The rebuild for Elita didn’t go as smoothly as I would have liked. In the end, I had to use Carnivac and Cyclone as nurses and neither one was particularly good at it. Sentinel would have been more useful, but he was currently patrolling the area with Jackie, keeping an eye out for any scouts or potential hostiles in the vicinity.

Using my big guys for this was a lot like asking bears to help you install a home theater system. I resolved to build a proper shop assistant when time would allow. Maybe something with multiple arms like Najii...

I finished the upgrades to Elita and selectively began bringing her back online. Her eyes lit up with their familiar blue glow, and I could see that she was going through the self-diagnostics as her senses became aware and her system rebooted.

Elita looked a little woozy so I went through some simple cognitive exercises with her.

“Let’s take it a bit slow at first. Your system is getting used to the greater mana load. You’ve got three new limbs to deal with, after all.”

“I’m... I’m okay,” she said with a look of determination. She started standing up, and her tail lashed out, completely clearing everything off of one of my project tables. “Ah. Sorry,” she said sheepishly.

I couldn’t help but think of a certain Autobot medic and their stuff getting constantly smashed by another certain Autobot wrecker...

“Yeah, let’s get you outside where you can stretch your wings... both literal and metaphorical.”

I hadn’t built anything for myself yet with multiple limbs except Shrapnel, but his bug legs all work in concert so I didn’t have to think about it. I didn’t really have any frame of reference for what she must be going through to suddenly have extra limbs that you didn’t have until now... Maybe it was similar to how I had to section off some of my mental load to control multiple proxies while trying to control them actively would be—

“Prime!”

“What? Oh sorry, got lost in thought.”

“I can barely stand up with these huge wings, there’s no way I’m getting through the doorway.” She looked annoyed, I assumed this was the second time she’d said it, maybe the third.

“Oh! This is the best part! I forgot to tell you, each new limb has its own [Inventory (small)] connected to it at the attachment port. The two wing ports function in parallel so running the [wings()] command will toggle them in and out of the space. Use the [tail()] command to do the same for the tail.”

“Oh neat,” she said sarcastically, “that would have been really useful to know... about ten minutes ago.” She rolled her eyes and the wings and tail vanished.

“Okay, okay, granted, Miss Snippy. Before you head out, activate [Cloak()] for me, I want to make sure everything works.”

She did as asked and her metallic plating was replaced with the illusion of smooth red skin, her eyes took on the appearance of organic demonic eyes with red irises and black sclera, her long hair transitioned from silver to black, and metal horns formed from platting along the top of her head before being cloaked by the illusion to look like bone.

“Good, good. That’ll— Eeeagh! Deactivate, deactivate!” I screamed in horror.

Everything looked like it was working, but then the illusion started replicating the eyes all over her body and they were all looking directly into my soul. It was SUPER creepy.

“Sorry, looks like I’ve messed something up and will have to debug the illusion program.”

“Bah, you can do it later. I feel the need to go kill something, got any requests?”

“And you say I’m creepy sometimes? I need to go kill something?”

“You want me to bring you back something, or not?”

“Something with a water crystal, this time, please. Oh! Blink Bird crystals would be great if you come across any.”

“Got it,” she said as she headed out the door.

I looked around at the mess she’d left in her wake, and started picking things up. Thanks to Alfred and the store proxies, I now knew how much time we had until the King’s Posse showed up, as well as what to expect from them. I was still hoping that we’d be able to solve this diplomatically, but I didn’t want us to get caught short either. I had no intentions of declaring AutomaTown to be sovereign in any way and would be happy to pay the local taxes and be treated like any other town. A "robot uprising" would be a great way to insure that every Automata that was still under the curse got executed on the spot. We couldn't just go run and hide either if we wanted to come to a place of understanding. Not that I had any faith at all in my ability to talk to people, but this was all basically my fault so I should be the one to go out and meet the Prince and try to open a discussion. In the meantime, I would have Sentinel and Jackie work on getting the townsfolk ready to escape and go into hiding if things go south.

Choosing how to display myself would be just as important as our ability to negotiate or to defend ourselves. I felt like I would need to meet the Crown Prince face-to-face, using a proxy like Sentinel or a Pretender Shell like Cyclone, could be considered as cowardly in not being willing to be direct. Plus, the Guild Master already knows about my main body and we can assume that Shea has been filling in the details. On the other hand, I wasn’t much to look at, and was pretty small and weak as compared to other Automata. I wouldn’t want our group to be thought little of based on my appearance.

I tapped my chin for a bit. I lacked the ability to build a new body for myself. Sure, I could build new bodies for others, but I could hardly power myself down and still be able to transfer my core into the new body, or expect others to be able to perform the procedure without having access to [Console], and I couldn’t operate any proxies when my main body was shut down, either. I’d have to come up with something else. I thought some more about the expansion ports that I’d installed for Elita to be able to use the new dragonoid limbs and remembered a toy from when I was a kid that was covered in plug-in ports. The characters, and toys by extension, would call a remote operator on a satellite and weapons and armor would teleport to their location and mount onto those ports.

With the idea racing around my head, I got to work sketching out my schematics and design concepts. I didn’t have much time to work so I had to devote my full time attention to this concept. If it worked out as well as it did in my head, then little ol’ me would get a pretty extreme upgrade without having to use up any of my proxy slots.