I felt a small touch on my hand.

My little boy was gently patting me, attempting to provide comfort.

I managed to wipe away my tears for, what I think was the fourth time that morning? I Kinda lost track, it had been a bit of a rough day.

Regardless, I at least had an ally. An ally with articulating hands as it turned out. Whilst it was attempting to comfort me, Fry had opened a previously shut fist.

Huh.

“Can I pick you up?”

The little guy nodded its consent and stuck out both its arms, like a child waiting to be carried. I suppressed an urge to make squealing noises and gently raised him up to take a closer look.

The detailing on him was different than I remembered. There was way more of it, for one. I could see crevices and paneling on his outer armor that just wasn’t there before. I also noticed, as my chibi robot tried and failed to stay still, that the joints were a bit different too. He could bend at the waist now, and he couldn’t do that before. He also had functioning knees and elbows, which was a sizable change from his previously near statuesque levels of articulation. He was also a good bit heavier. It was less that my model had simply been made to move, and more that it had been brought to life as a ‘real’ version of itself.

With one exception. There was no cockpit.

While there are few in the genre that eschew the trope, for the most part, mecha have a cockpit inside them that a pilot physically rides in, so as to give the battles they fight in higher stakes. After all, if your robot is remotely controlled, then there’s little to no consequence to the story if it loses the battle and is destroyed.

This was not to say that all model kits included such, and indeed this adorable rendition of the fry didn’t. But for the model to receive such an upgrade and not include the cockpit seemed strange to me.

Maybe my ability could only work off of details that were already present in the model.

I had no way to test it now, though. Of my three remaining mechs, none had a cockpit. It didn’t help that only the more expensive kits generally had them.

Still, animating another one couldn’t hurt. . .

I put down my new olive green companion and opened my display. I noticed that my ATP bar was no longer full. This wasn’t a surprise; the listing for my Animate ability had even told me how much using it would cost, which in this case was one unit. My bar had reduced by exactly a quarter, so I had four ATP total.

This time, I decided to Animate a much larger model with more weapons. This one had an official name that I frankly didn’t care to remember, but that I had long ago dubbed Mick-Chicken. I did so because whoever had designed it had decided that a rooster would be the sensible design motif for a giant robot.

It had big chunky drumsticks for legs, taloned feet, a chest made from two bulging plates, a vaguely wing shaped shield on each arm, and a laser mounted on top of its head in place of a cockscomb. It was dumb, and needless to say, I loved it.

Of important note however, was that the listed ability cost was the same as for the much smaller fry. This guy was seven inches tall, more than double the height of the tiny Fry.

Also, his listing was “Mick-Chicken”, and not the long winded nonsensical string of characters that was its official title. Something I only noted because nobody called it that but me. How did the display know to call it that? I pressed the help button, but it did not cede any answers to me. Just the amount of time until I could use it again.

Oh well.

I pressed the Animate button, and the same lightshow occurred once more. After that was over, it seemed to wake up. It turned its head to me and lowered its weapon in order to salute me. Or to be more precise, it tried to, as instead of a neat salute it instead smacked one of his big shields into its head mounted laser. His head snapped back comically, and the poor guy fell on his behind, knocking the other mecha on the shelf over.

I reached out to grab it before it fell off the shelf entirely, carefully righting the remaining inanimate object.

The now Animated mick-chicken, on the other hand, had gotten back on its feet, and was looking a bit embarrassed.

I waved at it tentatively.

After hesitating for a spell, It waved back.

“Are you ok?”

It nodded.

Needless to say, I found its bashful clumsiness immediately endearing.

Being attached wouldn’t help me here though. I needed to use these little fellows in order to survive.

I looked at the mick-chicken, and it saluted me much more slowly this time, being careful not to smack itself with its shield again.

Once its arm was in place, its three glass eyes seemed to shine just a bit brighter. He perked up and stood straighter too, seemingly proud to have gotten it right this time.

My heart melted.

God it was just so fucking cute. I mean he was a bit bigger than the small fry, but he was still standing at just barely seven inches tall. So small. So earnest.

So. Fucking. Cute.

Jesus Christ I wasn’t sure I could handle this.

That being said, Mick-Chicken was looking at me earnestly, and I’d been through this once before.

“At ease, soldier,” I said, trying my hardest not to break out into a grin.

Alright, next was to test his armaments. He had a pulse laser on his noggin, and an oversized missile launcher in his hands. His chest plates could also open up to release a micro-missile salvo.

We decided to test them all in sequence, and we used my battered study desk as a target. I wasn’t getting my security deposit back anyway.

First I cleared off the in-progress model and everything that was still intact off of my desktop.

Then we started with the pulse laser. There was a pop as the beam hit the wood and instantly vaporized a small portion of it. That was pretty in line with how real pulse lasers worked, and this was clearly a relatively powerful one.

The real problem was that I wasn’t wearing eye protection, and was now blind.

I’d entirely forgotten that lasers can cause serious eye damage, even when they don’t hit you directly.

After a while, some of my vision returned. I say some, because there was a massive splotch in the center of my sight, like a sunspot from hell, and it was not going away. I blinked, shook my head, rubbed my eyes, and to no avail.

Whilst blinking dazedly, I noticed something. The splotches seemed worse in one eye. I closed one eye, and compared it to the other.

I was nearly completely blind in my right eye. And my left eye could barely see. I just had some vision out the corner of my right, and the view from my left was dim and inconsistent.

Fuck this, man.

Hopefully a healing potion would do the trick. I navigated the display with some difficulty, but I got there eventually, using one of my remaining two heals.

It hurt a lot less this time. My eyes felt like they were being stabbed with needles and it felt like a branding iron being applied to my shoulder, but that was still relatively mild compared to last time.

“Okay, don’t use the laser unless I tell you.”

Mr. Mick-chicken nodded, seemingly more than a little concerned with my condition. Fry seemed similarly distressed, grabbing onto the right leg of my pants.

“I’m fine now, and it’s my fault for not thinking it through so don’t feel bad. Next let’s try your missile launcher, and this time I’ll use my safety squints.”

As promised I squinted my eyes, and covered my ears after thinking about it for a second. As usual, my desk was the target.

There was miniature fwoomp noise, a fwip if you will, and then a loud bang. There was a decent fireball and a sizable puff of smoke. The leg of my desk did not survive the event, and my desk started to tip, before falling over entirely and dumping my melted computer monitor on the floor.

It occurred to me then that I could have used something else as a target, like the couch in the living room everyone hated.

Too late now.

We didn’t test the mick-chicken’s chest missile barrage. That was single use, from what I remembered of the lore filled blurb that was in the instruction manual that came with the kit. Of course that blurb hadn’t been written with the Idea that the missile barrage feature would actually work, per say. So maybe it worked differently in reality.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

But I didn’t particularly want to test it now.

I looked at the other two abilities I had. Resupply, and Repair. I had a decent Idea of what Resupply did now, likely it just reloaded the weapons that each of my mechas wielded, as well as possibly refueling them. I could test it later.

Repair on the other hand. . .

I tapped the ability, and was given another list, although the list this time was much larger, and all the names were ones that I predictably knew.

I could bring back my collection!

I would have probably cried again, but I seemed to be out of tears at that point. Like, my eyes burned, but no watering happened.

Still, the depth of emotion I felt at that point could not be understated. You might think it all rather silly, but not only had I spent thousands of dollars on those mechas, I had built each one with my own hands. You get a little attached, is all I’m saying. Especially when you find out that you can bring them to life.

After another emotional moment, I looked at the display intently. I needed to decide what to do with my remaining ATP.

I wanted to Animate my remaining mech, but I also felt like maybe I should save my points.

That reminded me, I had access to a shop. I should check that out. Maybe that’s what I could use my single unit of CR on.

I clicked on the conspicuous little pink button. It brought me to a new screen, resembling the inventory. There were only three items for sale. The same items I’d received in the relief package, as it turned out, though there was a blurb at the bottom promising more would be available soon.

It looked like I didn’t buy these things with CR, however. Instead, things had to be purchased with ATP. This meant the same resource I used for my abilities was also used to buy Items.

That made ATP even more important than I had initially realised. I really couldn’t afford to spend it willy-nilly.

Each Item costs a percentage of my ATP, as opposed to a fixed value. A single healing potion would cost 25% of my max ATP. Same went for the houses and the cans. At first glance, my abilities all cost 1 unit of ATP, and I had four units total.

That meant I basically had four total actions that I could take with a full bar of ATP. I had already used two.

I could buy items, use my abilities twice, or split it fifty-fifty. I was pretty tempted to buy another potion honestly. Given the rate I was going through them there never seemed like there could be enough. That being said, I already had one in the bag, and I knew a single potion could heal some pretty grievous wounds. A scenario in which I had to use two consecutively was hard to imagine. In fact, if I received any more damage at once than I had previously, I’m pretty sure I would just be straight up dead.

On the other hand, animating another model would give me more fire power. And Repairing another model before I Animated it would allow me to pick from my entire pool of mechas. That gave me way more options.

Ultimately, Repairing a specific model and then animating seemed the wisest choice. I could get the exact thing I needed that way. And I knew just the guy for the job. This specific model had plasma based armaments capable of dealing some serious damage, at least in comparison to many of its fictional counterparts. In fact, I was pretty sure the model that I was to resuscitate was the same one that had completely melted my monitor. If so, it would be more than enough to take down another shambler, attack dog or no.

The Repair ability was just as flashy as Animate was in action. The scattered pieces of the model were coaxed together by clouds of dark particulates, and then once everything was together, the cloud flashed like lightning in a dark storm. The particles then started to dissipate, floating towards me as they did so.

A perfectly Repaired mech was gently deposited into my hands as the last pieces of black evaporated. I was just glad to have it back.

I went to Animate it, but was met with something unexpected. This model cost two points to Animate.

I’d just thought that it would take one point like the others. I had been operating under the assumption that all my abilities had a flat cost. Instead the cost of my abilities seemed to scale.

My disappointment was immeasurable, and my day ruined.

Nothing I could do about it now, though. I would just have to wait until I got more ATP. Though at that point, it did occur to me that I had no Idea how or when that would happen. And I had nothing I could do about that, either.

I kinda wished I hadn’t used my single hint for the day earlier, but past was past, and knowing that I wasn’t going to be a zombie was a pretty huge deal.

Hey, I wonder if I can put stuff in my inventory?

Was the inventory just for the healing potions and stuff, or could I put anything in there?

How would I put something into the inventory if I wanted to, anyway?

Could I just sort of. . . shove it in there?

I pressed my one remaining flip flop into the screen of my display. It sank in with a mild, gelatinous sort of resistance.

There was a new item listed in my inventory, indicated by a picture of my flip flop.

Great. Time to see how much this thing can hold.

I placed my two inanimate models into it as well as all the destroyed pieces of mecha debris I owned.

It ate them all up without much trouble. The items were listed in my inventory as expected.

The only odd thing there was that while not every item had a completely distinguishable portrait, I could tell exactly what everything was. I mean, many of my mechas shared similar silhouettes, and when they were drawn in the monochrome stylizations of the display, they were almost visually indistinguishable.

Especially the broken ones, those were all just miserable piles of scrap.

And yet I just knew what everything was. Except for the houses and the cans, which were still a mystery to me. Weird, but not weirder than everything else, so I just moved on. And more pressingly, I still hadn’t figured out how much this thing could hold.

The problem was that I didn’t have anything that was small enough that I could shove it into the screen anymore really. I mean I had my computer mouse and my hobby supplies I guess. I shoved those in.

Oh, and my toothbrush. I exited my room and walked over to the bathroom to grab some toiletries.

What else. . . That might be it really.

If I could fit anything bigger in the thing, that’d be a different story, but that was it for small stuff.

If I could just make the screen a bit bigger. . .

I pinched one corner of the display and tugged. To my mild surprise, the display complied and resized itself dynamically as I pushed and pulled on it.

Well, would you look at that?

I promptly got to throwing in my favorite pillow, some other miscellany, and the boxes for all my models that I had held onto. I still had them because that was where I stored the additional accessories for each kit. Extra weapons, effect parts, display stands, that sort of thing. Also, the boxes looked cool, and I’d be loath to part with them as a collector.

I also changed my clothes. My shirt not only had holes in it, but was covered in blood. My pants had also been soaked in the stuff. I thanked my lucky stars that blood was the only thing they'd been soaked in.

I’d somehow managed to avoid any bouts of incontinence.

And with that, I think I was prepped for my journey. Such as it was. All I was really planning was to make it to 215 and ask my friend if I could sleep on their floor. My room was trashed, and while I could still use it or even sleep in the common living room, I didn’t want to be all alone during this disaster.

***

I walked out of my unit and into the hall again. After noticing that my mini mechas had trouble keeping up with my stride, I had perched them on my shoulders. I’d wondered if they’d be able to keep their balance, but they’d seemed confident and sure enough, they held fast even when I jogged.

This time I’d equipped myself with a standing lamp which I intended to use as a sort of polearm/bludgeoning instrument. It might not be the most lethal instrument, but at least I’d be able to keep my distance this time. I was really hoping to avoid getting stabbed again. Or bitten. Or anything else, really.

It wasn’t long before I’d made it to the stairs again. I opened the door cautiously, and ducked through it quickly. Well, I tried to anyway. What actually happened was that I stepped into the door, hit one end of the lamp on the door frame, got startled, then hit in the shoulder by the door itself, before nearly tripping over the dangling power cord from the lamp. That in turn toppled Mr. Mick-chicken from my shoulder.

I reached out to grab him, but missed. I watched as he fell, helpless to stop it, but a plume of flame lit itself beneath him, and he rode the fire down safely to the floor.

Oh right, he had thrusters.

Basically all mechs had some sort of rocketry attached, after all, and Mick-chicken was no exception.

He waved from the step below me. I waved back.

I turned to look at the fry, who’d managed to stay perched on my shoulder by grabbing onto my hair.

“Can you do that too?”

He nodded affirmative.

I picked Mick-Chicken back up and sat him on my right shoulder again.

I heard a scraping sound then, and I felt both the beings sitting on my shoulders stiffen. The sound had come from below. This stairwell was constructed such that you could see several flights above and below, and in my case that meant I could see clear to the bottom. There was another supernaturally Animated cadaver there, and it was looking straight at me. I briefly wondered how it had gotten in, but I then saw that the door leading into the stairwell had been held open with a chair from the lobby. I probably had my previous attacker to thank for that one.

The scraping noise came from this corpse shoving his way past the chair. This corpse was different from the last one too. His armor was scalemail, and his primary weapon appeared to be a scimitar. The scimitar was already unsheathed.

Also of note, there was substantially less flesh on this specimen. He was basically skeletal, in fact, having only a bit of papery skin and jerky like muscle hanging from his bones. His head was also on fire. The same flame that I had seen previously in the Mongol zombies’s hollow eye had escaped the confines of this skeleton's skull, enveloping it entirely.

The skeleton started climbing the stairs at a clip. I wasn’t naive enough at this point to believe he did so with good intentions.

I wrapped my lamp’s power cord around my hand so that I wouldn’t trip over it again. I had already removed the lamp cover and lightbulb, so all there was on the business end of the lamp was metal.

I held up a hand so that my toy soldiers wouldn’t start firing prematurely. We were waiting for it to come to us.

Once Mr. Bones made it to the flight of stairs right below me, I jumped, planning to use the full force of gravity to aid my attack.

I swing down with my lamp at his head. The skeleton deflected my strike with an arm, but the force of my strike tore that arm from his shoulder. That arm was not the one holding the scimitar, sadly, and Bone-jangles raised the weapon to strike at me with it.

My small Fry responded by shooting him in the face. He unloaded a whole drum mag into the damn thing. It staggered back. I whacked it with my lamp again. It was blocked by his scimitar. I had the initiative though, so I kept whacking at it. At least until my shitty standing lamp snapped in half.

Stupid fucking landlords and their cheap-ass furnishings!

Rattle-me-bones noticed the opportunity and swiped at me with his blade. He missed, but I was now on the back foot and stumbling.

Why for the love of god could I not just keep my footing?

Mick-chicken jumped from my shoulder then, and his rear thrusters kicked on, he was propelling himself forward and up, right into skelly boi’s fiery face.

The skeleton tried to respond by blocking its flying avian attacker with a raised scimitar, but he had overextended when he’d swiped at me, and couldn’t recover in time.

Mick-chicken took that opportunity to launch a missile directly into an open eye socket. He then flipped backwards, and gracefully landed as a cherry bomb crack rang out, and the skeleton collapsed.

It dissolved into sunshine and fragments soon after.

I stood there stunned for a second, before joyfully picking up my chicken-child and throwing him up in the air, catching him, and repeating that process all whilst a whole lot of excited sounds and high pitched nonsense spilled out of my mouth.

I felt a tug in my hair, and turned to my left before grabbing Fry off of my shoulder and rubbing him against my face and babbling at him just as excitedly.

In retrospect, I think all the adrenaline and endorphins may have briefly put me out of my mind, but victory was just so sweet.