“How do you feel, buddy?” I asked Shiro as he came online.

“I liked the little baby illustration of you giving the thumbs up during the start screen.”

“Where I’m from, that’s called chibi; it means ‘small and cute’.”

“I have no idea how you even go about creating something like that.”

“Do you want to know? I could show you.”

“No, I don’t. I’m good, thanks.”

I helped Shiro get down from the workbench and steadied him on his feet. He was now roughly 5’8” and looked like a silver hybrid between a Thundercat and a Silverhawk. He appeared to be wearing an armored black trench coat with a lion faced breastplate and armor plated skirt that wrapped around his waist, and stylized boots. He could remove most of the armor plating but it was actually a part of his body and would disable some of the functions I built into him, if removed.

“You’re still a little wobbly because this is your first time using this body, and the body’s first time being used at all. But your systems should stabilize in a bit. Let’s do some neural connection exercises to help them along.”

I walked Shiro through moving each body part individually and then in groups. It was a bit like physical therapy for organics but once his brain module made the connection, he was set. This was the 17th time I’d walked somebody through this, but it was an important step to getting them comfortable in their new body.

“Okay, for the last set of movements we’re going to access some function commands. Hold your hands away from your body and think [claws()].”

He did as asked, and six inch blades extended from each of his finger tips. Instead of the typical two-thumb, two-finger hands of an Automata, I’d given Shiro single-thumb, three-finger hands. He’d said that while the Automata hands might be more functionally practical, they never felt natural to him.

“Whoa, Master Prime! I said I didn’t want to fight! Why am I armed with all these knives?”

“I’m sorry, I know I didn’t ask first; and I hope that you never have a need for them; but I can’t stand the thought of you not being able to defend yourself again, I thought we’d lost you. Besides, maybe you can use these for chopping carrots or something.”

“Oh, that’s true! I could dice up celery really fast with these! Um, how do I put them back?”

“The command works like a toggle, so just think it again and they’ll go back. It also accepts a parameter of right, left, or a digit one through eight. That way you can extend the claws on a single hand or even a single finger at a time.”

Shiro played with the claws for a bit, popping them out, pulling them in, toggling different fingers in various combinations. Soon, he’d mastered them like he was born with them. I didn’t know anything about Maahesians, so maybe he was.

“Last couple of things, your tail follows a really basic algorithm based on your mood. So when you’re happy it will lift and gently sway, agitated and it will thrash around, that sort of thing; but you can consciously move it as well. I just didn’t want you to have to be actively thinking about it all the time in order to pass yourself off. Final exercise, I want you to think [transform()].”

He looked at me and narrowed his eyes, the fact that he was easily making facial expressions now told me that I’m not the only one that makes facial expressions in my head even though my face lacks the ability to replicate them.

“Master Prime. What’s going to happen when I do that?”

“I dunno”, I said, putting my hands behind my head and looking at the ceiling. “Try it and find out.”

He looked like he was thinking things over and weighing the risks before deciding on something and giving me a curt nod. Then a panel on his back opened up and his head rotated 90 degrees backward at an unnatural pivot point. His fingers realigned themselves into paws and the lion-faced breast plate pushed out and shifted upwards to clamp onto the front of his face; completing the lion head. Doors opened on his thighs and he fell forward onto his paws as a new set of animal feet rotated out of the hidden compartment and his boots rotated back and locked into the thighs to complete the look of muscular hind legs. The armor plated skirt of the trench coat folded onto itself and hidden control arms lifted the connection points up and around to lock back in between his shoulders, forming wings.

Shiro’s tail thrashed around and he let out a deep, rumbling roar. He then looked shocked and looked up at me.

“What was that? Why did I do that?? Master Prime, what’s happened to me?”

“You, my little kitty friend; like your big sister Ravage; are a Beast-Former”, I said tapping him on the nose. “Be sure to go through the README file included in the Beast Mode directory for all the stuff that mode offers you. You can disable the auto-roar on transformation if you want, but I like the presentation of it.”

“What was that? I heard an animal in here!” Elita yelled with sword ready, as she stuck her head in the shop doorway. She looked at Shiro in his lion form and asked, “Shiro, did you ask for this mode?”

“Um... no... but it’s fine? I’m sure it will prove useful.”

She walked over to me and slapped me in the back of the head. “Stop giving people upgrades they didn’t ask for! Prime, I’m serious. We all know you can do amazing things, and we largely trust your judgement; but it’s nice to be asked first.”

I rubbed the back of my head, even though I didn’t really feel any pain. I guessed it was a habitual response to getting smacked and reprimanded.

“Yes’m... Sorry Shiro.”

Shiro just shrugged.

“So... Are you, like, literally just hanging out, right outside my door today? Waiting for your cue to pop back in?” I asked.

“If you didn’t want people hanging out, then you shouldn’t have put that couch out front with those little Battle Beast Discs you’re working on left on the coffee table,” Elita replied.

“That’s true. Who’s leading in the tournament?”

“Mara. With that green Automata looking rabbit character.”

“Um... Master Prime? Not to interrupt, but what exactly am I, right now? Other than a Beast Former.” Shiro asked, timidly.

“Come”, I said, and led him over to a polished slab of sheet metal that I used for a mirror. He walked over to the slab and looked at himself, turning one way then the other. He flexed the wings and spread them out, revealing red accents that had been hidden under the black plating.

“Red wings? On a black lion?” he asked.

“It felt right to me. I can change them if you want, but I can’t help but be tempted to build you four friends in primary colors...”

“Um.. no, it’s fine.”

“Great”, I said, “go out and read through the documentation and do some practicing so you get comfortable with having two different body types.”

Elita watched as Shiro, awkwardly, walked out of the workshop.

“So... you ready to work on me now?” she asked, sounding a little giddy.

“Hop up on the table, this should go pretty quickly. You sound rather excited.”

“Of course! You’re going to give me the ability to FLY. Who wouldn’t be excited by that?”

“Fair enough. Before I get started, while I have you under, would you like me to take a look at your core and see if we can figure out what’s going on with your past memories?”

Elita looked thoughtful for a moment before responding. “We’ve come this far. You might as well.”

Elita removed all of her Adventurer gear and clothing and laid down on the workbench. I started with disabling her inputs and shutting down the mana flow to the areas where I would be working. It struck me how much more relaxed she was, as compared to when I had first worked on modifying her frame. Now she was excited and totally trusted whatever it was that I was doing. We’d come a long way since I’d met that warrior bot that trusted nothing and would attack at the slightest provocation.

Before working on the hardware end, I opened up my [Developer Environment] and connected to Elita’s code base. I started looking into her memory core to see if I could figure out why she was experiencing so much memory degradation. I couldn’t see her memories or anything, just blocks of data. It was similar to looking at old Memory Defragment outputs in Windows computers. I could see reverse spikes of data as I rolled back through the data blocks, which I assumed lined up with each time that she had been put into a new body and had her memory locked again.

As I went further back, the data became more and more fragmented between the reverse spikes. At a certain point, the data was too fragmented and corrupted to be accessed any more. From what I could tell, this meant that Elita was old. Like.. REALLY old, and had been an Automata for a ridiculously long time now. I still wasn’t any closer to figuring out what she had been or why her memories were so degraded though. I took a snapshot of the data blocks and stored it in a subdirectory in her system. If we got the chance later, we could compare her memory core against this snapshot to check for differences.

Having gone as far as I could with that investigation, for now, I worked on all of the code changes and updates that she would need in order to operate the new limbs as well as reconfigured her [Cloak()] functions to match the new disguise.

Since I had [Cloak()] open, I added some parameters to the function with the default set to the new demonic disguise, but if needed, she could pass other parameters for different disguises as needed. So far it would just be the demonic one and [Cloak(orc)] for now.

I rolled her over and opened up the plating on her back. I was essentially adding three new limbs onto her but I wanted to do it in a way that made them removable. Like plug-in accessories, if she were an action figure. I installed two new connection ports on her back, just under her shoulder blades, and the third one at the base of her spine where the top of her butt crack would be; if she had one.

With the new ports installed, I slowly allowed the mana to begin flowing to the area again and watch closely for any leaks or dead zones. I’d completely missed a couple of connection points in the tail port and had to shut it back down and reconnect them. The real test would be, how well the mana would flow to the plug-in limbs.

Elita actually had a very high mana pool as compared to anything else I’d seen. Much higher than any of the other Automata I’d built or worked on. One day, I’d have to research that and figure out what determined the mana limit for Automata creation.

I plugged in the tail and opened the port connection valves to allow mana to flow into the limb. I couldn’t directly manipulate the limb through my [Console], no matter how much access Elita was willing to give me, which was probably for the best. I would need her to be online for the initial limb tests and neural synapse migration, but I wasn’t ready for that yet.

I really wasn’t sure how to go about putting the wings on— they were huge, and the space on my workbench was already filled with a really big warrior robot. I needed extra arms. I brought out Carnivac to help, but I’d really need to build a new proxy that was specifically tailored to this sort of work. Dangit. If I had Ram and Rom on hand then they could help, or they could start work on the new proxy but they were locked away in an evidence locker back in Urd.