Turn 23

--- Maya ---

“Huh, you’re actually keeping up today.” Izzy admitted with no small amount of surprise.

“That’s right, soon enough I won’t be getting my ass kicked by a twelve-year-old!” She declared, just before once more getting her ass kicked by said twelve-year-old.

While her fight with Decker and his various summons had helped her figure out a number of things about fighting with and without her Hand Cannons, such as learning how important her endurance was as well as how to push through a certain level of pain, it unfortunately hadn’t done much for her actual hand to hand skills.

In fact, the primary reason she was doing as well as she was, was less because she was better at fighting so much as it was she was better at avoiding and taking a hit. A fundamental skill that pushed her fighting ability from ‘lasts one minute against Izzy’ to ‘lasts five minutes against Izzy.’

Not a big gap on paper, but…

(One hell of a gap in reality.) She noted as she caught Izzy finally breaking a sweat from fighting her.

---

Knowing that she was going to be taking a trip to her base anyway, she made a detour through her family’s basement, collecting what bits and pieces she could before making a second detour around the nearby neighborhoods to see if anyone else was throwing anything else out.

And thanks to her MAP() she was able to find a broken laptop that while turned off, was still picking up wi-fi with what little power it still had.

(If only we didn’t have to literally dig through a dumpster to find it.)

“We’ve still got soap and water at the hospital, I’ll try and clean up some there…” She told herself, trying very hard not to think about the way her skin was crawling because of the (filth.)

---

Given what she’d learned after setting up her drone’s AI, she decided to go ahead and give her digital AI an intelligence boost based on the same upgrades.

Admittedly transferring this from physical interactions to digital ones was a bit of a hassle, but with the bits of experience and inspiration she’d picked up here and there the task didn’t even take her a full day to complete.

Meaning her AI minion was now capable of performing up to five different tasks each time she sent it out.

(Glad to see murder bot didn’t scare you off of working with AI.)

“He’s not a murder bot.”

(And what exactly did you name him?)

“Drone Minion One, or DM-1 if we’re shortening it down.”

(Huh, that almost spells Demon.) Her inner insanity mused smugly. (Fits.)

“It’s not a demon.” She growled at herself.

(The first thing it did when we set it loose was murder something.)

“It was defending the lab.” She argued.

(Sure, it was.)

---

Deciding to prove her inner child wrong, -(Or is that right, since we always wanted a pet robot?)- She hid DM-1 in her backpack and took him to the trainyard on her way back to her house.

After setting the drone on the ground and turning it on, she began pointing the metal around her. “Okay, now what I want you to do is gather any useable metal and drag over here into this train car.” She gestured towards the train car she’d broken open. “Can you do that?”

The drone stared at her for a moment before looking towards the car. It stood still before suddenly running off to a nearby pile of junk and pulling out a warped piece of metal that it began dragging towards the car.

True she could’ve done it in a fifth of the time it took DM-1, but…

“Yeah, okay. This can work.” She nodded watching DM-1 store the metal before running off to gather more.

(Do you think we should set it to nocturnal?) Her inner reason eventually asked.

“What do you mean?”

(Well, if it works during the day it might be spotted by someone.) Her inner logic pointed out.

“Maybe, but since it’s just him odds are he won’t attract attention. At least not as much as a swarm of drones would anyway.” She argued. “Besides, if he only worked at night he wouldn’t be able to gather nearly as much scrap for us.”

(Point, but in truth this merely boils down to a matter of risk vs reward.)

“True… but we aren’t really at risk of one drone drawing attention.” She felt the need to reiterate. “Not as long as we pick him back up in the next week or so.”

(Either way, it’s something worth considering.)

“I guess it’d be safer to have DM-1 only scavenge at night so people are less likely to spot him."