AutomaTown was only another 2 hours or so up the road by car. When we arrived, the sky had already started turning pink, though the sun hadn’t poked up yet. Elita and Shiro got out, along with Sparky and I returned IronHide to [Inventory] as Sentinel and Jackie came out to greet us.

“Sentinel Prime gave us a heads up. We’ll be ready to throw down with the King’s men, but if they come at us in force it won’t be pretty”, Jackie said somberly.

“Thanks, Jackie. This is Shiro, I told you about him via Sentinel.”

“Righto, how's it going Shiro? You've been in the wars, mate”, Jackie said, shaking Shiro’s remaining hand.

Shiro tilted his head to one side, maybe he was unsure of Jackie’s manner of speaking.

“Okay, for now, I’ve still got a set of eyes inside the Knight Watch headquarters so hopefully if they get word on when the king’s squad is coming, we’ll know. In the meantime, I’m going to focus on rebuilding Shiro as well as any combat upgrades our people need. Elita, can I leave it to you to handle getting materials that we’ll need?”

“You got it Prime, Jackie, can I borrow Kull and Mara as needed?”

"You've just got to find the right motivation and I'm sure they'll jump at the chance to help ya,” he said, giving her a wink.

I headed over to my workshop and unloaded all of the tools and materials that we’d collected from the Urd shop. I felt like I wouldn’t be heading back there and it made me a little sad. I also had to figure out a way to help Jada. Alfred hadn’t heard anything useful yet and I didn’t have a reason to power up Rom or Ram, but I hoped that soon I’d be able to get them out of there.

The first thing I did was install a speaker unit into Shiro so that he could talk with us again. The production model MurderBots didn’t have a need to be able to speak, I guessed. Cheaper to produce, but even more of a crime against the person that was bound to that body, further “dehumanizing” them— if I can say that about people and species that might not be humans.

I pulled the dragonewt-based body frame that I’d been working on out of storage and laid it out on my workbench. It was tall and lanky, and I’d been working on giving it large, functional, wings and a powerful tail. The plan had been to cover the frame with skin from the wyverns that I’d killed, but now I wasn’t so sure after the reaction Carnivac had gotten from Victoria Greywind. It could be catastrophic for Shiro if he met up with other Dragonoid-type species.

I told my concerns to Shiro, who agreed that he wouldn’t want to be in that situation. Shiro, also wasn’t keen on the idea of flight, but having a tail felt right. It had never even occurred to me that Shiro was a non-human species before becoming an Automata. I had a lot to learn about this world beyond what immediately affected me, it would seem. Maybe I wasn’t so different from those that only saw magic tools when they looked at an Automata, full of my own bias and prejudices. Shiro said that his species was called “Maahesian”, but I didn’t know what that looked like.

I rolled out some scrap paper and started sketching. Thanks to the configuration of my hands, with two thumbs and two fingers per hand— all the same length, I couldn’t grip a pencil like I could when I was human. Instead I had to grip it exactly like you might expect a robot claw to grab a pencil. It took me a lot of getting used to, but I found that without having any human wobble, my lines were perfect and precise. I felt a bit like a CNC machine, or one of those computer controlled drill bits that carve out metal or wood.

I drew out the base body frame that I’d constructed for Shiro already, but without any of the dragonoid elements.

“You said that a tail felt right, what kind of tail?” I asked him. I sketched out a couple shapes nearby of bushy tails, long thin tails, thick short tails, curly tails...

“A bit like this one”, Shiro said pointing at a long cat-like tail, “but with a tuft at the end.”

“What else would feel right? How about ears? Maybe horns?” I sketched out a variety of ear types and horns.

Shiro looked over them before poking a set. “Like this... sorta... but more rounded.”

I was getting a lion-like vibe from the tail and now the ears, so I sketched out something like Lion-o from Thundercats but with more human-like hair and the tail.

“Yeah, like that! So you do know the Maahesians after all”, he said with what sounded like a big grin.

“No, but they are similar to another species I’m familiar with called Thundarians.”

“Oh, I’ve never heard of them. They sound tough though.”

“Hey Prime”, Elita called as she walked into the shop, “I think I’m going to need a new disguise since everyone at the Guild knew my orc one.”

“Hmm...” I tapped my chin and looked at the dragonewt frame on the table. “We won’t be using the dragonoid parts for Shiro after all. I could install them in you instead.”

Elita looked at the table, considering the option. “I’m not a fan of wearing lizard skin on top though. I know it saves on mana but I think it’s harder to pass for real than using the illusion that [cloak] provides.”

“Do demons exist here?” I asked.

They both looked at me like I was an alien, which I guess I was.

“There are hundreds of different demon species”, Elita informed me, “ you know Talios, from the guild, is one, right?”

“Ah, right. I meant, specifically of the larger than average build, with red skin, horns, and huge wings. Maybe a tail. That sort of demon.”

“I don’t think so... at least, I’ve never heard of any like that”, Elita shrugged.

“What about a hybrid?” Shiro offered. “A union between an Oni and a Dragonewt might result in a species like that.”

“Great”, I said, clapping my hands. “Elita, you’re going to be a Dragoni.”

“We’ll work on the back story... and that name”, she countered.

“An Onigon?” I offered, she rolled her eyes and walked out of the shop.

My ear-in-the-watch, Alfred, hadn’t heard anything so I was hoping that no news was good news. Shiro’s new body was going to take a while in order to get it right. I was determined to build him something worthy as well as capable. I spent the next six days working on Shiro’s new body now that we had a direction he wanted to go in. I hoped that giving him an Automata version of what he might have become had he been allowed to grow up, would help heal some of those wounds. At the same time, I didn’t want him to get into trouble that he couldn’t get out of again, so I snuck some extras into the build when he wasn’t looking.

During the time that I worked, Alfred was able to catch the odd snippet of conversation from the Knight Watch. There was talk that some fancy pants from the Capital would be coming. If they had to wait for this fancy pants, then that could buy me a solid chunk of time before anyone might show up.

I gave Shiro two small mana crystal ports, and two medium mana crystal ports. I had a lot of wind crystals and not much else, so those went into his medium crystal ports. They’ll boost his speed and agility as well as give him some lift for extended leaps or gliding as part of a surprise. I wanted to install illusion crystals into his small ports, in order to let him cast [cloak()] like Elita, but I didn’t have any on hand. Shiro said that he was proud of who he was and didn't want to hide, but sometimes hiding keeps you alive. I still wrote the program functions into the body’s firmware files so that when he gets an illusion crystal, the disguise will be ready to go. In the meantime, Shiro asked for a fire and an ice crystal. He says they will be really helpful in cooking; though I have no idea who he plans on cooking for.

I was rapidly running out of supplies, having to create everything from raw ore was using up a ton of time, and I was really missing the ability to go to the market in Urd to just buy the components I’d need. We had set up a bit of trade with the closest village, Willow Park, but even that was minimal as they were a small town and still kept us at arms length. The city of Trone was closer than Urd and they wouldn’t know of our old disguises yet. I considered that it might have been worth taking a trip, if we were careful.

Thankfully, I had enough to finish up Shiro’s new body and the work for Elita would mostly be software and installing components that I’d already built for the dragonewt project. After building new bodies for all the AutomaTown villagers and then installing their soul cores into them, transplanting Shiro into a new body went remarkably smoothly. I closed up his chest panel and brought his systems back online. The blue lights in his eyes lit up and I could see him looking around as he went through his boot processes. He had a weird smile on his face as he looked over at me.