I honestly felt a bit bad for the tiger woman. She wanted to help safeguard the Princess and possibly me, was likely exhausted from fighting, had lost her younger brother, and was frantically trying to keep pace with an Automata equipped with boost jets. Several times on the way to the AutoForge I slowed down enough that I wouldn’t lose her, which I felt was very generous of me. If I didn’t have her trailing me, I probably wouldn’t have stuck to conventional roadways.

The streets were mostly empty, despite the late morning hour. I assumed that everyone was keeping indoors and out of sight thanks to the Jamnasian attack followed by a military coup. I wondered what would happen to the Marquess’ territories. Would it go to an heir? Did he have an heir? Was he a good father? Are there Marquess orphans and a widow? Shut up brain, not the time.

I reached the AutoForge and kicked up a spray of cobble stones as I slid to a halt in front of the empty storehouse entrance that masked the shop below. I made eye contact with the panting tigress some ways off and ducked inside. Ugh, the “secret” elevator. Near the back of the large, empty store room was a decorative tile design that basically screamed “secret button, right here”. I had no part in the design of the place but Prince Milliardo had been very proud of it when he showed it off for the first time. I just rolled with it.

I stood in the center of the false-floor tile elevator and tapped my foot impatiently. If I had IronHide fixed, I could just scoop her up and carry her along. Eventually, Wendy pushed her way through the large door, panting and breathing heavily.

“Fast... so fast... you... could have... waited...” she wheezed.

“Let’s go Lieutenant, chop chop. The Princess is my priority, not making sure you keep up,” I said sternly. “Though, I did slow down as much as I could so you wouldn’t get lost...” I added, apologetically.

As soon as she had all four feet on the tile work, I hit the hidden switch and we descended into the shop proper. Her eyes widened in appreciation but otherwise she continued to gulp down air. Interestingly, she both sweated and panted... I shook my head again to reclaim focus. The elevator reached the bottom and I dashed off for the nearest work table.

“Crash room’s over there. Grab a cot big enough for you and get some juice,” I ordered, indicating the direction with a free hand.

The work tables had been pulled into a U shape and had some notes on it for some sort of dwarf Automata. Maybe one of the student teams had been working on it before they got captured? Looked like something I’d design though, maybe working with me had rubbed off on them.

I set Lena down and unwrapped her. The curtain cloth was stained with various fluids and soaked through. I stowed away the Convoy armor, pulled clean towels from my [Inventory] and started moping her up, looking for where leaks could be. Tools I would need started showing up next to Lena and hands with long, thin fingers carefully opened up her chest plating.

I glanced up to see Ratchet deftly pulling apart Lena’s damaged systems and analyzing what steps to take. Part of me wondered if I should just leave everything to the proxy. It was functionally better at this and designed for this exact purpose, but Lena was my friend. I needed to do it myself, though I welcomed its silent assistance.

We replaced as many components with Factory parts as we could and even kitbashed a stock, maid model lower half onto her. Her face had been heavily damaged so that was also replaced with a maid model face plate. She wouldn’t be happy about it, but she’d be functional.

We were nearly ready to button her up and turn her on. All that was left was to top off her mana fluid levels. Ratchet scuttled off, as I opened up her reservoir access valve. It returned quickly with a small measuring glass full of glowing blue liquid that was filled to the 3/4 mark. She would probably need two of the glasses full.

“Three quarters of a glass is all that remains in stock of mana fluid,” Ratchet explained, as it tipped the glass into her reservoir. “Mana fluid circulating within the Primary Unit is highly concentrated as compared to standard mana fluid. A one to one hundred part solution mixed with ethanol would be recommended. No. The viscosity of the Primary Unit’s mana fluid will not be a concern,” it stated, apparently reading my mind.

One of its other arms produced a larger measuring glass, already full of a transparent liquid, and a glass straw. I chuckled at the absurdity of it all and how Ratchet was anticipating everything, yet I had to really focus on the proxy to get inside of its head. I couldn’t help but imagine that maybe that’s how dependable I might be if I didn’t have such focus issues. All of my proxies were me, or at least some part of me, but none of them seemed to have my problems with staying focused on things or hyperfocusing on other things. All of them seemed... better than I was in some ways...

“Not better. Simply optimized for a specific task and lacking whatever might be unnecessary for that task,” Ratchet consoled, opening up my chest and locating my own mana fluid reservoir.

“I suppose that does explain your bedside manner and general lack of a sense of humor,” I joked.

Ratchet paused for a moment, the glass straw dipped into my mana fluid to collect a sample portion.

“Correct,” it continued, resuming its work. “This unit does not possess the required capacity to fully replicate the Primary Unit. None of us do.”

“Huh... is that so?” I asked as it released the sample into the previous measuring glass.

It ignored my question and I got the sense that it was embarrassed but nothing showed outwardly. I closed myself back up and it took care of diluting my “blood” enough to be used for Lena. My mana fluid was a bit thicker than most and glowed brilliantly next to the standard stuff. I felt a bit of unearned pride, then felt dumb for taking pride in how brightly my fluid glowed.

Lena was topped off with the thinned out mix and I pushed some mana into her before booting her up. The weirdness of “booting up” another person, much less a Princess and friend, hadn’t yet been lost on me. Her eyes flickered to life as she went through the various startup processes. She glanced over at Ratchet, who made an awkward, tilting bow, and skittered off to resume whatever it had been working on. She watched it go, then turned and looked at me.

“My dearest Prime... wait, what’s wrong with my voice? This isn’t my voice,” she said, starting to panic a bit, in a higher register than normal.

“Shush now, you spoiled kid,” I said soothingly, while gently stroking her forehead. “You haven’t really been repaired... you’re just... functional right now. I’m sad to say that you’re currently a mix of whatever I had at hand that would work so that I could hurry and get you online.”

“I see. Is that why my face feels numb? I can’t feel it moving at all anymore.”

“Yeah, your face got pretty trashed. I need to make you a new one. Actually, I need to make you a new everything.”

“Sigh. If I’m here then I guess we won. How is my brother?”

“You did. You both fought brilliantly, it was really something to witness. Milliardo is doing okay, the healers got to him as soon as the barrier dropped. The bad guy troops wanted to make trouble after, but the army swooped in at the last second and suppressed them.”

Thanks to my connection to Cyclone, I was able to relay his current condition as well as relay her condition to him. Milliardo was recovering in his quarters after being tended to by the royal healers. Now that he’d won the duel in an official challenge to the throne, all of the sycophant nobles had instantly changed their tunes. Every single one of them had claimed that LeCrueset had been blackmailing them or somehow threatening them into supporting him. I was incredibly grateful that I didn’t have to deal with that mess and could go back to just being a robot enthusiast and mechanical tinkerer.

The sound of excited chatting pulled me away from talking with Lena as the heads of students started popping up out of a stairwell leading to the lower level where the larger scale projects were worked on. The kids had the social buzz of a group coming out of a movie theater or off of a roller coaster.

“I’m so glad you guys are safe!” I shouted, running over to meet them.

“Master Prime!” they shouted back.

I was suddenly surrounded and getting pelted with head rubs and a cacophony of voices telling me about their trip. There were a few incredulous accusations regarding my beating them here and how it wasn’t safe at all, but no one was hurt and that was the important part.

“We’re home,” Ram said, teasingly.

“Welcome home,” I replied, taking the hand of each sister and projecting “smiles”. “The place looks great. You girls did a bang up job of cleaning things. You’d never know that anything had happened here.”

Rom squirmed a little and looked embarrassed.

“Well... we were maids for a while... so we have experience with this sort of thing...” she said sheepishly.

“Maids? Your original bodies were maid models before I customized them and installed your subRoutines but you never performed any maid functions...” I said, confused.

“Didn’t we? I could have sworn we worked as maids at one point...” Rom answered, also sounding confused.

Ram stared at her blankly and shrugged before heading to the work table where Lena was patiently waiting. Before I could devote more cycles to it, Priss came up the stairs with BombShell on a shoulder and Shrapnel in her arms. She was trailed by a dwarfish Automata that I hadn’t seen before but recognized from the drawings I’d seen on the table. KickBack was riding on the bot’s shoulder. Aside from my minibots I’d never seen an Automata this short. It was a whole head shorter than me, no taller than a meter. It felt very familiar though.

“Good to see you safe and sound Miss Priss. And who might thi.... IronHide?? Wait, what? How? When??” I stammered.

"Uh... Hey Pops," IronHide said nervously, avoiding direct eye contact.

As I focused on the short stack, IronHide’s memories synced with me and I whipped around to look at Rom, who’d designed him; without me knowing about it at all. She was making conversation with Lena and hugging her and I didn’t have a clue what she was thinking about.

“Um... Sir Prime? I’m glad to see you safe as well,” Priss ventured.

“What? Yes, thank you. Uh, let’s see if we can get a proper fix for you, yeah?”

I motioned her over to Ratchet, who was already at a workstation and waiting for her. What the hell was happening to me?