Trip could spend hours at a time fiddling with these sorts of projects. She loved the intricacies involved in fashioning her own inventions and modifications, whether they actually worked, or almost blew up in her face. It had only taken her about an hour and a half to install a power source in the headband. Disabling the pain response was simply a matter of a few keystrokes. She had never told Monkey she deactivated the termination trigger long ago, shortly after enslaving him. The only reason she had activated it in the first place was to prevent his killing her. The first time she clapped eyes on him he had been about as disarming as a rampaging dog mech. But after less than a day together Trip had caught a glimpse of something almost like gentleness in him... When it was her turn to keep watch that night, she had seized the opportunity to disable the death-trigger while he slept. She couldn't stomach the idea of him senselessly dying with her if something happened. Still, she had left the disciplinary pulse active. Hours earlier she had offered him a home in her town. Silence had been his only reply, but it stung as much as if he'd said "no". She wouldn't have blamed him for hating her, so she hadn't been able to trust him not to abandon her. From then on she had constantly reminded herself that his apparent concern for her could well be entirely based on her lie of omission.
Until the last stretch of their journey to Pyramid. From the moment Trip had met Monkey, her mind had been constantly preoccupied with avoiding imminent death. But the total safety of the Leviathan offered no escape from her own searing thoughts and the awful reality of what she had done. How horrifyingly naïve she'd been. Monkey had become an invincible force of nature in her eyes, handily taking out mechs left and right everywhere they went. But the truth was, he could have died each time he fought for her, and now they were headed to the very source of the slavers themselves. The slavers who had managed to catch Monkey in the first place. The slavers that had murdered his parents years ago and destroyed Trip's entire life. Her rage over her father's murder had all but blinded her to anything but revenge, and she couldn't achieve it without Monkey's help. But her already smoldering conscience had become an absolute torment after she reneged on her deal to set him free. She knew she had to give him the option to back out of the suicide mission she'd taken him on.
Only when she had tried to release him, he insisted she turn the headband back on. She still didn't know how to process that moment. She didn't deserve a shred of loyalty after what she had put him through, much less this terrifying willingness to die with her. It was baffling, and only compounded the guilt she still bore. Worse still, she'd had to keep up her lie. She had a feeling it would cut him to the core if he knew the truth, and she had been relieved when the death of Pyramid removed the headbands' power source. Even so, she missed their audio link and the almost effortless teamwork it allowed. Re-configuring the headband felt like a chance at a fresh start. No more lies.