Percussive Progress (Upgrade Her!)

Sentry-chan was cute and all, but as a great robot once said… “Upgrades, people, upgrades!”. You attempted to scroll through your weapons in real life, but even though you could hear the scroll wheel mentally, your hands in real-life failed to switch to anything else, no matter how hard you flapped them around. Maybe you needed more wrist movement? That was always the trick… no, not this time. How the heck were you going to get the engineer’s wrench?

Hold on a second, the engineer’s wrench was just a wrench wasn’t it? Well, it definitely did things that a normal wrench couldn’t do, but appearance-wise it was just a hunk of metal right? Maybe… You put the construction PDA down and look at Sentry-chan.

“Stay and be good. Don’t follow strangers, don’t do ****, stay in school, and always remember to do the right thing.”

With that, you left your room quickly enough to leave a cartoon puff of dust, tearing your way to the storage closet where all the miscellaneous shit was thrown into. One of those shits was a toolkit, with a metal wrench! You nearly tore the closet door off of its hinges as you transformed that door into a jar. There were some cardboard boxes on top of the toolkit. With both arms, you grabbed the topmost box and violently threw it out of the closet, listening to the sickening sound of it impacting the opposite wall. You hastily repeated this until there was a pile of damaged boxes behind you, but a goddamn toolkit in front. You open the toolkit and see the metal crab-claw tool. You gripped it with your own flesh crab-claw, holding it in a white-knuckled grip as you sprinted back to your room.

Sentry-chan beeped with alarm as you slammed your shoulder into your room’s door frame, bouncing off of it and into your room. Her one eye was wide and the other one was also wide (but it always was because it was a gun, so this was normal for that particular eye). You stared down at your little Sentry-chan, a menacing gaze intimidating the little bot. A black light casts the shadow of your long, thick, throbbing wrench across her face as she looks at you with a hint of worry in her LED eyes.

You brought the wrench down in a blur and it contacted the metal shell of Sentry-chan. With a satisfying clang, the wrench bounced off without a single scratch or dent. Taking a quick glance at the construction PDA that you put down earlier, you notice that your metal count decreased from 70 to 60. It was working!

With a manic smile on your face, you raised your wrench high above your head and brought it back down like a blacksmith striking his hammer upon the anvil. With many more strikes of the wrench to go, you started getting creative with the wrenchening. You take a batter’s stance and swing the wrench like a bat! Bang, home run! You take a golfer’s stance and swing the wrench like a golf club! Bang, hole-in-one! You take an athlete’s stance and swing the wrench like a stick in a stick-and-ball game! Bang, points or something!

The satisfying sounds of wrench on sentry contact changed, becoming higher pitched and empty. Another glance at the PDA confirmed that you had no metal left. Well hold on now, where am I supposed to get more metal? Oh wait shit, did you need to build a dispenser first to generate metal? Oh no, did you softlock yourself with level one Sentry-chan? No! No no no no no no no, wait wait wait wait wait wait wait!

You looked back down at Sentry-chan, who beep-booped, completely unaware of your emotional turmoil. Oh god, you failed her! You looked at your hands, the hands that failed her, at the wrench that failed her too. Oh wait, the wrench… it was a normal wrench from your now-destroyed closet, yet it worked just like the engineer’s wrench in the video game! Maybe… maybe… maybe you could collect metal like the engineer?

Back down to the closet, you found a pack of nails alongside the toolkit. You grabbed a bunch of nails in your hand, and wondered how exactly you were supposed to do this. The nails didn’t absorb into your hand or anything, they were just there… still being normal nails. Maybe it did work and your metal number went up on the PDA? You brought the box of nails back upstairs with you, but looking at the PDA’s display as you walked up to it, it still showed a big fat zero. But as soon as you touched the PDA with the nails in your hand, you felt them disappear. The number on the PDA now showed as a 3, it worked! But wait, seven was kind of low… but then again a handful of nails wasn’t all that much either. You finished your hand around the inside of the nail box, disappearing every metal nail that you touched until your display showed a 17. You needed more metal!

It’s a damn blessing that you never threw anything away! Busted watering can with a hole in the bottom? Metal! Bent screwdriver? More metal! The promised day was here, the day that these items would see use again! You knew it would come! After pillaging all of your “artifacts” and “relics” from around the house, the PDA shows a rather pleasing number. 131. Returning to your bedroom where sentry-chan waited, you took up the wrench once more. Turning it over in your hand, you spoke an octave lower than usual, with a raspy old-man voice.

“Hello again… old friend… back into the fray… once more partner.”

The dance of the wrench resumed as you got physical with sentry-chan, upgrading the everloving metal into her. And with a final strike, sentry-chan immediately reacted. She lurched upwards, growing taller as her limbs lengthened. Not only that, you could see her metal plates moving like a transformer, forming a more mature feminine appearance. Even her metal hair lengthened! And her arm became a gatling gun, hot!

After her transformation had completed and every last metal piece of her had slid into place, Sentry-san looked you in the eye. Unlike her level one form, this version of the sentry girl seemed to have more than just basic programming behind those camera lenses. You looked right back, searching for a soul in there. The moment lasted for a while, and you expected her to start speaking at any moment, but she was silent besides the periodic beep.

“Uh, hey there Sentry-san, can you… understand me?”

The metal girl nodded her head. Holy shit it was alive. She was alive. Oh fuck, what if she was like the terminator.

“Uh, so are you going to kill me or something?”

The metal girl shook her head, signaling a no. Phew! After a few more questions, you determined that she was a friendly kind of robot… at least on the surface. One shudders to imagine what inhuman thoughts lie behind that metal (Spy, 2012). But despite the risk of having a killing machine in your bedroom, you decided to trust her. You built her after all, sort of. You looked back at your pseudo-daughter and she had a look on her face, like she wanted something. After a game of 20 questions, you found out exactly what she wanted.