somebody put me together

[hauntedsavior]

Damn it. She's put off getting this air filter changed for too long, and her display won't shut up about how there's a catastrophic failure in the intake port or whatever. A2 almost literally drags her body over to the mechanic's bench and sits herself down with a loud, unceremonious noise. She can talk just fine, but literal sirens in her head keep going off every time she tries, so she's speaking loudly to Brigitte, too.

"Finally caught up with me. I need a new air filter." Should be simple enough. Doesn't mean Brigitte can help, but she's the best hope A2's got.

Comments

[hauntedsavior]

A2 put one leg up on the bench, then physically lifted her other with both hands before getting fully horizontal and tilting her head back to better expose her neck. Good thing she'd cut her hair. Made this a lot easier.

"Being in the middle of a sandstorm didn't help," she said, "But the last time I had this replaced was... I don't know. Before your dad had you." The Lindholms had been A2's mechanics for a while now. Even she lost track.

[theirshield]

Brigitte let out a low whistle at that, before reaching for the panel she knew-more from a diagram than direct experience, since her father usually did most of A2's maintenance work-should house the unit. Starting to unfasten it, she shot a glance up towards A2's face.

"Does this hurt at all? Being repaired, having parts replaced? We usually use anesthetic and fall unconscious for... the closest equivalent we have." Though she supposed the android was probably well aware of that already.

[hauntedsavior]

A2 didn't wince, but she didn't exactly seem comfortable—most of it was the alarm bells in her body, again, and her display was freaking out about a damaged or loose filter because she could never actually get it to understand when a part was being taken out on purpose.

Inside her neck there was a fair amount of machinery all working in tandem—a tiny oscilloscope to modulate her voice, tubing to pump fluids (oil, coolant, whatever) from what had to pass for her heart up to her central processor in her head, and of course the filter to prevent anything from getting too deep inside and damaging more important parts. Which she suspected had already happened, but whatever.

"It's annoying, but I can deal with it," she said. "Easier to shut out pain when I know what it's for."

[theirshield]

"Should you be... shut down, or whatever, for this then?" After undoing a few screws, Brigitte began to carefully tug on the filter, unfastening its connections once they were exposed. "Oh! Sorry if that keeps you from talking."

The old filter let out a puff of dust as it was released, clear evidence of the sandstorm A2 had mentioned. Brigitte blew on it, but she'd need far stronger wind than what she could herself provide to clean it out at all.

[hauntedsavior]

And there it was. Red exclamation point displays, klaxons in her ears and nowhere else, if her pod were still around it would be shouting at her... she got it, okay? God, she should've had herself shut off.

"It's fine," she said, louder than she wanted to. The voice modulator was still working just fine, after all. "Just replace it fast so my body shuts up." God, she hoped that was everything that was wrong with her.

[theirshield]

"Alright, this shouldn't be too hard." She'd watched her father perform similar maintenance, after all. Just plugging the filter into her wiring would be enough to make some of the alarms stop going off.

Next was the more delicate part. Sure, screws usually made things simple enough-but it required very precise placement on her part. Holding her breath, Brigitte slowly slid the filter into place, looking to A2 to tell her when and if everything stopped shouting at her.

[hauntedsavior]

Good. The blaring red was slowly being replaced with neon yellow that, while no friendlier, at least shut off some of the "status: critical" alarms and dropped it down to a warning. "Good," she repeated out loud, and waited for everything to shut off as she felt the filter slipping into place.

And the alerts started slowing down and normalizing further, from yellow to the familiar white of her HUD. The only one that remained was something about re-securing it, which was admittedly kind of an important thing to be warning about, but at least this was a safe scenario and everything else was more or less shutting up.

"Almost good. Just screw it in."