After Shea finished her breakfast, the girls headed out again. This time they would go to the Guildhall and try to get Elita registered as an Adventurer and then register their own party. I wished them luck as they set out. Again I’d be left to my own devices, so I worked on getting the shop cleaned up. This was going to take a lot of work—the shop hadn’t been touched in ages—but then I remembered that I had those three dead Automata in my [Inventory]. Time to try a new idea.

I didn’t have any nearby souls to connect to according to my [developer] installation tools, so I couldn’t go that route, but I wanted something simpler anyway. I got the bodies repaired and lined up against the workbench. All of them were taller than me but more human-sized. I guessed these were intended to be servants and would have to fit in with human staff as well as wear human-sized clothes. I completely replaced the firmware that was installed with new firmware. These bodies would simply be proxy shells rather than house any spirit. The two that had cried trying to put their shackles back on were female maid types, while the one that had resigned themselves to being a slave was a male type. None of them had any facial features other than their eyes, though the male did have a mustache decoration. It was rather dapper looking and made me think of Alfred, the Wayne butler, so that’s what I named this one. I named the maid types Rom and Ram because I’m a dork and I liked the play on Read-Only Memory and Random-Access Memory, the two “twin” memory types in computers. All that was left was to test them.

I still felt horrible that Elita had killed these three but maybe they could live on, in a way, through me.

I updated my own code to register the proxies and initiated the connection commands. As soon as I connected to the proxies, I had the sensation of seeing a picture-in-picture effect. The main “picture” was my own vision, but in three new views I was seeing out the eyes of these 3 bodies. Under each view was a label for which proxy’s view I was seeing. It took some getting used to, but I was able to partition a bit of my consciousness to run in the background for each proxy. The proxies didn’t have my abilities, but I could still move them around independently. This was great! It was like there were now four of me able to work on cleaning up the shop and the workshop.

By lunchtime, I had gotten both the shop and the workshop cleaned up and organized. Shea and Elita had gotten back from the Guildhall and were ready to go out on their first quest together. Via Alfred, I gave a nice butler bow to them when they came in and welcomed them home. Rom and Ram also bowed, then all four of me said: “Welcome back, ladies.”

Elita froze, looking unnerved and guilty before turning on her "cold indifferent" look. I’m sure she remembered killing these three. Shea looked completely lost and just stammered in her confusion before saying, “That’s really creepy. How are you doing that, Prime? I know this is your doing, right?”

I laughed and had the proxies step back and line up against the wall before disconnecting from them. “Yes, that’s my doing. I’ve set up these Automata bodies as proxies that I can connect to. I don’t know what the range is for how far apart from me they can be yet or if anyone other than me can do this. It seems to eat mana rapidly, but with my levels it’s negligible.”

“Well, the place looks great at any rate,” Shea admitted.

“Thanks, how did it go for you guys?” I asked.

Elita explained that when they had gotten to the Guildhall there were a lot of people there, since it was the usual morning rush for Adventurers looking for Quests. She had gotten a number of odd looks, but no one tried to mess with her. During the Adventurer registration, there had been a part where they had her place her hand on a magic sensitive crystal to determine her affinity and she got nervous, but she used the [lightning()] command and no one thought anything of it, assuming that she had the lightning affinity but wasn’t very strong with magic. After registration, they had been able to form their party, which they named “Angel,” and picked up a quest. Since the morning rush had mostly picked the quest availabilities over, there wasn’t much to choose from for E rank. In the afternoon they would head out for some simple collection quests. One for a particular root, and another for Shadow Rabbit pelts. I reminded them to be sure to never accept escort quests or multi-party quests, otherwise Elita would have to maintain her disguise the whole time and could run out of mana. I issued them my own quest for some Mythril ore if they happened upon some and that I had an idea for a weapon upgrade for Elita that I’d reward them with. For Shea, I offered to look at and upgrade her water magic as a reward.

With that settled, Shea went upstairs to get lunch for herself and Sparky while Elita helped me finish organizing the material inventory for the workshop. I hadn’t seen Ravage lately, but she seemed to be most comfortable with Jada and wasn’t particularly disposed to helping out anyway.

“What’s this thing?” Elita asked, pointing to the exo-frame I was working on.

“Oh, that? That’s going to be a sort of armor that I can get into that will, hopefully, let me pass for an Adventurer. I’m planning on making it look like a beastkin so that it will be easier to hide the Automata seams and joints. If possible I’d like to use a wolf, so if you come across any, I’d appreciate you getting a couple for me.”

“Sure, that shouldn’t be a problem, though we might have trouble bringing the bodies back.”

“Ah, right; that’s true. Here, I’ve been messing with something that you can try out for me.” I pulled out a satchel that I had been working on and handed it over to her. “This satchel is connected to my [Inventory], so anything you put in will be directly added to it. For objects that are bigger than the opening, you may need to turn the satchel inside out... really, whatever it is just needs to touch the bottom of the satchel. Getting things back out is a lot trickier though, and I haven’t figured that part out yet. For now, I’m the only one that can pull things back out of my [Inventory], so you’ll need to come back here after your quests to get your goods. You should probably avoid touching the bottom of the satchel yourself...”

“This will be really useful—thanks, Prime!”

“Sure, no problem.”