“You’re an Automata. If you have no master then you’re Unclaimed Property. I will claim you,” she said definitively, as if there was no more obvious outcome.

I turned to fully glare at her and walked right up to her. I had no idea if I was actually glaring or what facial expressions I was actually capable of, but I thought “glare” really hard. “The HELL you will,” I said with what was hopefully gritted teeth, looking up at her from inches away. Wait. looking up? I was shorter than this little teenage girl? Not the effect I had hoped for, but it still seemed to work. She jumped back as if I’d slapped her and looked shocked.

“You? You can’t talk to me like that! You’re an Automata!” she stammered.

“Idiot,” I spat and turned on my heel and started walking away.

She ran in front of me and put her arms out to stop me. “Look, I’m sorry. You’re the first Automata I’ve actually met, but anybody that finds a cool sword in the woods would expect to pick it up and keep it, right?” Her expression of innocence made it seem as though this was the only logical conclusion.

“And your first thought upon meeting me is to treat me like some finders-keepers thing and enslave me. Nice. Have a great life, kid.” I tried to move past her, but she blocked me again.

"Shea."

Spoiler: Shea Character Art

Shea, elf adventurer [https://img.wulongti.com/rr/autodot/characters/Shea.png]

“What?”

“My name. It’s Shea, not kid.”

“I’m very happy for you, enjoy your bear.”

“Okay, I’m sorry. I thought all Automata were just magic tools or puppets. The ones in the shops don’t move or seem alive until you buy them, and the ones I see walking with the rich people act like perfect servants.” She seemed a little shaken, like her view of the world was fundamentally altered, and she didn't know what to think anymore.

I sighed and looked up at the sky. “Thanks for letting me know this was a slave race, Beam.”

Shea followed my gaze up and asked, “who’s Beam?”

I sighed again and blinked for a long second. At least it felt like I blinked; I don’t think I actually have eyelids. “You know what, don’t worry about it. Not important.”

“Um... I told you my name. What do I call you?”

I thought about it for a second or two, then answered, “you can call me Prime.” Please forgive me, Optimus.

“Prime. You got it, nice to meet you!” When she spoke, her whole body seemed to smile. It was hard to stay mad at this kid, and I’ve always sucked at holding grudges. As if just noticing Sparky, she squealed, “he’s so cute! I’ve never seen a pet Fire Squirrel before.”

“Sparky isn’t my pet. I helped him out with a problem he was having with his magic, and now he’s decided to hang out with me.”

“...helped out with his magic. You are very interesting, Mister Prime,” she said, staring at me intently.

Mister? I didn't have any Mister parts, but sure, why not?

“Hmmph. So what’s up with the bear? Seems like a pretty tough customer for you.”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Oh, that." She sighed. "I had a subjugation quest from the Adventurer’s Guild to bring it down. Though I admit it was probably too high a quest for me. The Thunder Bear is a rank C but I’m only a E. I’ve got water magic, so I thought that I’d be able to take it down easily.” She shrugged.

“I imagine that’s only true if you have a high level of water magic and can disrupt its electricity without getting zapped yourself,” I said speculatively.

“Yeah. Lesson learned,” she said with a lop-sided grin.

“So what do you do with it now?” I asked, gesturing at the corpse.

“I need to collect its mana crystal and bring it into the guild. It’s a shame I can’t bring the corpse in, as I could sell the materials, but there’s no way I can carry that thing.”

She drew her sword and shoved it into the chest of the bear before plunging her arm into the wound and pulling out a large crystal that glowed with magical energy. I was surprised to see this young girl so easily and thoughtlessly bury her arm up to the shoulder in gore. She set the crystal down on the ground away from the corpse and began a low chant while holding out her clean hand. As she chanted, water droplets formed in the air around her hand and coalesced into a wobbly ball of water in her palm.

I opened up [Console] to [Inspect] her magic as she performed it. I was really curious about how magic worked in this world and how I could interact with it. There were no console errors or warnings; everything ran smoothly. Looking at the runtime logs, I could see in real-time the functions that were processing her magic. It appeared that her chant was a collection of keywords that triggered several small functions. One to gather moisture from the air, one to contract the moisture into droplets, one to cycle through generated droplets and collect them into a ball, and another to keep the collected ball from collapsing. It was pretty interesting to see happening but seemed rather inefficient. Once she’d gathered enough water together, her chant ended with a new word that triggered a loop with eventListener to keep the ball together.

Shea took the ball of water and used it to clean her bloody arm and clothes and then crouched down to clean the mana crystal. As I watched her, she started to look self-conscious and looked back up at me.

“Um... What is it? Why are you staring at me?” she asked, before releasing the now disgusting bloody blob of water and dirt onto the ground.

“Ah. Sorry." I stammered as I realized how intently I was staring. "I was interested in how you were doing your magic and was watching the magic functions you were triggering with your chant keywords.”

“You can see the magic functions? I had to study the functions for a long time before I could use the chant keywords and then chain them together.” She seemed puzzled but intrigued.

People can’t normally do that? Maybe it was because I was a machine, or maybe this [Console] ability is unique? I guess I can’t hide that now. If I could fix Sparky’s code, maybe I could rewrite some of hers, I knew I shouldn’t but curiosity overwhelmed me and I had to find out.

“If you don’t mind, I think I can improve your casting efficiency. I seem to have some [Programmer] functions and abilities.”

“Are you a great Sage??” She was definitely interested now, "I’ve never heard of such a thing before!”

Crap, I guess this is a unique ability. Again, thanks Beam, but this is better than being someone’s slave.

“I don’t know about being a sage or anything, but I’m sure I can write a quick function for you that can condense all those chant keywords down to a single command.”

“YES, PLEASE!” She looked so excited for the chance to improve her magic that I was a little worried that she might explode.

“Sure, not a problem.” It was an easy enough thing to do; in her source file, I added a new function that just ran through all of her chant keywords once, then another function to call the first one in a loop until the water mass reached a certain threshold. “Okay, all done. Try using [waterGlob()]. It’ll generate a glob of water the size of your fist. If you need other sizes, you’ll need to go back to the chanting or I can modify it to accept size parameters.”

Shea looked sideways at me, then looked at her hand. “[waterGlob].” Like before, the droplets gathered and formed into the ball of water in her hand, but this time she didn’t need to keep chanting and it gathered much faster, since the function could run the subroutines asynchronously.

“Whoa!” she screamed. “Whoa! Really, whoa!!”

Shea then started running around the area shouting [waterGlob] and generating multiple globs of water until she got woozy and fell over. When she fell over, the globs collapsed and drenched her. It looked like she had kept casting the spell and maintaining the globes until she ran too low on her mana to keep them going. She sat up, soaked to the bone and looking sleepy, but happy. “Yeeerrr... pretty amashing mishter prime...”

I had to laugh; this kid was growing on me. I took a look at the giant bear corpse. It would be a shame to leave it here to rot if it could be sold or processed for materials. In my old world, I couldn’t stand when hunters would kill animals for a trophy and leave the rest of the animal dumped in the woods. This felt like the same thing.

“Hmm... [Inventory]”, I said, as I extended my hand to the bear carcass. Like some sort of digital effect, the bear broke up into small cubes that floated into the air and vanished. Soon there was nothing left, and I felt a sensation of an item being added to some internal inventory. “Well, that’s handy.”

“You have Inventory?? OhMyGoshThat’sAmazing!!”

“Is it really that good?”

Damn. I thought for sure that [Inventory] would be more common.

“That’s a REALLY fantastic skill to have. Whoever built you made you really top of the line!”

“Is that so?”