Chapter Text
Uzi sat in the nurse’s office, ice pack pressed over where her right eye would be. The nurse had said something about how it would stabilize her temperature? She hadn’t really been listening all that closely. That and the bandages were apparently all they could do for now, she’d have to stop by an actual doctor on the way home for any proper repairs.
She felt a peculiar thumping against her skull. It almost sounded like… a conversation? She could probably chalk it up to her head injury. That really would have to get checked out later.
She slouched in her seat next to her sick-as-hell railgun, somehow still steaming from the explosion earlier. Save for herself, the nurse’s office was completely empty.
“Eww, it didn’t kill her.”
Scratch that, Lizzy and Doll were lurking in the doorway. She watched the two scurry down the hall, giggling to each other. Considering Uzi just got half her face blown off, she didn’t have the energy to chase them down this time. She instead resigned to herself with a groan.
As she sat there considering possible revenge plots for whenever she recovered, she heard another voice coming from down the hall. Thad, right? She was pretty sure he was on the football team.
“Classic toxic masculinity, Chad! That’s never gonna end up problematic”—He glanced over to Uzi—“Oh wow, Uzi? I heard you, uh…”
He trailed off, as if unsure whether or not to actually say it.
“I’m an angsty teen, Thad, bite me.” She tossed the ice pack aside for dramatic effect.
As she did so, she picked up on something else he had just said, “Also, how do you know my name?” She added, “people willingly talk to you.”
He laughed nervously as he walked over to sit down in one of the nearby seats. It was nice that he didn’t sit down right next to her.
“Well, I’d say everyone knows Khan’s daughter, but, uh…” He hesitated, gesturing to the numerous posters of her dad on the wall, “Then you might blow the other half of your face off.”
Right, her dad, Khan Doorman. The dad liked to pretend his daughter wasn’t there half the time. The dad that wished she had been born a door. Hell, one of those posters on the wall just straight up said, ‘doors are my real daughter.’
As if being a deadbeat wasn’t enough, he was constantly going on colony-broadcast interviews talking about how much more he loved his stupid doors than his own daughter.
That dad.
“Crippling daddy issues, hilarious,” She remarked, before quickly pivoting to something else, “What are you in for? Testosterone too hard?”
Thad’s optics widened hearing that, “That can happen?”
It startled her a bit how genuinely worried he seemed for a moment, before he leaned back in the chair and added, “Awesome.”
She honestly couldn’t tell whether he actually believed her or was playing along.
“Hey, those bandages look pretty badass.”
Did he just…?
She brushed a stray strand of hair out of her face out of nervous habit as she tried to regain her composure. Was she blushing? She wasn’t, right?
“Oh… uh… ew, gross, I hate that you said that,” She said, eager to shut down whatever was happening as quickly as possible.
He seemed to move on pretty fast, leaving Uzi to wonder if he even meant it like that in the first place. His attention turned instead to the weapon beside her.
“So… what’s the, uh—” He gestured to her sick-as-hell railgun.
Grabbing the railgun behind her without turning to look, she jumped up onto her chair to point the thing at Thad.
“SICK-AS-HELL RAILGUN?” Uzi cut him off, excited to get to talk about something she wanted to talk about. Not that daddy issues and weird bandage comments weren’t riveting conversation, but Robo-God if it wasn’t a breath of fresh air to finally get an excuse to talk about her interests.
“Sci-fi nonsense that super works! I’m sneaking into the murder drone lair tonight to get the last spare part I need to save the world and earn my dad’s respect and stuff”—She caught herself—“but mostly the world part.”
Thad took a moment before responding, “Oh… But, doesn’t your dad make awesome doors so we don’t have to, uh”—He faltered—“do all that scary-sounding emotionally-repressed stuff you just said—?”
Uzi pressed the railgun to his face again, cutting him off, “NO MORE FEEDBACK ON MY REPRESSION TODAY!”
Really, she just didn’t want to be on the topic of her dad or his doors again.
Just as she turned to dramatically storm off, she was immediately taken aback by the red silhouette floating in front of her.
“OH MY ROBO-JESUS, WHAT IS THAT?!”
“[Oh, so she can see us.]”
Thad just stared at her for a second. He eventually mustered up the courage to hesitantly ask, “What’s… what?”
“THAT!” Uzi frantically gestured to the ghost right in front of her.
“...Y’know, I’m gonna take that as my cue to leave.” Thad responded as Uzi watched him hurry down the hall.
“[Interesting, I suppose only Uzi can see us, then.]”
Now alone with this… thing, Uzi had absolutely no clue what to do. Talk to it? Hit it with the railgun? Not as if that would do anything, it was a ghost robo-goddamnit.
Luckily, her dilemma was solved for her.
“[I’m genuinely surprised you didn’t notice us sooner. We were here the whole time.]”
Uzi picked up on the fact that it was speaking Russian, and quickly put the pieces together. She only knew one drone who spoke in another language, “Doll…?”
“[Bravo.]” It—or she, rather—started slowly clapping in mock-congratulation.
“…And what do you mean ‘we?’ ”
“Jumpscare.” An eerily monotone voice excitedly called out from behind Uzi. She stumbled back, startled by the sudden voice. She turned to see a second ghost, though this one was yellow instead of red.
“Giggle, get snuck upon.”
“[No, you’re not insane—not because of us, at least—we’re just incorporeal,]” Doll attempted to reassure Uzi.
“Then why are you in my head?” Uzi hesitantly asked, still a bit frazzled from everything going on, before pointing at the yellow one, “And who the hell is she?”
“[I suspect brain damage from the explosion earlier, but really we’re just as clueless as you,]”
“I certainly don’t feel like a figment of her imagination,” the other ghost interrupted.
“[As for her,]” Doll continued, gesturing to the other ghost, “[I’m not entirely sure. She says her name is Cyn.]”
“Hi, Uzi!” Cyn waved. It was weird how she could sound so emotive and unemotive at the same time. Doll, on the other hand, sounded almost completely monotone, not at all like how she did in class.
Uzi wondered if talking weirdly was a ghost thing or not.
“You mentioned you were going to the murder drones’ lair?” Cyn asked.
“Yeah, I just need one last spare part to finish this sick-as-hell railgun.”
“[Considering we have nothing better to do, we might as well join you.]”
“Great…” Uzi wasn’t exactly sure how she felt about two creepy ghosts following her for this excursion, but what was she supposed to do? Say no to the actual voices in her head?
“Well, we’re leaving tomorrow. First I have to get the master key from my dad’s room, and before that I gotta stop by the doctor’s office to get my visor fixed.”
“[Wouldn’t your—]” Doll started before abruptly cutting herself off, “[…No, nevermind.]”
“...Wouldn’t my what?”
“[Nothing. I was going to ask something but decided against it.]”
“Alright…” She offered hesitantly.
“Giggle, maybe the doctor will end up patching us out. Then you’ll be good as new, Uzi!”
Unfortunately, the doctor did not patch them out.
He had off-handedly mentioned something about irreparable damage to her ‘neural lattice structure,’ whatever that meant. Beyond that, she wasn’t any closer to figuring out what the hell was going on.
But as for her mission…
Uzi had decided to depart for the spire at night, mostly to add dramatic effect to the act of sneaking around the colony. She couldn’t just walk out in broad daylight! What would she have pirated all those countless hours of anime for?
Sure, there were also practical reasons, but they were all pretty much secondary to the ‘coolness-factor.’
The fortunate part was that waking up at three in the morning wasn’t actually all that hard. That was because she wasn’t asleep in the first place. How was she supposed to sleep with two (presumably) dead drones constantly bickering in her head?
Her alarm blared in her head as the pop-up on her HUD displayed the time: 3:00 am. As annoying as the sound was, it gave her a brief reprieve from their voices. When Doll and Cyn said they’d join her, she didn’t think they meant they’d join her everywhere.
Though, to be fair, what had she been expecting?
“—But he’s mean, she said so herself,” Uzi overheard Cyn saying.
“[That is not a reason to kill Mr. Doorman.]”
They had been going back and forth like this all night.
Uzi hadn’t really been listening all that attentively, but in the few hours they’d been talking, she’d picked up that Cyn was…
…Odd. Really, really odd.
Even for Uzi, which was saying a lot. Putting the creepy voice and weird maid getup aside, it seemed like she valued life even less than the average worker drone already did. She’d even say there was an almost sadistic quality to her, similar to that of the murder drones.
That along with her yellow eyes was certainly weird. It seemed like there was some sort of connection there, but Uzi couldn’t come up with anything concrete yet. She couldn’t be one of them, she clearly had worker drone limbs, but it couldn’t be that all the parallels she had noticed were just coincidences.
Right?
Doll was odd too, but to a lesser extent. For starters, she only had one eye. Cyn still had both of hers, so it probably wasn’t a ghost thing.
But beyond that, personality-wise she was pretty much unrecognizable. It wasn’t like the two regularly interacted, but even just based on what little she knew about her, this ghost version felt like an entirely different person.
The corporeal Doll didn’t seem all that dissimilar from her friends, Lizzy and Rebecca. She’d always joined in their gossiping and whatever the hell else they did with their time. Sure, she had her moments where she’d just zone out from time to time, and of course she exclusively spoke in Russian for no discernible reason, but for the most part she seemed like a relatively normal, well-adjusted student.
Ghost-Doll, meanwhile, seemed… not quite jaded, but more like she was perpetually in that zoned-out state. She had the same blank expression since she had appeared in the nurse’s office, and expressed minimal emotion whenever she spoke. Uzi wondered if that had something to do with the fact that she was a ghost. Maybe it wasn’t a ghost thing per se, but she didn’t imagine being dead was that great for Doll’s mental state.
Also apparently the two of them were closer when Uzi’s mom was still alive. Uzi had since deleted most of her early memories because they were gross and cringe, so she couldn’t really confirm or deny that.
But then how did she end up as Lizzy’s friend? One of her bullies?
At least this version of her didn’t seem to be interested in bullying her. As for why that was, she couldn’t be sure.
She stared at the ceiling for another moment before lazily slapping at the buzzing alarm on her newly-fixed visor and finally rising from her bed. She looked over to see the two ghosts somehow still at it.
“Hey Uzi, you should kill your dad.”
“[Do not do that.]”
Uzi silently glared at the two for a moment before deadpanning, “Yeah, wasn’t planning on it.”
Sleep-deprived and recovering from a major injury, right now was possibly the worst time she could’ve picked to leave. Nonetheless, she walked across her room and swiped the railgun off her desk. After slinging it over her back, she briefly checked herself in the mirror to make sure she was ready to depart before heading out her bedroom door.
“How about a bow?”
“I don’t even have a bow. And I wouldn’t wear it if I did!”
“You should.”
She didn’t have anything to say to that, so she continued with her preparations.
Just down the hall was the door to her dad’s room. She creaked it open, just enough to slip a hand through. Luckily, she didn’t have to look around inside since the key was hanging right next to the door. She grabbed it and shut the door, a little louder than she’d hoped but presumably still unnoticed, given the lack of any reaction.
“[He might have heard that.]”
“Bite me,” Uzi shot back. She still made sure to listen out, though. Just in case, of course.
“[Well he definitely heard that.]”
Stepping outside of her home, she made her way through the colony with attempted stealth.
It was a relatively straight shot. Naturally, the Doorman residence wasn’t very far from the doors themselves. Just a few turns through the frozen-over corridors and she had already arrived at the imposing work of machinery.
Door 3, the first of three doors that kept the drones of Outpost 3 hauled up underground. It was like they were waiting for some idiot to come along and accidentally let the murder drones in.
“There’s no reason it has to be so big, right?” Uzi mused, mostly to herself.
“Rubbing chin, why not go over the top when you have the opportunity to?” Cyn responded.
“[The outpost here already existed. The doors were built retroactively, so they were made to fit the corridor.]”
“Wait, really?”
“[Yes, this is where the humans that once lived here came to wait out the planet’s toxic death storms. Did you not pay attention in door history class?]”
“Slept through it,” That wasn’t entirely true. More so she had actively tried not to listen.
And evidently, she’d succeeded.
“[Ah.]”
It made sense, come to think of it. Some of the facilities here didn’t make much sense to have in a settlement inhabited by drones. A cryosleep room, for instance, she had always wondered why they had one of those when—being robots—they could just power down at any given time.
“So there used to not be any doors here?”
“[No, there was one, but it was the only one, and it was slower to close and easier to break through. It wasn’t made to keep out murder drones, so your father made better ones.]”
“Hooray for him, I guess,” Uzi gave as unenthusiastically as she could.
Uzi took out the master key and pressed it to the nearby control panel. The first door promptly opened to reveal none other than her dad, standing there with his arms crossed and a stern look on his visor.
“OH ROBO-JESUS,” Uzi jumped back a bit upon seeing him.
“[Told you.]”
“And where might you be off to?”
Great, now he shows up to do anything.
“Kill him, do it.”
“[Make something up. Doors are his whole thing, right? Try that.]”
She went with Doll’s suggestion.
“I… need to… measure the exterior hydraulic mechanisms of door 1!” Coming up with something on the spot, she was mostly just throwing around words that sounded like they made sense.
“Because that’s the project I’m working on for… school? A big ol’ door! Just like what my old man built.” It came out more unsure than she’d hoped, and she ended up drawling that last part for some reason.
He just eyed her suspiciously in response. He didn’t look like he was buying it.
“I wanna join the WDF and hide behind doors like cowards while playing cards and stuff,” She nervously added with a healthy amount of hand gestures.
“Well, we don’t just play cards,” Khan corrected. She still wasn’t entirely sure whether or not he believed her.
“Sure, right, well if that’s all then I should probably get to it, right?”
He chuckled, “When you make doors so good”—He took a moment to… pet… the door? As if he was reassuring it?—“There’s no need to fight. Uzi, this is great news! Here…”
He pulled out an oil-stained wrench, “…The wrench I used to tighten the bolts on my first door prototypes—and to put your mother out of her misery when the murder drones got to her with that nanite acid—I want you to have it.”
He placed the wrench in her hands. She looked down at it with hollowed optics for a moment, before nervously responding, “Neat, therapy’s fun.”
He seemed to believe her, at least.
Suddenly, the door behind Khan opened on its own. Four WDF members were gathered around a table for, wouldn’t you know it, a card game.
“Khan, can you grab a fresh pack? We literally only play cards so much that the numbers are faded!” One of them called over from the table, “Oh, hey Uzi!”
So much for ‘we don’t just play cards,’ then.
In truth, Uzi wasn’t sure why they had a ‘Worker Defense Force’ in the first place. They weren’t equipped with so much as UV flashlights, and were mostly just assigned to watching the doors to make sure they didn’t suddenly open.
“Guys, my daughter is finally into doors!”
The other WDF members all cheered at that, which was quickly interrupted by a sudden cold gust of wind from outside as Door 1 opened, blowing the card game off the table and blasting them with snow.
“She’s going to be outside for a bit to examine the exterior of Door 1”—He turned to address Uzi—“Your door-specific destiny awaits!”
“Uh… wow. I’m just gonna leave then, since this worked so weirdly well,” She wasn’t entirely sure how to react. Relieved? Utterly flabbergasted? She started for the now-open Door 1 before adding, “Uhh, go doors!”
The giant metal door shut behind her, leaving her in the frigid wastes of Copper-9.
She was on her own now.
“Giggle, I changed my mind. Don’t kill him, actually. He’s funny.”
“[What is wrong with you?]”
“Cheeky grin, plenty.”
Oh, right. She nearly forgot about the devils on her shoulders.
“How’d you know that would work, Doll?”
“[How would it not? His name is literally Door-man. I’m almost certain you could have figured it out on your own if I hadn’t said anything.]”
“Well, thanks for the help anyways.”
“[It’s no problem.]”
Come to think of it, having two ghosts in her head didn’t sound all that bad right now. It certainly beat being alone with her thoughts in a situation like this.
Uzi took a moment to orient herself with the surrounding landmarks, before heading off in the direction of the murder drones’ spire of corpses.