[A/N: the prompt for this one comes to us from my friend Toonyrobot from AO3: "I think it'd be fun to see more of what it's like for Auto at Beaumont Middle School. Maybe Robot surprises him at lunch?" Ask and receive, my dear!!! Anything for Toony!!!

Right off the bat, this one is probably gonna be, uuuhh… well, you know Auto by now. I have a couple fics that (aren't finished) mention a couple things about their school, so it is a lil developed. We'll just explore more of what my– i mean her– middle school days are like. Yes, feminine pronouns, for no reason in particular coughingdyingwhy Get ready for school, kiddies.

TW/CW: school, teachers, classmates/children, stress, anxiety, directives/missions/goals, emotions, trying to make friends, really trying to make friends, severe-level third-wheeling, rejection, bullying, disappointing a parent, skipping school, crushes, lots of colons]

Beaumont Middle School; and its anthropomorphic lightning bolt of a mascot, if you can believe it; was named after Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont, a 16th century Spanish inventor that improved very many instruments and methods to a wide array of working fields, all done to make things better for the people that had to actually do these things. From furnaces to diving, and the steam engine he developed to drain mines of toxic fumes and water: Beaumont was named after a pretty advanced dude.

Which made it perhaps expected of them to accept the robotic student presented to them by another pair of Latin scientists. There were reservations by staff and school boards, but at the end of the day, Auto Maton was allowed to attend Beaumont Middle School to study its students.

Most people thought it was weird. A robot didn't belong in a human school unless it was an appliance or for maintenance or USEFUL in some way. But this thing was RECORDING them all: it was showing everything that they did and everything they did wrong and reporting back to… someone. Teachers were worried that it was going to out them for not doing their jobs. Parents thought that it would skew things unfairly in one direction or another: curving a class's grade to be better than another's or being so exceptional that it would demoralize the humans around it. The students, well…

Some of them admittedly thought that having a robotic student would be pretty neat. It would be able to ace everything that was thrown at it and help them do their work or just outright give them answers. Some were worried about it recording things as well, and the academically competitive were also worried about the skews. Some simply didn't want to share a class or school with something that wasn't a human.

But then it actually happened. And it wasn't what they were expecting.

The reason Auto Maton was here was to integrate with the students. She was supposed to be part of them, be their friend. It was a means to an end, but it was the easiest way to get the information that the Martinez scientists were after. They needed to know anything they could about the student body as a whole, and needed the individual case studies to determine things about how the kids learned and what would make it easier for them.

To ensure that kids were being taught at all, Auto was let loose with only elementary-level knowledge of subjects, so she was only as smart as the average sixth-grade freshman would be. Of course being a robot made it easier for her to retain things, and having that backup would help determine methods that would get other kids to retain things, too. If watching a video was going to help them remember the parts of a sentence better than a lecture on a chalkboard would, Auto was supposed to know.

She couldn't know it on her own: she needed the input of her classmates. A robot would be easier to talk to if it were more like they were. So Auto was outfitted with something that the Martinezs had spent hundreds of hours perfecting just for this purpose: they called it a "Personality Chip." It was a simulation of various human emotions that would make Auto's output more palatable to the people around her. She could talk like them and feel like them and react like them, and it would make her 'more human.' That should have been all it took to get them to accept her.

Except, it wasn't QUITE perfected. It was TOO good at replicating emotions, and it did it too much. It was scary. A machine shouldn't be able to feel the anxieties of upcoming tests, or the relief of a teacher forgetting to assign homework. It was very natural, and that made it very very UNnatural. It upset the kids and the teachers and most other humans that Auto encountered. Some weren't as put off by it, but those were the people that didn't care enough to consider that it was all code that they were talking to. But everybody else??? Well, they hated it.

This was never a secret to Auto. "Why do you act like that??" Asked more times than she could remember, and she had dozens of terabytes of space in her hard drive. "That's weird. I don't like that. Don't talk to me anymore." Or, at least, the nonviolent ones would be so civil about it. It happened a few times a day until she had met everyone at the school. Having that chip made the reaction… disheartening. Nobody liked Auto. And, salt in the wound, it meant that she was failing her objective. Which was also disheartening.

But she did try. She would try to talk to kids about the things that they liked. If she could become a little bit amicable with a few of them, then it would prove that she could make friends. They might mention something that they liked, such as a band or a movie, but since she 'wasn't a real fan' of any of those things, they didn't want to talk to her about it. She would ask about hobbies, like the doodles that kids would scribble on the sides of their notes, but "i don't know, i was just moving my hand." She would even inquire about somebody's plans for the weekend and get "oh, nothing" or "you can't come" as a response.

But if people weren't going to LET her in, then she was going to let herself in. She would join groups of working students, listening to snippets of conversations that they were having before she showed up. She would ask if they understood the assignment, to find the miracle that they all did. She would even sometimes give them the answer to a question or two, but rarely ever got thanked for it. Many didn't realize that she would have done that for them if they asked: help them complete their mission if they helped her complete hers. But nobody wanted her around, so she never really offered.

In the freer times, like lunch, she would sit with different groups. Sometimes she would try to be part of the conversation, mentioning how she liked something that they did or agreeing with an opinion about a teacher, but the kids usually lowered their voice when she was next to them. Sometimes, she would just sit quietly with them, which was maybe even more upsetting. "Why is he just sitting there???" A friendly wave and smile would drive them off and leave her all alone. In short: that wasn't working either.

But maybe it was just that she wasn't persistent enough with it. No one had the choice to be here, and what was one less choice to them if it meant success for Auto? Now she wasn't just an annoying classmate that would bug them every now and then: now she was a parasite. She would follow cliques around for days at a time, giving them no chances to talk without her hearing, and giving them no choice but to hear her useless rambling. She would latch onto groups of kids until she found better groups: at which point she would dump them completely until she ran out of others to follow, and then she would latch onto them all over again. No one was spared from her cycles, not even the outcasted individuals.

Don't get it wrong: those kids didn't want her either. ANYBODY at Beaumont would prefer to be alone for the rest of their lives than have to deal with Auto for a full day. It was funny to see her annoy any given clique of kids, until they became the victim and lost the will to live.

And again, those were the ones that DIDN'T bully her. They had the obvious ammo: "who would let a pile of scrap metal go to a human school?" "Why were you built like that?" "Do you go through the car wash?" "Can you tell my tv to play something good?" "What tastes better, double A or triple A?" "You get that you're not a human, right???" "You're stupid, nobody likes you." "You don't belong here."

A fact. A fact she couldn't escape. Even at home: the data was never sufficient. It was never good enough, she was never good enough. It was no use. But she didn't have a choice. This was all that she could do.

But one time- just one time- it was worth it. She followed people as she would and found someone along the way. Four someones, to be exact, with one being just like her. It was incredible, this feeling of friendship. It was better than she had ever expected it to be. It was happiness, it was fulfillment, it was exactly what she was programmed for.

But, it wasn't. These kids didn't go to Beaumont Middle School, and one of them wasn't even a human. This WASN'T what she was programmed for, and it was not at all satisfactory to her creators. It was proof that she COULD make friends with humans, but since these humans were not of the target group, they were useless for her research. In fact, they were a detriment to her life in the lab, as it made her creators DECIDE that she wasn't trying hard enough at school.

And, after experiencing actual friendship, SHE decided that she didn't want to try so hard. The kids at Beaumont decided that they didn't like her from before they knew her, so they were a lost cause. Auto couldn't go against her programming or change her directive, but that little Personality Chip in her helped her realize that there were better things out there: much better things. Blond things and musical things and things that rolled around on skates. And short, cubic, robotic things that made her feel like she didn't have to be alone. That there was hope for somebody like her. That there was something beyond friendship. A marvelous, fantastic thing.

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Auto was uninspired and leaning by a window in the school cafeteria. Her power reserves were enough to get her through a full 18-hour day, so full charges made this lunch period completely useless to her. She didn't want to bother people for friendship recently, so she spent the time alone. She didn't need it, but she figured that she could blame the behavior on needing a minor recharge through the solar panels on the upper dome part of her head. The fluorescent bulbs couldn't recharge her, so she stood by the window. She watched the plants outside gently swag with the light breeze.

She heard a tap on the window from the outside. There was a walkway there, so she figured that it was just a teacher telling her not to lean on the glass. She sat up and turned her head to see who it was.

Her hard drive skipped hard. "WHAT?" On the other side of the glass was her very best friend, Robot Jones; who was supposed to be at Polyneux Middle School right now. He grinned wide and waved at her.

Auto looked around. There weren't any school admins or deans nearby, and no other students were looking in her direction. She nervously reached for the edge of the pane and cracked the window open. "Robot!!! What are you doing here?!"

"Visiting my best friend!" He blinked cutely.

"Why aren't you at school?! You could get in trouble if anyone sees you!" She tried to stay quiet.

"I'm playing hookie! It's a normal thing to do on occasion."

"Who told you that???!!!"

"The guys!"

Auto's face fell. "Okay, that WAS a dumb question." She shook her head. "I thought the point was to stay away from school!"

"It is, but i needed something."

"What could you need from MY school?!"

He smiled. "I need you, Auto."

Her chassis wirred hard. It was really nice that Robot came to see her, even though it meant he risked getting in trouble for being here. It was exciting to sneak a talk like this with him. It was very nearly romantic of him to ask her to join him. Her head hurt. "What do you mean??"

"Come with me, Auto! There's not much time left in the school day since it's early release. They won't miss you in just this last hour." He waved her toward himself.

Auto knew that she couldn't do it. Even if the school didn't notice, two other people would. "My parents are gonna decommission me if they find out i ditched school!!!"

"Just stitch together some old recordings! They won't notice that it's old footage."

It wasn't as if Auto had never done that before, and her parents never did seem to notice. She gave it thought.

Auto looked around her again. There still seemed to be no eyes anywhere to see her, but she made double sure. She opened the window all the way, deciding to sneak out through here because it would hopefully be less noticeable than going through a door, and because it would be more fun this way. She stumbled to her feet like a baby deer and felt like she had to run like one too. "Come on, we have to get out of here!!!"

"Right on, Auto!!! You're gonna love this, i just know it!!!" Robot ran close behind her, glancing back to make sure no one saw them.

Auto thought to herself. "Well, i love something RJ. And he better not get me in trouble for ditching school!!!" She smiled wide, already liking the feeling of leaving all of that weight behind her.

[Post a/n: to be completely fair, i wasn't EXACTLY like Auto as a kid. There's obviously some embellishments for story, and probably false or implanted memories too. I definitely never bailed in the middle of the day like that.

I hope it was okay. OC-centric and a little rushed so Toonyrobot didn't have to wait too long, but i hope it's decent. Thank you again for the suggestion!!!]