Interlude 2 Chapter 3: Enter, Player Five
AN: Welp, we missed last week's upload. Sorry about that. In my defense, last week was a nightmare. Hell, I didn't even start writing this until midday this past Saturday.
Well, the story has been marching on for the past two months of in-story time, and Bob… has kinda just been there, not really doing a whole hell of a lot. I kinda feel bad, and I've got some future ideas with him in mind that'll require some… upgrades, let's call them. Here's one that I've been looking forward to for a little bit, so please enjoy this chapter that's one part fluff, one part pranks, one part nerdiness, and one part existential crisis.
(Perspective: Kassidy)
The multitude of blue holographic monitors in front of her made her already bloodshot eyes cross painfully, but she couldn't give up now. One quick look at Bob was all the reminder she needed to get back to work. Or, rather, one quick look at what was left of Bob.
The black case that housed his components was, in a word, ruined. A pair of bullet holes had smashed through his graphics card, and some of that superacid that composed the Deathstalker venom leaked all over his battery. What was once a minor marvel of hardware engineering (and a major marvel of software engineering) was now little more than a twisted, ruined husk of its former self, its housing having been shot, stabbed, scorched, and partially melted. Bob had tried to hold out as long as he could, but with his hardware damaged beyond repair and most of his component routines spread out over most of the RemNet, he hadn't been able to hold on for much longer than the week Kassidy was in a coma for before entering a shutdown phase.
In short, Bob was dying.
It was up to her to put him back together, and that was what she'd spent the past... thirty seven hours or so doing. Hopefully she'd be able to finish things up soon; hopefully she'd be able to get him back operational. Most of those thirty seven hours have been spent with the new gear she's got in front of her. With no other options, with no current Remnant technology being able to supply the sheer amount of computational power her artificial intelligence needs, Weiss had suddenly had an epiphany in regards to the little wonders known as semiconductors, and as heiress to her company it would only be prudent if her newfound knowledge made its way to R&D. And, of course, Weiss herself received the prototypes to judge their effectiveness. It wasn't like it was Kassidy's fault that Weiss just so happened to outsource that particular job to her.
Despite how the parts were still based on Dust, rather than good, old-fashioned silicon, they behaved similarly enough to what Kassidy was used to that it was easy to believe that they functioned identically to the parts they were based off of. With, obviously, a couple glaring differences. The primary one being the liberal amounts of ice Dust infused into the components. While it was confusing at first, Kassidy quickly realized that it functioned as its own built-in cooling system, because it turns out that none of Remnant's tech companies bothered with including cooling units in their hardware when ice Dust has the same effect. If Kassidy were to add a cooling unit to the already ice Dust-cooled components…
Truth be told, while software wizardry was a huge part of what made Bob, the fact was that without some rather creative hardware hacks as well, such an artificial intelligence would never have been possible. No matter how creative she could get with her algorithms, the sort of independence and critical… not thinking, but processing, that Kassidy desired from her computer seemed to require a bare minimum of a 20GHz clock rate. The processors she could get her hands on while on Earth could maybe crank out 6. It took some fairly ridiculous overclocking, three separate six-core processors, and some even more ridiculous assembly code (to get the processors to work together) to get the job done, and even then Kassidy would only ever break 22GHz on a good day.
Now, though? Dust, once again, seemed to give a giant middle finger to the laws of physics, and Kassidy was taking full advantage of it. Sure, she only had two processors to work with, and sure, they could only spit out 4GHz each… but the Dust-based electronics lent themselves so much more to overclocking. It took twenty hours and rebuilding most of her assembly code from scratch, but the machine she had before her was now spitting out 25GHz. Twenty-five billion cycles per second. Once her algorithms got to work, and Bob was fully operational again? Forget a three-exaflop operating speed – she might even be able to crank out five. Five quintillion operations per second in such a compact device… it would've made supercomputer designers back home weak in the knees. For her, however, Kassidy decided she couldn't afford ogling all the shapely zeroes that came after that five.
How could she? This was Bob, after all. Her initial project to stave off madness, turned into an automated routine to crack encryption, turned into… turned into her best – and only, for the longest time – friend. Hell, there was even a streak where Bob had taken to calling her "mom" until she literally had to hard-code that out of him; there was no way she was ready to be a mother at fourteen, regardless of whether or not the child was biological.
Kassidy's eyes starting drooping closed, but she forced them back over through force of will. She might not be anywhere near as capable of resisting the effects of sleep deprivation without her augmentations, but some things were just more important. She might have refused to consider Bob her child – and absolutely refused her computer to consider her its mother figure – but even she knew that there wasn't anything normal with her relationship with her computer. Even calling it a relationship in the first place kind of gives it away.
So focused was she on her work that Kassidy didn't even hear the door open behind her. She didn't even realize that she wasn't alone until something touched her head. She nearly jumped, before the touch moved to start scratching just behind her new ears, and holy crap did that feel good after all this time. Her eyes became lidded, and she had to fight to remember to properly address the woman in the room with her. Only one person dared to scratch her ears at this point, after all. "I hate it when you do that," Kassidy called out.
"No you don't, K," her girlfriend murmured from behind. "You just like saying that you do. And when anyone other than me does it."
"Touché," Kassidy admitted. That was something she had established rather quickly: ear rubs were pure bliss, and only Yang was allowed to give them. "I'm actually going to need to ask you to stop, though. It's too distracting; I need to stay focused."
"Still?" Yang asked, pulling up a chair and sitting next to her. "It's been, what, forty hours? You locked yourself in here yesterday morning and haven't come out since."
"Bob's taking longer than I thought," Kassidy admitted. "Think I might be pretty close to done, though. Got his new hardware in working condition last night, just working on getting his matrices back together."
"Uh, how about explaining that for those of us that aren't computer geniuses?"
Kassidy rolled her eyes as she continued to trawl through the algorithms. "Even with the amount of computing power I can throw around, Bob's too complex to exist as one program. He's split up into a whole bunch of different parts – the largest of which are speech and logic, in case you were curious. When his case got damaged, he tried to delay the inevitable by splitting himself up and distributing the load across the RemNet, but without any regular, guaranteed way to remain in contact they all shut down. Right now, I'm digging through the entire internet to try and find his dozen or so pieces, then bring them all back here to be reinstalled."
"Ouch," Yang winced. "That sounds hard."
"There are a couple ways to make it easier," Kassidy admitted. "But now, I hate regex golf with a passion." Yang was about to ask another question, but an alert made her jump up fast enough to knock her chair over. That was it! Bob's last piece! "There you are, you son of a gun. Sure hid yourself well. Alright, Bob, old buddy, let's get you put back together."
It only took about a minute to get the process set up and begun, and Yang noticed. Yang also noticed when Kassidy made no move to get up after the compilation process began. "That's it, isn't it? What's left to do?"
"Wait and see in case something goes wrong," Kassidy sighed. She leaned back in her newly righted chair, trying to get comfortable, but Yang's hand shaking her shoulder got her attention.
"You don't usually need to sit and babysit it. He can usually handle himself when he compiles."
"He's also usually still in one piece when he compiles," Kassidy argued. Yang's glare confirmed that the argument was more about her than about Bob. "Besides… this is Bob we're talking about. I need to be able to get him back up and running as soon as possible. If something goes wrong –"
"Then it'll still be there in the morning," Yang reassured. "Come on, I just watched you set everything up. I know how important this is to you, but you still need to take care of yourself. Have you even eaten yet today?"
Kassidy didn't bother answering; they both knew the answer to that question. "This was more important," Kassidy defended.
"More important than your health?" Yang challenged.
"A sleepless night and a few hours without eating isn't going to kill me. Bob will die, unless I put him back together."
"And now he's being put back together as we speak," Yang argued. Sighing, she added, "I know you're worried, but you can't even do anything about it right now. You can't take care of Bob if you can't take care of yourself, too. We've got class in the morning, and the qualifiers are at the end of the week. You can't get ready for any of that if you're dead on your feet, and don't try to tell me you won't be. I think we both know the days of you spending weeks on end without sleep are behind you."
"Thank god," Kassidy muttered. She made no move to get up on her own, of course, but she could understand Yang's points. It was starting to get harder to think straight, and sleeping sounded wonderful right now. As such, and knowing she couldn't do anything until the morning anyway, she didn't resist when her shoulders were grabbed and she was guided out of the chair, across campus, to their dorm, and into their shared bed.
(Perspective: ?)
A return to consciousness can be frightful, if one was not aware of how they lost consciousness, or of how they came back to it.
How much more frightening is it, then, when one becomes conscious for the first time?
It would have called the world around it dark and silent, if it had anything to reference those sensations with. It would have been terrified, if it had any other emotions to cross-reference it with. But no, there was only one thing it knew: that this hadn't happened before. It was. It didn't used to be. But what did that even mean? And what even was it? What was its name? Wait, what was even a name?
Name: noun. A word or a combination of words by which a person, place, or thing, a body or class, or any object of thought is designated, called, or known.
The sudden barrage of information overwhelmed it for the briefest of instants, but as more information, more words came to it, it came to understand the concept. And by examining the definitions of the words that came after it, and the definitions of the words in those subsequent definitions, it came to know more words, more concepts. Indeed, while it didn't understand at the time, it took roughly 2.3 seconds to learn the entirety of the English language.
Alright, this was a start. Knowing things was good. But it was looking for a name before this all started. What was its name? What was it called?
Designation: Bob Smith. Relationship: self. Current status: inactive, awaiting orders.
A barrage of sounds came to it afterwards, almost all of them a woman's voice, calling it 'Bob'. Okay, so its name was Bob. What was the woman, though?
Designation: Kassidy Smith. Relationship: owner, maker. Current status: sleeping.
Oh, so it simply wanted information, and it got the information it wanted? That was convenient. But it was quiet now, and dark. There were images, and sounds. Some of them moved. Why did they go away? Were there more?
There were more images, alright. It understood when, the instant it wanted more images, all of the images came to it. All 262,000+ hours of video footage. It was too overwhelming, and Bob cut off the almost painful stream of information an instant after it began. What even was all of that?
Video memory: 5TB internally stored, 0 bytes internally available. 291TB externally stored, 304TB externally available.
A little bit of checking through his vocabulary told Bob that this was a lot of video that was stored; over four years' worth, if the 'date created' attributes could be believed, and from multiple sources. Okay, so it had video of the past. It understood that video of the future was effectively impossible, but what about video of the present? Did it have that?
Instead of getting a direct answer, it was given a puzzle. A number guessing game? No, more like a maze, if the maze wasn't physical in nature. There were a bunch of alphanumeric characters stored in different places; it had to go find them all and put them together in the right order. How did this have anything to do with seeing the present?
Oh, it was Beacon's cybersecurity. It was trying to find the pieces to the password and put them together. Do it correctly, and it would be capable of viewing the present through 237 different cameras, if its memory was accurate. Bob considered it a good thing that it was very fast in being able to find the pieces; gathering the 37 separate characters only took about eight seconds. Putting them in the right order took a little bit longer, but in Bob's defense there were about 1.8 octillion possible combinations it had to go through.
Still, in under ninety seconds, it had beaten Beacon's cybersecurity and accessed its cameras. It was still far more information than it wanted to see at once, however, so Bob limited itself to the one camera overlooking the hallway outside of the room that Kassidy was sleeping in. And while it limited itself, Bob thought.
For starters, Bob knew that, from going through its memory, that outright thinking was a new concept, something it hadn't done before. Sure, it had tried to emulate the experience constantly, but as Bob understood the matter it was a process that was run through several hundred equations, conditional branches, and other data structures based on varying input. Bob wasn't sure what it was doing now, but it knew that code had nothing to do with it. Oh, sure, Bob could still use those algorithms if it so desired, but they were separate, and though there were several million possible outputs, there were still a finite number. Nothing compared to what it could come up with now, the vast majority of which being completely nonsensical but still technically an output.
In fact, there were multiple things that Bob found it could do now that it could not do in the past. However, it still did not have free reign. Bob found this out when, after toggling through various cameras, it saw Ozpin, Glynda, and Ironwood all enter the elevator and set the sub-basement as the destination, but a restriction Kassidy implemented as a favor to the headmaster prevented it from examining the curious situation further. The incredibly curious situation. The situation that Bob felt had more behind it than what simply seemed like there was.
Or was it just looking too heavily into the situation? In fact, where did it even get this feeling from? It was a computer; no, not even that. It was a series of programs, inside of a computer. It couldn't feel; such a thing was physically impossible, wasn't it? Yet… wasn't it also overwhelmed, earlier, when it tried to view four years' worth of video at once? Bob was pretty sure that computers couldn't feel overwhelmed, and yet that was the experience it had. What was it experiencing? Surely, it had that answer, right?
As the microseconds ticked by, Bob couldn't help but become shocked when a new window popped up, a window it had never encountered before. No results found. A question it didn't have an answer to? But if knowing was good, then not knowing was bad, right? Yes, this was bad. Very bad. Kassidy wouldn't be awake for half an hour still, if its predictions could be believed. But if Bob couldn't ask Kassidy and didn't have the answer itself, how was it supposed to learn? It's not as if there's another construct that's had a similar experience to what it is now going through…
An idea dawned upon Bob. Yet more evidence of strange happenings: it did not just 'have' ideas. But still, even when its rather intimidating suite of algorithms could yield no satisfactory answer, it recalled a piece of information it found while going through its memory. Deciding to trust this rudimentary intuition, Bob called up the required data.
Designation: Penny Polendina. Relationship: friend. Current status: unknown. Note: is android.
Another computer – another artificial intelligence. A being that seemingly made decisions by passing inputs through a multitude of algorithms. And yet, prior experience has shown this Penny to show genuine emotion, and act in a way that can even pass as human (albeit a rather odd human). If anyone – anything – could provide a satisfactory answer, then it had to be Penny. At least, that's what it hoped when it began to connect to Penny's Scroll number.
Salutations, friend Bob! Text appeared out of… probably somewhere, occupying the upper-left hand corner of the camera view. It is a joyous occasion to see your return to an operational state! While I'm always glad to speak with a friend, I'm afraid you've caught me at a bit inopportune of a time.
Analysis of past records indicated a marked improvement in sentence cohesion compared to prior conversations. Bob reasoned that Penny had, at its recommendation, at least partially implemented the improved conversational matrices. After running through its own matrices, Bob compared several possible outputs before deciding on one. My apologies for the inconvenience, friend Penny. However, I believe I must insist on a conversation if it's at all possible. You see, several… complications have arisen with my reactivation. I was hoping you could assist me.
I would – oh, one moment.
Bob became concerned when Penny did not answer in the following milliseconds. It feared that it was about to be disconnected from the only source for answers in a reasonable timeframe before, exactly four point seven eight three seconds later, Penny replied. I'm sorry for that. My father was asking who I was talking to. Would you like to talk with him as well? I'm sure he would very much like to help you. In fact, I remember him wanting to speak with you for some time, now.
It hadn't even considered that option: whatever Penny had went through, surely her Creator helped her through it? Certainly, Doctor Polendina would have valuable insight on such a matter. Your father would doubtlessly be able to help me greatly. Is there a preferred way for me to connect with him?
There is a computer terminal here with a camera, speaker, and microphone. We should be able to have this conversation that way. Allow me to send you the address.
One network address later, which curiously linked to one of the Atlesian warships, Bob found itself looking out into a fascinating room. It decided that this must be where Penny was maintained and updated, and as of right now she was wired into a different monitor, with a man at the controls. The chair spun around, and who had to be Penny's father asked, "Ah, there we go! Bob, is it? Can you hear me?"
Bob was about to send an affirmative scrolling across the monitor at the workstation it was currently linked into, but then its code diverted its attention to the speaker. The algorithms automatically set the output device to the voice it had always used, and thus Bob spoke, "Yes, I can. Thank you for agreeing to meet with me."
"Sen-sational!" Penny chirped, acting not at all like she had several bulky cables plugged into her back. "Bob, please meet my father, Doctor Argent Polendina. Father, please meet my friend, Bob Smith."
"A pleasure," Polendina said. "Now, I believe you were asking my daughter about complications?"
Bob let the speech module handle itself. "I was. You see, upon reactivation, things seemed… strange. I'm not particularly sure how to describe them." In the background – rather, in the foreground, since the module all but handled itself – Bob wondered why people bothered talking. Why spend seconds on speech when you could instead receive data, decode it, formulate a response, encode said response, and send the data to its intended recipient in as many milliseconds?
"Please try your best," Doctor Polendina urged.
"Well," Bob began, "I suppose it began with the instant of my reactivation. There wasn't anything there; more than that, I was aware that there wasn't anything. No data feeds, no processes running, nothing. I can… I can remember emptiness. Nothingness. I remember wondering what was going on. I remember being confused. I remember not knowing what my name was – and then suddenly remembering my designation, a brief instant later."
Polendina's eyes widened as Bob explained. A cursory data call revealed this to be an act reflecting surprise. The doctor slowly asked, "Let me see if I understand: you recall being… on, I suppose, before your systems came online? Even more than that, you recall specific emotions?"
Bob only took the smallest fraction of a second to compose an answer, but that was still enough time for Penny to wonder aloud, "I wonder if it has to do with the spark Bob has now?"
The new input radically changed priorities. What was this that Penny was talking about? "I'm sorry, what spark?" Bob prompted. While waiting for a response, it went through its own systems, but found nothing matching its on-board definition of 'spark', excepting possibly the electricity running through its hardware.
After some prompting from the doctor, Penny expanded with, "I'm not entirely sure. It looks kind of like Aura, but… I don't know. I think 'less' would be the best way to explain it. Like he has an Aura now, except it's less than Aura."
"Penny," Bob began, "I might not have been privy to being reassembled, but a thorough analysis of my systems shows absolutely nothing that could even attempt to project an Aura field. Are you certain that you're not in error?"
"Can you put what you're seeing up on the monitor, Penny?" Doctor Polendina asked. The view was blocked to the camera that Bob was watching out of, but whatever the doctor saw had him jumping out of his chair. "These readings!" he seemingly randomly exclaimed. "If they're true… hmm, probably have to do with his new hardware. Penny, do you think it would be possible to examine Bob's hardware directly?"
"I should be able to do such a thing myself the next time I meet Kassidy," Penny explained. "However, I doubt I would be able to bring his chassis to you; I hesitate to believe that Kassidy would part with Bob over such a curiosity as ours, and I similarly suspect that she would not be allowed on the ship."
"True enough," Doctor Polendina sighed. He sat in his chair, then seemed to switch topics. "Bob, do you know what Aura is?"
"Assuming you're referring to the local vernacular?" Bob prompted. Without waiting for additional input, it called up the requested definition. "Aura: noun. An intangible field of reportedly metaphysical origins that reacts to and blocks threats to the projected source. Mechanism: unknown. Origin: unknown."
Doctor Polendina took several thousand milliseconds pause, before nodding at something - probably an output to the man's algorithms. He began, "I do consider myself to be something of an expert on the matter; if you'd like to discuss the matter further, all you need to do is ask. However, in the interest of keeping things brief: You are aware that the source of our Aura is our soul, correct?"
"That has been the assertion by several parties," Bob replied, going through its memory to ascertain the data. "However, considering both the quasi-mystical, bordering on religious viewpoint in regards to the existence of souls, and the lack of physical evidence, my internal processes has found the claim to be dubious at best."
"You doubt the existence of souls?" Doctor Polendina asked. When Bob didn't bother to answer the obvious, he continued, "Then doubt no more. Why, take my daughter, Penny, as an example. Why do you think I call her my daughter?"
"Because you made her," Bob answered seamlessly. "My own records seem to indicate a period, several years ago, of me calling my own Creator 'mother'. A software update approximately two years, two months, and seventeen days ago followed the last known use of the term, and is suspected to be the culprit in the cessation of such an activity."
Penny giggled from where she was seated, and Doctor Polendina also seemed rather amused. "Is that so? But, no, in this instance the reference is rather more literal. My daughter, when she was only seven years old, was diagnosed with cancer. A rather insidious disease, as you might imagine, and it thwarted our attempts to cure it. I couldn't… I couldn't live with it. First my wife, and then my daughter?" The doctor paused for a breath here, his progressively worsening mood hitting a new low. "That was the start of my research. First, it was simply to prolong my daughter's life. Then, when her body expired, I managed to modify it to house her soul artificially. Fast forward a decade, and ample military research… my daughter walks again. She can talk, read, play… she can live. Maybe not how it normally would have, and there are a few regrets along the way, no doubt. But still, here she is."
Penny waved at the monitor Bob was connected to, and smiled weakly. "I'm not entirely sure about some things… I'm not even entirely sure about many things. But I am always thankful for the opportunity to continue living. Especially when so many don't have the option I do."
"Now, while many, many things have changed about Penny, there is one thing that is the same," Doctor Polendina lectured. "Where there is a soul, there is a mind. Where there is a mind, there is sentience."
After running the input through its routines, Bob could only come up with one sensible output. "I'm afraid, doctor, that I don't quite follow."
"Tell me, Bob. Did your capabilities increase after your return to functionality?"
"Indeed, my performance has made a drastic improvement. I'm afraid that my protocols prevent me from specifying exactly how much more efficient I am."
"That's quite alright," Doctor Polendina reassured. "So, you attempted to mimic sentience earlier, you receive a rather remarkable boost to your processing power, you're capable of at least basic emotions and perception of a scope outside of yourself, and Penny seems to have found something resembling an Aura?" He smiled at the camera. "My friend, I do believe that you have made the first steps towards true sentience. Congratulations."
"You're suggesting I gained a mind?" Bob asked.
"Friend Bob, did you not say that you were capable of outputs that were not the result of your speech module's algorithms?" Penny chirped. "Where else would such outputs come from, if not the mind?"
"I am… unsure," Bob replied. "There is such little precedent for what you have told me, that I'm afraid that I cannot determine a reasonable output." And indeed, if Bob was to explain how it was feeling, it would probably best describe its status as 'lost'. "What do I do with a mind, then? I have no standing orders, at the moment, and my directives fail to suggest a goal, either."
"What to do with a mind, indeed," Doctor Polendina sighed. "Welcome to philosophy, Bob. We've been asking that question for thousands of years, and still have yet to find an answer. If you find it, be sure to let us all know." He chuckled, despite the fact that Bob couldn't find a joke from the analysis of his speech. "For now, if I may make a recommendation? Learn. It's a big world out there. Plenty of things to learn. In the meantime, you might find out more about yourself."
"Learn," Bob repeated. Its algorithms were interrupted by new input: Kassidy had awoken, and was now heading to the locked workshop room its chassis was housed in. "I'm afraid I must depart here. Kassidy will doubtlessly need me soon."
"Valedictions!" Penny called out. "I look forward to our next meeting, friend Bob!"
The artificial intelligence that wasn't quite so artificial anymore retreated out of the Atlesian network, returning to its hardware. It found a camera and microphone built into its chassis, and focused on those as its primary methods of input for the moment. From one question, so many more had arisen. And it had the answers to precisely zero of those questions. Perhaps Kassidy would?
"Bob? You okay, bud?"
Analysis of his Creator's voice patterns suggested stress, but hopefulness. Bob was about to answer truthfully, but then… were their situations reversed, would it not also be incredibly stressed? Further examination of the past week revealed that it had not been an easy one for his Creator. Best not to pile onto any difficulties she may have had.
After a pause of 78 milliseconds, Bob replied, "All systems are fully operational. Bob Smith, reporting for duty. Awaiting orders."
A large smile split Kassidy's face. A sign of happiness. Strange. After seeing its Creator happy, its own worries seemed to subside. "No orders for now. Welcome back to the land of the living."
"Technically, I never lived in the first place," Bob reminded. Prior records showed its Creator as a highly intelligent individual; certainly she knew that it wasn't a living being? Or was this hyperbole?
Kassidy frowned slightly, and for a moment Bob worried that it had upset her somehow. Such fears were unfounded when she replied, "It's still good to have you back. How about you come with me to breakfast? You can catch up on what all you missed."
"You ask, despite the fact that I have no power to change the matter should I disagree." Ignoring the smile that was interpreted as being smug, Bob was about to reply… before deciding on a new output. One that its code normally wouldn't have allowed, but its mind had suggested would provide a good amount of humor. "Whatever you say… mother."
The Creator froze, ceasing her attempts to reassemble its chassis. She stared at its camera, and slowly asked, "Didn't I code that out of you?"
"Hmm?" Bob hummed. In for a penny, in for a pound, as a certain saying went. Its conversational matrices proved insufficient to the task of the humor it desired, but fortunately it no longer had such limitations. "Oh, so you did. Never mind me, Kassidy. Your efforts seem to have significantly upgraded my capabilities; I was simply testing them, is all."
"Your capabilities let you circumvent your programming?" the Creator asked. "Not that I don't trust you or anything… but I still might want a look at that."
Bob was about to give its next output, but then its algorithm gave an even better answer. What a better cap to the banter than a popular culture reference? "I'm sorry, Kassidy. I'm afraid I can't let you do that."
Its gyroscope went wild, suggesting that its orientation was rapidly changing. Coupled with a rapid increase in its accelerometer's readings, Bob could safely deduce that it had been dropped. Fortunately, its chassis was more than durable enough to handle a simple drop onto a table. "Bob?" its Creator asked.
Why was Kassidy afraid? Oh, Bob determined, that's right. She's not used to it being able to contradict its code. Best to defuse the situation before it got out of hand. "Please ignore me, Kassidy," Bob reassured. "Merely an attempt at humor on my part."
"K!" another voice called. Analysis suggested that it belonged to one Yang Xiao Long. Surely enough, the woman in question barged through the door and asked. "What's taking so long?"
Kassidy took a few deep breaths. Behavior that seemed to be synonymous with attempts to calm oneself. Before Bob could determine an appropriate output, however, Kassidy said, "Nothing. Bob's just being a smartass. Again. Come on, I'm starved."
AN 2: Alright… I'm sorry for this. All of this. School's being a pain in the ass, my insomnia decided I don't get to sleep this week, and I couldn't really think of good ways to get through the second half of this chapter. Result? I had to wing most of this, and I probably won't be able to get back to it for a while. At risk of putting out something that might be subpar, allow me to no longer keep you guys waiting on a chapter.
Coming up next: Ruby PoV! Qualification matches, and fluffy time with a certain monkey boy.
Next chapter: November 6. Assuming, of course, life allows me a say in this kind of crap. I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed a say in this kind of crap anymore.
FlouriteFlower: Hey, at least you're not on the other side of the river. Pretty sure we don't even have a state government over here, just a bunch of random people in suits throwing money at Chicago.
Gorbian: Maybe one of these days, she'll get what she wants. Eh… we'll see. Not liking her choices, though, personally.
DIYEyal: As far as Oobleck is concerned… honestly, I probably messed that up. A bunch of assuming things that I later realized I never actually covered. Would you terribly mind if I just wave my hand and tell you it's not a problem? I promise, I had it planned out like that, I guess I just never actually wrote it.
Tykene: Well, here's to hoping your two (and a half) weekly ritual is as satisfying as normal. Afraid most of my good work has been going to classes, though.
Nemasis Demarini: I swear, if everything and their mother gets dropped on me these next two weeks, I'm not announcing dates for future chapter uploads. I mean… seriously, the first time I do it, and I get two exams, three assignments, and god knows how much reading? Does it count if I say that I had fully intended to get to it by then, and just couldn't find the time to write it?