The next several weeks flew by in a flurry of productivity. Tapper delivered everything he brought back from the mall, starting with the museum tablets with enough historical knowledge to make Ms. Uxral openly weep. Then Tapper had the bright idea to scavenge the remaining good arm from Drillbert and present it to Aazran, who refuted it on the basis of incompatible ports. Besides, even if they were compatible, Aazran said he would never wear anything so big. Tapper tried to offer making the ports compatible, but he really wanted to finally clear this quest from his list so he decided to take matters into his own hands.

Aazran now shared a bench seat with Struzick most days, watching advertisements together. Not only did it double the rate they earned watch time for movies, the two would heckle the advertisements together and shout wild falsehoods, other people sometimes joined in just to watch their commentary. Together they added life to the warehouse, and Tapper learned several colorful words from them.

But it also meant that Aazran would now occasionally lower his guard, so once he was settled Tapper clasped his hands together and mentally commanded the latches in his left shoulder to open. With one fluid motion Tapper swung his own arm up and over, striking Aazran like a club right onto the bullseye of his exposed shoulder port. The veteran soldier yelped in surprise, and on instinct threw Tapper off with a disarming flip. A complicated maneuver for anyone, especially when it required two arms.

"Aye ya daft bot! Ah... oh! Thank you? Uh, are you alright?"

Tapper extracted himself from the jumble of chairs he had landed in and said, "Not to worry, Mister Aazran! I can make do with this!" He pulled out Drillbert's arm with some effort, its fist clenched into a thumbs-up gesture that Aazran answered with his new hand. The motion flipped back its thumb and lit the hidden flame, a cherry on top for the old saboteur. Tapper left Aazran to play with his new toy, and as he fiddled with the drill arm he received the notification of a job well done.

[Quest: Lend Him a Hand complete! Perk reward: Ministry of Silly Walks, keep your feet unpredictable to keep stable.]

Another mysterious perk, this one accepted and forgotten when Tapper slotted in the spare arm a moment later.

[Augmented cyberlimb detected: Drillbert's Drill Bit, requires attunement to unlock augment ability]

[Would you like to attune to Drillbert's Drill Bit? You have 3 slots out of 5 available. Y/N]

He happily accepted, and the new walking perk kicked in when the oversized limb knocked his center of gravity out of alignment. Tapper leaned nearly 20° to the left and his legs started to kick out in the opposite direction, never quite accurate enough for him to stay still but always keeping him from fully toppling over.

The ratbird, still following around the guardsman's feet for any chance to gobble up spilled food, jumped on Tapper to sniff at the odd sight. Its presence didn't seem to alarm anyone, and when he offered to dispose of the vermin Struzick just shrugged. "Nay lad, this is one war of attrition that I don't mind losing."

Struzick also still carried the dead coil rifle with him, and when Tapper asked to interface with it Struzick worked the weapon with some hesitation. The vet admitted that after all these years of carrying the coil gun it had become a sort of security blanket, even though it would never fire again, and Aazran leaned over to interject.

"Just give the bot a full rundown and he can probably build you another one. Fairgood knows you've told me enough times." Then Aazran sat bolt upright and acquired an exaggerated British accent before continuing, "See here, Tap ol' chap, coil rifles create a spark of PSI energy and roll it down special tubing to harden the spark into a plasma bolt. Longer tubing means harder bolts, and thus the coil design! What-ho, jolly good."

Stuzick affectionately called Aazran several synonyms for 'moist' and disassembled his rifle with the quick hands of practice. He laid the components out on a table, but Tapper only needed the piece containing its universal port.

Tapper plugged in and instantly bumped against the firewall of its terms of service. It was a large and imposing firewall, but as Struzick put it the weapon was "tossed" by a corporation that no longer existed to maintain their own contract. The firewall, despite its absolute coverage, now stood flimsy and full of holes and it didn't lash out at Tapper if he was careful. He initially meant to read a copy of the contract for study, but maybe he could download the original in chunks and delete it before he absorbed anything...

That is, if Tapper could determine exactly where the terms of service interacted with the rest of the programming. An attorney robot could have likely extracted the contract with a scalpel, but a bartender robot carved out large chunks of the program wherever he saw the firewall pop up. By the time Tapper realized the potential damage he was causing it was far too late to stop, so after he finished deleting every trace of the weapon's contract — along with most of its core programming — he topped off the rifle's energy cells with his own mana. Just one point of mana caused an overflow, and in this strange program astral space he could feel the energy runoff escaping the coil gun as sparks and steam.

Returning to his senses in the physical world showed a sun several hours along its skyward path. Aazran and Struzick were back to watching advertisements on their shared wide chair, the former idly scritching the ratbird nestled between them with his newfound cyberlimb. Fighting against the distracting feelings of guilt, Tapper tried to explain his process and watched Struzick's face twist with signs of betrayal.

Before the guardsman could start his tirade, Aazran barked out a laugh and grabbed his partner by the shoulder. "Relax already! This bot is full of surprises. 'Sides, not like he could turn that cludgeon into any less of a gun." Aazran wiggled his robotic fingers towards a blinking green indicator light on the rifle, and the guardsman made a double take.

Struzick snatched the gun with both hands and went through a long but rapid process of preparing the weapon, exactly how he had done every day for over twenty years. Physically the rifle was still pristine, but its operational readouts... the guardsman shot Tapper a look of disbelief before striding out of the warehouse without a word. Aazran and Tapper scrambled to follow and found the man standing in the middle of the open square with the rifle at his shoulder.

Coils of crystalline glass around the barrel glowed with pale blue life, lighting the steam wafting off the heatsink fins and giving the entire weapon an almost ethereal outline. All motion paused just long enough for Struzick to hold his breath, and with a muffled crack he fired a shot into the air. The smell of ozone came and went just as quickly, and half a second later a puff of smoke indicated where the plasma bolt decimated the top of a garbage mound far in the distance.

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A handful of onlookers whooped in celebration of having their guard back in prime force, but Struzick held his weapon as if he were seeing it for the very first time. "It's... blank." He looked up at Tapper and explained, "The toss is gone, but so is most everything else. Aim assistance, distance measurements, wind tracking, almost everything is blank."

"Is that... beneficial for you?" Tapper asked, and Struzick's silver tooth shined when he smiled in response.

"Well I doubt I'll make any of the trick shots that made me famous within my unit as a fresh soldier —"

"Your muttonchops are what made you famous," Aazran cut in.

"Shush, you. But Tapper, this is amazing! I have my baby back! How is it even possible for you to hack it so thoroughly?"

With the positive reception Tapper's confidence swelled and he gave the two vets a happy eyebrow wiggle. "Trade secrets, gentlemen."

"You're a weird robot, lad," Struzick said, but Tapper's social programming read positive body language at odds with the supposed insult.

"Is that… a positive connotation, Mister Struzick?"

"Aye, lad. Yes it is."

Tapper's faltering smile redoubled. "Then, thank you! Have an excellent day!" He waved with his oversized driller arm, the motion giving extra sway to the robots's awkward gait as he departed. Everything was coming up Tapper!

Struzick and Aazran watched Tapper teeter and totter. One armed the grip on his old weapon and the other adjusted the grip on his new arm, and in the quiet space between them long-dead embers started to glow with new life.

"That's your weird mate."

"You're the one that let him into town, Mutton."

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[Augmentation attuned: Drillbert's Drill Bit

Now fitting...]

The notification came with a wave of sensation as the arm finally, truly connected with Tapper's shoulder. He was relieved that the limb wasn't numb by design, until the arm started to glow and the sensation became searing fire. Dents started to form with loud pops and then instantly smooth themselves out, the very metal flexing under unseen forces. With every smoothed crinkle the arm shrank by degrees, and right on the edge of Tapper's pain tolerance the process ended.

Now the mining limb was noticeably smaller, still larger than his original arm but it no longer dragged him off balance. In fact it felt completely natural, as if Tapper had rolled off the factory floor with it installed, and with some focusing Tapper called up the information on the arm.

[Augmentations]

[Drillbert's Drill Bit, Left Arm

+1 Strength for actions using limb, drill takes 1 turn to activate and can be used as an unarmed weapon for 1d6 + Strength piercing damage]

[Suck-o-matic Vacuum, Left Back

Pulls in small objects within (1) m cone]

[Spray Spritzer, Right Back

Shoots liquid in (4) m line]

[Empty slot]

[Empty slot]

That explained why Tapper had to attune with this limb, and with sparks of excitement he activated the special ability. The fingers in his left hand instantly went rigid and lost all sensation, bending in preprogrammed motions to form angled ridges that met in a single point. When it spun into a whirling blur Tapper yelped and shut the function down — the last time this limb used that ability, it almost ended Tapper's life. But now that it was a part of him, he felt compelled to grow with it to become stronger. And also tell Ricky, there were new system messages to record!

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"Here, do something with this," Ricky said and nudged the pile of Drillbert with his foot. "There's some good tech we can salvage here, but my system says you already claimed it as loot and won't let my skills examine it." He held up a hand to preemptively stop Tapper and continued, "No, don't try to unclaim it yet. I want to see if your system will do anything else special like that arm. Give each part a close look and let me know what happens, but I'm definitely claiming this." Ricky snatched up the arm of Rethar's exoskeleton and used it to wave goodbye.

Tapper looked down at the scattered remains of Drillbert, shoved unceremoniously underneath one of the benches in the jitney, and his emotion center spun up an illogical theory. Tapper was already wearing two limbs from this robot, if he incorporated anything else would the mining programming start to take over? He was reasonably sure that Drillbert wasn't sapient when Tapper killed him, but what if? There wasn't enough data for his predictive algorithms to work with, which paradoxically only raised more questions.

A whisper of data came to Tapper, from the witchcraft section of his adventurer's library, suggesting how to prevent that. It was a small thing, a process only known in secrets, and yet every single magician knew of it because that's just how magic works. Tapper already innately knew the process the same way he knew how to brew potions and braid spells, he just had to stop computing questions and urge his soul forward.

Tapper powered down his visual input and turned his processing power towards the feeling, attempting to follow the process this time without trying to stop it or let his mana run wild. His visual module, without eyes available, attempted to see through his tactile inputs and his sense of feel suddenly grew to laser focus.

There was a metal sphere in his hands. When did Tapper pick up Drillbert's cranial unit, his skull? Fingers traced lines over the mismatched panels, the bad weld jobs, the dents and dings, wondering how many stories were written here.

A witch knows how to read stories. Tapper turned the skull upside-down and his mental image turned fuzzy as the crystalline fibers in his fingers his soul threads reached out. But there was no point, because there wouldn't be a universal port here, just the CPU the brain. The crystalline threads ran over and through every microchip, interfacing directly soul searing with a torrent of data so strong that it felt warm with knowledge and secrets.

Only, the data was too fragmented to be of any use. Not enough life in the brain, just rocks for thoughts but not the context. His fingers dug deeper into brainflesh but stopped when he felt lines of golden thread, with enough magic wherein to weave the forbidden knowledge together.

[You have learned a new spell component: Drill!]

Tapper's eyes blinked open. He was still inside the jitney, still holding Drillbert's skull — no, the cranial unit chassis — in his hands. Except, the cranium's interior was scraped clean from any trace of silicon wafers and gold filament, and no trace of the computer components could be found within the vehicle's interior. They were simply gone, and the cranium rang hollow when it tumbled from limp fingers.

Tapper felt... dirty, as if his sanitation metrics were firing with no visible grime to report. He did recognize that learning a new spell was a noteworthy achievement, but if this secretive process felt so wrong then Tapper will keep it a secret.