Miu crept her way through the corridors of the castle. She didn't have a strip of lights to guide her this time, but it was obvious to a super-genius like her where she was going: that room behind the entrance hall that Idabashi had disappeared into had to be his actual lab, where he stashed the good stuff. Miu would just have to find another way in.

The lack of the guiding lights also meant that there weren't any actual light sources in this part of the castle. That didn't matter. Her Glasses-of-still-being-productive-when-everyone-else-wants-the-lights-off-so-they-can-sleep took care of that.

And, obviously, she wasn't going to get herself caught. An ancient asshole like Idabashi had to have an early bedtime: wasting precious hours of the night to stave off his frailness. Seriously, he should have just given up and passed on everything to someone who could still use every hour of the day properly: like Miu Iruma. But at least it meant he wouldn't be up and awake, prowling the corridors.

Miu found the entrance she was looking for easily. It wasn't even concealed at all, just located right on the opposite side of the hidden laboratory from the entrance hall. She yanked open the door and stepped inside.

If the lab wasn't well-hidden, at least Idabashi had put some security in place. Miu stopped just in time, as her glasses-of-you-know-what revealed a web of infrared lasers criss-crossing the passageway. She could see the small lever to turn the sensors off on the other side of the array, but there was clearly no way to get through the lasers and switch it.

Not through normal space, at least. Miu had just the thing.

She reached into her backpack and drew out a thin plastic ray gun. After peering through the sight at the end to make sure the crystals were calibrated properly and fiddling with the dials to get the ranges right, Miu pointed the gun downwards and held her breath. She pulled the trigger.

A small gush of air. Miu's underwear popped into existence three feet up in the air and on the other side of the laser beams. It floated for a second, then fell, catching the end of the lever and pulling it down. The lasers flickered, then vanished.

Miu stepped through. Before moving on, she took the panties off the lever and stuffed them into her backpack. Couldn't be letting some fucker find and perv over them, could she?

Miu had barely got a few more metres along the passageway when she saw the next trap. Cracks between the floor and the walls gave away pressure plates, like nervousness gave away a virgin. Only a dumbass would step right into that mess after they'd seen it coming, but Miu still needed a way forward. Her inspired intuition led her to a concealed maintenance panel on the wall, and when she opened it up and stuck her head through she saw that the pressure plate connected to a mechanism that would swing a sharp blade straight the whoever had stood on the pressure plate if it hadn't been deactivated properly. Damn, Idabashi wasn't fucking around.

Miu could just about make out a weak point in the mechanism: a place where a slight jostle would knock the gears out of place and gum up the mechanism. Far out of Miu's reach, of course, and she wasn't going to try reaching her arm through the hatch and swinging it about like a desperate loser. She was the Ultimate Inventor! She had much better options.

Another item came out on the backpack. Miu passed the boxing glove on the end through the maintenance hatch, then turned it towards the mechanism. One quick adjustment to turn off the auto-aim, and the device was targeted straight at the weak point. All Miu had to do now was activate it.

"Hey, Idabashi," Miu whispered, "How you liking this penetration? Gonna come and give me what I want, yet?"

Boing! Boing! The Auto-Puncher sprung twice, and Miu was sure she heard it hit the mechanism both times. When the Auto-Puncher settled Miu pulled it back through the hatch, then undid the previous adjustment to restore it to pristine condition. She trusted her talent enough to be sure the puncher had done its job, but even so she approached the pressure plate with trepidation, stepping over the edge with a tentative outstretched toe and squealing as the plate gave way beneath it.

A fierce grinding sounded through the stone wall, but the blades didn't swing through their slots to slash her.

Phew! Miu had worried that the joke had been too bitter to trigger the Auto-Puncher-that-punches-you-for-telling-terrible-dirty-jokes, but it must have worked. As it turned out, the Auto-Puncher's taste in jokes didn't really matter. Of course, your sense of taste didn't matter then either, when you were…

Boing!

"Ow!"

The final obstacle that stood between Miu and Idabashi's personal laboratory was a perfectly-sealed electronically-locked door. There was no way to trick her way through this one; she'd just have to guess the password. She booted up the computer next to the lock and read Idabashi's password hint.

'My first true love.'

Miu didn't even need her Hookup Counter to know that the answer was some variation on 'no-one.'

o - 0 - O - 0 - o

With the final door out of her way, Miu Iruma burst into Professor Idabashi's private laboratory. She whooped; only the one-and-only awesome inventor, Miu Iruma, could have bust through all those traps as effortlessly as she had, baby! Now it was time to claim her reward, and smash her way to victory in this stupid challenge Idabashi had set her.

She glanced around the lab. From the inside the sliding panels and mechanisms the old man had used to flee the entrance hall were obvious, and right in the middle of the wall opposite – just above the electronics workbench – Miu could see a lever that would reverse the process and her back out. Fucking neat: she wouldn't have to crawl all the way back up that dingy corridor like she was escaping from a BDSM dungeon.

On each side of the laboratory were cabinets filled with Idabashi's inventions. Most were works in progress: the cabinets had reinforced blast-proof viewing windows to protect against explosions and releases of toxic chemicals, and cables came down the wall above each cabinet, connecting to sensors that were monitoring for power surges and unanticipated successes. Levitating platforms, generators for converting sound energy into electricity, shoulder-mounted laser cannons, and multi-armed drones: all of those inventions had been stored by Idabashi in his laboratory for safe-keeping.

All of them would be Miu's, once she figured out how to grasp them.

Miu's eyes followed the cables from the cabinets up to the ceiling and traced them back to where they joined together at the top of a central column. Bundled together, the cables spun around the column and then descended into a large metal box at the bottom. As she skipped up to it, Miu though it looked a bit like a school locker. She yanked open the door.

God damn; it was the most beautiful fucking thing she'd ever seen.

Inside the locker was a human-like figure. It was obviously a robot; Miu ran her fingers over the sleek metal panels of the body and traced out the grooves where they interlocked perfectly, before moving up the line of buttons along the centre of the robot's chest up to the head. She stroked the messy surprisingly-realistic white hair, separating each strand from its neighbours to get a closer look at it. She looked into the robot's eyes: dull, unmoving, inactive.

Why the fuck was a senile grouchy old git like Idabashi allowed to have something as amazing as this?!

Miu made up her incredible mind. This robot – 'K1-B0', according to the label – Miu would make it her own. Once she'd got through improving K1-B0, he'd be so, so much better.

Miu looked over K1-B0's body for a connection port, finding one right near the centre of the mop of hair. Taking what she need out of her backpack once more, Miu plugged one end into the port and the other into her computer tablet. A few quick flicks of her finger, and the robot's code was sprawling across the screen. Code for formulating and choosing goals, code for understanding incoming sensory data and making plans, code for simulating human speech and behaviour… and code to ensure that K1-B0 obeyed the Professor's orders at all times.

Just a few little alterations, and… magnificent.