"Well, Fuck," the voice said in tones of deep disgust.
"Damn thing," it added.
There was a solid clunk, followed by a yelp of pain, which itself was followed by a clatter and a burst of vicious swearing.
"Note to self: Do not kick immovable object," the voice finally said when the flow of obscenities stopped. It was female, speaking Japanese, and heavily annoyed.
Standing up from where she'd fallen over, having tripped as she'd hopped around on one foot, the woman with long green hair glared at the current focus of her ire. "Hundred thousand year warranty my ass," she muttered. "Stupid mages, cheaped out on the options, and now the fucking thing has burned out a power node," the woman sighed. Talking to herself had become something of a habit over the appallingly long time she'd been on duty.
With a great sigh of, in her view, fully justified irritation, she stomped back to the ancient artifact and started removing covers from various places, pulling a toolbox from one storage cabinet. A couple of hours later a significant amount of the magitech device was scattered around on the ground around her feet as she worked. The swearing had continued nearly non-stop the entire time, although at a low volume, and she'd worked her way through every language she knew and was on the fourth generation of the ancestors of the people who hadn't wanted to pay for the good hardware.
Lying on her back with her head stuck inside the machine, her black and white uniform dirty and wrinkled, Setsuna was not in a good mood. "Damn it," she grumbled, her voice echoing around inside the thing and her normally serene and calm appearance entirely missing, "where the hell is that tessaract wrench..." A hand came out and felt around, picking up and discarding half a dozen odd-looking tools, until it landed on the one she was after, which then disappeared back inside with her upper torso.
There was a crackling sound and a burst of green light.
"Ouch!"
Another crackle.
"Aha!"
She slid out from inside the main power control sub-unit, rolling to her feet and brushing her hair out of her face. There was a patch of grease on one cheek and a scorch mark on her right index finger, but she was smiling.
"Now, let's see if that's got it."
Grabbing her staff, which had been propped up on the main console, she fiddled with the gem in the end, the control key for the entire massive machine, entering commands with the ease of far more years of practice than she liked to think about. A deep rumble from somewhere under her was followed by a whine inside the panel she'd just been working on.
"Yes..."
The whine grew, as the main power source spooled up to ignition.
"Yes..."
A throbbing hum joined the whine.
"Yes..."
The hum grew louder and deeper, the whine trailed off.
"Um..."
It was joined by subsonic undertones that made her tools vibrate and rattle.
"That's not right..."
She watched the thing very suspiciously, then checked the readouts. "Really not right," she muttered as an irregular thumping sound joined the other noises. A deep violet glow was coming from around the edges of the currently closed, huge, and ornately carved doors that formed the main user interface to the machine.
Stepping back as the sounds peaked, she winced when there was a very loud pop from somewhere, a trail of smoke coming up from an open panel. The hum wound down, the other sound effects dying as well, and the glow abruptly went out.
"Bugger."
The tall and elegant woman, currently a rather mussed up looking tall and elegant woman, put her hand on her forehead and groaned. "And there goes the temporal synchronization limiter. Wonderful."
Shaking her head, she put her staff down again and started looking for the advanced service manual.
Two days later…
"Yes..."
"Yes..."
"Gak! No, noooo…!"
POP
"Fuck."
There was an aggrieved silence for some seconds after the sounds stopped and the smoke cleared.
"Screw this, I need some beer," she grumbled, setting up for a quick trip back to Tokyo and a little shop she knew. Soon the void was empty, only the currently off-line machine left.
"DAMN IT!"
Setsuna was very, very pissed off, dirty, tired, slightly drunk, and deeply wishing she'd never accepted this assignment in the first place. Sure, it was important, and sure, she pretty much had no choice, she knew that, but…
"If they weren't all dead I'd find them and kill them myself," she snarled, flipping through the manual yet again. "Install replacement power coupling at an angle of twenty-three point two degrees offset from the third reciprocal of the secondary fusion node, tighten bolts eighteen degrees inverse with left hand..." She threw her hands in the air. "What does that even mean?"
Eventually she sat on the lawn chair she'd brought with her, staring at the huge and currently entirely useless form of the device that she was supposed to use to guide humanity to a new golden age.
Or, technically, silver age.
Whatever.
The precious metal didn't matter when the fucking thing was broken.
"Goddam it, I have no choice," she sighed, rubbing her forehead tiredly. "I have to call tech support. That means I need to deal with… them."
With the demise of the Moon Kingdom, service support had ultimately devolved back to the people who had manufactured a lot of the parts of the giant time machine, people she found excessively annoying. Mostly because they all seemed to have a peculiar and inappropriate sense of humor at the best of times, and tended to look smugly like they knew something you didn't. Which was almost certainly true, but was also more than a little bothersome.
Grumbling in a low voice, she got up and started looking for the business card with the contact details on.
"How the hell a bunch of crazy lizards ended up being the best contractors to make this thing I'll never know," she muttered. "Damn unions. Ah, there it is." She read the card, then activated her communicator, carefully adjusting it to make a link she'd sworn the last time she'd never use again.
"BBFO Interuniversal Product Support," a far too cheerful voice said, sounding like the woman on the other end of the link was having a much better day than Setsuna was. "How may we be of service today?"
"Hello, this is Setsuna Meiou, service contract MK1023/TG/04. I have what seems to be a hardware failure and I need a service engineer."
"Certainly, Ms Meiou, let me just find the details here..."
The sound of someone humming under their breath came clearly across whatever technology or magic was allowing this call to occur. "Ah, here we go. Yes, you're still within the warranty period, although I note that your organization didn't go for the extended service option, so I'm afraid this will be a chargeable service call if new parts are required."
"Fine, I just need this damn thing fixed," Setsuna snapped.
"Of course. Now, let me just check the current schedule… All right, we can have someone there with you in two solar days. Will you be in between six AM and six PM, UTC, local time system?"
"Two days!?" she yelled. "I need it fixed now, not in two days! The fate of the world depends on me and I need this damn machine and I've already wasted four days trying to fix it in the first place."
"Calm down, Ms Meiou, I'm sure we can help you somehow," the woman said soothingly. "All our customers are important to us and we do what we can to aid them, but we are also very busy. Let me just go and talk to the boss, we might be able to shuffle some things around."
Breathing heavily, the green-haired woman closed her eyes and counted to five in Hebrew. "All right, that would be very helpful. I'm sorry for being rude but I'm under a bit of a time crunch here. Ironically enough."
A soft laugh came to her. "I understand. Please hold, I'll be back as soon as I can."
Music started playing and Setsuna slumped into her lawn chair, reaching for her last bottle of beer and popping the cap off. She drained half of it into her stomach, then tried to relax.
A few minutes later the music stopped. "Ms Meiou?"
"Yes?"
"I've managed to switch two service calls around. We can have a team with you in three hours."
"Thank you." She sighed in mixed relief and worry.
"Please ensure that you are available, and if at all possible have a good description of the fault. But I don't think you'll be disappointed. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"
"No, thank you, that's all I need."
"In that case, it was nice talking to you and thank you for selecting BBFO for your eldritch artifact requirements. Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you need anything else. Good bye."
"Bye," she said absently, disconnecting, then finishing her beer and sitting back to wait.
"That's your problem right there," the large reptilian creature said, holding up a shiny and very visually disturbing thing and pointing to part of it with one claw. "The seirpinski gasket is leaking, see? Higher dimensions are cascading through the lower ones, that caused a power fluctuation, and ultimately took out the power node. I've checked the records, the people who commissioned this thing decided against the higher spec materials, which we warned them about at the time." He shrugged. "Cheap now, more expensive later. You know how it goes."
"I do, but that's not important now. The important thing is can you fix it?"
"Oh, sure, that's not a problem. I need to call a colleague to make the new parts, but that won't take long. Do you want to go for the top end material? That'll stop this happening again, but it's more expensive."
"I don't care about the cost, I just need it fixed."
Sharp teeth were exposed in a grin that made her wince despite herself. "That's always nice to hear," he snickered. "OK, let me make a call." She watched as he walked off a short distance, then produced what looked like a cell-phone, raising it to his head and speaking in a language she couldn't make heads or tails of, despite her linguistic abilities.
Eventually, he came back, putting the phone away somewhere. "Right, that's all sorted, she's making the replacement parts now. While we're waiting, I'll just do a diagnostic on the device and check that there aren't any other problems waiting to annoy you."
"Thank you," she said, to which he smiled again, then went over to where his colleague was prodding the innards of the time gate. They were quickly involved in a discussion about something, which she watched for a moment. Eventually she shook her head, sitting down again and wishing she had some more beer.
Or a sandwich.
Damn it, now she was starving. Her stomach rumbled.
"Want one of these?"
"AHH!" Setsuna leaped out of her chair, whirling around in a combat pose, to see a…
Cloak?
What?
The animated item of clothing held out a box of pastries. "Doughnuts. That one is jam, these two are custard, this is chocolate..."
Staring, she gaped as it went through the options, then looked over at the two lizards who were now half-inside the time device.
Every time.
Every time those people turned up, weird shit happened.
Although a floating, animated cloak was new. Eventually she sighed and reached out.
"I'll take a custard one, please," she said.
"Good choice, they're really nice," the thing hissed in a friendly tone, before taking one for herself. It disappeared into the empty hood in several bites in one of the most disturbing displays Setsuna had ever seen. "Bit empty here, isn't it?" the creature added, the hood moving as it presumably looked around. "Just that machine, this platform, and all that void out there. Lots of room for something like a swimming pool."
"I..." She stared again, then shook her head, eating the doughnut and deciding not to even try continuing the conversation.
She looked at the fully operating time machine with a sense of relief. Both because she could get back to her duty, and because those weird reptiles and their floating outerwear had finally gone.
It was always a strain dealing with them. She had no idea where they actually came from, even after all this time, and didn't actually want to know.
There was definitely something very wrong with them. Damn good engineers, but weird.
And more than a little scary. When the new parts had been delivered, an orange-bordered hole in space had opened up, a huge scaled hand coming through holding a large box, which it carefully put down before retracting. She'd nearly jumped into the void in shock, although the other lizards hadn't reacted at all. They'd quickly repaired the system, cleared up all the debris, polished the outer casing, handed her an eye-wateringly large bill, and left.
She still wasn't sure how.
Whatever, it was functional again and she'd been assured the same fault wouldn't recur. Lifting her staff, she used it to open the doors and start a scan. She needed to see what had happened while it was off-line, then go and repair anything that had gone wrong.
There was always something wrong.
Twenty minutes later, she sighed heavily.
"Oh, for fuck's sake, Usagi, how did you manage to do that?" she groaned, palming her face.
This one was going to be a bitch to sort out.
"Teenagers," she grumbled as she set about getting ready for yet another intervention. "At least they're not damn lizards, though..."
The thought of a teenaged lizard girl made her shudder, so she stopped thinking about it very quickly and got on with work.