Servos wheeled inside the severed half of Lillie's leg that was still attached to her hips, the leg fidgeting as Lillie tried to keep her balance. Without calf attached to it yet, it moved like a stiff thumb at the end of Lillie—a strange motion on top of an already strange display. Beneath the edge of Lillie's skirt, where her free hand had held the edge of the dirtied white fabric just slightly back on her thigh, the artificial skin bulged—Ash's arm was buried inside her thigh, reaching deep inside for something.

"It's red, black, and blue… It's like a… a…" Lillie stammered, not sure whether to pay more or less attention.

Lillie had her broken leg propped up on a smooth stone, raised just enough so that the thigh still attached to her hip was straight. Having hands automatically made Ash a much better assistant than Pikachu had been, with the way he had propped the rock beneath her leg keeping it straight and perfect for lining up the other leg to be reattached. He was able to lean in and peer down, looking down the hollow inside of her leg and through the mechanics that filled the hollow sleeve—something that made Lillie want to look away even more.

Ash still wasn't used to having his hands inside of Lillie, not that he thought he ever would be—at least like this. If his friend Sophocles were here he would have been on the wrong end of a dirty joke about it by now, but the rubbery feeling of the underside of Lillie's skin kept his mind from wandering too far. The underside felt like a rubber mat, with the ribbed inside—the 'grid' that he had seen from the translucency of the outside—keeping the skin rigid and resistive like it was full of flesh—and, supposedly, was where the feeling receptors were housed.

"Is it… This one…?" Beneath the tattered edge of Lillie's ripped silicone skin, Ash produced a cable from the underside. He pulled it out just far enough, showing the round black connector at the end of it, pulling it out far enough to show the three tangled and thick wires that snaked around to make the connector at the end of it. They were red, black, and blue.

Lillie nodded quietly, quickly. The skin flexed as Ash pulled it out, but Lillie didn't feel a thing. Still, he moved quickly like she might have been.

"Yesyesyes, just…" Lillie swallowed. Her voice was stifled and starved of breath. Her face was turning whiter than usual, looking like she might faint any second.

The stocking on her calf had been rolled down, giving Ash access to the invisible zipper that traveled down the underside—something that the stocking kept from view, as Ash was learning. With the zipper down, the insides of the mechanical leg exposed, Ash looked between the metal rungs where fitted metal disks held the shape of the leg and where bundled cables snaked through engineered holes. Several thin pistons lined the inside, connecting like tendons to key parts of the leg and the foot underneath, and when Ash nudged them reaching inside to find a certain cable, they shifted around to limply move certain parts of the foot and little muscles beneath.

"Red, black, and blue… It's really thin," Lillie repeated. "It should be tucked underneath panel A-3—er, uhhh… The front of my leg. There's a small little clip, and a—"

"Red tag?" Ash interrupted. There was a small clipping noise from the inside, and as his hand slipped out of the narrow clearance around the pumps and pistons, he produced a thin cable with the exact coloring Lillie had described—and a red tag, hanging from the side. The small black-tipped connector had a thick and tightly braided set of red, black, and blue cords, leading to something deep inside her leg.

Something strange had happened. Ash hadn't quite figured it out, as his attention was on the two cables. He held both lengths—both the same kind of red, black, and blue cable—looking at the connector on the one he had pulled from the severed half of her leg, mentally lining it up. In his other hand was the cable pulled from inside the hollow, severed end of Lillie's thigh—the cable also had black connector, but it was female, a point where the other cable would have plugged in. He held the two out close together, ready to plug them in, and paused.

A long moment passed before Ash realized what had happened—it was silence. He had been waiting for some kind of response from Lillie but he hadn't gotten it, instead left in silence. Though he had had his attention on getting ready to connect the cables, he looked up to where Lillie was looking back at him in total silence.

"What's wrong?" asked Ash. He watched as the sound of his voice broke what was visibly a string of self-loathing, fearful thoughts Lillie had been trapped in when she looked back up. She refocused, quickly wiping away the tears that were building beneath her eyes with a finger—almost pretending like it hadn't happened. Ash never looked away, but instead put on a gentle smile.

"N-Nothing…" said Lillie, not doing a good job of lying. She almost immediately avoided eye contact, again, looking away from Ash and looking away from the leg, off at the distance—Ash knew it was nothing. "Go ahead and connect the cables… I'll… I'll need you to…"

As Lillie looked off, the moment Ash had spent trying to engage with her—again—had failed. His smile faltered, and he felt the urge to sigh creeping up on him. It wasn't nearly as frustrating, instead feeling more discouraged at any of it. As he looked down at the two cables in his hands, he let that urge to sigh get the best of him and come to the forefront, but instead used it to carry on and press forward despite Lillie's almost purposeful willingness to not help at all.

"Come on, Lillie," said Ash. He pulled the cable out further, only hesitating to reach down and feed the cable back down and loop it beneath where it had caught on another cable inside the leg. "This doesn't work if you don't talk with me. I know this is—well—I know this is really, really weird, for, um, the both of us… but I need your help, okay?"

"But… But…" Lillie stammered. "But I, I—Ah!"

Something broke Lillie's attention. It looked like she had been prodded, her expression leaping for a second, a tiny gasp coming from her. Though she had wanted to respond and had been genuinely, visibly mulling over what Ash had said, all of her thoughts reset in a cold, clean moment. She looked down, wide-eyed, trying to realize what exactly had just happened when she saw her leg. The cables had been connected, linking her legs together from the edge of her thigh down to her calf.

"Yes?" Ash asked. He was leaning in closer, looking up from where he had made the connection, searching her face beneath where the straight ends of her bangs had fallen over her brow and obscured the tops of her eyes. He thought he had seen a flash of light beneath her eyes, like they were transparent and something had glowed underneath in the instant where he had connected them. It wasn't that Lillie was staring off to space, it was that she was looking down, looking down at the edge of the severed—now re-connected—leg. She was looking at the end of it, where her foot was, and as Ash followed her line of sight and looked down he saw it too.

Lillie's ballet flat shoe had once been a pure, glossy white, but it had become beaten and scuffed with alll that had transpired that day. Where scuffs had marked the shiny surface had become trenches for dirt to set in and color her shoe a tan brown in places. The side wall was bashed in and torn where Lillie had accidentally stepped on it. It was lying only a few feet away from her foot, the white stocking that covered it similarly turned gray and dark in places, small tears in the fibers surrounding her foot and leading to deeper gashes along the stocking, her skin hardly touched underneath.

There was something new with the leg, Ash was noticing: her toes were moving. The thin white material flexed beneath the reach of her toes as they slowly curled and unfurled, feeling out the newfound sensation in Lillie's lower half.

Ash was awestruck, watching in silence with Lillie as her whole foot flexed, turning on her ankle just gently enough to not disturb where her calf was still practically hanging on by a thread. As he looked up towards Lillie, looking back and seeing the look on her face, he realized he was making eye contact again. There was a certain wonderment in her eyes, but it was all very intent on her eyes.

In an instant, Lillie reached down and grabbed Ash's hand. He looked down, seeing where she had touched him. He was deeply confused, unable to make sense of the gesture and what it meant—although one possibility came to mind.

Then Lillie yanked Ash's hand out from the open recess of her leg, pulling it out sharply.

"Lillie, what are you—?"

It happened again. Ash saw the flash of light beneath the transparency of her eyes—and several, like lights on a computer processing something. It stopped him from finishing his thought, watching in confusion and awe.

Suddenly, a mechanical pump hissed sharply inside of Lillie's leg, a metal arm shooting out from beneath the hollow, rigid skin in her leg and reached out, shooting through the space of air where Ash's hand had been. The shiny, metal arm was rigid, and had a set of clamps on the end of it. The clamps rotated, a small light flashing and aligning with the broken steel rod—the rod that was, in practice, Lillie's femur—and clamped down, sealing it to the leg. Several metal sub-clamps locked the two, large plates of the clamp around the leg, sealing with little snaps and sealing themselves into perfect alignment.

Ash finally let out a tensed breath. Lillie did too, and when he looked up they both exchanged a nervous, terse glance. Where Ash had backed himself away, shuffled away from the sudden mechanical happening inside the leg, he peered down into the leg—after first making a cautionary glance to Lillie. The leg was perfectly sealed together from the inside, small whirring sounds accompanying it as tubes reached down and connected to sealed ones inside.

"S-Sorry…" Lillie gave a weak smile. "I figured you didn't want to be in the middle of that…"

Though terror was painted all across Ash's face, he offered a smile at the joke. He looked back at where Pikachu was, just several feet in front of where Lillie sat, not sure if everything was necessarily safe, raising his ears slightly at the sound of Ash and Lillie chuckling to themselves.

"Can you stand…?" asked Ash, looking back at Lillie.

At that, Lillie went from her leg up to Ash. The thought of what Ash was suggesting made her quiet, and she tensed up. Her mouth hung open like she had something to say, but there really wasn't anything for her to say. She just looked back down at her leg, and then off. Something was wrong—out of the corner of her eye, Ash was catching on, his determination turning into a frown when he realized there was another catch to what was going on.

Then, a hissing sound—coming from within Lillie's leg.

A white cloud of smoke jetted out from the open side of Lillie's thigh. A thick, fibrous haze engulfed her suddenly, and Ash had to stand himself up to get out of the way—the memory of the last time something had suddenly erupted from her leg still fresh on his mind. As he covered his face with an arm, stepping out of the way suddenly, he couldn't stop himself from looking up over his arm to look back at the cloud of pure white that had erupted out. The hissing hadn't stopped, and the cloud had reached past the treetop. A horrific smell emerged, something like burning plastic, keeping Ash at a distance as he watched and kept himself from breathing it in. Out of the corner of his eye, Ash watched as Pikachu had dived out to the side, crying out in shock and sprinting behind the tree. Still, squinting, he tried to watch and see Lillie through the mess of smoke. He could barely see where her leg was sticking out beneath the swirling jets of smoke, showing that she remained perfectly still.

When the hissing stopped, it didn't take too long for the vast bulk of pure white smoke to lift through the branches and past the treetops, wafting up and dissipating like the remains of a campfire. The thickness of it made the leaves waft gently, rushing up to disappear quickly. Still, little wisps of smoke hung around Lillie obfuscating her.

"Lillie…"

Ash was just about done asking questions—not necessarily because he wasn't getting answers, but because he didn't know what to expect any more. He had to think to blink, his eyes wide with terror as he stared at Lillie's obscured figure. When he rushed up, hurrying through the smoke and brushing it away—Pikachu's paws thumping on the ground behind him as he ran up to meet Ash—he first looked down at the leg, looking at where the severed leg had been.

The skin had repaired itself—mostly. A new wire mesh grid had formed over the leg and taken the shape of the skin that had been there before, looking just about identical to what was on her other leg with the three-dimensional shapes of the lean muscles and other hidden shapes any natural skin would have alluded to. New skin had taken the place of the gaps in her leg, filling in the large gashes and tears that had been there before. However it was incomplete, and where skin had been grafted on over the invisible mesh it wasn't quite right. There were large stretches where the skin wasn't right, looking naturally pigmented and having all the right features but having long holes like Swiss cheese with the near invisible strands of plastic that constructed the mesh grid showing through. The synthetic skin had become oily, runny, and shiny like fresh rubber. Around where the newly-made hinge resided beneath the skin, the dimpled flesh that would have shaped her knees was nonexistent, and little dribbles of synthetic skin had dripped onto the hinge.

As the smoke cleared, Ash heard a sniffling sound coming from just above where he had been looking. It was Lillie, and she was crying again.

"No, no... I-It didn't work again… I-It didn't work…!" Lillie gasped through her tears, barely able to keep her eyes open as they welled up with tears. Her hands trembled, held up close to her in little balled fists as she stared at the skin. She shifted her leg around like it might finish the job, making the tattered skin sway limply around in the air. "Oh g-goodness…" Her voice was trembling, her hands smacking at her own face, rubbing at her sobbing eyes weakly and blindly rubbing with the heels of her hands.

"Wait, wait, hold on," said Ash. He reached out, getting himself down on a knee to bring himself level with her, totally unsure of what to do as she watched her freak out. "This is fixable, we can work with this. Just—"

"No."

Ash looked up at her with the strangest look. His mouth hung open, ready to keep saying the same things he had been saying only moments earlier, but he couldn't bring himself to do it again. He was too confused for words.

Before he could get an answer from Lillie, he watched wide-eyed as she reached for her leg. Her fingers suddenly hooked through the wide, loose holes in her synthetic skin.

"W-We can't leave…!" Lillie shouted, her voice croaking. She then ripped the skin clean open, re-exposing the bare metal around her knee.

A strange sense of horror gripped Ash, the sight of Lillie ripping off her own skin—even if it wasn't real—totally catching him off-guard. His mind jumped at the chance and knew exactly what to do, and though he watched as Lillie grabbed at the skin again to tear more of the incomplete section he jumped in, grabbing her wrist. He yanked it free, pulling away her fingers from grabbing at what she could and pulling them free. She fought, her arm forcing back at Ash's like they were arm-wrestling in the air—Ash hit with the sudden surprise of Lillie's incredible, inhuman strength when she won hard. Ash managed to wrestle it away from her leg, moving it into a different direction and forcing Lillie to wrestle their arms in a different direction. Her other arm shot out and reached for her leg again, getting ready to tear when Ash reached out to catch it with his other free hand.

"Hrrrgghh… L-Lillie…! This is insane!" Ash said, his voice muffled and strained as he clenched his teeth. He was caught in an awkward position wrestling Lillie's arms to the ground.

Through his one open eye, he looked down to his arm and where he had caught Lillie's wrist, watching as it snaked around in his grip, turning itself into position for a perfect bicep curl, ready to push back hard. Something clicked mechanically, and Lillie's arm stopped struggling, locked rigid in position like he was holding an arm-rail.

"Hyaaahh!"

Lillie's arms pushed, the superhuman strength in them shoving Ash back. She flung him, hard. Ash spent almost no time in the air, hitting the ground and practically being driven into it with the remaining force of it. He skidded along the dry earth and through thick patches of loose grass, flying across it like he was tumbling down a hill. The only thing that stopped him from flying any further was the hard collision against the side of a tree, where his body hit hard and flung his body sideways into a patch of ferns.

His head hit a rock, hard, dazing him and making him slump over. He didn't want to get up, instead staying near unconscious on the ground. His face twisted up, eyes forcibly shutting as his body quietly writhed, his arms blindly trying to reach around to his side to straighten himself but finding nothing to latch onto. He managed to keep himself from passing out, eventually shoving his arm back behind his head and wedging it between his sore head, the tree trunk behind him and the thick emergence of rock from the dirt underneath. He managed to lower himself, laying himself out flat on the ground and his head on softer dirt. He took a breath, relaxing himself—just keeping the pain in from that had exhausted him.

"Ohhh…" Ash groaned. He had finally settled, finally past the feeling of passing out.

Almost as soon as his senses were coming back, he could hear the sounds of Lillie's footsteps hurrying over to his side. He saw the dark shadow of her coming over him, Pikachu's dark shadow appearing by his side and blocking out the sun from his vision. It made him stir, trying to get himself up but not quite finding the strength to do it.

"Ash… Oh Ash, I'm… I'm so sorry…! I… I don't know what came over me!"