Princess Relena ran out of my shop with her shiny, new, body wrapped in some leather offcuts. In my previous life, I’d read more than enough comics to read between the lines, and having a teenage girl interested in me wasn’t exactly high on my list of interests right now. Well, not like I had the time or organic equipment to respond to such a situation anyway. Still it was flattering in a way.

I clapped my hands together and rubbed them, to mentally put the matter aside and move on to the next topic. Laying on my workbench, was Ram’s body. I finally got her back and I was eager to get her to work. It was probably more accurate to call her Ram Mk II given how extensive the rebuild was after I’d overloaded her and blown out all her systems.

Ratchet had rebuilt the body from scratch, salvaging what we could from the original body, before she needed to be loaned out to the princess. The new body physically looked identical to how she did before the blow out, but was considerably stronger with heavy reinforcements and larger mana crystal ports.

Thanks to the raid on the Factory, I had some large fire crystals that I’d stolen from one of their forges. With these crystals, Ram should be capable of producing temperatures that would turn steel into butter. I also incorporated the plasma manipulation spells and related crystals from my LandMine hammer into her. I figured that she’d make better, more practical, use of them.

It didn’t take too long to convert her internals back from being able to support a soul core to a proxy configuration. I remote powered up the body and established the proxy connection. Once connected, I handed over control to the Ram Subroutine Protocol that had been laying dormant in my systems. Like my other proxies, I was aware of what was going on in the head of the proxy but at the same time let it handle things on its own without me having to directly control it.

Ram went through all of the usual system power-up checks as she came online and looked at the ceiling of the shop. She lifted an arm and held out a hand, waiting for me to grab it and help her sit up. The move reminded me of something regal given that this body had housed a princess for a couple of weeks now and I chuckled at the small joke of it. I grabbed her hand and felt a sensation of joy coming from Rom. Somehow, I hadn’t even noticed that she had moved from her workstation to my side.

Ram sat up and swung her legs around and held out her arms, looking a bit embarrassed and maybe annoyed as she looked up and to the side. Rom grabbed Ram and pulled her in, hugging her tightly.

“Welcome back Ram,” I said, folding my arms and chuckling softly to myself.

“I’m back,” she agreed.

I noticed that her green pin-prick optic lights had dilated to half the size of her optic stones and turned pink. Huh. Did my eyes do that when I got embarrassed? Was it a bug, I mean feature, of the tweaked operating system that I’d given to Lena and now Ram?

“Master Prime... can we, please, not do that again?” she asked.

“Agreed,” I nodded, thinking back to how it felt when I’d overloaded her. The sensation had been like trying to lift a car and having every muscle in your body catch on fire while being struck by lightning.

“Well, that too...” she said, looking away, “but also being offline all that time...”

“Wait...” I trailed off.

I looked internally, and all my proxy subroutines were actively running even if they weren’t connected to a body. Carnivac and Shrapnel gave me the impression of sitting in a room, by themselves. Carnivac was meditating, while Shrapnel was working on designing himself a new body as well as the bodies of two friends.

I had also set up a subroutine that handled code development in the background. It handled most of the operating system development and spell crafting for the various features and systems I was creating for people. It didn’t have a form, really. The others likely did as a result of my imagination connecting the subroutine to the body they controlled. So this whole time, Ram had been running in the background by herself in a locked room and I simply hadn’t paid any attention. I could see rooms for Rom, Ratchet, Sentinel, Cyclone, and IronHide as well. The rooms for the active proxies felt like the insides of their heads, where all of their external inputs were coming. They reminded me of those virtual holodeck rooms with projectors on the walls.

IronHide was running but wasn’t active. He was in vehicle mode and just sitting in what looked like a garage. That subroutine didn’t get out much, as I generally only called on him when I needed a giant, and even then it was rare that I wasn’t in active control of the body. I guessed that the subroutine hadn’t developed as far as the others and was less autonomous. Did the others have an ego of their own?

I decided to label the code development subroutine “MainFrame” and gave it the side-quest of creating a common room for the subroutines to enter as a means of having more direct contact with each other than the awareness pipeline that currently existed. At least this way, those that were “offline” wouldn’t be trapped in a room with small windows looking out at what everyone else was doing.

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I patted Ram on the shoulder. “There’s still so much I don’t know or understand... But I do know that we have a lot of work to do.”

She nodded and hopped off of the work table. Rom gave me a little bow and hurried back to her own station. I watched as Ram found her forge hammer and hefted it, feeling its weight.

“I’m half tempted to rename you Solus,” I said with a smirk to my voice.

Ram looked like she was thinking it over for a minute before responding and pointed her massive hammer over to her sister, Rom. “Together, we are Solus.”

“Quite right,” I agreed. “Now, Carnivac needs a new body. Let’s not keep him waiting too long.”

The two nodded in unison as Ratchet was already working on the design sketches and fabricating the endoskeletal components.

I brought Shrapnel’s subroutine to the forefront and found a little animated icon of Shrapnel’s head in my HUD. Mentally, I was able to review the body designs that he’d come up with and started pulling out all the materials that I’d need. In my HUD I could see the design schematics of three different body types. At Shrapnel’s size, nothing would be off the shelf, but there was still a lot of part overlap between the different body designs. I’ve long been a fan of designing building systems to streamline production and have single parts be reused in different ways. Shrapnel’s designs were reflecting that philosophy as well. Given that “Shrapnel” is me playing a role, I guess “duh.”

With the burst of inspiration, I pulled off chunks of metal with my fabrication skills, pouring mana into it and forcing it into component shapes. The process was a lot like 3D modeling in CAD, except that the part was physically in front of me and being reshaped by the power of this magic. I had no idea if this was how native artisans worked in this world, but it was the skill package that the cosmic SysAdmin Beam had given me.

I fabricated enough of Shrapnel’s new body to allow him to be connected to it and let him work on completing the external shell and extra components. While he worked away at his new skin and armor, I worked on the other two bodies. Work on the scale of an action figure went ridiculously faster than a full sized Automata and within a handful of hours, I’d finished the internal frames for both bodies.

I spun up new proxy subroutines for each one and designated them as Bombshell and Kickback. Shrapnel Mk II was slightly larger than the previous body, but still action figure sized. He’d gone from being roughly six inches tall to eight inches. The slightly larger size wouldn’t hamper any covert operations and might give him some added strength to open doors and windows and such. He could still transform into a stag beetle like before, though he also still lacked any sort of voice modulator. The size of the body, along with the extra transformation components, didn’t allow for it. Especially with the additional upgrades the Mk II had.

Bombshell was given a more feminen looking body type and personality. I knew that didn’t match up with her namesake, but I wasn’t about to make her a sadistic “mind taker” like the original character either. Like her namesake, she transformed into a rhinoceros beetle. Like Shrapnel, she also lacked any voice modulator. Once the subroutine connected, I set her to work, finishing off her own armor and skin components.

Completing the set, Kickback was taller than the others at ten inches, but stretched out like a basketball player. His alternate mode was one of a grasshopper and covered in little spikes. All three of them had been detailed to look like little armored ninja in their robot modes. I had once seen a third-party company take that approach to the Insecticons figures and I really liked the concept.

Shrapnel would serve as the team leader and mechanic. Bombshell was designated for observation and defense while Kickback was focused on offense and combat. The three working together should be able to cover each other's backs pretty efficiently.

I completed Kickback myself as Shrapnel and Bombshell finished up their own bodies and connected to the proxy, bringing him online. My team of mini-bots stood proudly on the desk. The first Shrapnel body had been hastily constructed and largely made-up as I went. This time, the new body, and the team as a whole, had been designed with infiltration and recon in mind. Each one also had access to a shared [Inventory] space so that they could store needed equipment or collect items in the field.

I had each of them transform back and forth a couple of times in order to check that everything functioned the way it was supposed to. I also went through a couple of basic tests for their abilities.

Shrapnel had a collection of embedded tools and a small fire stone powered blow torch to help with fabrication and repairs. Bombshell’s beetle armor formed two large shields in her bot mode. She could store them on her back like heavy wings but she also had a small shield generator that could cover an area of three feet. Normally that wouldn’t be terribly useful but given their size it would work out perfectly. Kickback had integrated swords and a kusarigama, or sickle chain weapon. I’d also given him a push-pull stone that would give him some measure of telekinetic control of the kusarigama and kunai that all of them were equipped with.

“Alright guys, looking good. Final test, let’s see Swarm,” I ordered.

They nodded to me and put their fists together. Each one partially transformed, splitting and combining as additional parts materialized from their [Inventory] space. When they were done, a single bot, of about eighteen inches tall, stood on the table. This new bot was named Swarm. I didn’t have a subroutine dedicated for it as the three component subroutines worked together in sync to control it and handle various aspects of its operation. I lamented that there was some “parts-forming” involved, which is to say that the component members disassembled and reassembled a bit and non-integrated parts like hands, feet, and combiner head required [Storage] when not in use. I could think of several ‘former fans that grumbled at the practice but it did make for better bots in all three of their forms.

Swarm had four arms and three sets of wings, but was otherwise mostly humanoid. It clasped fists with both sets of hands and bowed. The combiner tested its wings and flew above the desk, hovering for a few seconds before dropping and engaging the shield force field. It then stood up and threw out multiple flaming kunai that rotated and spun around it like fireflies.

“Very nice,” I complimented them, “very nice indeed.”