Chapter Text
Uzi wandered the rubble of where she and her friends had done battle with J and Cyn in their last stand for Copper-9. Where V had come back. Where her parents reunited. Where she had killed Cyn and the Solver… almost.
“Tee hee.” The tail hovering behind Uzi’s head spoke, mimicking laughter. “So overdramatic, Uzi. You really should know that I cannot be killed. I am-”
“Can it, pipsqueak!” Uzi shouted, grabbing her tail in one hand and forcing its mouth closed before wrapping one of the ribbons it was so obsessed with around its mouth, tying it shut. “I am feeling way too angsty for your taunting right now!”
Uzi’s tail still continued to attempt speech, but its voice was muffled enough that the drone turned eldritch god(?) was able to ignore it.
Why was she exploring the battlefield? Well, she was looking for something…
It didn’t take her long to locate it, her lost Railgun. Flying it over to herself, Uzi gave the high tech machine an inspection before she nodded and slung it over her back. It would take a little while to patch up, but that would be easy for her now. Heck, she’d probably be able to make it way more efficient!
As Uzi turned to go home, she tripped on a large rock, face planting into the dirt. When she started to sit up with a groan, Uzi gave a quick glower all over the wreckage, making certain that no one had seen her embarrass herself, and as she did so, a glint of reflective light caught her eyelights.
Cautiously stepping over to the wreckage, Uzi carefully shoved away boulders, heavy metal plates, and fleshy tendrils leftover from the battle, and when she finally reached the bottom of the pile, Uzi gave a gasp.
There, under the dozens of tons worth of stone and debris, her body crushed and mangled nearly beyond recognition, her hair torn out and her clothes shredded, was J.
---
J woke up with a terrified shout… or she would have if not for the fact that she had no mouth. In fact, she didn’t have anything at all!
She couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t taste, couldn’t feel. It was just… nothing.
She was only able to exist, silently, the only sensation that she could detect was that of the universe passing through her, or that’s what it felt like. Acidic code running through every fiber of her being and threatening to drag what remained of her along with it, lost forever among a digital embrace she was having trouble comprehending. Was this what it was like to die permanently? She had always just come back from the dead, she didn’t know what it would be like to just… stop for good.
No wonder all those toasters were so keen not to die. This stuff kinda sucked.
“...an…he…me?”
A sound rang out in the limbo, and J was nearly sent spiraling from the deafening, incomprehensibly destructive noise, like a thousand exploding napalm bombs at once. She tried to shriek. To call out, to be seen, but she could do nothing. Was this the Solver’s punishment for her failure?
Was this the fate she deserved?
“I… J… in…th…re”
“She’s… h…rting! …lp h…!” This voice was more clear than the last, and far more audible.
Every second that passed, the voices became easier to understand, less loud, and more intelligible.
“I’m g…ng to t… giv…g …a b…dy.”
Suddenly, the burning, agonizing stream of ones and zeroes that she could feel ripping her apart all began to compress around her. Where digits once flowed out, they now flowed in. It burned, it burned so badly, a hundred times worse than before, but when she tried to scream…
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!” A bitcrushed, high pitched little screech emanated from the location she thought she was. Her voice! She had a voice! It didn’t sound like she used to, but… it was something.
Looking down at her hands, J jumped back at the sight of pixely, chibi little digits. With three fingers and a thumb each, her handlights each had only a trio of mildly rectangular pixels. Looking at the rest of herself it was more of the same. J was 2-dimensional and blocky, like a character from some cheap sixteen-bit game!
“Hello, J? Can you hear me?” N’s voice called out from above, and J looked up to see her former colleague, a giant in the sky. V and Uzi were both behind him, their heads floating above like mad gods.
“What did you useless traitors do to me!?” She wailed in her new, adorable voice.
In the sky, Uzi and V began to laugh, buckling over at something, and even N chuckled a little. “Sorry, J. It’s really hard to take you seriously when you’re so tiny and cute, you’re itty-bitty!” N held his finger up, and it was still more than twice J’s height, sending her stumbling backwards with how huge and surprising it was compared to her.
J blushed a bit at the humiliation, before she tried to go back to being ‘intimidating’. She summoned her wings and swords, jumping into the air and trying to fly at the giant beings, only to hit some kind of invisible wall once she got close enough, bouncing off with a soft ‘thunk’.
The trio laughed a bit more, before N finally wiped digital tears from his visor, stifling his giggles to explain. “Uzi found you really badly injured in the ruins of the Last Stand for Copper-9. Er, that’s what the Workers have started calling that battle we all had. Uzi’s dad kinda turned us all into heroes with the story. But anyways, your body was way too injured to heal, and we didn’t want to risk Cyn coming back through your corpse, so we kinda… shoved your CPU inside of Uzi’s computer???”
J just stood there, mouth hung open comically wide in a way that a physical body couldn’t. “You did… what?”
Uzi laughed, looking down at the screen with contempt. Clearly she had no sympathy for J. “Hey, don’t feel too bad, I really like this! You’ve got nearly a million Terabytes of storage, I really appreciate the extra room. And you’re way less annoying as a chibi little computer pest, along with being harmless! Almost cute, even.”
J just stomped her feet, steam coming from the sides of her head and sending her pigtails rising into the air. “DON’T CALL ME CUTE! I AM AN UNSTOPPABLE KILLING MACHINE! I’LL RIP YOU ALL APART!”
V just flicked the screen of J’s prison, sending a shockwave into her digital confines and knocking her to the ground. “Oh shut up. You weren’t very unstoppable when I kicked your butt two weeks ago. Now you’re just a Bonzi Buddy ripoff, like from those old computers on Earth.”
“Silence yourself, V! You should have joined me, you traitor! We could be ruling the universe together! Not just wasting away in some rusted old toaster’s den! What happened to all that bloodlust that made you so valuable to the team in the first place?”
Using her claws, V picked some wiring out of her teeth, flicking it at the screen. “I started going to therapy, J. I recommend you do as well. Me an’ N have been relocating our hunting. We’re eating the Sentinels underground until Uzi figures out a better solution. Maybe if you paid attention to us more, you’d have known that I didn’t exactly want to be that way. You and your freaky god were what turned me into that.”
A muffled noise came from behind Uzi, but J couldn’t hear what it said. From the expressions on the trio’s giant faces though, it was important. J made a mental note to try looking into it later, but for now, she would try using the gifts she was given by fate.
Using her new body, J bulged out her eyes and puckered her lip, clasping her tiny hands together as she wiggled her tail from side to side. “So what? Are you just going to let poor little old me sit here on your desktop for all time? You kidnap me, destroy my body, and can’t even give me a little furniture? Uzi, your wallpaper is like, REALLY boring, there’s nothing to do here!”
V nodded. “She’s right, y’know. Like, does everything you do have to be skull themed?”
“Bite me!” Uzi shouted, before grumbling out a response. “Ugh, fine. I don’t wanna have you staring at me constantly anyways…”
Uzi opened up a new Folder in her computer. Quickly coding a handful of little desktop furniture, dragging them into the folder, before she password locked it. “There, a room for you. The password is the first four digits of your Serial Number, 10x1. And don’t try busting into my other files, I locked them all before shoving your untrustworthy brain in here.”
J peeked into the folder, impressed at how it was actually a little room. A bit empty, but it had a bed, desk, dresser, rug, mirror, some chairs, all the necessities. There was also… a plushie of herself on the bed?”
“Hehehe~” Uzi grinned. “Figured you’d want a friend, but you’re too egotistical to love anyone but yourself, so here you go, have yourself a J-Junior.”
“Wha- But-” J spluttered, furious at how poorly she was being treated. She was the most important disassembly drone ever made! The Absolute Solver’s right hand! How dare they treat her like this! She summoned a flamethrower, grabbing the ‘J-Junior’ and shoving the nozzle in its face. “I’ll kill this stupid thing!”
N rolled his eyes. Even he was tired of J’s arrogance. “Well, you’re welcome to do that, but Uzi’s not replacing it, right Uzi?”
“Yup!” The purple haired drone nodded, dual colored eyes shining with a gleeful delight at her boyfriend talking back to J. “In fact, I’ll give you a plushy of my railgun if you try anything funny.”
J hesitated, before putting away her flamethrower and pouting, hugging the PNG-Looking plush doll to her chest. “I… I didn’t even wanna kill the stupid doll anyways…”
“Uh-huh… Sure…” V smirked, catlike and smug. “Well, I’m bored of this loser, let’s give her some privacy, I want to go watch those old movies that Lizzy saved. I think she said we were watching some movie called ‘Thursday the 12th’? Something like that. She said we’d probably like it.”
“Yeah, that sounds way more fun! Have a good night, J. Or don’t. To be honest, you’re way too awful for me to care.” Uzi reached for the power button, and J felt a surge of panic as she reached out to try and stop Uzi, but she couldn’t actually do anything to stop her.
“Wait, NO-” And then there was darkness.
—
“Hey, Uzi?” N faced his girlfriend, wringing his hands on the way to the movie night. “Do you think we were a bit too mean to J? She’s probably going through a lot as well, and-”
Uzi put a finger to N’s lips, shushing him. “Seriously? I thought we were past this, N! J sucks, she’s getting what’s coming to her. She’s in my computer because I needed a new CPU, and I didn’t want another worm on our hands, nothing more. She’s a manipulator and an abuser, don’t let her guilt trip you.”
“Yeah, but still…”
V chimed in from up front. “Don’t worry too much, N. J isn’t going anywhere. We can check on her later, she’ll be fine. She’s survived worse, right?”
“Yeah… I guess so…” N looked away, reaffirming in his mind everything that J had done to him, done to them all. She was awful indeed, but it still felt wrong.
Uzi knew more about tech than he did, so he would trust her on this one. J was fine.
Even if his gut told him that she was cold, hurt and alone…