It’s funny how inspiration can hit you sometimes. For me, it often takes the form of a seed or a hatching egg. It has to break free and see the light of day regardless of what else is going on. I often fear that if I don’t act on it then it will be lost forever. To carry the metaphor a bit further, it can also demand a lot of effort and energy to be realized.

I scribbled away on the large sheets of brown craft paper that I used for roughing out my ideas before I got started building anything. Princess Relena, sorry Lena, found a stool and planted herself right next to me. Her shoulder rubbed against mine as she hovered over, watching me work. I got the impression of one that casually watches ants.

“So what is this thing?” she asked, jabbing a finger at my illustration.

“He’s working through a concept for a mana generator and battery,” Rom answered for me as I brushed Lena’s finger out of the way.

“Now Prime,” Lena chidded, touching my sketching hand, “you can’t grumble that people only want to deal with your proxies and then answer questions that I’m asking YOU via your proxy.”

I stopped sketching and set the pencil down. “That’s fair.” I turned and gave her my attention. “You haven’t been an Automata for long, but you know that we don’t eat or sleep.” She nodded. “To survive, we need mana. Nearly every living thing generates its own mana and gives it off in the form of magic. The mana that is consumed by the spell is released into the environment. Automata don’t generate our own mana. As far as I’ve learned, so far, Automata and undead are the only things that can’t. Instead we have systems that absorb mana from our environment.”

“It’s not like Automata are naturally occurring or that we evolved to be like this though,” Lena countered.

“True, we don’t occur naturally. We’re synthetic in that respect, but I’m sure we still evolved, though artificially, to this point. The first Automata probably didn’t have these systems and may have been more of an undead than what we are today.”

“Artificial evolution,” Lena rolled the phrase around, tapping her face plate.

“Well, from where I’m originally from, we would have called it iterative design. It basically means a cycle of design, prototyping, testing, improving, back to designing, and so on.”

“Ah, the old back to the envisioning slate as they say.”

“Do they?”

“Yes? It’s an old and well known saying?”

“Ah. Sorry, I’m not well versed in the idioms of this country. We had back to the drawing board.”

“That’s weird,” she said chuckling, “why would anyone draw on a board? You mentioned where you were originally from, just where is that?”

Crap, she caught me. I looked back at my sketching and started unconsciously tapping it as my mind raced, trying to think of how to answer her given she was infinitely more familiar with this world’s geography than I was.

“You’re from another world, aren’t you Prime?”

My head snapped up and whipped around to look at her. “What? How?” I got the impression of a smug, self satisfied look from her.

She turned from me and dragged her fingers along the edges of my paper. “It’s not common knowledge,” she began in a lowered voice, “national secrets and such, you understand. Every generation or so that overly religious and human-centric country to our west, the Jamnasian Theocracy, summons someone from another world.

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“I don’t know the details of whatever rituals they are performing but they abduct people from other worlds, call them heroes and conscript them into their armies to attack us. These heroes usually have abnormal strengths or aptitudes for magic and are used as powerful weapons to invade our lands and murder our people.”

I noticed that her fingers had curled around a prying knife as she turned to look at me full on. There was a tremble to her hand, but her voice was calm and deadly serious.

“While I’ve never heard of a summoned hero that wasn’t a human, I have to know. Prime, where did you come from and who summoned you?”

I looked at her for a while, collecting my thoughts, then gently took her hand holding the knife and placed it against a seam line between armor plates at my throat. I then held my arms out to my sides in an open, hug gesture and told her my story of how I arrived in this world. When I was finished, she remained still for a long time, the only sounds coming from Ratchet and Rom who continued working on her new body.

After a while, her body started shaking in that way that I associated with Shiro getting emotional. The knife dropped from her hand and she crumpled to the floor as she buried her face in her hands. I got down off of my stool, even crumpled on the floor, her head was at my waist. I only had to slightly lean over to hold her head to my chest.

“Oh Prime, I was so scared,” she sobbed.

“You were very brave,” I soothed, stroking her hair. “I am pretty formidable,” I joked.

“I was afraid that I’d finally found a real friend and you were an enemy,” she said, ignoring my joke and looking up at me.

“Officium ante seipsum,” I mumbled, “Duty before self. That can be admirable, putting the needs of the country and your station above yourself. Though that sense of duty can often be abused by those in positions of power. Well... I’m not your enemy. Well, maybe a little bit if it means fighting the empire on behalf of the Automata slaves... Now I don’t know if I’m an enemy or not...” I said absently, patting her head.

She started laughing and brushed my hand away before standing up and brushing imaginary dust off. She then bent over and touched her forehead to mine.

“As far-fetched as it sounds, I choose to believe you Prime. You’re probably not the first to arrive from somewhere else without being summoned. I’m just glad that you arrived here in our empire, rather than somewhere else.”

“I am pretty amazing, aren’t I?” I said, folding my arms.

“No one said anything of the sort my dear Prime. Now,” she said, getting back onto her stool and patting mine, “get back to work so that you can finish my new body. We have a schedule to keep.”

She was right, her new body would be completed in a day or two. In the meantime, I needed to make repairs to CloudBurst as well as install air brake flaps, on top of all the other stuff. I figured that we had four days until we’d need to hit the road to meet Prince Milliardo’s deadline for having the princess in the capitol. He, likely, assumed he was being unreasonable for demanding I do my investigation as well as bring her in time but he was thinking about travel times for people that need to sleep and take potty breaks.

I brought out one of the spare Automata bodies from my [Inventory] and started taking it apart. I got rid of all the things that weren’t needed. When I was done, I was left with the hardware systems that handled mana absorption and storage as well as the spark housing for the soul core. I then took a spare soul core and inspected it via my Dev Tools. I completely formatted it, obliterating the base operating system so that I could install my own. I had been dabbling with creating my own operating system anyway so I forked the code and focused on reworking the aspects that had to do with soul management.

I called the new operating system: Soulless Methodology Utility Terminal or SMUT, which I know is a terrible name. I’d think of something better, later. The new system didn’t require a soul to be bound to the hardware, infact, it wasn’t capable of supporting one. As far as an operating system went, it was stripped down to just the bare-bones needed to handle running the absorption and storage of mana. It couldn’t even handle the release of the mana and required an external system to interface with it.

It would need testing, of course, but it should allow any Automata, with the required permissions, to tap into it and either draw out the power or control it if other systems are hooked up to it. I built a simple housing for the loose collection of parts and tucked it all into a neat little package with terminal outputs. I ran a mana line from the outputs to a detached Automata arm and looked over at Lena.

“Wanna test this?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“I have no idea what this is, but yes,” she said enthusiastically.

I touched her face plate and pushed a file packet over to her.

“Prime... dear?” she said, blinking, “what, pray-tell, is a Smut Interface?”

“Ah, that’ll let you interface with the operating system I wrote for this thing. It’s perfectly fine.”

“Okay... installing...”

“Yeah, should be fine I imagine.”

“Prime!” she said, projecting glare at me.

“Kidding!” I said, laughing. “Okay, put your hand on the device, it should bring up the interface connection screen automatically. I don’t have any authentication in place yet for testing so don’t worry about that.”

“I truly wasn’t.”

“Okay so once it’s connected, you should be able to extend your thoughts out into the device.”

“I can! It’s quite strange, I can feel how much mana has accumulated as well as all the sensations from the attached arm... oh! I can move it!”

She hopped up and down in her excitement and let go of the device. The arm went limp and flopped back onto the table and the lights on the device went dark with the exception of the “charging” indicator to show it was absorbing mana properly.

“Oh, it cut off,” she said, looking disappointed.

“It did, but I’d say that was a successful test,” I said, beaming.