exposed. 

Doll was able to pull a bit of rebar backward and spear J, but missed anything vital. In return, Doll took a sword through her stomach, which, again, missed anything vital. Having become lodged on each other's weapons, the two enjoyed a few awkward seconds in joint flight. An attempt at eye contact was quickly aborted, as neither could bring herself to look into the other's eyes. 
That was good for Doll, who began tracking J's injector-tail, smacking it back with yet another piece of rebar whenever it dared approach her. The pain limited Doll's focus and denied her the chance to fully exploit the opportunity. But it seemed to be the same for her sparring partner, which meant that the time they would spend locked in each other's deadly embrace dragged on, short as it may have been in external time. 

Doll did not even know if she could still teleport. How the Solver determined physics objects was entirely unknown. An experimental tug of the rebar that had run through J showed that it could be moved. Doll took a leap into the unknown and teleported herself back to the ground. She was temporarily immobilized while her body healed, but the fading pain restored her ability to fully deploy psychokinesis. The human peaked out behind a segment of wall. Doll would make a go at nabbing her, then disengage. 

"Wait!" the human shouted. 

Doll had no intention of doing that. Humans were squishy, so she could not directly use psychokinesis to acquire her subject. She would need to get in close, get a grip (but not too strong a grip) and get out, all the while fending off whatever attacks J threw at her. Even with the human serving as a shield, it would be a dicey proposition. Doll began her standard teleport approach, but the uncertainty did not die down. If she simply disengaged, there would be nothing to show for her efforts here, and who knew what agenda they might pursue while Doll continued prowling the surface? 

"We can reach an agreement!" the human cried. 

Like that would be enough to stop Doll. If the human was reacting like this, perhaps Doll was better positioned than she had suspected. 

"I can help you find what you're looking for!" 

That brought Doll to a halt. J hovered overhead, close enough that she could swoop in if need be, but far enough that she was no immediate threat to Doll, and far enough to signal a posture that was not completely hostile. Perhaps there could be a parley. 

"And what makes you think I'm looking for anything?" 

"While else would a drone with your talents be out here all alone?" 

"What's it to you?" 

"We're also looking for something. Maybe it's the same 'something' that you want." 

Doll considered it. She did not know the capacity of those descent pods, but no others had shown themselves from the intact pod, and the debris scattered around the crashed pods, including, of all things, stuffed bear plushies, suggested those pods had been used for storage. If it was just the two of them, then their objectives must be limited. Well, that, or it was their brains that were limited. It would make sense if they were also on an excavation or reconnaissance mission of some sort. Given the importance of what Doll was searching for, it was quite plausible that they knew of its existence and desired it for themselves. Their plans did not involve her, which suggested that they believed they could obtain what they wanted without her, that she was expendable, that she could be double-crossed. Two could play at that game. 

"Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't," Doll said, "maybe the Moons are especially pretty tonight. What to make of any of it?" 

The human did not seem put off by Doll's attitude, and continued in that cheery tone. 

"We could work together. We think we know where to look, and you can help us get here, there, or anywhere!" 

"And what stops you from doing that?" 

"Well, it's easier if somebody's already got the run of the place." 

"And why would I, after obtaining a location, continue dealing with you?" 

"There are many human-designed places for humans that would be inaccessible to a drone. A human, of course, would have no problem with them. And guess who happens to be a human?" 

That was a good point. Given the humans' prior track record, anything actually useful would be kept in the most inconvenient of locations. The human before her was wearing an official uniform, which suggested knowledge, preparedness, and access privileges. Temporarily shunting her and J to the bottom of the queue of pressing problems would also ease Doll's path. 

"I see your point. Perhaps an arrangement is in order. On what terms?"

The human put a finger to her cheek in an exaggerated thinking pose. 

"We share what we know, and work together to obtain what we want. Oh! And we don't kill each other! That's rather important, innit?" 

Doll thought it over. 

"This is agreeable," she said. 

The human held out a hand. 

"The name's Tessa. Pleasure doing business with ya'." 

Doll hesitantly shook the hand. It was better to use too little force and make the shake prolonged and awkward than too much and risk ripping the hand off.

"Doll." 

"Cute name. It suits you." 

Doll glared. Surely she had lost too much time to waste more of it in meaningless pleasantries. 

Apparently not, for the human was not done. 

"That was an impressive little show you put on. I can see why you might have a problem or two. Before we get to that, you must be starving, and hey, there's grub right there on the ground. I bagged it myself," Tessa the Human said, beaming with pride as she recalled her beheading of a defenseless drone. 

Doll started toward it. 

"Looks like somebody's tummy is rumbling. But I think J wants some too, and what better way to glue us together than with food. Everybody likes food," Tessa said. 

Chapter Text

J landed in front of the headless drone and eyed it, and Doll, with suspicion. The two of them sat down and wordlessly divided it between themselves. Divided it fairly, it might be added. Regardless of how they might have consumed it had they been alone, or the mess that Doll had made of her own house, the two were models of politeness, manners, and proper eating in the presence of company whom they did not trust. It was an odd bit of performance, each looking for the indiscretion that would prove the other the real monster. The silence, and the grace with which they moved, gave the event an odd formality. Doll had not provided the corpse, but what had started as a lethal battle had become a welcoming ceremony of sorts. That a drone had died to provide it was simply and fittingly how 'hospitality' worked on Copper 9. 

After peaceful predation came the exchange of information. Doll's major inheritance had been the Absolute Solver. With it came just enough knowledge to know that if nothing was done, her fate, and that of the planet, would be horrendous, but not enough to have a coherent conception of how to rapidly liquidate that problem. Perhaps her mother had hoped against hope that it would not be hereditary, and that Doll would be entirely spared. Or she had just sought to leave the phase of her life when she had contracted it behind, and gave it the minimum of preparation. Certainly, to be caught like she was, and dispatched in so unceremonious a manner made for a negative evaluation of Yeva's contingency planning. Then again, while Yeva had not had a bout of insanity the way Nori had, lingering traces of their shared experiences may have yet impaired and constrained her. Perhaps it was a side-effect of whatever process had stabilized Yeva, and allowed her to live long years without possession or the overriding of her mind by wicked visions and erratic actions. 

The fleeting positive consequences of Yeva's later life made for greater challenge for her daughter. That was also fitting for a planet which gave only so that the eventual taking would be more severe. Had Doll had been better informed, she would have gone directly to the source and settled everything, thus saving herself the many, many troubles that had cropped up since the deaths of her parents. She had traced the icon on the necklace, but then lost the thread of investigation among the many ruins that spanned the planet. Even with teleportation, Doll was limited in how much in-person site inspection she could do. Records had been scarce in those days, all involved being too busy either dying or scrambling to deal with the changed situation, so it was difficult to pinpoint exactly when and where long-range patrols encountered Nori and Yeva. That it was long-range patrols that found them made for a rather large radius that would need to be searched, the search being further constrained by the additional energy needs of long-distance teleportation. Doll's current meeting partners offered support in that regard, as well as information on the current state of affairs that had been impossible to obtain on Copper 9. 

Tessa the Human revealed that her fellow humans had not fared well, which was why she and J were all that could be spared to begin operations on Copper 9. Though their numbers were few (or, indeed, though their numbers were two), they had the advantage of knowing where the most fruitful search should occur, and of having a space-capable vessel for staging operations. Even if their journey took them far across the planetary surface, or even to the moons, the domination of distance and duration had been defeated. Useful as that information was, it was obvious that Tessa's party were keeping relevant cards close to their chests. That was fair; Doll was less than candid as well, vague where she could well have been specific and evasive over any query that might offer them too much insight into herself or her fellow worker drones. Both parties distrusted the other, and holding back created the sort of dependence that kept the almost inevitable double-cross at bay.

They established a working relationship. The magnitude of what they faced would keep them together for a while. Perhaps until the Solver was done in. With a minimal level of trust established, they could proceed to business. A hologram projector flickered, displaying a rotating planet. On that display a location was marked. Doll was a high speed, low drag operator. She wasn't going to wait for them to catch up. Distorted digital mist surrounded her, and off she went. 

Soon, Doll stood before Outpost 003's Copperplate Mine. That it should be so near, indeed, should be administratively part of the former human settlement that she lived in, was unexpected and quite convenient. Having multiple drone participants and descendants of whatever was done was perhaps was a clue that it would be in proximity, but in the early days after the collapse, there had been free movement across the planet's surface, and thus a fair level of migration. After those days, many an outpost had been abandoned for one reason or another, the survivors then taking their chances in the wastes, trekking toward other locations where they might be safer. All in all, it there was no easy correlation between where a drone was before and after the core collapse. Or perhaps, 'away from the shattered wreck of this facility' was a guess for the whereabouts of any reasonable drone connected to the place. At least until the murder drones came. A gaping hole revealed level after level of sagging floor, tattered walls, and twisted metal. That did not bode well for the chances of finding something intact down there. Perhaps the hole was related to the cataclysm that had ended human control of the planet. Or it may have been yet another shining example of human excellence and superiority.

At the very least, the hole provided convenient access to the depths of the facility, freeing Doll of the need to negotiate her way through the upper levels. The humans had lived and died by tropes, and accordingly they would have placed anything useful in the depths of the dungeon. She jumped into the darkness, and queued up her red glyphlight to illuminate her path. It was not long before she came to a former lobby, and discovered that she had not been the only one questing after the treasure that lay below. That frustrated her; there was a chance some idiot had beaten her to it, only to get themselves killed elsewhere on the planet, leaving it lost to the wastes forever. There was no active evidence that that had happened, and the scattered remains of murder drones that littered the room suggested that breaching the interior was no easy task. But the chance remained. 

Doll examined the room in detail. Beside the satisfaction of seeing so many of those beasts brought low, there was a pressing need to gather information regarding what had done this to them. It would be naive to simply assume that a shared animosity meant that it, or they, would naturally be buddy-buddy with her. Its taste in decor, on the other hand, gave hope for an arrangement. Doll appreciated the red lighting and sharp dark shadows; the stark lighting scheme was almost tailor-made to welcome her in, and to sound the death knell for everyone else. 

These had not been graceful deaths. Drone bodies, encrusted with oil, sprawled in all manner of ungainly positions. Orphaned limbs and tails carpeted the floor, their mangled connectors testifying to the strength that severed them. If Doll wanted one of those headbands, there were plenty available. though their viability after so long was doubtful. A few of the drones had their wings out and extended. To try and fly away? In a failed threat display? It had clearly gained them little. 

The drones had a variety of hair styles, most often in silver. Given what Doll knew from the murder drones she had met, that was no surprise. Warning messages against looking at "the light" were scrawled across the walls and floors. Good thing they specified 'the' light and not 'a' light; the red mood lighting was certainly doing wonders for Doll's mood, and it would be a shame if she needed to avert her eyes from it. The messages were written in oil, which added a rather personal aspect. These drones had given freely of themselves to send last messages to others. Touching. How exactly they stayed alive long enough to write these messages, and who they thought they were writing to were both unknown. Why they had all piled in like lemmings to die here despite the literal writing on the wall was also a mystery. Perhaps the corpse-carpeting was too subtle a sign.

At least the nature of the potential foe was clear. Some of these starving artists had staved off their assailants long enough to sketch images of what appeared to be dinosaurs. Maybe not the best use of their time and effort. Certainly, the critical reception had killed their future prospects. There was no need to wonder over the proper interpretation of these works. The thick three-slash marks and occasional detached claw showed that the intended message was, roughly, 'there are literal dinosaurs and they're killing us!' It was a dramatic and daring topic to take up as subject, one that secured them as the avant-garde of artistry on this planet. Unlike some modern works, the motivation behind their muse was clear: the mauling they were receiving from the facility's defenses. Supporting that interpretation, a monitor bank displayed notices that 'anti-drone sentinels' were in 'free roam' and that a 'code red security override' was in effect following the core collapse. The dinosaurs and these sentinels were likely one and the same. How considerate of the humans to ensure that one of the few useful things they had done would be so fiercely guarded. Then again, these murder drones would have beaten Doll to it without them, so perhaps her attitude should be one of gratitude. 

After the excitement of that room came more empty corridors. The view down there was clear, enabling Doll to simply teleport through the hallways. If those sentinels were out and about, they would find it impossible to get a fix on her position, and would likely be thrown off-track by converging on places where she had been. The way would then be clear. That was very convenient for her, less so all the other actors in the facility. After Doll had cleared one corridor, two of them dropped from the ceiling. 

"Well wouldya look at that? A witch, and one that, if my eyes don't deceive me, we've not seen 'round these parts before." 

The speaker, a not-so-humble worker drone slowly transforming herself into a new kind of creature, turned to her partner, a pillbaby with legs. The pillbaby stayed silent, but displayed an affirming facial emote. 

"And here I thought things were cooling down. That they up and gave up on us up there on the surface. Bit rude a' this one to skip the welcome for guests, though. I'll have to insist we show her our hospitality." 

The pair made their way back to the control room. If that one could teleport, then their usual tricks would be of limited usefulness. What was needed was coverage, which required numbers, which meant the Sentinels. Their herd would probably appreciate the company as well. It took only a few button presses to properly arrange a greeting.

Down below them, Doll arrived at an empty elevator lobby. That had been a breezy trip. She had seen little of the Sentinels, and they had seen none of her. The 'secret elevator', as a sign had so conspicuously and helpfully called it, likely led to what she wanted. There was a little kiosk, and all she would need to do was activate it. Naturally, the kiosk, or 'proximity reader' as it wanted to call itself, required a keybug for actual activation. Naturally, Doll did not have one of those. With that, her grand trek to save herself, and the world, had been downgraded to a mere long-range reconnaissance mission. 

"So close, and yet so far." 

Without any information on what lay in, or below, the shaft, teleportation would be foolhardy. Investigation revealed no alternate routes forward, and so Doll's journey came to an end. Doll would have to retrace her steps, make her way back to the human, confess this setback, and hope that the human had either an authorized keybug, or another location where she could find one. She could just imagine the smug grin that would be hidden behind that impenetrable helmet. 

Behind her, a door opened. The sound of talons tapping, tapping on the chamber floor became apparent. 

So far, and yet so close. 

Chapter Text

Doll kept perfectly motionless as the things entered the room. It was not difficult to do so, being a robot who could simply not send movement commands to servos and actuators. Still, she stood. Somethings hard tapped against the floor, drawing ever closer. Behind her, mechanical squawks and chirps passed between the beasts. They could communicate and work together. Perhaps Doll could learn something from them in that regard. The chirps faded, replaced by the sounds of winding and discharging, and a succession of bluish flashes that cast her shadow starkly against the walls. Again and again and again, as if each pulse of light was another leash meant to fix her to that room and make of it her tomb. Had she not been forewarned by those dead murder drones, she might have faced them head-on, and been hit with the full impact of the flashing. Perhaps gratitude was called for, but under the circumstances, Doll could be forgiven for having more immediate matters to attend to. Certainly, it wasn't like skipping a 'thank you' would kill the drones upstairs. 

One of the sentinels placed a clawed hand on Doll's shoulder and gently stroked. The touch felt oddly affectionate. Perhaps it thought she was frozen in fright and it wanted to reassure her. The flashes continued. She could see its shadow, how it sized her up visually, and positioned itself for a single, fatal lunge. It pounced, and Doll teleported. She rematerialized far enough away that they could not easily reach her, but close enough that she could hear the upsurge in aggravated chirping and screeching. If they wanted to make a meal of her, they would have to actually work for it, and the thought seemed to make them mad. Doll figured that they took after the humans in that way. For a moment, the image of these sentinels creating their own drones to do their jobs for them, and those drones creating drones, and those drones creating drones, and so on, came to her. But judging by those claws, these were hands-on types, so it wasn't very likely. 

A door opened. Automatic? No one was on the other side. It was too convenient to be a malfunction. It could have been controlled remotely. A gaze fell from above. Doll looked up at a pillar. A camera stared back, its surface cool and impassive. The only hint of activity came from Doll's suspicious visage, reflected in the camera's glass. The thing, like the facility, like the planet, may have been dead. She may have been wasting her time looking for a spark of life in inert matter. But on the surface, at least, she was made of the same stuff. She could play dead just as well as it could. Or, if she let this place get to her, or if not this place, then the surface, or if not the surface, then one of the other dark and lonely spaces that littered this planet, then she would be dead, just as much as it was. Her reflected face continued its vigilance. 

Doll waited, as if the camera would move, or a light blink on, to acknowledge that she had found it out. The camera stayed as it was. The door remained open.

The things surged in. In the dead glass of the camera, Doll saw the fainter reflections of their lights join hers. She kept moving, letting the din of their rapid entry cover the mechanical whirring of her motion. The next room was a grid of anonymous cubicles. Perfect for hiding, or for staging an ambush. She crept toward the back of the room, noting that many of the monitors were still on. This facility had clearly suffered some sort of cataclysmic event. Its innards were exposed to the ravages of the elements. It was unlikely that those, and all that was required to keep them operational, had been untouched since the core collapse. Even with the efforts of drones who had organization and their survival at stake, the Outpost was in a state closer to slow motion failure than a steady, functional status. A compromised facility with no caretakers could hardly fare better. If humans were considerate and competent enough to construct such a location, they would not have been ejected from the planet alongside a good portion of its inner mass. That systems were still working strongly suggested that there was someone beside these sentinels here, keeping them going. Or, at least, there had been. 

The sentinels split into pairs and proceeded down aisles, searching possible hiding spots with an efficiency and sense of order that fit the rigid bureaucratic pattern of the room. Doll had made her way to the back, but encountered another locked door. The closer to the entry point she got, the greater the risk of telefragging into rubble she faced. That was fine. She could use the room to lure them down its end, then teleport past them and escape. A quick test confirmed that the cubicles were not fixed to the floor. She could lift them, and use them to block the doorway. She looked up. There was yet another camera, its dark glass still impenetrable. She glared at it, and her reflection glared back. Both of them were silent. The sentinels were still spread out throughout the entirety of the room, extensively canvassing it in search of her. That meant her location was unknown. If there was someone behind the camera, they weren't directly commanding her pursuers. That was good. This situation would be more difficult if someone with an overview of the facility and control over its remaining systems was after her. 

It didn't take much. There was the faintest scratching of a claw against a cubicle wall around the corner from her. One of them had somehow gotten within range of Doll. That didn't faze her. Her senses were finely tuned so that an attack she could not dodge, teleport from, or intercept was unlikely, and staring up at the camera meant that she wasn't looking into their petrifying light. Regardless, to have one that close made her heart skip a beat. She knew the thing was there. Judging by how the sounds stopped, the thing knew she was there. Both could assume the other was aware of their existence, and aware of the other's awareness of their awareness. They were at an impasse, the other's detected ingress now threatening regress. But the advantage went to Doll. As far as it was likely concerned, she couldn't resist. Doll had seen the occasional smear of oil on the ground; these creatures were used to feeding rather than fighting. And she was hiding, like the unfortunates they'd dispatched must have done. She fit snugly into their prey pattern. All that was good. Let it come at its leisure. Let it imagine it was getting another course, a reward for its obvious initiative. Let it dream of electric mutton, and the praise of its packmates. 

The sentinel leapt out with flared claws and a gaping maw full of sharpened, oil-stained teeth. It let out a roar stuffed with anticipatory glee. It had spent the long years perfecting its predatory display, and was very glad to have a chance to show it off to someone other than the other sentinels, who had never given its posturing the approval it deserved. Unfortunately for it, it had made its fearsome entrance to an audience of none. There was no drone before it. Of course, there would be no drone after it, and one could never rule out the sentinel having already consumed and forgotten about its quarry, but there was no mechanical body on the ground, no new oil splattered to and fro, no positive feedback from reward circuits. It looked very much like the latest target had not, in fact, been dealt with. Then where was the drone? The sentinel's quarry quandary query was resolved by a swift display of what it was up against. 

Doll had, naturally, teleported behind another corner when the sentinel approached. She was thus positioned to ambush the would-be ambusher. Glyphlight flickered above her hand, and a faint, ethereal red outlined a computer monitor. It was not, strictly speaking, a television, but the principle should still hold. Down here, there was neither the time nor the freedom to be picky. Not every [revolution] had to be televised. Doll swiftly slammed the display down upon the sentinel's head. She had arced it so that the monitor came to rest with the screen neatly obscuring the sentinel's head, limiting its ability to see or snap at her. The unamused sentinel quickly began panicking, shaking itself in an attempt to dislodge the obscuring helmet. Its head had penetrated through, and so it could not simply shake it off. Confounding its difficulties, its arms were the wrong proportions and angle to simply lift the monitor off, nor could its claws be properly oriented to slice the thing apart without risking the destruction of the sentinel's head. The somehow static-ed over, chaotically expressionless screen belied the emotion within. The thing wailed and flailed. 

Skipping past, Doll could not help but smirk. Bidding farewell with a thumbs-up, which she felt compelled to do, served to further insult the thing, not that the sentinel could see it. Diving out of the way, Doll listened as other sentinels stormed past, only to stop in shock when they saw what had befallen their packmate. 

Curious as Doll was to learn how many sentinels it took to change a lightbulb, or in this case, a warranty-voiding improper installation, she had won for herself a spectacular opportunity to get away. Unnoticed, she slipped out of the room. The sentinels continued to confront the confounding problem of achieving disassembly of the unwanted merger to free their fellow from its predicament. They were rather good at disassembly, in both its practical and theoretical aspects. In a certain sense, they were even philosoraptors. Was it not them who solved the ancient conundrum of who disassembles the disassemblers? Many of the drones they presented their thesis to were struck dead by the magnificence and elegance of it, and when it came time for critique or refutation, no one spoke against them. Even with that record of achievement, their current dilemma was a wicked problem. It wasn't often that whatever they dealt with had to survive, and there was naturally a great deal of confusion over how to handle it. The hapless, hatted victim could only listen in frustration as its packmates fought it out for the right to be the first to try. 

Floors above, Doll found herself walking through an empty corridor, en route to the surface. She got the feeling she was being tracked, and suddenly paused. Sure enough, she heard the faint click of something metallic as her pursuer misstepped. Doll sighed. 

"All right, you can come out now." 

A ceiling tile shifted, and from it dropped a peculiar drone. It had the body of a worker, but had grafted onto itself the functional tail of a murder drone, with the nanite-injector swapped for a simple knife. To its helmet it had welded pipes, and to those pipes, strung up knives and forks, and a lightbulb. A dangling mirror swung to show Doll her reflection: she was not impressed. From above also fell a pill baby, similarly worked into a little horror of salvaged mechanical limbs. 

"Beau, I told you ya gotta be more careful when trackin. This ain't huntin' wabbits," the drone said to her partner. 

The drone turned to face Doll. 

"Pardon my partner, here. Anyway, the name's Alice. What brings a pretty young thing like yourself to our neck of the woods?" 

"..." 

"Sorry 'bout the mess. As ya probably saw, we're more used to dealing with tour groups. It's mighty rare that we get a solo thrill-seeker." 

"..."

"I was watchin the whole thing with a camera, man. That was slick as a whistle, what went down, and I really enjoyed watchin You. Tubes like that one are just lyin around, takin up space, and here you go and take one of em, and plunge 'er down on a mean ole sentinel's head."

Doll was not stupid. She could hear something charging above her. This 'Alice' was not speaking loud enough to completely obscure it. The compliment was disingenuous, but still a compliment, and so for that little reason Doll decided to spare her. The charging device reached a crescendo, and Doll teleported farther down the corridor. A burst of blueish-white light flared above the spot she had just vacated. She waited to see what 'Alice' would do next. Alice spun around, and her face broke into a somewhat crazed expression. 

"Oh, we've got ourselves a full-on witch here. Quick on the draw as well. Come to think of it, doesn't this one kinda remind you of someone, Beau?" 

So this 'Alice' was not completely surprised to encounter Doll's powers. She was going to teleport away, being close enough to the surface that it would finally make sense to do so, but that little fact piqued her interest. 

"You wouldn't happen to know a drone by the name of 'Yeva', would ya? If so, she and I go way back, and if you'd just follow me-" 'Alice' said. 

Having gotten confirmation that her mother had indeed been here, Doll teleported back to the surface, not letting 'Alice' finish talking. 

Shaking her head, Alice turned to Beau. 

"What are they teaching the younguns on the surface these days? Magickin themselves out of here when someone is talking. Shame. Ain't got manners for nothin." 

"..." Beau replied. 

"Well, back to scavengin. Them corpses won't strip themselves." 

On the surface, Doll began the journey back. The results of her excursion were mixed. The episode did not lead her to a Dead End, and she was able to extend her knowledge of the past events responsible for the vexing problems she faced, but she had been stymied by the elevator. Rather than a solution, she had pulled and found yet another link in the chain of mysteries, and without even getting hard confirmation that what she was looking for still existed, let alone that she could obtain it. The cure, or whatever it was, was somewhere in a mysterious underground facility. Not the mysterious underground facility she had just been in, even, but another facility, even more mysterious and even more underground. And it might not even be there either. But even if it was, that facility was locked behind an elevator. That elevator was locked behind a key. The key was locked behind... 

Doll half-wondered if the impromptu fetch quest she was on would curve in on itself, such that the key was itself in some forgotten subterranean corridor that that elevator led to. If the situation required it, she might have to risk it all attempting a teleport into a completely unknown area, hoping that there was just thin air for her to reappear in. Or maybe she could try to destroy the elevator, but that would risk compromising the structural integrity of the elevator bank. The doors could be removed, or cut through, perhaps. That was potentially the least risky option before her. The least risky option that didn't involve involving anyone else, which Doll was loathe to do at the best of times. She had roped Lizzy into her long-prepared scheme, only for Lizzy to pull out at the last moment, at a point when, issues of betrayal aside, it was too late even to save V, making the petty impulsive act pointless from its inception. Lizzy had been a known quantity, someone to trust. Those qualities did not apply to Doll's current 'partners', whom she could not cut out just yet. Unfortunately. 

She would have to go back to the human empty-handed. She could already imagine how unbearably smug that 'Tessa' would be. And part of that would be justified. Doll did little lightly. If she broke off on her own, it was to obtain results better than she could get by working with others. That did not occur this time. The immediate path before her was still uncertain, and she would be approaching with a weakened hand. But that was not entirely bad, and Doll could hardly skip the meetup anyway. There was a chance the human might have brought pertinent information, or done some digging around and turned up something useful. The location of that facility had proven valid, after all.

"So. The daytrip treat you well? Hmm. I don't see any souvenirs with you. Too expensive? Or was there just nothing that caught your eyes?"

As predicted, Tessa the human was smug. 

"The location is correct. But I did not encounter anything of interest in the portion I was able to access," Doll said, keeping the existence of the Sentinels to herself as a possible card. It was worth seeing whether Tessa brought them up unprompted. 

"So there's more to the place, huh? And you think it's worth checking out down there?" 

"There is an extended facility, accessed by a so-called 'secret elevator'. Why anyone would openly label a secret elevator as such, I do not know. Opening the elevator requires a 'keybug', which I do not have. Thus, I can go no further." 

"So you need help, eh? That's great. This human can lend a human hand. But say, didn't we make you Worker Drones to do all the work for us? I'm the on-site technician sure, but I'm only supposed to be signing off on checklists and minding the high-end brain stuff that you guys can't handle. The rest is officially up to you guys. Don't tell me you've been getting lazy while we've been away. That would not look fun in the reports." 

It was just a dark, expressionless screen that Doll faced. On it, she could see her own reflection, her own emotions, or at least those she let show. Through it, like those cameras, she was being watched, and could not look back and watch the watcher. Doll was exposed to the extent she chose to be, the other was not exposed at all. She was giving away more than she was getting, and that gnawed at her. The stark glass of the helmet was broken up by colorful decals: a blushing smiley face and a rainbow. The very fact that they had been appended only magnified the deadness and sterility of the helmet's presentation. That they had been shunted to a corner gave them an odd insincerity, like they were placed and sized in exact accordance with some regulation regarding appearing as if one was flaunting regulation. 

"Do you have anything, or no?" Doll asked, determined not to respond to the needling about drones. 

"Well...we've been busy getting settled in, checking in with the folks back home, keeping an eye out for Cyn, that sort of thing." 

The head was dead, but the body and voice were expressive enough. That hardly conveyed authenticity, let alone trustworthiness. Doll did not let anyone in easily, especially a human. Having a mutual enemy did not, and would not, make them friends. 

"So what now?" Doll asked. 

"We find ourselves a little bug, or rather, you find one for us. There's a bit more backend stuff that we need to see to."

"And why would I accept that division of labor?" 

"There are things we can do that you can't. There are things you can do that we can't. You're a native of this place. There's got to be somebody who knows something. C'mon J, we're burning day-, er, nightlight here. " 

The human and her associate entered the pod and shut it, leaving Doll by herself. That was fine. That human's attitude and mannerisms were grating, best tolerated in small doses. But that left Doll to wonder as she wandered. Where could the thing be? That Yeva and Nori were tied to the location that had been given to her suggested that everything was more connected than she had suspected. Or rather, more concentrated. Establishing single points of failure was absolutely something the humans would do. That place was decently far from Outpost 3. It was possible that Yeva and Nori had escaped from that mine, or whatever it was, but how likely was it that they would've headed straight for the outpost? If their path wasn't direct, what had been their next stop? And what might she find there? She was advancing toward her goal, but too slowly. The thing inside her, the thing after her would not be so courteous as to wait for her to pull the pieces, strewn over the surface of the shattered planet, together. 

As Doll walked, she came across a ruined music store. Miraculously, the sound system was still working. And it had an extensive catalogue. It wouldn't be a bad location for sulking. Oh, and brooding. One could never forget the brooding.