My radio sat on my overcrowded desk, teetering with a corner of the small, plastic unit hanging off of the wood surface. If it were to fall it's drop wouldn't be far enough for it to completely break, but if it fell at a certain angle it'd be almost guaranteed that the front panel would pop off again as it had after countless times where I'd just gotten a little too into the music. It was a small gadget in a canary yellow case, with a tiny handle on the top for if I ever had enough time to get away from the shop for more than an hour and I wanted to hear the radio for some reason, which was extremely rare.

A new Luka song played softly over the airwaves, only loud enough for me to hear it, but just quiet enough for me to revel in the echoey silence inside of the repair shop. The statickyness of the relatively inexpensive radio combined with the speaker, that I had broken and Gorilla Glued back together countless times, did no favors for Luka's smooth voice, nor the nice piano ballad accompaniment. I appreciate VOCALOIDs and all the little idiosyncrasies all the different producers have that make their VOCALOIDs sound different from other VOCALOIDs of the same model, even though I don't own a VOCALOID of my own.

When you run a VOCALOID repair shop, you're faced with the reality of all the work that goes into not only tuning and making music with your VOCALOID, but also the work that goes into keeping up with your new companion.

The door chimes and I'm pulled out of my appreciation mode, away from listening to the godly human-like tuning that Luka had on this song, and put right back into work mode. Customers haven't been coming into the shop as often as they once were earlier, and I mostly attribute that to the change of seasons. We usually get more customers in the months where it's not too hot and not too cold, optimal temperatures for a VOCALOID owner to have their companion accompany them on their errands. Fall ends early here, and in exchange for that we're given a gift of not only an August and September too warm to wear anything nice and fall-ish, but also a disappointingly snowy October and a bitterly cold November. It's disappointing to most people but it's fine to me - I was never a fan of holidays anyways.

A young woman comes into the shop, appropriately dressed in a fashionable yet functional puffer jacket, knit pom pom hat, and sunglasses, that were probably hindering her more than anything since it was nearly 6 pm now and the streetlamps were on. She held a plastic bag in one hand and held the door open with the other, allowing the icy wind outside to come in, sink through my short sleeve t-shirt, and raise my goosebumps.

"Come on, Yuki." She says, to what I assume is her VOCALOID, standing outside. The way she spoke to her companion made it seem like this was an everyday occurrence with him, and really, I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case. "Yukio, get in here now."

I can hear Yukio outside, a KAITO model, I think, say a quick and succinct "No."

She noticed the face I was making - a combination of discomfort from the sudden chill, and a sort of amusement at this entire situation - and gave a quick, nonverbal, "Sorry, this is so embarrassing." sort of face. She closes the door and I take the two seconds that she's outside to unfold the blanket I kept under my desk and wrap it around my nearly shivering shoulders.

The woman comes back into the shop, and with the glasses I'd put on I could see the tiniest flecks of snow in her box braided hair, quickly melting as the warmth of the shop returns. I could tell that either she loved winter, or she just loved light blue - her acrylic nails and the braiding hair in her braids were the same color as Yukio, the VOCALOID she owned, who had come to stand next to her. He's a KAITO model, just as I had suspected.

Yukio shifts his weight from foot to foot in discomfort with a frown on his face and his arms crossed over his chest. He glares at me and I think he was told that he was going into the repair shop, which he seemed not to appreciate, judging from the way he's glaring at me now.

Despite his glare and his cold demeanor, he seemed to me like he was very well loved and taken care of, judging by how much she'd decorated him. Yukio was a new model KAITO, a version I've been seeing a lot recently since it had just dropped only about a month ago. He wore a long coat that was just a little too big for him, mismatched gloves, and a baby blue scarf that I'd like to think that the woman made for him. His hair had been rerooted, and instead of the usual true blue that the stock KAITO models had, Yukio had a silvery sky blue and white combo, and he also had an eye replacement - his right eye was that nice stock blue and his left was a periwinkle color. Other than that slight amount of attitude he had before coming in, and the way he's messing with his scarf as he plans out how he's going to run away as soon as he's out of my view, Yukio didn't seem to have anything wrong with him.

"What can I help you with?" I ask, watching her send a quick text to someone on her iPhone. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit nervous, I haven't had a whole lot of experience working with these newer models yet, and I hope that whatever service Yukio needed would be something simple so there was less of a chance that I'd mess it up.

Yukio started inching away from my desk and towards the front door, as though he really would run away. I don't think he'd really get very far, since it seems like he's so well taken care of.

"I'd like to install an additional voicebank." She says, putting her phone back into her purse and taking out the plastic bag she was carrying earlier.

She pulls out a box and sets it on the counter. It's KAITO Whisper, with a picture of the stock character on the front. It looks like she had already tried installing the bank and it went wrong somehow, since the box had already been opened, and quite hastily at that. In my head, I sigh in relief. I might not have much experience when it comes to these new models, but installing voicebanks was always something relatively easy to me. Hopefully the company didn't change up any of the internal mechanics too much.

"I know I'm able to install additions on my own, but something went wrong when I tried to install this one, so I just said 'Hey, I might as well go to the shop and have the professionals do it', you know? I don't want to hurt Yukio by accident." She adds.

"I see." I say. It's a simple task, and something I think I've done to every VOCALOID in town at least once by now. "That'll be $50. What name is it under?"

I passed her the yellow plastic clipboard I'd been preparing, and a Sakura Miku pen that had found its way into the shop in one way or another. It was a cute pen, but I can't for the life of me remember where I got it from.

"Imane." she says, and she starts hastily filling in the spaces on the clipboard. It was starting to get dark outside and the snow was starting to come down, and she and I both knew that my shop closes at 7. It was around 6:30 pm.

Imane finally noticed Yukio's escape plan and gave him a look, causing him to sheepishly move away from the door and come back to her side. He's still frowning and still uneasy and I don't really blame him for acting in such a way. I guess he feels the same way I feel when I'm going into the doctor's office to get a vaccine - that same sense of suspense in the pit of your stomach, when you know it's not a super big deal but you just can't shake that nervous feeling.

Imane takes her hat off and stuffs it in the left pocket of her coat, revealing the parts between her braids, and I wonder if she'd done them today since the parts were so neat and crisp. She meticulously unclicks the pen and tucks it between the clip and the papers on the board and sets it on the counter along with the $50 and the voicebank, and I give her a simple thank you.

"This'll take, like, 20 minutes." I tell her, as I shut the lid on my laptop and come out through the door. It'd probably be closer to 10 minutes but I don't like feeling rushed, especially when I'm doing tasks like this. Plus, with the extra ten minutes I might have, I'm able to double- and triple-check that everything is up to date and Yukio's vitals are all perfect, little things like that that keep any headaches from forming down the line.

"Come with me, Yukio." I say, and I expect him to refuse and stay by Imane's side, but I guess that Yukio also knew that the shop was going to close soon and that he'd already been checked in, so he was going to have to come in the easy way or the shutdown-and-carry-back way, which I always felt like shit for doing. Before the door closes behind us, Yukio is sure to give Imane a look of anger, like he's never going to let her hear the end of this, and I smile softly in amusement.

"You'll be in and out really quick. I promise." I tell him, not that he cares all that much. He's just focused on getting out of here. Yukio follows me through the door and back to the workroom, still frowning, but now trembling a little bit as well. I wonder why VOCALOIDs were programmed to tremble like that - I can't think of any reason why that'd be necessary other than to potentially avoid harm, or to make repair shop owners feel horrible, I guess. I thought that all the cute posters of Miku models, new and old, and signed photos of different famous Kagamine and Utatane Piko models in the hall would make the VOCALOIDs less scared, but I guess that that's not the case. Neither Yukio or any other VOCALOID that's been back here since I put them up has even so much as glanced at the photos. I take my keys off of the hook, and I think that I'm asking to be robbed by keeping them so close to my office door, but they're only there because if I don't see them as soon as I leave, I'm probably going to end up locking them inside my own office by accident.

It's bad, but I'm sort of glad that Yukio is shivering - I like having the peace of mind that a VOCALOID is doing well enough that they can still properly emote, unlike the shutdown emergency repairs I've been having to do lately, which do a great job of sucking all the happiness and energy out of the shop. Dad always said that after repairing a number of Kaai Yuki models with broken sound processors and Gumi models with damages to their Personality cortexes, you just get used to it and stop thinking about what could've caused all these damages, but I'm sure that I just haven't gotten to that point in my career. I think about all those cases all the time, and they just break my heart. I know that they're just androids, but still, the guilt just makes me want to close the shop and move on to another line of work, but I just can't think of anyone who'd want to take this shop over.

I open up the room with the blue door, the KAITO themed room, and usher Yukio in, locking the door behind us. I doubt that Yukio would try to run, but it's not entirely unheard of. I just wish that Yukio and all the others that'd be coming into my shop knew that I'm not intentionally trying to hurt them. Yukio, giving up at this point, plops down dramatically on the cushioned blue chair I'd purposely bought to match the blue operation table, blue computer, and all the other blue decor. I pull up his file on the computer, and take out the disc containing his new voicebank, setting it onto the disc tray and booting it into the computer. I find myself looking at the KAITO figurine a customer had gifted me a while ago while the program loads. It takes a little bit longer than usual, but I figure that's just because I haven't cleaned out my Recycle Bin in a few months now, and a lot of computer bloat tends to accumulate when you're installing programs on VOCALOIDs all day.

"Yukio, I'm going to install an additional voicebank for you to use, okay?" I tell him, looking into his eyes. He's still trembling, and he turns his eyes to look at a spot on the floor. "I'll need you to shut down. I won't hurt you."

He's quiet for a moment, holding still as though I could only see movement, and silent.

"Yukio?"

"Okay." He says, after taking a deep breath.

He slowly takes off the knit scarf his owner had made him (I could tell now by some of the missing stitches and the general shape of the scarf, along with the fact that she'd run out of light blue yarn around ⅔ of the way in and did the final third in lilac) and he's very careful to not let it hit the floor. He folds it up carefully, in half, then in quarters, and sets it atop the mini freezer next to him, which doubled as an end table.

"Wait-" I start, and I stand up quick enough to knock the keyboard shelf just a little bit. Usually they'd take their scarves off and then move to the operation table, instead of shutting down in the chair. "Yukio!"

Yukio finds his shutdown button, which was a small, insignificant bump near his collarbone just like every other KAITO model, and holds it down and while I'm trying to tell him to stop and move to the operation table the 4 seconds pass too quickly and he slumps over in the chair, dormant.

I sigh.

I silently give a rare thanks to Dad, who opted to pay extra (a rarity on its own) to get operation tables that were able to go up and down with just a press of a pedal. I hold onto Yukio's shoulders for just a moment to make sure he doesn't just suddenly fall off of the chair and break his face or anything, and I lower the table as far as it can go. I'm no weightlifter, in fact my arms are quite weak because a growth spurt I experienced as a child kept me from going on the monkey bars as much as I wanted. Yukio, like all of the other KAITO models, weighed about 143 lbs, and I'm far from being able to lift my own weight, so I sort of half carry half drag him over to the table, knocking over a lamp and a statuette of an ice cream cone and kicking the rug under the chair in the struggle.

He falls onto the table with an amplified metal thud loud enough to be heard outside the room but not hard enough to suspect any damage or harm to his systems. The computer does a three note chime, signifying that the voicebank was ready to be installed to a voice processor, perfect timing. His eyes are closed, and he looks peaceful to me like he was sleeping, and, well, shutdown mode is kind of like sleeping I guess.

I take off his coat, and put it on a hanger, stuffing his mismatched gloves into the pockets, before turning back around and pulling his sweater up over his chest. I get my toolbox from the closet next to the table, the yellow-orange metal box standing out against all the blue items inside of the room. I'd been meaning to find a blue toolbox to match the KAITO room but I just haven't gotten around to it and I just love the color yellow. Some KAITO models have yellow on them, right? I get out my smallest Phillips head screwdriver and a little tray to put all the screws in - one thing about VOCALOIDs, they've got tons of screws.

I ghost my hands along the right side of Yukio's abdomen - it turns out that the location of the chestplate opening hadn't changed when they released the new model, thank goodness. I line up the screwdriver with the screws, keeping it straight and perfectly perpendicular with the little bits of metal, and start screwing left, slow and steady, going and unscrewing all of the necessary pieces, which used to take absolutely forever when I was a newbie, but now that I've got almost 6 years under my belt, Yukio's chestplate is wide open in two minutes tops. I put on an anti static band, because the same way static is bad for a computer's innards, static is almost worse for a VOCALOID's.

Now was where the real differences showed. Inside, all of his parts are all labeled and much more accessible than previous models (which I didn't know was possible, but hey, I'm a mechanic. What do I know?), they just need to be screwed and unscrewed. Everything inside of Yukio was stock, except for the Voice Processor, which Imane seemed to have upgraded to a model that had just a little too much space to the point where I don't know if Yukio would be able to catalogue and read the different voice banks' information in a timely manner, and the Personality cortex, which had been changed to have Shy and Neat additions on it. I haven't seen a Shy/Neat KAITO in a while, but that personality combination wasn't rare in the slightest.

I use a slightly larger screwdriver to unscrew the four screws keeping his vocal processor in place, and hook it up to my computer to put the vocal information in.

Everything was going according to plan. I deleted the remnants of the first time Imane tried to install the voicebank addition so that there'd be enough space for the new voicebank to go in correctly, which opened up a LOT of space in the storage, thankfully, and I started installing the new voicebank. Now, the boring part comes - waiting for the damn thing to install itself onto the processor. I stretch my back out over the edge of the desk chair and my back and shoulders pop just a little too loudly, something I've been used to doing daily so my joints don't start to hurt, but then I remember that I could be checking on Yukio's vitals instead of going through with my daily chiropractic routine.

I come back to him and I double press on each of his hands and the baby blue 'nail polish' on his fingertips start glowing, revealing the LED lights underneath the paint. Finger lights were a common addition and they often broke just for no reason at all. I would've gone more in depth with the vitals but the computer chimed saying the installation was successful and frankly, I was ready to go ahead and close up shop for today.

I carefully eject Yukio's voice processor from the computer and gingerly put it back in the square-shape indentation in his chest that it had come from, a magnet that I hadn't notice snapping it into place before I screwed it back in gingerly, careful not to strip the screws on accident or screw it in so hard that the case would break, since that'd be an expensive repair that'd be coming out of my own moderately lined pockets. I put his chest plate back on, covering all his processors and cortexes and VOCALOID guts and count out 20 screws that needed to be put back on and 20 holes, a perfect match. I silently thank whatever higher power that was looking out for me because a missing screw isn't nearly as expensive as it is a pain in the ass. It takes 1 minute to screw everything back, make sure his sweater wasn't stuck inside him somehow (it happened once.), and sit him up on the edge of the table.

I put his coat back on him, and his gloves, and put his sweater on his lap under his hands. Usually I wouldn't bother putting all the clothes and accessories back on but it was cold outside, and Yukio probably needed it. Plus, he didn't have on that many accessories, thankfully. I had a decora kei themed Gumi come in for a personality addition around a month ago and I still shudder when I think about all the shirts and bracelets she was dressed in. I still find errant pieces of glitter and rhinestones in my laundry today.

I do a last check to make sure that all of his things were together, and do a deep breath before powering him back on again, my fingers on the side of his collarbone for only 5 seconds and I still can't let go of the feeling that maybe I somehow fucked up and he won't turn on, but his eyes flutter open and that dread dissipates.

"You're all set." I say to him, and he looks around the room confused for a moment before his memory sets in and he remembers that he's at the VOCALOID equivalent to a doctor's office. "You can whisper now. Here."

Here's where that mini freezer comes in. In the KAITO room, I keep all sorts of different kinds of ice cream and popsicles, because most, if not all KAITOs love their ice cream. I don't know if that was something that was programmed into them, but I've yet to meet a KAITO who didn't like ice cream. I hand him a vanilla ice cream sandwich, since it could stay mostly in the wrapper, which will keep his fingers from getting sticky, and vanilla ice cream won't stain if the sandwich ends up melting. Instantly, his frown disappears and changes to a shy smile.

"Thank you." He whispers. It feels good to know that the installation was successful.

I unlock the door and bring Yukio back to Imane, who'd gotten comfortable in the lobby loveseat, reading one of the many out of print courtesy magazines I had put on the coffee table.

"Everything went smoothly." I say, and I give Imane her disc back. She probably wouldn't need it anymore since the bank had already been installed and was blank now, but too many customers have argued with me about how I keep the now-blank discs to burn DVDs onto them.

"Thank you so much!" Imane says, putting the magazine down and straightening them. Yukio comes over to her and she fixes his hair and scarf, which I didn't know that there were even problems with.

"It's no problem. Please come again." I give her a courteous smile.

I wish that all of my repair jobs were quick and inexpensive tasks like this one, and they had been for a while. I hope that big changes to this pattern don't happen any time soon, but something is telling me that change is coming, and fast. I turn off the radio, and then the lights, once Imane leaves the shop, and head upstairs to spend the last few hours of the day not working. That night, I dreamt of Yukio and Imane, cases that have came and went, and pink elephants on parade.