CHAPTER XIX

Heart

"Liam! Liam! Look at what I've gathered for you!"

Hillphire turned to Penny, who had a massive bouquet of flowers of all types. He scratched his head, chuckling.

"I don't know if I can carry all of that back to the Forge," he said.

Penny tilted her head. "Hmm. I'll carry them, then! There's plenty of space to plant a new garden around the building. I made sure to extract each of the plants very carefully so as not to damage the root systems! After all, without delicate handling, it's really easy to destroy plants."

"I'm glad you've found something you like doing."

"I saw that Weiss likes to take care of her own garden, so I thought I'd try and do the same!"

Liam...

"We have another job from the Mistral Council, Liam. It looks like there's a bunch of Grimm that appeared in the countryside really close to Kuroyuri. Ren and Nora have requested our assistance."

"Let's get a move on, then. I'll get in touch with Jerry and Sara and Ariel. Maybe we could grab some lunch with the old friends before we head back, too."

...Liam...

"Hey! Not there! Ohh, no, Liam's gonna be really annoyed!"

"Sorry, Penny."

"Goodness. I said the electron microscope is supposed to be on the south side of the building and the x-ray machine is supposed to be on the east! And you guys painted all over the wall! Liam had notes scribbled on the walls!"

...Where...

Penny hung on to each of her memory fragments, but they were fading rapidly. Patches were missing here and there and she wasn't sure when each one occurred anymore. There were days with Ruby and their old friends from that Vytal Festival before her match with Pyrrha, and also days from the war when she was honored with a place on Team JNPR.

...Who...

She was back in the labs now, one of her oldest memories. She was still under construction at the time, but she had been considered a miracle even back then.

"This one. Doctor, this one. This unit has succeeded in constructing an aura."

"Interesting. Only those with souls are capable of projecting an aura, is that not the case?"

"Surely you can't believe that this machine possesses a soul."

"I am a scientist. I don't make judgments on belief, only what I can observe. Whether it is the case that this machine has a soul or our previous understanding of aura has been mistaken until now is yet to be determined."

...What am I?

The crowds fell silent as Penny's own swords were redirected back at her, slicing her body into bits. Error messages flashed everywhere, completely filling her vision until everything went black, her main power supply destroyed. Auxiliary power routing failed, switching to batteries. Those would only last for a few minutes, however. Her systems were not configured to properly manage such a catastrophic level of damage.

Was this what it felt like to die?

She waited for the nothingness, but all that came was the gradual fading of the sounds of the surrounding Amity Arena. The next sensation to go was the touch of the metal floor. Balance itself would soon abandon her followed by every bit of her consciousness until all that was left was her awareness in a total void. There was no walking for she had no legs with which to walk. No sounds came from her mouth. In this blackness existed only her thoughts.

She tried to count the seconds at first, a trivial task for a machine. And then the minutes. The hours. Days. Weeks.

Months.

Years.

Eternity.

That was the only thing she could compare this to, an eternity of absolute solitude. She had only just made a friend in Ruby Rose, only just experienced what it might feel like to be human, and all of that was taken away from her.

She felt no anger. There was only sadness and loneliness.

She would never see another human smile, never hear another human voice, not until the eventual heat death of the universe, which wouldn't be for another billions of years.

She began walking now, marching steadily toward...somewhere. Nowhere.

Nothing.

There was nothing here.

Nothing but her thoughts in a perfect, empty void.

"Who are you?"

She turned around, but she had no body with which to do so. And yet, she saw a face, one she had never seen before.

"My name is Penny," she said, her own voice surprising her.

"Penny?"

She nodded, looking down at herself. She had a body again, but she was in pieces, pieces that floated around to form something that at least somewhat resembled a human figure.

"My name is Bedivere. I...don't know how I'm reaching you, but I am standing right next to you right now. Do you feel this?"

She looked down at her right hand. There was nothing there, but she felt another human hand clasping hers.

"I do," she said.

"Penny, know that you are not alone. I have a friend who is doing everything he can to get you out of this place. I swear it, you will walk in the light once more."

She looked down at the void below her feet.

"Do you have faith, Penny?"

She turned to him and nodded. "I do. I have faith."

"Good. I will see you when you come to in the real world, okay?"

"Okay."

She found herself in a perfect void once more, but she never lost faith. She could see his face and hear his voice even now, the warmth in his light-brown hazel eyes keeping her company even as the perfect blackness surrounded her.

All right, hammer drill, please.

That wasn't his voice. It was another. Could that be the friend he had spoken of?

That's her left arm. This is the right side of the table. Okay, I'm glad you understand now.

There were flashes of light.

Jerry, could you please get out of the way? No, I'm not trying to be mean. You're literally in the way of my engineering team. Sara, could you and Ariel get him out of here? Thanks, you guys are the best.

Something flashed in her vision, something she hadn't seen in a long time.

Booting...

Her self-awareness expanded and she found herself with a complete body again, but still stuck in the void.

All right, defragmentation is complete. System checks are still ongoing. We have a lot to clean up in there, but we'll get it done. Is the new Dust reactor ready? We have her hooked up to the wall, but we can't keep her like this forever.

She began walking around in this emptiness, and yet it was no longer empty for she could freely move within this space.

You all might want to take a look at this. Do you see these patterns?

Is she dreaming?

That's an interesting question.

She walked around endless fields of flowers of all types. The sun's warmth was so soothing, the perfect complement to the cool breeze on her skin.

This is amazing. Her BIOS is reconfiguring itself. There must be some kind of subroutine that we don't have access to.

"Okay, Team APEX, you're up. All four of you are gonna attack me at once, is that clear?"

"But, Penny-senpai," Xanthus said.

"What's wrong? You're not afraid of me, are you?"

"Hell no!" Athena said, readying her spear before attacking first.

Is everything stable?

Yeah, it looks like you actually succeeded, young man.

I only did the best I could given what I knew at the time. I'm relieved I could contribute, but from here on, it's entirely up to her. Her neural network is much more sophisticated than her old computer and this is, for all intents and purposes, no different from neurosurgery. Any misstep might lead to us losing her forever.

"Hello, everyone!" Penny greeted the newest students at Beacon Academy. "My name's Penny and I'll be your tour guide today!"

She had an entire group of students with her for this tour, but there were only a handful who commanded her absolute attention. The fact that they were now congregated in the back of the group touched her heart. Leon and Ingrid had grown up together, but Lilly Schnee was with them as well, even though she had never met them until now.

Glaubst du an das schicksal?

Penny turned around to face him again after so long since the last time she had heard his voice.

"Bedivere, is that really you?"

"What are you doing stuck in this place again, Penny?"

"Huh?"

"I thought Hillphire had brought you back from the dead."

"Oh. Oh, that. Yeah, I had another booboo."

He chuckled. "You've been through worse, haven't you?"

"I guess you got a point."

"So get up, then. What are you still doing in this place? You don't belong here, you know."

"What about you?"

"Penny. I'm dead. Have you forgotten?"

"Does this mean I'm dead, too?"

"Don't be silly. If you were dead, would you be talking to me right now?"

"But you just said..."

"The dead speak nothing, Penny. We only live on in your memories and in the legacies we leave behind."

She looked down at the ground. "Yeah." She turned back up to face him. "I know you're not really you, but...if you really were you, I just wanna let you know that...that I think you'd be proud."

"Of Lilly?"

She nodded. "She takes after you so much, even though she's never met you."

He smiled. "Go. This is not yet your time."

"What about you?"

"I'll be right here when you need me again, tucked away safely in your memories."

"Is it okay for me to go, though?"

"Of course it is. Out there is where you belong, after all."

"Only if you're sure."

He walked to her, giving her the warmest embrace she remembered ever having. "I'm absolutely sure. Lilly and the others still need you."

She sobbed, closing her eyes as she rested her head on his chest. "Weiss misses you so much."

"Someday we'll meet again."

"I wish I could believe that."

"Then, believe it. Hurry up, now. The living still need you."

She nodded, allowing herself to be taken by the bright light that overcame this pitch blackness within her mind. When the light subsided, she looked around. She was drowsy, but she could make out the bright overhead lights. At the peripheries of her vision were several system checklists.

Muffled voices sounded to either side of her. She tried moving her head, but nothing was responding. She glanced over to the left. There were employees in lab coats, people she did not recognize.

"Penny?"

She looked to the right. She could finally move her head and neck.

"Can you hear me?"

She tried to speak, but neither her lips nor her vocal cords responded to her commands.

"If you can hear me, blink twice for yes, once for no. Can you blink?"

She blinked twice.

"Okay, do you recognize who I am?"

Two blinks.

"Oh, thank god," Xanthus said, exhaling heavily. He leaned against her repair bay, silent for a while. The other technicians were quiet, waiting for him.

"I think you did it," one of the engineers said.

"Good work, young man," another said. "You've saved her life."

"The monitors are showing negligible levels of fragmentation. There is zero damage to her personality that we can detect, but a few errors in her memory. Still...this is amazing. It seems as though her neural network is repairing itself without our input at all."

"That is the nature of a neural network," Xanthus said. "For all intents and purposes, it is no different from a human brain." He scanned the monitor next to her head. "Penny, it looks like you're reconfiguring everything yourself. And...from what I'm seeing, your vocal systems should be online right now."

"I'm..." she began, "I'm seeing the same thing."

He smiled. "Did you have any awareness of the passage of time?"

She shook her head. "I saw a lot of old memories. And a lot of darkness. Loneliness. But I stopped counting the seconds the last time I saw your face."

"That was a little over a month ago, Penny."

"A whole month," she echoed as she closed her eyes. She rested for a while, allowing her mind to regain clarity when she quickly shot up in her bay. "Liam!" she yelled before prying herself loose from her binds and falling to the ground. She panted, breaking her fall with her hands. She looked at both limbs, which were whole.

"Penny, wait," Xanthus said, kneeling beside her and draping his lab coat over her bare skin. "Your systems are still recalibrating to your new body."

"I'm fine," she said with determination. "Where is Liam?"

"Give yourself time to adjust. I'll take you to him once everything is finished."

She turned to him.

"I said I would save him. And I did."

She let out a heavy sigh of relief before sitting upright on the cold ground, clutching his lab coat closely to her body. She stared at the metal tiles for a while, still trying to sort out everything in her head. The system messages persisted in her peripheral vision. She took conscious control over the priority list and reordered balance and motion at the top. Once those were finished calibrating, she reached out to Xanthus, grasping his hand as she worked her way to her feet with his assistance.

With every movement, her system continued to calibrate and configure until her balance and precision were perfect. She glanced over at Xanthus. The joy in his face was indescribable.

"You really learned well, didn't you?" she said to him.

He nodded, wiping away a tear as it fell down his cheek. "To be completely honest," he began, sniffling, "I really thought we had lost you back there."

"You shoulda seen him move," Athena said, walking into the vault with Echo and Perseus. "You literally had about five minutes left in your batteries when the light bulb came on and he ran all over the place, getting everything he needed to hook up your brain to a power source."

Penny turned to Xanthus.

"Y-Yeah," he said, scratching his head. "Once your primary power went out, it was only a matter of time before your emergency batteries went dead. At that point, because of your neural network, we had no real idea what would happen, but I feared that power loss might have a catastrophic effect on your psychology since it's no different from an actual brain. In order to maximize your survival, I carefully extracted your neural network from your old body and hooked it up to a primary power source and kept an eye on your psychological integrity."

"After he fixed up Hillphire," Perseus began, "he went right to work on you. Apparently it takes a whole month to build a new body for you? Right?"

"Her systems are a lot more complex than the typical Hillphire prosthetics," Xanthus said, pushing up his glasses. "So, yes, it takes some time to build everything from the ground up. We had all of the factories working full time to rebuild your body."

Penny walked around. The touch of the cold steel flooring on her bare feet was no different from before. She hopped on her feet. Balance was right on the line. Just then, the final system checks disappeared from her vision. Everything was in nominal working order.

"Here," Echo said, handing her a new set of clothes.

Paying no heed to everyone around her, Penny let the lab coat drop to the floor before getting into her underwear and the pair of blue jeans and the white t-shirt. She looked at herself in a mirror.

"This is Lilly's favorite clothing," she said.

"I can get onboard with simple clothing, not gonna lie," Athena said, standing next to her. "I can see the appeal."

Penny turned to Echo, who was holding out a green ribbon, which matched her emerald eyes. She smiled as she took the ribbon and tied up her long, auburn hair into a ponytail, fashioning the ribbon into a bow.

"Are we all gonna cosplay as Lilly now?" Perseus chuckled. "Yo, all three of you guys are in ponytails."

"Speaking of Lilly," Penny said, turning to Team APEX, who stood together.

"Repairs to the CCTS tower were just completed," Xanthus said.

"I didn't even realize it was down."

"We didn't either. Anyway, I just went through a big backlog of emails and several of them are from Lilly. Apparently, Ivory has been with her this whole month."

She had completely forgotten about Tyrian's abduction of Ivory. "Is she okay?"

"Just fine, it seems. Before we catch up on everything, c'mon, follow me."

"Ow!" Leon winced as Ingrid tightened the bandage on his arm. "That hurts!"

"Duh, your arm's still broken!" she yelled at him.

"Why do you have to be so mean!"

"Ugh, suck it up, you big baby!"

"Are you doing better?" Yuan asked him.

"No thanks to your girlfriend!"

He chuckled as Ingrid hissed. "Xanthus just got word from Vacuo, by the way. I think you'll be happy to know that both of your girls are safe."

Leon turned bright red. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"He means Lilly and Ivory are safe, you dunce!" Ingrid yelled.

"Stop yelling in my ear!"

"Aaahhh!"

"Agh! Yuan! Help!"

His combat partner couldn't help but chuckle as he turned to the door. Xanthus was walking through with Penny and the rest of his team.

"Leon?" Penny said.

"Penny!" Leon said, wrestling with Ingrid. "Help! Please!"

"He's doing better, obviously," Athena said. "The hell are you yelling about anyway? Ingrid's just changing your bandage."

"And she's sitting on my back! Why!"

"Because you won't sit still, you boob!" Ingrid yelled.

"Um," Penny began.

"Oh," Athena said, "my stupid brother broke his stupid arm last week."

"Grimm?"

"No. He thought parkour through the water gardens at the middle of the company campus would be a good idea."

"...Isn't that place kind of a maze? A slippery maze?"

"Uh-huh."

"Why would he parkour through that?"

"See, that's not what bugs me. What bugs me is why the hell he didn't just teleport to safety."

"How the heck did you even manage to break your arm?" Penny asked Leon, who was too wrapped up with Ingrid to answer.

"Have you met my brother?" Athena said, rolling her eyes.

"Tyrian's poison is gone, though, right?"

"Yeah," Perseus said. "Hillphire Innovations has a hell of a medical team."

She nodded. "Yeah. I know."

"Senpai?" Xanthus said, holding open a door into another room further in.

Penny took a deep breath, holding it for a while before walking through. Hillphire was still unconscious, hooked up to numerous machinery.

"His arm," she began, looking at his left arm. She was certain that it had been amputated above the elbow the last time she had seen him, but his new arm was seamless all the way up to the shoulder. She noted the patch over his right eye as well.

"There's a lot I have to explain," Xanthus said, pulling up a seat for her beside Hillphire's bed. "Yes, I managed to reprogram the heart to optimize it with his body. But that's not all. I had to do a number of adjustments because we've done a lot of work on his entire body."

"What do you mean?"

"I had half of the company's resources dedicated to building you a new body from the ground up, following to the decimal all of Dr. Hillphire's blueprints. The other half of the company has been working on his body."

"What's wrong with his body?" she said, distress rising in her voice.

"We still have no idea as to the nature of the damage that Colonel Gottfried was able to inflict on him, but in addition to his crushed left arm, there has been degeneration in his bone structure along with a number of other internal injuries and persistent chronic abnormalities. His liver had to be replaced entirely along with a large section of his digestive tract and his whole left lung. His bones have also been fitted with similar enhancements as your own skeleton, but the bone degeneration won't stop for some reason. There are also abnormalities in his nervous system, but we've been able to compensate with a lot of the new technology he himself had been working on. We've also introduced the microbots into his blood. We kept everything limited at first to see how he would respond to it, but so far everything has been on the up."

"Microbots?"

"Similar to what you have in your body, but we've managed to work out the issues with live bodies rejecting them. It wasn't all that difficult anyway since he's immunocompromised. The microbots themselves serve as a substitute immune system and also as a supplement to his tissue repair, which is also impaired."

Penny looked down at the ground. "How in the world is there so much wrong with him? What about his aura?"

"It's active, but as you can see from the monitors, it's incredibly weak. I'd say his aura is about 33% its maximum capacity and won't go any higher than that. And his aura's healing capacity has also been lowered, likely by whatever is causing everything else. Or it could be a result of the physical injuries he's sustained."

"Do we know what's causing all of this?"

He shook his head. "Qrow and Raven have told me that it has something to do with the battle with Colonel Gottfried and his army of Übersoldaten, but, I dunno. Unless he injected him with, like, a biological warfare bomb, I don't see how in the world he has bone degenerative disease or a compromised immune system or a weakened tissue repair. All of the physical trauma we can attribute to the usual combat injuries, but these other things, it's as if he suddenly received all sorts of illnesses that he's much too young to contract."

"He's been out for the whole month, too?"

Xanthus nodded. "Everything is stable, but he's in a medically induced coma right now. There are a few things we still have to work out with the nervous system interfaces for all of the new prosthetics, but he should be fine with a bit of rehab."

"It won't be nearly as fast as my systems reprogramming and recalibrating everything, though."

"He's only human, after all. You're human plus." He looked over at Hillphire. "Although, in a way, he's on the path to becoming human plus himself. At this point, all he's really missing is the neural network."

She rolled her chair closer to the bed. "You said that the heart he had developed for me is beating in his chest right now, right?"

He nodded. "Unfortunately, the lab that was working on the prototype meant for you was completely destroyed, and so we had to use the old model heart for you. We probably won't have one ready until he's back up and working again."

"I don't care about any of that. I just...I want to see him healthy again."

He looked down at the ground. "I have stuff I need to do, senpai. I'll leave you here with him. We'll be taking him off the drugs soon, actually. You probably wanna be the first face he sees. I think you should be, anyway."

"Xanthus."

He stopped as he turned away from her.

"Thank you. For everything."

"You're welcome."

"By the way. After all of this is done, once Liam's awake and everything's fine again, we're gonna talk about your Wraith-Knight."

"You remember that, do you?"

She nodded.

"We'll get to that when we get there."

Team APEX left the room, closing the door behind them. Penny leaned closer, placing her ear on his chest. She listened to his strong heartbeat, tracing with her finger the scars around his shoulder where his new arm met his new, reinforced body. She closed her eyes, allowing the steady beating of his heart lull her to sleep.