Ruby resisted the urge to punch her alarm as it buzzed her awake. It wasn't the alarm's fault that she kept exhausting herself by staying up until 4am working on one project or another, so it wouldn't be fair, she reasoned, to punish it for just doing it's job. From time to time Ruby thought about attempting to fix her sleep schedule, actually going to bed at a time which didn't make getting up at seven an agonizing experience, but she knew in her heart that she wouldn't actually get round to doing something like that unless someone tied her to the bed every evening.
"Salutations!" A sing-song voice says from across the room. "The time and date is now 7:04am on the 20th of March 2037. Your schedule for today is currently empty. Would you like to schedule an event?"
Ruby bolted upright, her jaw dropping as she looked towards the workbench. Penny was standing up on top of it, and appeared to be functioning perfectly.
"You're working! This is amazing! Heck yeah!"
"Acknowledged! Please specify the event you wish to schedule."
"Oh I didn't actually mean to say yes to that, but I guess this is a good chance for me to test you. Tell me that I need to go down to have breakfast in two minutes, and that I need to take my hormones."
"Event set! Is there anything else you wish of me mistress?"
"Uh, for a start my name is Ruby." Ruby didn't like it when robots called her mistress, it made her uncomfortable even before Yang told her about the word's 'implications.' (She was never getting that innocence back, thanks a lot Yang). It was a welcome surprise that Penny had gotten her gender right the first time though!
"Understood mistress Ruby!"
"No no, not mistress, just Ruby. I'm your friend, not your mistress."
"Understood friend Ruby!"
"Uhh… Close enough." Ruby glanced at her alarm clock. "Right, so any minute now you should…"
"Alert! It is time for the scheduled event of: going downstairs for breakfast, and taking your hormones."
"Yes! Perfect! Great job Penny!" Ruby shouted gleefully. "This is great! I can't wait to show you to the oth… huh?"
It seemed like Penny's smile had grown slightly wider as Ruby started praising her. But that was impossible right?
Ruby shook her head. She must have been more sleep deprived than she thought if she was seeing things like this. She resolved to get a full night's sleep tonight.
The uncomfortable feeling that Ruby had soon faded as she began to pack her bag for school. As much as she wished that Penny was lifesize, her being small made her much easier to transport.
Once she had completed her morning routine, Ruby headed down to breakfast. Normally she would hang around in her room, tinkering with something or messing around with her computer, until it was time to go, and just grab a slice of toast or something on the way out, but she kind of felt obligated to follow through on Penny's first bit of scheduling. After eating, she headed off to Beacon.
In a stroke of good luck, her first lecture that day was with professor Port. With how much he rambles, Ruy would always get more out of just read the lecture notes, and so Ruby was free to doze through his lecture without worry. She didn't dare sleep through her next lecture, as it was with Professor Goodwitch. There were countless rumors circulating the academy about Glynda Goodwitch, the most popular one being that she was an ex soldier who once snapped a man's spine in half with her bare hands. Ruby believed it.
When lunchtime finally arrived, Ruby cornered Weiss, Blake, and Yang, and dragged them over to a table in the corner of the lunchroom in order to show off her creation.
"Please make this quick Ruby," said Weiss, who was impatient, but obviously curious despite herself. "I was hoping to get a head start on Professor Port's homework."
"You're going to forget all about that in a minute," Ruby said as she pulled Penny out of her bag and placed her on the table. "Penny, please introduce yourself!"
"Salutations! I am Penny, friend Ruby's artificial personal assistant! How may I be of service?"
"Aww, she's adorable!" Yang cried.
"She's a bit loud," said Blake, one of her cat ears twitching, "but she looks good enough to be professionally made. Did you make her Ruby?"
"Yup! I've been working on her for a few months now. Last night I started her up for the first time, and although she glitched a bit at the start, she's fine now!"
"I must admit, I'm impressed," Weiss conceded. "May I have a look at her code?"
"Uhhh… No, it's all on my home computer."
"Well that shouldn't be a problem, I'll just plug my scroll into it and…"
"No wait! You can't look!"
"What? Why? You've never stopped me before." Weiss' eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Ruby, what did you do?"
"I… The code is just a bit of a mess right now. I was going to tidy it up I swear!"
Weiss scowled. "Ruby you know that writing untidy code just makes things much harder further down the line." Before Ruby could react, Weiss snatched Penny up, located the port on the back of Penny's neck below the on/off switch, and plugged her scroll in. "Right, let's see what the damage is… Huh? That's strange…"
"What is it?"
"It all looks fine. There are a few points at which I would make improvements, but it all functions, and is perfectly tidy. I'm not sure what you were worried about."
"Huh? Let me see." Weiss held out her phone for Ruby to take a look at the code. "That's really weird. It looked terrible when I went to bed last night! How come it's fine now?"
"Maybe you did actually tidy it up last night, and then forgot about it in the morning." Blake suggested. "It's happened to me before. You need to take better care of yourself, just because I'm on my way to replacing my bloodstream with coffee, doesn't mean you should follow my example."
"But… I could have sworn that I didn't change it…"
"Well you must have, code doesn't just change itself." Said Weiss as she continued to skim through the code that made up Penny's brain. "Although it seems that you didn't fix everything. This class right here seems to be badly corrupted."
She held up her phone to show everyone the code in question. It was a incomprehensible garbled mess.
"That must have happened when I started her up," Ruby muttered. "She's working fine, so you should probably leave it alone for the moment in case messing with it breaks something. I'll try to fix it later."
"Do you mind if I save a copy? I would like to try and figure out what happened to cause this kind of glitch myself."
"Sure, just make sure to tell me if you find out anything."
"Of course, it's your work after all, I wouldn't dream of concealing anything about it from you."
After that point, their conversation lapsed into their usual lunchtime chatter. Ruby didn't participate like she usually did however, as her mind was on Penny. She knew that she hadn't changed Penny's code after her test run. Something very strange was happening…
