It started out as just a favor, but somehow it turned into something more…
Error and the Irregulars were out for a walk so Presley could get a new game he’d wanted when Pendulum ran into an old friend of his, a fashion obsessed robot who ran a small blog and the diner Error worked at. The two seemed really happy to see each other and Error even felt a twinge of jealousy from how well the two got along.
The bots name was Mall-E, a sweet old girl Pendulum fixed up a long while back, and apparently she was breaking down in a crisis over her fashion blog.
“Oh Penny, Penny, Penny, it’s horrible, it’s just AWFUL!” She’d said this about four times already, Pendulum himself unsure as to how to precede the conversation.
“I can’t do it, but I certainly can’t give it up! Penny it’s just awful!”
Error decided to cut in to see what had the old girl in such a tizzy.
“Ms. Mall-E, what’s wrong, you need to take a deep breath and tell us.”
The woman huffed in and out a few breaths, her cheeks sparking gently as she spoke.
“Oh Hassen, Honey, it’s terrible, I don’t have enough money to hire a model and I’ve got so many new patterns and styles to try! How am I supposed to run a fashion blog without a model!”
“Um…You could model the clothes yourself?” Error offered.
Mall-E’s cheeks sparked again as she looked at Error like she’d just said her skirt was caught in her panties.
“Hassen, I am a photographer, a cook, a waitress, and a damn good girl, but I am not a model. How would I fix lighting, or take pictures, or fluff out patterns, how?”
“What if you had an assistant? That could do all that for you?”
Mall-E raised a hand to her face in thought, sparks zipping this way and that as she thought it over. She shook her head a few moments after, Pendulum getting dragged away by the children so they could buy their game.
“No hon, I can’t do that, I can’t afford to hire an assistant, I just can’t.”
Error stood there trying to process a way to help her until Mall-E seemed to have a spark plug go off in her head.
“I know!” She cheered. The bot turned to Error and grabbed ahold of her hands.
“Hassen, you’re tall, thin, and have go just the right face to model, my girl!”
Error’s core pulsed gently at that, her turn to now look at Mall-E like she’d just insinuated something horrid.
“M-Ms. Mall-E, I-I can’t model, I’m not pretty enough to do that.”
Mall-E pursed her lips at Error, a spark zipping from her cheek. Error averted her eyes, staring into the pavement instead of her boss’s disbelieving gaze.
“I have a friend, T-Spoons, she’d probably be much better at modeling than I would, I could ask her. O-Or one of the other kids at my school, they’d probably do it for cheap. Heck, maybe you can get Pendulum to throw on a skirt for you and pose?”
She kept looking around the road, at pedestrians, shop windows, street signs, anywhere but the bot who still had a firm grip on her hands.
“Honey, I will raise your pay by 75 cents an hour if you do this for me. You’re perky, you’re young, and you’re adorable, you’d be a perfect model for my blog.”
Error looked at Mall-E again, biting her lip in thought, but then Mall-E gave her a puppy dog face with fake oil tears and Error sighed and agreed.
That stupid agreement sparked a private modeling career for retro clothes and dresses. Now the only concern is who finds and reads Ms. Mall-E’s blog? What kind of horrid embarrassments would ensue if one of the bots from Error’s school found out?
I can just imagine so clearly Error and Gage sitting together in the courtyard during lunch and reviewing random stuff for classes and one of them decides to say something in Shakespearean language and they then proceed to study for various things while speaking as such.
A loud shrill buzzing knocked dreams from her head and sleep from her conscious as she sat up in bed. Another day, another adventure.
Shoving the hair from her face and combing through a few tangles with her fingers, Error punched her alarm clock and heaved off of her bed, opening the door to her shared bathroom and stepping inside. The mirror was already fogged up from the steam left over from her brother’s shower and his cat was curled up comfortably in her sink. She sighed and gave the feline gentle smile, petting her head and looking into the mirror. She grabbed a towel from the towel rack beside her sink and brushed the condensed water from the mirror, looking at her pale face and red hair with a bored, half asleep expression. Her body went stiff and she dropped the towel, a sick feeling pooling in her stomach and her throat tightening painfully.
Error leaned over the sink, looking deeply into her reflection’s eyes.
Eyes.
Two shiny yellow eyes stared back at her and darted down to soft pink lips and gentle cheek bones. She looked down at her hands, smooth plastic and exposed joints now replaced with soft skin and long transparent nails. She ran her hands over each other, her shoulder shaking at the sudden realization that she could feel them.
She could feel her soft skin, the warmth of them, her finger tips slightly colder than the rest of her hands. She could feel the steam from the shower seeping into her pajamas and touching her skin. Error could feel and see and smell her own breath and the scent of her brother’s strong body wash. She could feel the soft plush fur of Ben’s cat, thin hairs rubbing between her fingers and under her nails. Her gaze was drawn back to her face again as she touched her pale cheeks, her fingers gently placing themselves over her right eye and prodding at soft satiny flesh around the yellow iris and white cornea.
Her right eye was a darker shade than her left, but she’d never felt so overwhelmed.
The sight of this face, the feel of these senses, the smells and the textures were all new and all wonderful. This was amazing, this was a miracle, this was a dream…This couldn’t be happening, it just couldn’t…could it?
The door to the shower opened and her brother emerged, freshly showered and smelling like his own personal fusion of Chocolate Axe and Spring Old Spice. So that’s what he smelled like in the mornings, this is the scent that Lawrence always complained about, always complaining it burnt his nose. She couldn’t blame him, the smell was slowly beginning suffocating her.
She’d never felt so glad to feel like death was clutching her lungs before. The mere sensation of pulsing beneath her skin was enough to bring a smile to her face.
“What the hell are you so happy about, Nazi-Bot?” Her brother quipped. She’d never felt so happy to be called that before.
Error threw her arms around Ben and hugged him tight, feeling toned muscle shift under tight skin. Her brother was warm and the scent of Axe was overpowering her nose again, but she didn’t care. Her eyes stung and for a moment she was scared she might have been breaking, but the hot streams going down her cheeks let her know she was crying.
Tears.
She was crying actual human tears.
“What the hell!” Ben shoved her away and stared at her with confused disgust on his face before his eyes went wide and he held her shoulders tightly in his grasp. He repeated his last sentence again, this time slower and more confused.
“What…the hell?”
Her metal jaw was gone, her black rubber lips were gone, her scope was missing, her plastic skin and ball joints were gone and she didn’t smell like oil and steam. His sister was human. Ben wasn’t sure whether to smile and hug her or shove her and run and for a moment he thought this was some stranger who’d broken into his house. This was his sister. This was a human. This was…a wondrous shock.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know! Isn’t this amazing?” Her eyes brimmed with tears again as she put her hands to her face again.
“This is amazing! This is amazing! I don’t know what to think about this, this is-I just,” She was about to cry again from all this, her voice cracking from the threat of tears.
“Wh-what do I do? How long will this last?”
Ben looked at her and held her shoulders to get her attention, giving her a light shake.
“Take a few deep breaths and love the fact that you can take those breaths now. Now that you’re human you need to be hygienic, meaning brushing your teeth and wearing deodorant.”
After a few laughs and some awkward ‘brother-sister bonding,’ the two siblings ran downstairs to tell their dad about this new discovery. Error slid a few times on the hardwood flooring downstairs, running into a wall once and laughing her butt off as she took a seat at the table and put her head down.
Lawrence folded the newspaper he was reading and looked at them, ben seemed in higher spirits and Hassen seemed to be laughing in what felt like forever.
“Why so happy?” He asked.
Error looked up with tears in her eyes and a smile on her new baby pink lips, her cheeks turning a light shade of red from smiling so much.
Lawrence let out a soft gasp and dropped the newspaper on the table, standing and grabbing his daughter’s face carefully between rough hands. He felt cold and his hands felt hard against her cheeks.
“How did…what…Hassen?” He looked her over, horribly confused and a bit scared.
She nodded happily and looked up at him, a few more laughs escaping her mouth.
“I’ve never felt so happy,” She croaked, tears running down her cheeks for the fourth time this morning. This is the morning she’d dreamed about for years, the day she’d be able to feel when her father hugged her, the day her brother wouldn’t hate her, the day she actually felt beautiful for once in her entire life.
Because for the first time in seventy years, she felt beautiful.
{[continuation from the last thing I wrote! God this thing was awkward and it is 3 am so im gonna sleep now! YAY! *dies*]}
Error slammed the front door shut, collapsing on her shaking legs and leaning against the door. She released a breath she didn’t realize she was holding and relaxed against the stained wood she’d just entered through. She pulled her hood from her head and fixed the part in her hair, returning the strands to their rightful place over her scope.
That was way too close. Way, way, way too close.
Error unzipped her jacket and stood up, throwing the dark grey cover into a coat rack beside the front door and walking toward the kitchen. Lawrence wouldn’t get home from work until late again and Ben should be at the auto shop for a few more hours. She had the house to herself.
The silence of it was almost unbearable. It almost made her want to cry as more flashes of those boys from the college appeared in her head.
Shi returned to his own home, late as usual, and kicked off his shoes, leaving them by the door as he heaved himself up the stairs to his room. He dropped the owl bag he’d found onto his bed, the buckle under its beak snapping off upon landing and spilling the bag’s contents onto his bed spread. Shi dropped his own bag on the floor and pulled his jacket off, hanging the article off the back of his door.
Shi exhaled deeply and turned toward his bed, realizing that he’d broken the owl bag and that its contents were now on full display. His stance faltered a bit in embarrassment and he leapt over to the side of his bed, gently tugging the grey bird away from the few books that had slid out of it. He stared at everything that had fallen out. An assortment of colored pens, two .5 mechanical pencils, two notebooks, a German text book, a copy of To Kill a Mocking Bird, and a sketchbook now laid on his bed.
The boy stared at the common school supplies and weighed his options on what he should do. Should he out everything back? No, then he wouldn’t know who this stuff belonged to. If he looked through the notebooks wouldn’t that be considered an invasion of privacy and creepy? But he couldn’t just leave the stuff there on his bed, that would look fishy and there’d be no way of convincing Pa that everything “fell out” of the bag.
Shi shook his head and sat on the side of his bed, pulling one of the notebooks into his lap. He opened the front cover and was met with a full page of neat handwriting and doodles done in some strange language he couldn’t identify. He deduced that it must’ve been written in German, judging from the German text book he’d spotted earlier. Shi closed the notebook and set it aside, picking up the next one and opening it.
Characters: Scout, Jem, Atticus; family.
Atticus is an attorney with-blahblahblah, these were just notes on To Kill a Mocking Bird.
Shi turned the page and read the writing on the back of the front page.
Eyes that sparkle like gem stones of high class
A metallic face that holds brilliance
I cannot tell if I love him or no—OKAY NOPE, LET’S JUST CLOSE THAT NOTEBOOK THERE, SHI.
Shi did just that, closing the notebook with a snap and loosening the spiral binding just slightly as he all but threw it on top of the other one. He decided to just ignore that last page and picked up the sketch book, flipping open the cover and calming down at the sight of the first picture. A fully inked and colored drawing of a young woman sat on the page before him. Although the drawing was in a very cartoony style, it was still beautiful.
Shi turned the page and was met with another drawing, this one left in a crude sketch. This one was of a different girl, one with a steel jaw and machine guns for arms. She was standing there on that page, looking directly at Shi with dead eyes. The girl was dressed in a black coat with red frills on the ends of them; goggles were around her head and pushed to one side, acting like a headband of some sort. There was a small note on the side of the page.
“I don’t know why, but she seems familiar.”
Cryptic. Shi turned the page again and continued this for quite a bit. Picture after picture, some were odd, some were gorgeous, some were sketched, inked, or colored; all cartoons, but all very good in Shi’s opinion. He stopped when he was about halfway through the sketchbook. A picture of him leaning into his hand as he stared at his desk at in the page before Shi.
He turned the page again and saw a picture of Spoons, playing volley ball. The next picture was of Shi and Gage playing basketball. The rest of the pages were filled with Shi’s classmates, mostly of him as he looked over them. His face was the main focus of several drawings, he noticed. Shi wasn’t sure whether he should blush and be embarrassed by these drawings, or be scared shitless at the thought of having a stalker. Well, whomever drew these has drawn them in amazing secret if he never noticed them staring at him.
Shi flipped to the last picture of him and looked at the clean sketch the owner of this notebook had drawn of him and his skateboard. The lines on his face held determination and courage, his hand firmly holding the edge of his board. This artist must have had quite the talent of drawing falsities…there was no way he looked like that, not in his eyes anyway.
Shi looked at the signature at the base of the paper.
Hassen E. Boffin
Boffin? Why was that name familiar? Did he know a Hassen? The name certainly sounded familiar…
Shi closed the sketch book and felt his metal exterior heat up. Seeing so many drawings of him done by another classmate was…rather flattering. If he were human he’d probably be blushing redder than a tomato. He smiled to himself and slid the books and pens back into the owl bag, looking at the broken latch and remembering talking to someone about this.
“Yeah, I made it myself. There’s not another one like it…”
A voice played in his head; a girl’s voice talking to him.
“I’ve been working on it for a while and I finished it last night. The buckle took forever to sew onto the beak though…” a gentle laugh jingled past his audio receptors.
Hassen, a girl from school, his classmate that he’d talked to once about sewing before losing all interest and forgetting about her. She was a boring person from what he remembered and apparently she had a scope in the place of her right eye. She shouldn’t be too hard to spot then.
Shi sighed softly and wondered how he would explain the broken latch to Hassen tomorrow…
The next morning Error woke up in bed and ambled into the bathroom for her early morning banter with Ben, the boy ending it with “Nazi bitch” before Error rolled her one eye and walked out of the room. She’d lost her bag yesterday and was panicking so hard on the inside. What if Carlton found it, what if he found her sketchbook, what if he looked through it? She was shaking at the thought.
Error left the house, grey hoodie drawn up as she waited for the school bus to arrive. A soft rain had started while she was waiting, the gentle downpour dampening her clothes quite a bit before she got on the horrid yellow contraption.
Shi walked to school, skateboard in hand and owl bag stored safely in his own backpack. He entered the school and hung out with Gage a bit before first period. Nobody here by the name of Hassen, maybe she’d be in Biology next period.
Error made her way to the Biology room, her head hung low and her jacket zipped up to her neck like yesterday. She entered the room and fell into her seat, dropping her head onto the fake wood of the desk in front of her. She couldn’t draw, she couldn’t write, she couldn’t turn in her homework, everything needed for that was inside her lost bag.
Shi walked into the classroom and sat down in his usual desk beside her, not realizing she was even there to begin with. He glanced toward her upon noticing her head was down and raised an eyebrow. He noticed something off about her as a soft gleam of light reflected off of a bit of silver beneath her eye. Was that a scope?
“Hey,” Shi whispered, reaching over and tapping her shoulder. Error jumped slightly and sat up, looking over at him with a wide eye. Her hair covered her right eye, which Shi assumed would have been a scope. He was tempted to brush her hair behind her ear to check, but decided against it.
Error’s boiler was pumping hard, steam billowing into the air as Shi and herself had a short staring contest, both pondering on how to react.
“Is…your name is Hassen, right?” Shi finally spoke up, breaking the painful silence between them. Error’s eye widened a bit more, the shutter inside of it constricting a bit more.
“I-I…yeah…you can call me Error though…” Error turned her gaze away, pressing and releasing her lips together and fiddling with her odd gloves.
“You left this by the road yesterday.” Shi opened his bag and pulled the owl satchel from it, holding it out to her. Error jumped again and looked at it, the grey fabric bird staring at her menacingly.
“Sorry, it kind of…broke…” This time Shi averted his gaze from their horribly awkward conversation.
Error just took her bag in silence, tucking it into her lap and looking at her desk.
“Thanks,” She muttered, embarrassed beyond belief at what had just happened.
“…you’re really good…at-at drawing, I mean.” He piped again, keeping his gaze on his desk.
“Thank you…but I’m really not…”
“Of course you are, I uh…I saw a few drawings, like the one of the brown haired lady and the kid with the skateboard…”
Error let her head drop to her desk as he complimented her. Oh god he saw them all, he saw the pictures of him and the notes on how unique his build is, oh god someone kill her, someone rip her circuits out right now, this was so embarrassing.
“I can thank you for having such an interesting build, Carlton…” She muttered from behind her hair. Shi looked up at her comment and laughed nervously. Interesting? Carlton? Last names huh? Error was certainly formal.
“Carlton?” Shi laughed softly.
“Yeah, that’s your name isn’t it?” Error peeked at him from behind her hair, “Last names are a sign of—“
“If you two are done flirting, would you mind getting your text books and opening to page 394?” The voice of their teacher pierced their conversation and made bother students sit up in their desks and get to work.
This was quite the awkward day, but maybe Shi could talk to her again sometime in the future. He barely knew anything about her and she was obviously a fan of him, so it was worth a conversation or two at least.
of being in the FabotHigh AU and I still haven't finished half of the shit I've started for my character
I guess I know what I'm doing today. But not before an overly depressing story about Error because it's not like there aren't enough of those already 0v0
[6:28:26 PM] Zacharie .: whispers ive seen shi before hes a cute
and aaaah that's adorable :3
[6:28:30 PM] Zacharie .: bABS
[6:32:14 PM] Batter: It's like
[6:32:59 PM] Batter: Your name is Hassen, Error, Boffin and you're pretty sure you're stuck between two guys right now. You're absolutely in love with your boyfriend, but there's that one guy that you keep drawing because he has such and interesting face.
