Daily #69 - Makina Lumian and Laurce Oleglo (cowritten by Tess)
Raising a skinny robotic hand, and pausing for a few more seconds, he knocked quietly against the door.
The door whipped open within seconds of the metal hand touching it, revealing an empty doorway.
It would take Laurce a few moments before glancing down and spotting the Troll staring up at him.
"How long were you going to wait out there?" She barked with what seemed to be mock irritation, her mechanical left eye glowing dimly as it took in this one's modifications, her organic eye locked with his own. "I saw you enter my lawn ring five minutes ago already!"
It was a little presumptuous to call the field of dust and dry dirt a 'lawn', and she probably knew it. No doubt her irony was multi-layered. "So come on, come on, in you come." Bossy as ever, she disappeared into the hive, leading a path to her workshop - a room which comprised the majority of the building.
Living on a dust plain on the outskirts of a major city at least gave plenty of room to build, for the size of the place.
Despite ducking his head, Laurce very nearly bonked his horns on the top of the doorway as he entered the hive. This was a regrettably frequent occurrence, and had led to him almost breaking the antennas sticking up on the sides of his head multiple times. Granted, they weren't the most practical of electromagnetic receivers, but he'd grown so fond of them, he didn't know if he had the heart to redesign them, even if they'd broken.
He followed the brownblood into her workshop, looking around in wonder. So these are the working conditions of a professional, huh? Maybe he should take notes... would that be rude, though? The other troll hadn't said anything to him since he'd entered, so maybe this would be a good opportunity... nah, better get to business. Don't want to waste the girl's time any more than it was already being wasted.
He glanced back down at the note he was holding. "Are you... Makina Lumian, then?"
She nodded and grabbed the note out of his hand at the same time, turning it around to look at it. A few moments passed as she pursed her lips. "Yeah I don't recognise this writing," she sighed and flicked her hand, sending the note back to the troll before her. "That's me, Makina Lumian, best of the best, or so the liars would tell you otherwise."
She sat down on a stool, a leg on either side, and looked the troll before her up and down. "Don't recognise those either," she jerked a thumb at him, obviously referring to his modifications. "I mean I can get a good sense when working with parts but usually I can tell their origin at a glance. These though... how'd you get em? And who are you, that's a good question too."
She was very... forward. Seemed so used to going at her own pace that she didn't care one bit if someone couldn't keep up. Her mechanical eye was still studying the parts, zoomed in on his face, where metal met skin. Now who had done that?
"O-oh, I, um..." Laurce quickly grabbed the note back from Makina and put it in his pocket. "Sorry, I should have introduced myself, how rude of me... m-my name's Laurce Oleglo. And these parts are, uh... well, they were kind of an emergency procedure, you see. I'd been in a bit of an accident and... a-anyway, nowadays I have some, uh... memory troubles, so it's all hooked up to a database back home so I can keep everything in. I've been studying some of the mechanics so that I can maintain these properly, but I'm, uh, not exactly at a professional level yet. That's why I came to you. I was told you could help me."
There was a nervous look in Laurce's one real eye as he looked down at the other troll. She was small, but her forcefulness was still a little intimidating. What if she just rejected him right off the bat? Was he just wasting his time here? Maybe this wasn't such a good idea...
Makina gave a loud snort as Laurce finished speaking, crossing her arms. She spent a few moments looking intently at him, watching the poor thing's nerves nearly rattle him to pieces. Then she sighed deeply. "Jeeze, what a hack-job," she rubbed the back of her head, continuing to look him up and down. "It's gonna be some serious work to undo some of that mess - if the mods are messing with your brain there might not be anything any of us can do alone, you'd need some medical expert working alongside someone like me to replace those safely."
Her foot started tapping rapidly as she hmm'd and ah'd. "You got yourself in a bad way, Laurce - it's gonna take more than what I got here in my hive to fix the bad hand you been dealt. I can do plenty of upgrades and fine tunings but the core of the problem ain't something I wanna touch. I'm a mechanic, not a thinkpan surgeon."
She continued tapping the foot with increasing speed until it seemed she'd put a hole through the floor, then shot to her feet. "So let's get to work. You need a tuneup, that I can do, if you can pay. You learn anything while I'm working you get to take that home with you, I ain't gonna grudge anyone who can use their brain."
She wandered over to a cabinet, and began messing about with the contents, retrieving tools and laying them on a nearby table.
Laurce looked a little worried. "Do they... need to be replaced? They've all been working fine, I think, they just need... y'know, the usual maintenance every so often. A-and I can pay you for that, that's not a problem. I just figured it'd be simpler if I could learn to do it all myself... but I suppose maybe that's just not as possible as I thought it might be..."
He pressed a few buttons on the right side of his head, where his ear should have been, adjusting the volume a little and turning on the screen over his eye. He was ready to take notes. "But if there's anything at all you can teach me, I'm more than willing to listen."
"If you got memory issues," Makina slammed down a box full of heavy parts, dragged her stool over to where Laurce was standing and, reaching both hands up to place on his shoulders, pushed him down onto the stool behind him, "Then you got problems."
Her left hand grasped underneath his right wrist and lifted the hand, her right deep in the box of tools behind her. It said something for her experience that without even looking, she pulled the correct tool from the box. She placed the tiny bladed screwdriver against his metallic hand and began to investigate.
In stark contrast to her roughness of speech and action, and the grip with which her hand held his, the touch of the screwdriver was delicate and perfect. It took no time at all to lift off the top layer of plating and allow Makina to begin investigating, tsk'ing all the while.
"Mods aren't meant to hold you back," she continued eventually as she swapped tools, continuing to apply the lightest of touches to the inside of Laurce's mechanical arm, "They replace what you're missing, or make better what you already have. Your accident may have messed you up, but good mods woulda put you back where you were - or even better if you had a good mechanic. But memory loss - that's all kinds of bad news. You're gonna need to look at that, cause you can't say that that'll be the only problem. If I had a piece of faulty machinery stuck in my sponge I'd want it replaced as soon as possible, you feel me?"
Her right hand squeezed the tool she currently held and movement disappeared from Laurce's right hand - now dead at the wrist. "Don't fret," she didn't even look up from where she was working, a second tool held between her little and ring fingers, "Don't won't to replace the coating of a live wire after all."
Laurce sat silently as he watched Makina work on his arm, words flashing faintly on his screen as he took in every detail of what she was doing. He didn't have to read it properly, it was just a confirmation that his memory unit was functioning. His concentration was solely on Makina, and what she was telling him. Though it wasn't particularly pleasant to hear.
"I guess you could be right... Theoretically the database could allow me to retain more than the average person, but if relying on it could be a liability... I'm not even sure how well this sort of thing can be fixed with surgery, though. I mean, I'm not a surgeon, of course, but... hmm. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to get it checked out, though I am kind of an unusual case... I wonder how much they could even do for me..."
"Like I said," she continued onwards, threading a new wire into the wrist, "You'd need a highly skilled surgeon and mechanic working side by side - or some kind of genius who can do both - which I ain't by the way - to get at the bits stuck in your sponge and start replacing whatever's bad. But you know, if you can't guarantee the quality, what happens if one day you get stressed, the system flares a little and it suddenly overheats? Or fries your brain nerves? Suddenly half your brain doesn't work anymore. That's no good for anyone."
Raising her right hand, she let go of Laurce's wrist. "Try moving your hand and fingers, tell me how it compares in feeling to before."
Laurce examined his robotic digits as he wiggled them around, twisting his wrist to get a good look at both sides. It certainly felt smoother, and he smiled at the realisation. "It's good! It was starting to feel a little sluggish... it seems to be fine now, though. Thank you!"
He looked back towards Makina. "I won't ask you to examine the, uh..." He gestured towards his head unit. "B-but I don't think there are any problems there anyway. I've got spare modules back at home, so most of it's easy enough to replace if it starts wearing down a little... though I guess I can't replace burned-out neural connections, huh?"
His smile faded as he stopped to think. "I guess it hadn't quite hit me what the consequences could be if something went wrong."
Standing up, Makina moved to stand behind Laurce. Her left hand raised and the fingers settled on the metallic side of his face, her right hand reaching up to touch the antenna on his right horn. Both fingers tapped amiably but lightly, delicate touches on cold metal.
"I'm not the type to sugarcoat my words," she said after a moment of this, "Risky mods in the head are the scariest thing in the world to me, you have no idea how long I went with one eye making sure my new one was perfect. Now I get that whatever went down probably required you to get patched quick but that danger's past now. Now you gotta worry about the consequences of that. If you got any money and this grey," she moved her right hand to reach down and poke at the symbol on his chest, "Is just coverin' a highblood needin' a lowblood, you find someone who can do the deed and you make sure they do it right. Hell, if you get a good surgeon with no mechanical skill, ask me to help. Only reason I never done something like that is cause the good medical stuff is learned by the highbloods, and a highblood's more likely ta cut me open than the patient."
Her right hand returned to the antenna and she tweaked it a little, chuckling to herself. "This is cute though."
"Heheh..." It was a little embarrassing for Laurce, having someone examine his handiwork like that. "I figured that if I've got to walk around with a bunch of metal parts on my head, I could at least make them look kinda nice, y'know? I think it might have been more trouble than it was worth, though, I always get a bunch of nosy questions about it. It's rather frustrating... do you ever get that? Anyone bugging you for details on whatever must have happened for you to need that eye?"
"Ohh," Makina raised her one eyebrow, "So this was all done by you, huh? I was sure you had someone bail you out after getting your skull cracked open or something. Now I guess it makes more sense, can't expect someone with half their head missing to make calm judgements about part design." Her fingers settled on the side of his head and crept forward, beginning to press around the points where metal met skin. There was still more work to be done on the arms - and Makina was sure she could even examine the extremeties of the skull safely - but right now this was most important. Getting a feel for the parts installed.
"You had any education in engineering or did it get lost when you did the deed? Looks like you knew enough to do something about your situation."
If Makina had lost more than her eye, what would she have done? Would she have made the same panicked installs? Put herself in the same situation? She couldn't help but pity Laurce now, he really was her in just a slightly modified situation. So fine was the line between the one in control and the one in need of help. It was stunning.
"There's always someone who wants to know, but screw em, my business is my own. I did something stupid and paid the price for it, open and shut case."
She moved her head to poke over the left shoulder of Laurce and, putting her right hand on top of his skull, turned it just a bit, just enough so she could look directly into his mechanical eye. At this close distance, both their eyes were able to examine and understand one another.
"Oh, no, I didn't do the initial installation... maybe I wouldn't have gone to a mechanic first, but it wasn't really my choice to make at the time." Laurce smiled sheepishly. "They were just the one who found me, I guess. It was a miracle anyone found me at all, judging by how far I was from the city when I woke up... I guess they knew enough to be able to hook up some wiring to my think pan, but not enough to fix it the standard way? Or maybe they just didn't have the equipment for it, I guess, I don't know... Either way, I owe my life to them, so I guess I shouldn't be too picky about how they did the job."
He sat perfectly still as Makina's fingers feeled their way around the edges of his head implants. He didn't think she was going to crack them open and take a look inside, but you can't be too careful with these things. "Everything I know about engineering came after the incident, but I wasn't really in any condition to do anything about it anyway. As it is, all I can do now is make some minor modifications, like the antennas. That's why I'm trying to learn as much as I can so that I can take care of all of this myself."
"Mhm," Makina sounded the agreement as she finally withdrew her hands, stepping back around in front of Laurce. She raised a hand to his face, but then drew it away moments after. "I wouldn't mind checking that eye out, but I wouldn't trust anyone in the universe to do mine but myself, so I wouldn't ask you to trust me for that."
She stepped back and sat down on the stool, grabbing the bladed screwdriver again and twirling it around her fingers. "I can do more work on the arm and you can try learning from that and reproducing it as you need to." She tapped the arm a few times, clearly in thought. "Well, I'm not too worried by whoever did the job on you as competition, they had more good intentions than skills to say the least. Wondering who you got my name from though, it's always interesting to hear the circles my name travels in."
She smiled and showed an egotistical side. There was no pride greater in Makina than that in her skills. To be known was a badge of honour for her, and she wanted it written as detailed as possible.
"You can, uh, look at it if you want, I guess... it's easy enough to take out and put back in, but it, uh, does hurt." A pained expression flashed briefly across Laurce's face. None of his head modules were completely painless to remove, but for some reason the eye was particularly sensitive. Must have been a more direct connection, he supposed. "I asked around town for some good mechanics. I think it was an, uh..." He paused while he retrieved a description of the troll in question. "A greenblood? I didn't see any robotic parts, so I don't know if she was a customer, but you were the first one she recommended to me."
"Hmm," Makina continued to think, rolling through the list of greenblooded ladies she knew. Couldn't say for sure, really.
Now here was the key difference between her and Laurce. He was clearly more modular than she was, as her eye was non-removable. Then again hers was built directly into the flesh and his was connected through the robotic part of his skull. Differences.
She was intensely curious. But she was also cautious. How best to approach this. She was leaned in so close at this point their noses were practically touching, but she didn't notice at all, too intently was she studying the mechanics. She had that itch that any master of their art had, the desire to explore new works within their field.
But this work was part of a troll that she had no beef with, she wasn't going to do wrong by them. "Hmmmmm," she continued to think.
Laurce instinctively leaned back a little as Makina leaned in towards him. He could feel her staring into his artificial eye, and he braced himself in case she was planning to take it out. "I-it doesn't have to be right now, I could come back another time... it's no trouble, really! And then I could give you an update on how the arm's going, I guess, but y'know, whatever works for you..."
Finally paying attention to Laurce's words after far too long, Makina caught herself and stepped back, putting the tool back on the table. "Right." She blushed slightly at being so caught up that she hadn't been paying attention to anything else.
"Okay, if you think you learned something, give it a go and let me know how it turns out. I'll always be around if you need a hand, just make sure you have the coin," she chuckled a little, obviously still slightly put out.
"Right, I should pay you, I guess..." Laurce reached for his wallet, pulling out a more than adequate supply of caegars. K-keep the change! I'm very grateful for your assistance... both your mechanical work and your advice. When should I be back?"
Makina absently took the payment, bouncing it up and down in her hand. It took another few moments before she ran into what Laurce was talking about, her mind still being mixed up with thoughts about his mechanical parts and her interest in how they worked.
"Back? Oh! Right, uh," she stumbled over her words for a moment, trying to get her thoughts back in the game. Dammit Makina, keep your cool. "When you feel like you need to, I guess?" Wow. "I mean, you're going to be testing your own skills on yourself - you might mess it up and need to come running back or it might do a good job and you only come back as a courtesy to get a professional opinion."
She paused, looking at the machinery in his face, "But yeah, you should look into finding someone to do a proper job on your head, it worries me and if I'm worried, you should be."
"Alright..." Hopefully he wouldn't mess things up too badly. That'd be an even more embarrassing visit. "Well, uh, thank you for your help! I greatly appreciate it, and, uh..." Come on, Laurce, you said that like three times! "A-anyway! I'll be off, I guess... I'll see you some time later, I suppose!"
Laurce smiled at her as he turned around to leave, nearly banging his horns on the ceiling again. Being tall was such a pain.