When Madeline finally finished blow drying her hair, applying makeup to her face, and all the other things she did to keep herself looking much more seemly than myself, she did agree to my suggestion that we have breakfast together.

Using another ration item, our displays expanded and plopped a plate onto the nearest horizontal surface.

I had a plate of eggs benedict with a side of home fries and some fruit. Just like yesterday, silverware was not provided. As I got up to grab some, I glanced at Madeline's plate to see what she had. It looked like an absolutely massive breakfast burrito. I watched her peel off the tinfoil, and she took a large bite. Her eyes closed in rapture.

She probably wouldn’t need a fork. She might want a drink though, so I asked her. She took a moment to swallow her food, and responded.

“Water’ll do. Wish I had some orange juice, though.”

“Yeah. Personally I’d kill for a cup of coffee.” Madeline didn’t really like caffeine, so no coffee or tea of any sort was available in her apartment.

The lack of orange juice came down entirely to her unwillingness to go grocery shopping.

That and the fact that she drank so much of the stuff that no supply could ever last her very long.

I grabbed another couple mugs, and filled them with good old municipal tap water. The water around here was decent, but it didn't taste quite the same as the stuff back home.

I handed Madeline her mug and started in on my own meal. I sliced open a poached egg with a butter knife, and dipped a chunk of fried potato into the runny yolk. It was lovely. I speared another homefry with my fork and dipped it into the hollandaise sauce. Divine. I loved hollandaise. Some might deride it as warm mayo, but it was so much more. It was savory, the lemon balanced out the rich butter fat, and it egg-celently complemented an english muffin topped with seared tomato and canadian bacon. The poached egg was great too, with firm whites and yolks that were perfectly custardy.

I gulped some water, and glanced at Madeline. For her part, she appeared to be really enjoying her breakfast burrito.

“How is it?” I asked.

“Really good.” she said between a mouthful of food.

“What’s in it?”

“Chili verde, eggs, potatoes, bacon, and cheese. My go to order.”

“Nice.”

I turned my attention back to my meal. I was careful to balance my consumption of crispy potatoes, making sure I got enough sauce on each one, but not so much that the eggs benedict itself was left bereft. The benedict really was amazing, and the tomato was perfectly ripe, adding that bit of brightness that the rest of the meal needed.

There were those that preferred the tomato to be absent in their eggs benny, but I couldn’t understand that myself. Tomatoes were one of the few things in life that really made it worth living.

After I finished off my main dish, I snacked on the fruit. Sliced peaches, apples, and a handful of grapes were arranged neatly in a bouquet on the far side of the plate. The peaches were juicy and sweet, the apples tart and crisp, the grapes delightfully acidic.

Man, good food was the closest I came to seeing the face of god, I swear.

I saw Madeline eyeing my fruit, having finished her burrito. I gave her a couple grapes and some apple slices out of the goodness of my heart.

She’d have to kill me to get any of my peaches, though.

Thankfully. she seemed happy enough with the offering. Neither of us would be murdering the other, yet.

I could see her peeking at my peaches. I shoved the last few slices all in my mouth and chewed briefly before swallowing the pulp and nectar in a moment of incomparable satisfaction.

I pointedly ignored the crestfallen look on Madeline’s face and moved on. “So we need to take out the garbage, and there’s a lot of it so you're just going to have to cover me while I make the trip to the waste disposal room on the first floor.”

There was a waste disposal room every couple of floors, and in our case that meant making a trip to ground level.

“Is there really a point? I mean no one is going to come take the trash for a while I suspect.” she said.

“We can’t just let it rot in here, it's already starting to stink.” I shot back.

“Yeah, but l think making a trip to the garbage is a bit unnecessary. We could just shove them in our inventories after all.”

“I don’t really relish the Idea of making my inventory into a garbage dump, Miss Madeline.”

“Leo, you’ve already got the remains of a million dead plastic robots in there, not to mention an actual human finger. I don’t think a couple garbage bags is going to make much of a difference.”

“It totally does! What if there’s some sort of cross contamination in there or something?”

“You. Have. A. Fucking. Finger” she deadpanned.

“Exactly! I need to keep that thing sterile!”

“WHY!?” She threw her hands up in that particular way she did, with one arm clearly going higher than the other.

“Because!!!”

“Because why!!!???”

“I’m still hoping to return it!”

“Jesus Christ Leo.” Her palm met her forehead with an audible slap.

“You know I can’t stop myself from trying to fix people.” I sighed.

“It’s your greatest character flaw, I’m aware.” She said, breathing out a sigh of her own.

And she wasn’t wrong. Part of the reason we got along so well was because she took absolutely none of my shit in that regard. She was capable of setting boundaries in a way I just couldn’t, much to my regret. My need to just get all up in peoples business had caused me no small amount of trouble in the past.

It didn’t always end terribly though, sometimes I only got my heart slightly broken. Or I just spent a bunch of my emotional energy each week bashing my head against an impenetrable brick wall, like with Fucking Jacob.

“Earth to Leo, Earth to Leo, ground control isn't finished yet!” Madeline snapped her fingers at me crankilly.

“What, sorry?” I responded dumbly.

“I’ll just shove the trash in mine.” She showed her inventory to me. It was much emptier than mine, as she hadn’t thrown in every one of her surviving personal belongings in it like I had.

“I mean if you want to. No real guarantee it isn’t going to rot in there though.”

“You better hope there is, or else that finger of yours is in trouble.”

“About that, would you be willing to let me borrow your fing-I mean freezer for a couple minutes?”

“No. Final answer.” Her tone was flat, and brooked little argument.

“Just until the finger reaches storage temp! Fifteen minutes tops!”

“Not fucking happening. End of story.”

“Madeline!”

“Leonardo. No. And-” She held up a finger to silence my protests. “I know you’ve got it in your head that there’s no way to stop time, which is why you're being so insistent about this.”

“Magic isn’t real Madeline.”

“It doesn’t even have to be magic! Look, My field of study is in the social sciences, not the classical or theoretical, but even I’ve seen that one Christopher Nolan movie.”

“What?” I asked, not getting the reference.

“I’m talking about fucking relativity! All you would have to do to make it seem like time stopped for an object from our perspective is yeet the thing at lightspeed, or put it near a black hole.”

“Ok, that seems a little unrealistic.”

“Leo! Jesus Christ!” She pointed at the television, or rather the three diminutive figures near it. “Your fucking robots are playing The Last of us!”

“What's your point?” I said, playing dumb just to fuck with her.

There was a moment of silence. She stared at me with a “you’ve got to be fucking kidding me’ expresion on her face.

I barely suppressed a shit eating grin, but I felt the corner of my mouth twitch. Madeline flung her hands up in the air a second time before letting them smack into the armrests of her chair.

“I’m done with you today. I’ll be in my room, don’t disturb me.” She rolled off down the hall and slammed her bedroom door behind her.

I giggled.

I knew she wasn’t all that angry; she probably just was done with my shit. She was a pretty introverted person at heart, and needed her alone time. That left me alone again, though, and with not a whole lot to do. I checked my display again. The single point of ATP was all that was of interest. I could use it on something, but I figured it would be best to save it. There was one thing I wanted to test, though.

I grabbed a box from my Inventory. It was the box that Fry came in, or rather all the little plastic parts that became Fry. I still had the box because I liked the art on it, and because it contained his accessories.

“Fry, mind joining me for a sec?” He wasn’t an active player in the game the other two were engaged in, so I figured he wouldn’t mind the interruption. He trotted over on his little legs, and I picked him up before placing him on the counter that comprised the dining area.

The plates we ate from had since dissolved. Though something occurred to me then; the plates also seemingly disintegrated any remaining food debris that was on them.

After all, while I liked hollandaise, I didn’t literally lick the plate clean.

Weird, but no weirder than anything else.

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I wondered where the food debris went.

Maybe into a black hole?

After all, Madeline was probably right about the whole relativity thing. I supposed I could throw a really good accelerometer or high speed camera in my inventory to test the lightspeed theory, but I had no Idea how to verify if it was near a black hole. Maybe I could try taking a picture with a selfie stick?

I noticed I’d once again neglected Fry due to my internal wanderings. I could see his attention starting to drift, and he seemed eager to get back to watching the other two play.

“Sorry buddy, I spaced. Just hold these for me, I want to see if you can use them.”

I handed him the two pieces of miniature weaponry I had retrieved from his box. A missile launcher and a heat machete. The same lights and shadows that covered a mech during its animation process appeared from his hands, and expanded to cover his weaponry. That seemed to settle it.

“Those feel alright?” I asked. He stowed the missile launcher on his back, and attached the machete to a clip on his waist before giving me a thumbs up.

“We’ll test them later. I don’t wanna ruin Madeline’s apartment.” He nodded. I noticed he was still carrying his machine gun. He didn’t seem to have anywhere to holster it. “I can hold on to that if you want.”

He looked down at it, seeming to deliberate for a couple seconds. He then proffered it to me, having apparently made his decision. I delicately picked it up. “I’ll give it back to you when we figure out how to get more ammo for you.”

Speaking of which, I bet my Resupply ability did just that. That might be a good use of that point of ATP I had. Then again, I had a whole bunch more mini-weapons of mass destruction. If I could just hand them a new gun each time, I could put off using Resupply for a while.

Then again, juggling that many guns, each of thes small enough to fit on a keychain, would probably get confusing. Especially given how similar many of them looked, being mostly uniformly gray pieces of plastic in contrast to the colorful robots that wielded them. Frankly I wasn’t even confident I could tell them apart if I didn’t keep them in the right boxes.

The weapons, I mean. I would never mistake one of my children for the other.

I dropped Fry’s gun back in the box and deposited the whole thing into the ol’ inventory, swapping it for another belonging to a similar Small fry, albeit one from a lot later on the timeline than the SAR-D1N-2.

The mecha itself was a pile of shattered red plastic in my inventory, but the spare gun was all I was after anyway. Gently I retrieved the weapon, a beam shotgun, from the box, handing it to Fry.

There was no lightshow, this time, and Fry shook his head.

It didn’t look like he could use it, sadly. I took it back, and set him down on the floor to play with his friends.

Now the question was, why?

Was it just because the beam shotgun didn’t belong to him, or was there a limit to how many guns a single mecha could have?

Further testing was required.

I made Four-arms and Mick-chicken pause their game, though they had to do so in the middle of a cutscene. They were hesitant to step away from the controller, and it wasn’t hard to see why.

A prompt to skip the current scene was threatening them next to the pause icon. A single mispress could cause the scene to be skipped irreversibly, and they’d be thrown into the next combat arena without knowing what happened in the story.

That would be a tragedy.

“If you press the big button in the center of the controller, it’ll put the game on standby, so you won’t have to worry about skipping anything.” I said to them amusedly.

They all stared at me blankly for a second, before Four-arms carefully reached a hand out to the center button. He looked to Mick-chicken and Fry for confirmation, their shared tension a match for a bomb defusal squadron’s.

They nodded at him.

He pressed the button.

They successfully exited to the homescreen.

Fists pumps and high fives were shared by all.

***

With that over, I proceeded with the tests. The long and the short of it was that no mecha could Animate weapons that weren’t theirs, though an Animated weapon could be used by any one who could pull the trigger, including me.

Though that was something of questionable use, considering that in order to actually use one of the tiny armaments I had to pinch it between my fingers and stick a paperclip or a piece of wire in the trigger guard.

That being said, a couple of my models wielded weapons so preposterously oversized that they could fit semi comfortably in my grasp, so I’d keep it in mind.

I also swapped out Mick-chicken’s rocket launcher for his other weapon of choice, a futuristic railgun capable of firing in five round bursts, according to the pamphlet. Looking over the build details and lore contained in the manual, I thanked my lucky stars that it was in english., given that a good portion of the build guides for my models were in japanese.

That normally wasn’t a problem before because the instructions were highly visual, so not a whole lot of reading was required. Now that I could bring them to life, though, it was a different story.

Mick-chicken’s rifle was on his back, and I watched him as he vigorously pushed on a controller’s thumbstick.

Four-arms had kept his sword strapped to his back. He didn’t actually come with any other armaments, oddly enough. He could use the sword in its folded state like a cleaver, but he had yet to do so. I assumed the reason for that was because there was no real benefit at his size.

I’d also done some more experiments with my inventory. The gelatinous resistance I felt when sliding something in and out of it had interested me, so I’d spent some time fucking with it. The one interesting thing I discovered there was that an object could only enter or exit it at a fixed speed. The gelatinous feeling increased to a strange firmness if you tried to push anything in faster. It sort of reminded me of a non-newtonian fluid.

Checking my display, my ATP still hadn’t come back. Which meant I was officially out of things to do. I had some books I could have been reading on my phone, but that did me little good considering how I’d lost it yesterday. I was bored shitless, in other words.

Madeline was still in her room.

It had been nearly two hours at this point. I had to wonder if she was all right, given her complete silence. I felt a little uncomfortable with the Idea of knocking on her door, however. This was her place after all, and if she wanted her alone time she deserved to be able to have it.

That was what had kept me from knocking for about a half hour now, but I was reaching the limits of my endurance. With all this time to myself I was starting to think about the end of the world, and that was putting me in a dire mood. I sighed, and got up from my slouch on the couch.

It was time to bother Miss Madeline.

I crept down the short hallway to her room, trepidation quieting my steps. I paused once I reached the door, though I worked up the courage to knock, tapping out a rhythm on the door.

“Madeline? How ya doin’?” I asked as casually as I could. I heard the quiet sound of friction on bedding, and then it was quiet again. I was about to say something again when she spoke:

“Not. . . great.” she sighed.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” I heard her sigh again in response.

“I don’t know.” she said after another pause.

“Well, is it alright if I come in?”

“Do you have to?” she groaned. The honest answer to that was no, but frankly she had me concerned. With me being the way that I was, leaving her alone seemed hardly an option.

“I did leave my music player in there, so at the very least I’d like it back.” I said, even though it wasn’t my primary concern.

“Is that where this thing came from? I gotta say there is an awful lot of MCR on this thing.”

“You’ve been snooping? Really?”

There was an awful lot of MCR on there, but there was also much worse. I shuddered at the thought of her reading the names of all my playlist.

“And you’ve got playlist for days on here too-”

“That's it, I’m coming in there whether you like it or not. You’ve got thirty seconds to make sure you're covered up by more than your undies.”

“Fine. The door’s unlocked.” I twisted the doorknob and stepped through the entrance.

Madeline was sitting upright in her bed, with her bottom half covered by her blankets. She tried to smile, but failed. Her eyes were red too, and her makeup was smeared slightly. Clearly she’d been crying.

I let out a sigh at the sight of her.

I wouldn’t say I was great at comforting people, but in all reality I didn’t think anyone was good at it per say. From experience I knew that all you could do was offer an ear and maybe an arm or shoulder depending on how well you knew the person. I knew Madeline pretty well, but. . .

Seeing her so fragile was new to me.

She tended to put on a tough front.

At least she trusted me enough to be around her when she was feeling vulnerable, I thought.

I did the mental trigonometry required to calculate the exact distance that it would be appropriate to maintain between us as I gingerly stepped over discarded laundry. I then sat at a point in the optimal range of conversation and bodily proximity. Far enough to not be up in her grill, but not so far as to be too emotionally or physically distant.

Madeline looked at me with mild bemusement. I’d like to believe that I maintained some sort of cool facade, but internally at least I knew I was freaking out. I’ll be honest, I was only sort of holding it together prior to that moment by keeping myself distracted, but seeing Madeline like that made it all hit. This was probably real. And feeling that made me into a being without words. So we sat there in silence for a while.

***

Eventually I got the frog out of my throat, and I spoke up.

“So I’d like to be a big tough guy and tell you that it’s all going to be ok, but you’ve known me long enough to realize that I’m an emasculated emotional train-wreck with the durability of used toilet paper,” I took breath before continuing, “but as you said yesterday, being here for you is the least I can do. So if you wanna talk feelings I’m here for that.”

Madeline took a second to digest my spiel. I noticed that my MP3 player was in her grasp, her hands fidgeting with its click wheel. She was staring just past me, her lips pursed. I glanced in the direction she was staring and saw the hole in the drywall she’d mentioned. I could see metal behind the cracked paint and plaster. She’d apparently hit a stud. I winced.

When her voice made its way past her lips, it came out strangled. “So when I told you about my awful fucking morning yesterday-” She coughed. Her face was red, and fresh tears were doing a good job of ruining her already messed up cosmetics. “I may have been underselling it a bit.”

“Yeah?” I whispered, lowered volume being the only way I had to express delicacy.

“Yeah. I uhh. . . I nearly died. And I didn’t want to make a big deal of it because I feel like I have to be tough. All the time. And I’m not gonna get into that right now, or possibly ever, but whenever anything bad happens I feel that even worse.” She coughed a couple more times. The effort of forcing her words out amidst her tears was clearly taking a toll on her throat.

“And a part of that is just how I process things. My response to trauma is usually delayed, I just- I don’t feel things until after everythings happened.”

“So it didn’t kick in for you until today?”

“And now it's hitting me like a bag of bricks.” She finished. Her face was all twisted up. She was full on ugly crying. “That’s- that’s why I ran off earlier. I could tell I was about to cry. And I gotta be tough, so I didn’t want you to see that, and now I’m a fucking mess!”

She grabbed a handful of tissues from a box on her bedside table and alternated between blowing her nose, wiping her eyes, and coughing.

“I’m gonna get you a glass of water. I’ll be right back.” she nodded, and I rushed off. I grabbed the last clean glass in the house and filled it as quick as I could before hurrying back.

I handed her the glass. She croaked out a thanks. I sat back down on her bed. Her wheelchair was also technically an option, but sitting in it felt like it would be rude.

Madeline composed herself a bit and continued speaking. “I just. . . Don’t know. The day before yesterday I felt like I had things figured out, and now I don’t.”

“I hear ya. I spent most of today and yesterday half convinced none of this was real.”

“Yeah. Me too. I haven’t been able to get myself to open any of the blinds yet.”

“I’ve been intentionally avoiding looking outside myself.” I said. We were both quiet again for a bit. Madeline slowly got control of her breathing, raising a hand to her chest and taking deep breaths.

“Honestly I kind of want to just stay inside today, but I keep stressing out about running out of food or the power going out or something breaking down the door-” She coughed again. “I had a nightmare last night about being eaten alive. And I don’t got a vore fetish so it kind of fucking sucked.”

I laughed, and a little of Madeline’s smile made its way back to her lips. “Seriously though. I woke up sweating like I had a fever. It was awful.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“And. . .” She took a deep breath. “I’m worried this is permanent.”

“What specifically?”

She waved a hand around. “All this! Everything.”

I got what she was trying to say. “You worried we’re living through the apocalypse?”

“Yeah. . .” She let the word out in a long exhalation.

“You know the end of the world isn’t a thing right?” I said, reassuring her as much as myself.

Madeline was giving me that you’ve gotta be shitting me look.

I spoke again to explain.

“I’m not fucking with you, believe it or not.”

“Go on.” She said, squinting her puffy eyes at me.

“I mean that nothing really ever ends.”

“Look Leo, I’ve heard shit about how the planet will live on with or without us, and while that’s great, it ain’t much comfort at the moment.”

“Humanity probably isn’t going anywhere.” I explained. “We’re just experiencing a shift. And after the shift, there will be a new normal. It won’t be the same as the old normal, but there will be a new normal. Because humans are good at that sort of thing.” She chewed on that for a bit before replying.

“Yeah, I’ve read enough history to know you're probably right- ” she coughed and took another sip of water- “but it still fucking sucks.”

“Look at this way,” I grinned, “we won’t have to see the next fascist dictator get elected president!”

“Oh please Leo, Times of crisis are the perfect opportunity for powercraving despots.”

“But with no internet we won’t have to see it.” I emphasized.

“Touché.”