"Let me get this straight." Jazz pinched the bridge of her nose as she stood next to the lab's stairs. "You went into an alternate dimension, a dimension filled with these zombie robot things, using only one tree branch to keep the portal from trapping you forever, all to rescue this rusty thing?"

"Not specifically-"

"And you want me to hide it from Mom and Dad, when we're sitting like ducks in their lab?"

Danny's one hand scrubbing the rust off with a wire brush paused. "Sam and Tucker set up a radio station that broadcasts fake ghost reports all over town, and hacked into the RV. Trust me, our parents are not coming back any time tonight."

"I'm not just talking about tonight, little bro. It's pretty hard just keeping the ghost secret."

"Well, if we tell them about the robot, then we'll need to tell them where we got it." Danny turned to face his sister. "But aren't you excited about this?"

"Danny," Jazz rolled her eyes, and walked a little closer to where she could see the robot's face. Her brother had done a good job clearing up that part, revealing a rather feminine white-and-blue colour scheme underneath all the rust, with two pigtails for hair. "Futuristic robot from an alternate dimension? Sign me up, but we still do have to be practical about this."

"What do you mean?" Danny was putting hard work into scouring the arms of rust.

"What if the robot has a low AI, for example?" Jazz pressed. "It could be no more advanced than our current technology. We can't tell it to stay away from Mom and Dad. Or it might not start up at all, and that's a lot of work wasted."

"Should we try and fire it up, then?" Danny suggested. "See what it does- I mean, if it starts?"

"Certainly worth a shot, if Tucker can't come tonight." Jazz fished out two batteries from the case they had collected.

Danny finished up on the arms and stepped back to admire his handiwork. Then he accepted the batteries, skipped over to the back of the robot and opened the panel. Jazz watched as he knelt down and began fiddling around with the power.

"You ready, Jazz?" Her little brother called from behind the robot. Jazz couldn't help but grin.

"You did a really nice job with the rust. The top part looks brand new."

"Are you ready?"

"Fire it up!" After years of living in the Fenton household, Jazz instinctively stepped back from the robot.

As soon as Danny inserted the batteries, the robot jolted, eyes flying wide open. Binary code flashed across the eyes at an unreadable speed, and in the centre of both a red number popped up.

0%.

Danny rushed over to Jazz's side. "What do you think's happening?"

10%. 20%.

"It's working, little bro." A smile crept across her face.

50%. 75%.

"What'd-ya think will happen when it reaches a hundred?"

90%. 97%

"I don't know."

100%.

The numbers flashing in the robot's eyes switched into more eye-like black pupils. Her peaceful facial expression instantly switched into one of absolute horror. "Just go, Tuck! Just-"

She stopped mid-sentence, looking around the room with a sort of dumb confusion. "Wait a minute... where am I? What happened to my legs?"

Danny cleared his throat, and the robot instantly stuck one of her hands in his direction. Half of the arm partially detached and from the opening emerged a laser-like gun almost as tall as Danny himself.

The robot seemed unable to stand up, but she was perfectly capable of a burning glare from the floor. "I don't know who you two are, but you'd better tell me where my friends are right now!"

"Your friends?" Danny squeaked. She was certainly operational.

"Brad, Tuck and Sheldon." The robot growled. "If you've done anything to them, I'll blow you and your silly little haircut into next week!"

"Hey!" Danny recovered from his initial shock. "This is not a silly-"

Before her little brother could exasperate the situation, Jazz stepped in between them and placed a slightly shaking hand on the top of the gun. "Can we all just calm down for a second? We don't know who your friends are... miss...?"

"It's Jenny." The robot did not stop glaring daggers at the two of them, but she did retract her gun. "Jenny Wakeman."

Jazz tried for a smile. "That's cool. My name is Jazz, and this is my brother Danny."

Danny waved at the robot, but after a few moments of unresponsiveness the gesture awkwardly trailed off.

Another silent second passed and he leaned back to whisper in Jazz's ear. "Hey, do you think she's okay?"

Jazz knelt down and tapped Jenny's shoulder. The robot tilted and fell onto her side, and a certain annoying beeping started up again.

"She ran out of batteries." Jazz rolled her eyes. "I feel like my dad designed this; who in their right mind would use such tiny power cells to power a six foot robot?"

"Good question." Danny frowned. "Anyway, I'm not entirely sure I want to power it up again."

"Why?"

"Oh, I don't know, maybe because it pointed a giant gun at my face?"

"I don't know, little bro." Jazz shrugged. "She looked pretty confused... It seems those batteries last ran out at a pretty crucial moment."

Danny picked up the wire brush. "Still, I'm going to get the rest of the rust out before we do anything else."

"Good idea." Jazz began to head up the stairs. "If you don't need any help from me, I'm going to get a drink of water."

Her little brother seemed to have it pretty covered, so Jazz took fifteen or so minutes to go upstairs and get sorted in her head all the things to (and to not) mention to a confused robot with only a minute or so of battery life. As one can imagine, this was not exactly something this particular Fenton had learned in Psychology so the thought process took a little longer than usual.

When she returned, Danny was ready to power Jenny back up. Besides the unavoidably large amount of scratches in the blue paint, she looked like a new robot entirely.

A robot that seemed perfectly capable of thinking, feeling and pulling a gun on a human, even if it was thought to be in defence.

"Real AI," Jazz murmured. "It seems the person who built her didn't read Asimov."

"Are you ready, Jazz?" Danny had the two batteries ready in his hand.

Jazz shrugged off the feeling; she hadn't seen anything to really indicate they were in any sort of danger from turning the robot back on. "Ready!"

Danny replaced the batteries, and once again Jenny rebooted. She scratched her head, looking over at the two siblings.

"Whoa, I think I short circuited. What happened?"

Danny opened his mouth, but Jazz gently shoved him to the side. "What's happening is that you're running on really tiny batteries that only last for a minute. Do you have some sort of main power source?"

"Oh, that's right!" Jenny snapped her mechanical fingers. "When we fell in the ocean, the salt water corroded my primary battery. I had my auxiliary power on but that must have exhausted."

"That makes sense." Jazz nodded.

"I could charge my auxiliary, but I'd need to find somebody who could repair my main one." Jenny stood up, scrunching her hands and bending her knees. Though they had been cleared of rust, the joints still created the most awful creaking sound. "Am I malfunctioning, or weren't my legs covered in rust a second ago?"

Danny raised his hand a little. "Uh... that was me. Who got the rust off, I mean."

"Wow, thanks!" Jenny's face lit up in a grin, causing another loud creak. "That must have taken you ages. I'm sorry for almost blasting you earlier."

Danny raised an eyebrow, a smile of his own tugging at his lips. "Don't mention it, squeaky."

"Squeaky?" Jenny snorted, rolling her robotic eyes. "It's on. You just wait until I charge my auxillary. Danny, is it?"

"Yeah. But seriously, it's nice to meet you."

The conversation, however, was cut short by the sound of a car pulling up to the house.

"Mom and Dad!" The two siblings stared at each other in horror, then at Jenny. She frowned.

"Wait, is this a prob-?" It was at that moment that the batteries ran out. The six-hundred pound paperweight fell and faceplanted her head into the middle of the lab floor.