Turn 30

--- Maya ---

Seeing as the previous day had depleted a large portion of her supplies as well as her funds, Maya decided it was once more time to begin scavenging for parts to make use of from around her house, as well as the houses of her neighbors.

“Hey, it’s not like I’m actually breaking into anyone’s house.” She reminded herself. “I’m just walking around and seeing if anyone has thrown out their old TVs, computers, and whatever else.”

(Still…)

(This is so boring!) Her inner passion whined. (I mean at least when we were on patrol we could get in a fight with someone, but now we’re just… walking around!)

“It isn’t that bad.”

(Right, I’m pretty sure as long as you don’t get caught dumpster diving you’re happy.) Her inner madness scoffed. (Some of us actually have standards to our quality of living!)

“I… You’re a voice inside my head.” She felt the need to point out. “What exactly is your ‘quality of living’?”

(To live vicariously through you of course.)

(I mean we do feel what you feel, and we are a part of you so that does makes sense.) Her inner reason admitted with just a touch of reluctance.

She paused for a moment, considering the implications of that statement before shaking her head. “Okay, ignoring whatever personal crisis that gives me. We still need to find some parts if we’re going to get anything done anytime soon.”

(You mean like that game console over there?)

“I-what?” She turned to the side where a game console all of its cords and controllers had been thrown. “Who would throw away a perfectly good console?!”

(Actually, it looks like the system has been smashed against a wall.) Her inner logic noted as she picked the system up. (See those cracks in the chassis.)

(Ugh, rage gamers, they have no respect for their equipment.)

(Still their loss our gain.)

“But at what cost?” She wondered clutching the (poor baby) to her chest.

---

Taking her haul back to the hospital, she decided it was time to finish up her upgrades to her Alchemy () program. Once completed this would make it so that bits of plastic that became too liquid-y after repeated use, would instead become putty like allowing her to remove her overused bits without rendering it useless.

In fact, with a bit of time this more putty-like plastic would harden back to clay, before returning to the more solidified variant she used as a casing to her various bits of hardware. Allowing her to save a fair amount of the material.

What’s more, due to the way this program helped her better understand plastic it also gave her a few ideas on how to make better use of the plastic to make other things, like the plastic foam padding in the helmet she picked up from the store.

“Actually, thinking about it, if we could replicate that, it would definitely make our armor more comfortable.” She noted as she began molding the plastic into a variety of shapes.

(That’s a reasonable goal, though we’ll probably have to tear the helmet apart to do that…)

“Probably.” She agreed, still stretching the plastic between her hands. “Huh… You know this really is like silly putty…”

---

Now normally, after finishing a project and finding herself with so much more time in the day, Maya would devote herself to starting or finishing another.

Unfortunately, the project she’d just completed allowed her to convert her store of plastics into an almost putty like material. One she proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing with as she made a number of shapes and figures before squishing them all back into a ball and starting the whole process over again.

“No wonder Seamus loves his playdough.” She laughed, crumbling a small pyramid into a sphere of plastic.

(It’s all so squishy!) Her inner child squee’d.

---

Eventually –(thanks to her abysmally short attention span)- she grew bored of playing with her plastic putty, and began thinking of general improvements she could make to her kit. Such as a few modifications to her headset that would enable her to use her programs through her headset without needing to pull out her COMP.

The trick to this however was not enabling her headset to read her eyes and facial expressions to run and target her programs, but rather leaving the program open and modular enough to let her use any program she might think up in the future.

In order to do this, she had to register a large number of micro expressions by-

“Gah! My eyes!”

(It burns!)

(Why did you do this?!)

“It wasn’t supposed to flash like that!” She cried rubbing at her burning retinas as her facial detection software misfired pointblank.

(The light it betrays us once more!)