Field trip day came, and the atmosphere in the training room foyer was absolutely ecstatic. L-7 stood right next to L-63 along the wall, in her favorite spot halfway up the steps, not just because he wanted to be close to her, but because they wouldn't be able to hear each other from more than a few feet away. Everyone spoke over each other in an excited bedlam, the humidity from a hundred peoples' body heat growing with every passing minute.
She didn't seem nearly as agitated that morning, but she was still watching all the trainees in the room closely, as if one of them was going to spring out at her at any moment. Her bruise had turned from a nasty, deep purple to a yellowish-green color, and she didn't wince every time she swallowed. While everyone was distracted, and before Miss Minutes appeared, he decided to adjust her wonky tie. She blinked up at him in surprise, but didn't bat his hand away or tell him to stop.
"I'm just helping," he told her with a grin. When he was satisfied, he dropped her striped tie and put both hands in the air, like he'd been caught red handed. "Away from the chest," he joked.
She chuckled and smoothed her tie back down. He couldn't help but stare at her more, now that he knew she didn't hate him. She was so unbelievably mesmerizing when she smiled. He wondered how nobody else could see it.
"Good morning, class!"
Miss Minutes suddenly appeared, floating above the trainee's heads, her visage enormous, like some kind of huge guardian angel.
"Good morning, Miss Minutes!" everyone replied, quieting the room down instantly.
"I know y'all are excited to see the TVA in person for the very first time, but we'll need to keep everything orderly for this trip to run smoothly. So, instead of guiding a hundred of y'all through the hallways…"
Miss Minutes, to everyone's surprise, split herself into ten identical copies, a small swarm of clocks all about two feet tall, still hovering above the class.
"...we'll split up into groups of ten!" all of her identical duplicates chimed in unison. They floated to ten equidistant sections of the room, and the trainees scrambled to divvy themselves up into a group with at least one their new friends in it.
L-7 and L-63, of course, stuck together like glue, making their way towards the nearest group, which included S-10, D-132, and a few others from BQ6.
S-10 gave L-63 a look that L-7 didn't like much at all. The bruise under his eye was gone completely, replaced with a splotch of freckles on his fair skin.
"You'd better not stomp on my toes," he piped up.
"I won't," she replied coolly, "if you don't make me mad."
L-7 chuckled and S-10 turned his attention to him.
"Why are you laughing? You were the one she pushed over."
L-7 didn't have an answer, so only shrugged, and S-10 narrowed his eyes at them.
"Wait, do you two like each other now? Gross. That's gross, right D-132?"
He gently nudged D-132, with a spiteful, stupid smirk on his face, and she bashfully glanced between L-7 and L-63, looking trapped and helpless.
"Y-yeah," she said finally, playing with a strand of dark hair. "I guess."
L-63 scowled at them both, and L-7 stood as close as he could to her without drawing Miss Minutes' attention. All the copies of her seemed distracted anyway, counting out each group of ten and herding people into different groups to even them out.
"You over there, we need one more!" she called out to another Miss Minutes, who gently guided a straggler over to their group. With one last head count, all the Miss Minutes spoke in unison again.
"Looks like we're ready! Each group will get into an elevator, press the Main Terminal button, then await further instructions from me. Let's go!"
Everyone murmured low amongst themselves. There was no 'Main Terminal' button in the elevator. Still, the elevator doors opened, and each group filed in as Miss Minutes had instructed, their assigned duplicate floating in with them.
L-7's group was one of the last to get into an elevator, and their Miss Minutes floated in and alighted on the handrail on the side of the wall.
As the doors closed, a new button began to form on the wall, a tiny circle pushing itself upward from the flat, solid metal. A little plaque formed above the button, too, the shiny letters becoming four distinct words: 'Main Terminal: Division Nine'.
L-7 pushed the button before S-10 could get to it. The elevator, instead of lurching to the right, like it normally would, went up and up and up, the scenery near the bottom of the TVA growing smaller and smaller. Even L-63 seemed genuinely excited. L-7 wondered what Miss Minutes expected them to write down, because he surely wouldn't be able to focus on anything but taking in the sights. He also wondered how in the world they were going to get to all of the different parts of the TVA, which seemed to expand onwards and upwards for a mile. Would they have to spend half the day riding elevators?
Finally, the elevator stopped and the door opened to a fantastic sight: they were in an enormous terminal, with big, round, orange intake desks and all kinds of doors and real TVA employees milling around, doing their work, as if they didn't realize they were in the coolest place in the universe. He recognized the different jobs by the uniforms they'd worn in the cartoons. There were a few archivists with tan dress shirts at the intake desks, updating records on their tiny, beige computers, and hunters with their black tactical gear leaning on the wall, laughing about something between each other, and a serious looking, brown-coated agent flipping through a file as she walked down the hall and into the elevator next to them. L-7 desperately wanted to jump in that elevator with her and bombard her with questions about being an agent, but he had a feeling Miss Minutes wouldn't like it too much.
"Hey!"
L-63 tugged on L-7's tie as the rest of their group left towards the edge of an open loading dock that overlooked the TVA. They caught up to the group, which made a tight huddle in the middle of the dock. Even L-7 wasn't brave enough to look over the edge. It was a long, long way to fall.
"This is where our transport will land, trainees!" said Miss Minutes, still small and floating around them, like an orange, clock-shaped fairy. "This'll get us around a little faster than the elevators. When you get on, please buckle your safety belts and hold on to your notebooks and pencils. Look, here comes our ride now!"
A floating, yellow transport with five seats on either side and no discernable front or back puttered up to the dock, the strange sound becoming lower as it hovered inches above the floor. L-7 got on before the rest of them. The cart wobbled a bit as he shifted his weight forward, which was a frightening feeling, but he turned around, sat down, and quickly buckled and tightened his seatbelt. The rest of the trainees followed suit, L-63 settling in next to him and giving him a quick grin.
He wondered, only for a moment, if she'd had any more dreams about him.
Miss Minutes landed on one end of the transport, which became the bow of the little floating ship as it took off and flew away into the air. The trainees gasped and squealed, holding on to each other and their notebooks tightly. The drop was enormous, and it felt like they were going much too fast through it all. Other transports zipped past, holding bored looking employees. How anyone could possibly be bored while taking a ride that was floating a quarter mile in the air was beyond L-7. A transport three times their size passed close to theirs, going from above them, to below, but he didn't recognize their outfits. They wore identical blue jumpsuits, some with stains on the knees and elbows, and many wearing heavy, tan, fleece-lined coats.
"Miss Minutes," he called out, raising his hand high in the air, watching the other transport sink lower, "Who are they? What jobs do they have?"
"Those are maintenance workers," said Miss Minutes, sitting on the edge of the transport. "They're all going to the sub-basement."
He watched it as it sank behind them, then dipped quickly out of sight into the tangle of pipes and columns on the bottom of the TVA.
Their transport stopped in the dead center of the airspace and slowly rotated to give the trainees the full scope of the TVA. They were hushed with amazement. The tubes leading from each plate-shaped tower were visible from there, some of them clear, with little employees inside of them being lifted diagonally from one 'plate' to the other. That must be where their dorms and classroom were, somewhere among the hundreds of identical flat, round buildings suspended by impossibly thin elevator shafts. The Timekeeper's statue loomed above them, gazing out into nothing with its concrete eyes.
"Class," said Miss Minutes, "This is the TVA, in all its glory. It is so massive, it's split up into ten parts, called divisions, plus the sub-basement, which covers the entire lower level spread across each division. Y'all will be placed in Division Nine, which is at the south-southwest corner of the TVA."
She made a little map appear in front of them, a three-dimensional blueprint which just looked like a confusing mess of floors and buildings. It turned to give them a bird's-eye view and split itself into ten equal, wedge shaped parts, like a pizza. Division Nine was highlighted in green.
"There are approximately eighty six thousand and three hundred employees in each division, and an equal number of maintenance workers in the sub-basement that keep the whole TVA goin'. The sleep cycle rotates throughout every division, so that most of the TVA can still work while some divisions are asleep."
"Miss Minutes', what's that?" said L-63, pointing to a floor just above the bottom. It was lit up in ultraviolet light, and looked darker than the other floors.
"Ah, that's the fun part of the TVA!" she said brightly. "You see, on your off day, we graciously provide recreational activities, to let y'all relax and get ready for the new week ahead. That includes a huge bowling alley and karaoke rooms, all on the recreation floor."
The trainees buzzed with excitement, even though they didn't know what either of those things were.
"That's it?" said L-63. "There's only two things down there?"
"Our first stop will be the intake department," Miss Minutes continued, completely ignoring L-63. "There, we'll see how variants are processed and recorded into the system."
L-7 nudged L-63 with his elbow.
"I want to try the bowling thing," he said. "How about you?"
"Yeah. I guess." She looked genuinely disappointed, though L-7 couldn't imagine why. Two recreational activities seemed like plenty, to him. He didn't even know you were allowed to do anything but work once class was done with.
The transport took off again, straight up, and landed on another dock several stories above the one they'd come out of. The hallway beyond looked identical to the one they'd come from, apart from the different floor number lit up in white next to the dock.
Miss Minutes led them down the hallway to a door and floated in front of it as she spoke.
"These floors have every step of the intake process in each room. After the variants have been checked in at an intake table, they are placed in the search-and-strip room for reclothing."
The door opened, and the trainees gasped as it revealed a stainless steel room, dirty and scuffed, lit with bare fluorescent lights and nothing in it but a robot attached to the wall. It had a screen in the middle with a ghostly gray face etched into it, even though the robot was clearly turned off, its clamps and lasers curled up around the screen like a dead bug stuck to the wall.
L-63 actually jolted and hid behind L-7, which made him chuckle at her. He thought it was kind of cute when she got jumpy, now, because she went to him for protection.
"You afraid it's gonna come to life and get you?" he asked, giving her arm a little pinch. She stifled a yelp and glowered at him.
"Stop," she hissed. "I'm not scared, I just… don't like it."
"Stand back, class!"
The floor opened in front of them, to reveal a man sitting at a desk on the floor below. He looked up at them and waved.
"Normally, they would drop through each intake floor to the next component of processing," she said, "But we can see each step on this floor, without having to fall ten feet every time."
They moved to the next door, which revealed another large man with glasses at an identical desk, blue filing cabinets lining the walls of the room, bursting with files. A printer on the side of the room was dutifully grinding away, printing pages and pages that the man gathered slowly on his desk, ripping off each page and placing it in a neat pile. He was also in the middle of eating a sandwich.
"Hi there, Adam!"
He greeted them, still with food in his mouth, and put his sandwich off to the side.
"Well hello, trainees!" he grinned politely at them. A few trainees sheepishly replied in a low chorus of "hello"'s.
"After being reclothed, the archivist will confirm each and every sentence that the variant has ever said."
"Why?" asked S-10.
"To prove that we've captured the correct variant," replied Adam as the printer stopped grinding and he ripped off the last piece. "And it gives them a second to cool down, think about what they say before it comes out," he added with a wink.
A little squeaking noise came from the side of the room and the class was instantly distracted by a strange, tiny, hairy creature, with a round head, four slender legs, and a long tail. It laid down on the floor and stared at the class with big, yellow eyes, flipping its furry tail against the tile.
Without thinking, L-7 crouched down to look at it. It turned its head, made the chirping noise again and started to lick its brown, striped fur.
Fascinated, L-7 reached out to pet the animal, but suddenly Adam's voice boomed from behind him.
"No! Don't touch it! That's a flerkin!"
L-7 gasped and stood, cowering away from the thing with the other students, even though he didn't know what a flerkin was. The creature looked up at Adam with indignant surprise, its little pink tongue poking out of its mouth.
After a tense second, Adam suddenly burst into a fit of laughter, slapping a hand on his desk.
"I'm kidding! Oh, I love doing that! That's just Quibble. He's my cat."
"What's a cat?" asked L-7.
"A cat's kind of like a flerkin, but harmless. Unless you try to pet his belly, of course." Adam wiped away a tear of mirth and stifled one last chuckle.
Despite Adam's reassurance, the whole class kept a respectful distance away from Quibble as he went back to licking his tiny paws.
"Anyway," Miss Minutes began again, mildly annoyed, "after the variant has signed the papers, the files are sent away to the warehouse, where other archivists will scan them into our database. Come along, class."
They followed Miss Minutes to another door, L-7 wondering if they'd see any more adorable 'cats' or 'flerkins' anywhere else during their field trip.
The next door opened to two employees in a small room. One of them was pale, wearing a brown vest, and was very short and stout. He only came up about to L-7's waist. An older woman with gray hair tied back in a sloppy bun crouched next to a rectangular archway, wearing a blue collared polo shirt, brown pants, and a tool belt strapped to her waist. A little robotic helper floated next to her, much like the robot attached to the wall in the first room, but in miniature, with only a few clamps, and drills instead of lasers. She examined a hole in the archway where a panel had been unfastened. A tangle of wires spilled out from the inside and the woman was busy plugging them into each other while the helper robot handed them to her, one by one, with a little yellow grin on its screen.
"No, I need the red wire," she told the robot grumpily, and it dropped the green wire it had been holding and found the red wire for her, with an affirmative beep.
"I was supposed to go to lunch a half hour ago," muttered the man, tapping his foot impatiently.
"Should have called an engineer earlier, then," she replied.
"If you'd gotten here earlier-"
"Why don't you two introduce yourselves?"
The two employees perked up and stared at Miss Minutes, as if they didn't realize she'd come in.
The short man coughed and grumbled, "Just what I needed," before plastering a more amiable look on his face. "My name is Saim. I'm a technician. And this is-"
"Ooni. Engineer." said the woman, cutting him off. She didn't even look at the class as she fiddled with the different wires.
"This is where variants are scanned to confirm that they have souls," said Miss Minutes, gesturing to the metal arch. "They walk through the scanner, and the technician… actually, you're about to see the process in person," she said suddenly.
Without warning, someone in a beige variant's jumpsuit fell through the roof and landed gracefully on their feet, scaring the trainees. The helper robot trilled an alarm and hid behind Ooni. The man was tall, well built, and very odd looking, with reddish purple skin, striking blue eyes, no ears, and a small, yellow gem sparkling in the middle of his forehead. He didn't seem frightened or angry, only mildly curious as he straightened up and scanned the room.
"Ugh, great," said Saim, picking up a clipboard resting on a chair behind him.
"Wait two more seconds, will ya'?" Ooni said, frantically plugging the last of the wires in. Saim rolled his eyes and began his spiel without caring if Ooni was done.
"Please confirm to your knowledge that you are not a fully robotic being, were born an organic creature, and do, in fact, possess what many cultures would call a soul."
The man glanced at the trainees behind him, giving an especially long, hard look at L-7, for some reason, then turned back to Saim.
"I am a vibranium based android created by Ultron, with artificial intelligence invented by Tony Stark," he said, matter-of-factly. "The question of my form having a soul, though, is a much more difficult thing to-"
"So you are confirming that you are not an organic creature?" said Saim, clicking his pen and raising one eyebrow.
"Yes. I am… not," said the android, now confused.
"Hmm. Haven't had a robot in a while." Saim checked off a few boxes on his clipboard, then handed it to the variant. "If you have a given name, then please sign on the bottom line."
"Why?"
"Just sign, please, sir," said Saim, obviously losing his patience.
"There we go, all done," said Ooni, grunting as she stuffed the mess of wires back into the scanner and stood up. The little robot quickly drilled the panel's screws back in place as the humanoid robot signed its name.
"Let's all step back just a scooch," whispered Miss Minutes to the trainees, who obeyed quietly, though L-7 kept himself as close as he dared to get a good view of the machine, and the incredibly lifelike robot. The android noticed, though, giving them a suspicious look as he handed the clipboard back to Saim.
"Please step through the scanner."
"What does it-"
"Please step through the scanner, sir!"
The purple robot took a cautious step forward and placed one hand on the scanner, then drew away again quickly.
"This… this is an antimatter device!" he said, moving toward the trainees and the open hallway. Saim had already gone to a small panel on the wall, his hand hovering over a large, red button.
"Sir, do not leave this room, if you do I'll be forced to-"
Saim didn't get to finish his sentence, as the android fled out the door, nearly pushing some of the trainees over. Saim sighed and pressed the button on the wall, and an alert siren echoed through the hallway.
"Escaped variant at terminal ninety-two, escaped variant, terminal ninety-two," he said calmly into an intercom.
The trainees huddled together. L-7 instinctively grabbed L-63's hand and pulled her close to him, but they were both too frightened to care whether Miss Minutes saw or not.
"Don't worry, class," Miss Minutes said, though she looked a little worried, herself. "The guards already have the situation under control."
Indeed, even before the variant had left the terminal, he was surrounded by a squad of guards, preparing their time batons for pruning.
"Why can't I fly?" asked the robot variant, seemingly to himself. "Why don't my energy beams work?"
The guards closed in, yelling and shouting at him all at once.
"Do not resist! Go through the soul scanner or we will be forced to prune you!"
They backed him into the room, and the android raised his hands in the air, looking around with terror etched on his face. The trainees snuck in close again. L-7 almost felt bad for him, though he was excited to see what would happen, anyway.
"You mean to kill me?" he asked Saim. "Why? What have I done wrong?"
Saim rolled his eyes. "Sir, if you do have a soul, then you'll be fine."
Ooni chuckled to herself, wearing a sardonic grin as her little helper robot's face went from a smile to a frown.
"But… I…"
Finally, with no other choice, the android turned and took a halting step through the metal archway. The trainees screamed as a blinding light flashed from the machine, then became a pulsing strobe mixed with the sound of sizzling electricity. L-63 grabbed L-7 from behind and pulled him away, towards the wall, but once the pulsing was done, he scooted to the front again, his morbid curiosity insatiable. The android had been reduced to a pile of metallic dust, with nothing whole left of him except for the shining, yellow stone.
"And that, class," chimed Miss Minutes proudly, "was a magnificent example of TVA teamwork!"
The archway printed out a small, square picture, and Saim pulled it out and flapped it around a little before taking a look at it.
"There you go," he said, handing the photo to L-7. "Pass it around. In a normal, organic, carbon based life form, the soul scanner would show a solid blotch of color radiating from the chest. That's what it looks like when a variant has no soul."
The picture showed a gray shadow of the android in his last milliseconds, his arms across his eyes in terror, with no other color at all. L-7 passed it around to his classmates, who wore looks ranging from mild confusion to horror.
"That doesn't happen to everyone, does it?" squeaked D-132.
"No, honey!" Saim laughed. "Just robots. And vampires, occasionally." He picked up the shiny stone and blew a bit of dust off of it, examining it in the light.
"An infinity stone!" he said, with a grin spreading across his face. "Ooh, I call dibs! I've always wanted one of these!"
"Ahem!"
Miss Minutes gave him a glare and crossed her arms across her chest, and Saim's smile fell.
"We should be setting a good example for the new trainees, shouldn't we, Saim?" she asked.
"Yes, Miss Minutes."
"All items taken from variants must be submitted to archives, where they will be stored for an appropriate amount of time until being disposed of."
"Yes, I'll do that right away, Miss Minutes," said Saim, but he placed the stone in his vest pocket, anyway. "Totally keeping it," he mumbled to himself, so low that L-7 thought he was the only one who heard.
"Exciting first day, huh?" said Ooni, laughing gruffly as she nudged one of the trainees. Her robot gave her a few angry beeps, but she rolled her eyes and waved her hand at it dismissively.
"Aw, come on. You've gotta get your kicks somehow."
The trainees left, the door closed, and L-7 thought of a question he should have asked Saim only a few seconds before.
"Miss Minutes!" he said, flailing his hand in the air.
"Yes, L-7?"
"What would happen if one of us went through the soul scanner?"
"That would be a waste of valuable TVA resources, which is akin to stealing."
"Yeah, but, what would happen?" he whined.
"TVA employees are prohibited from using any company equipment for personal reasons. They must be used in accordance with their workflow."
"But-"
"Now, class, follow me back to the transport. We've got a lot more to explore!"
L-7 grunted in disappointment. Sometimes, it seemed like Miss Minutes didn't want to answer questions. She only wanted to make sure everyone followed the rules. Her rules. He took one last look at the door they'd just come out of. Now that Miss Minutes had told him not to, all he wanted to do was go through that scanner and see what his soul looked like.
His heart skipped a beat as a strange thought occurred to him: what if he was a robot, too? Was he technically 'organic' even though he'd been grown in a pod? Did robots have blood, like him? Was that where the soul was?
L-63 jabbed him in the ribs with her pencil and interrupted his thoughts. He batted the pencil away and she laughed at him.
"If you keep lollygagging, you're gonna get lost," she said, then trotted through the terminal to catch up with the class. L-7 caught up with her first, jabbing his own pencil into her back, gently.
"You were so scared of that robot," he teased, wearing a big grin. "You were all huddled up next to the wall, like this." He crouched up into a ball, with his hands over his face, his imitation deliberately over the top.
She scoffed, but smiled back playfully. "I was not!" she insisted. "You were way too close, I thought you were gonna get zapped, too."
L-63 tapped her pencil with his, and L-7 took that as an invitation to a pretend sword fight, which she accepted. They blocked and parried with their teeny, tiny play-weapons, giggling and laughing as they circled each other in the hallway.
Miss Minutes appeared between them, scaring the daylights out of them both. They hid their pencils behind their backs.
"L-7, L-63," she said, unamused, "Didn't you listen to my lecture yesterday? No horseplay."
"Yes, Miss Minutes," they responded glumly.
"I don't want to have to separate you two…"
"No, Miss Minutes."
That prospect drained all of the joy out of him. That wasn't fair. He'd just gotten her to like him.
"Good," she said with a nod. "Then come along and keep up with the class. Y'all are draggin' our field trip to a standstill."
They obediently followed behind Miss Minutes without speaking, as close as they dared to be without holding hands. They were the last two to buckle themselves into the transport, which took off again into the sky.
L-63 looked tired again, like she had when he'd met her for the first time, but she opened her notebook and tried to jot down notes as Miss Minutes spoke about the rest of the TVA. L-7 didn't really care about what their teacher had to say, anymore. She didn't demand that he take notes, so he decided to take in the sights and doodle, instead. He would read about it all later, anyway, and surely it wouldn't be the last time he'd see everything in person.
As they landed on different sections and floors, Miss Minutes showed them all the different rooms of the TVA: the chronomonitor rooms, where analysts stared at their screens and looked for branches beginning to form; the warehouse, a massive room where variants' belongings, signed papers, and soul scans were kept; the film archives, where archivists fed miles of variants' life-tapes into giant reels, which were then edited into the most important life events, for the agents to watch; the record archives, where millions of manilla folders sat waiting on alphabetized shelves…
L-7 stopped to scratch his calf with his foot as they walked down yet another identical hallway. The TVA was starting to lose its glamor, now. He was itchy, and bored, and antsy, and hungry all at the same time. He desperately wanted to do anything to relieve his boredom, and thought of a dozen things every minute; he could do a cartwheel, or pull ups on the edge of a door frame, or flip himself over the edge of the balcony and hang off the side, or-
"This is the last ride before lunch, class," said Miss Minutes, getting his attention once again. They filed onto yet another dock with another waiting transport. The class didn't waste time buckling themselves in: they knew the drill. "This time, we're going down to the sub-basement, to take a look at the inner workings of the TVA: the Viscera."
L-7 perked up at that. Maybe that would be slightly more interesting than looking at yet another room. He raised his hand again.
"Yes?"
"Miss Minutes, when are we going to go outside the TVA?"
"Outside? What d'ya mean?"
"I mean, aren't we going to see how the agents go into the timeline and catch the variants?"
Miss Minutes laughed at him, to his genuine surprise.
"Oh, golly no!" she said. "That's much too dangerous for a group of trainees! One of y'all could get lost, or do something to further alter the timeline. The only people allowed to leave the TVA for job-related purposes are highly trained hunters and agents."
L-7 groaned loudly and laid his head on the back of his seat, staring into the lighting on the ceiling as the transport sank lower and lower. He was never going to get to do anything interesting until he became an agent.
The temperature dropped along with the transport, until it was downright chilly. The atmosphere became darker, the elevator shafts, buildings, and pipes obscuring the light from above. L-7 didn't feel too cold, but the rest of the students suddenly hugged themselves tightly, shuddering, rubbing their arms and letting out puffs of steam with every breath.
L-7 tried it, too, blowing out air through his mouth, but he could barely make any steam at all.
"You try it," he told L-63, but she couldn't do any better than he could.
"We'll only be down here a few minutes," Miss Minutes reassured the class, "but normally, we'd require maintenance to wear coats and gloves, at the very least."
"Why is it so cold?" asked S-10, with a hiss of frozen breath.
"Our state of the art power supply generates deep-cold fusion energy, which keeps the artificial intelligence servers running much longer than other power sources. Plus, it actually absorbs excess heat from machinery friction and body heat from employees to regenerate itself. It's a perfect energy recycling system."
The transport came to a halt just above a rusty, metal floor. It slid open with a terrible screech and rumble. It looked very much like the cartoon Miss Minutes had shown them the day before, but even scarier, with all the strange, huge machinery with cogs three times as tall as a person, and enormous pipes as big as sidewalks. They stretched on and on in a tangle of poorly lit metal with no discernable bottom in sight. One faraway pipe was gushing steam and a spray of some unidentifiable liquid into the air.
"Uh oh," said Miss Minutes. "Looks like we've got a leak… a big one, too! But our top-notch maintenance team is already on it."
A smaller, dirtier looking transport hovered close to the leaky pipe and three women stepped out, dressed in tan coats, thin gloves, and heavy boots. Their grim faces and bare ears were flushed red with the chill, steam rising from their bodies. Though the class couldn't hear them very well, they shouted back and forth, passing tools from the transport to each other: giant wrenches and metal panels and drills. They didn't have little floating robot friends to help them, like the engineer did.
One of them climbed out to a precarious ledge, wet from the leaky pipe, and began drilling holes to fasten the metal plate over the leak. She slipped a little, making the trainees yelp.
"Oh no, she's gonna fall," whispered D-132.
"Don't worry," replied Miss Minutes. "She knows exactly what she's doin'."
The maintenance woman continued her work, balanced carefully on the edge of the pipe. She flexed her fingers and winced, as if her hands were numb, then tore off her gloves, stuffing them in her pockets. The metal panel she'd just drilled into the pipe started to fall out with the force of the steam. She noticed, then in a span of half a second, reached out to stop the panel with her bare hand, pulled away with a scream, then slipped and fell from her perch.
The whole class screeched, even L-7. L-63 covered her eyes with her notebook.
"I can't look!" she groaned.
L-7 pulled her hands away. "It's all right! She's okay."
The small transport had broken her fall, albeit roughly, toppling sideways and spilling tools into the abyss below. It flew her up to the top of the pipe, where the other women pulled her away, kneeling and holding her sitting upright. The first woman held up her palm, blistered red, tears streaming down her face.
"My hand! Oh, god, my hand!"
The trainees clamored with horror that even Miss Minutes couldn't subdue.
"Class, come on, now, simmer down!"
Even smarmy S-10 looked pale, like he wanted to throw up. They'd watched a robot get vaporized just a few minutes ago, but this felt different… it wasn't supposed to happen. They weren't supposed to see employees get hurt. The TVA was supposed to keep them safe.
L-63 put her hands back up to her face.
"I don't ever want to go to maintenance," she told L-7. "Never, ever."
The floor rumbled back into place, Miss Minutes still trying to soothe her rattled wards.
"Let's all just take a few calming breaths, m'kay? For all time…"
"Always," the class responded hesitantly.
"All right," she said, looking over them with concern. "Now I know that was hard to see, but there's a lesson to be learned, here. If you noticed, she took off her required protective gloves before stopping the panel, which had been heated by the steam. If she'd kept those gloves on, like she was supposed to, then she would have been just fine, right?"
L-7 looked around at his peers unsurely. No one, including him, seemed to want to argue with Miss Minutes right then.
"Well," she continued with a shrug, "I'm sorry the tour didn't end like I expected it to. But the good news is you get to eat lunch in the cafeteria with the other TVA employees from now on, instead of getting nutritional food blocks in your room. Won't that be fun, class?"
No one answered. D-132 sniffled and wiped the last of her tears away. L-7 had been starving not long ago, but how could she expect anyone to want to eat, after that?