Daddy Issues

Ivy ran hard, under James's command. Luke did his best to overdrive the machine, to make sure Ivy and James were calm and focused by chemically altering their stress levels as they angled toward the forested area. They were so close, even with the drone outpacing them rapidly...

And then, all of a sudden, everything came to a halt. Ivy simply stopped moving. Ivy thought it was James's fault, James blamed Luke, Luke accused Ivy of somehow locking herself up. All of them tried to get moving again, right at the tree line, but it was painfully obvious that they weren't going anywhere. Ivy was stuck to the Ichabod frame since it was half of herself, while James was equally frozen in a tight grip to the frame. Had Lucas been smart about the situation, maybe he could've figured out how to unstick his friends from their predicament and the three would just abandon the Yabusa tech. But for some reason, he was certain that he could somehow right this, get everything back to the basement, and nobody would know anything.

That chance was long past, as ten minutes just at the edge of the woods, as a robotic horse-girl and rider, the mood turned from argumentation to the fear that someone would see them from the road, and the strangers would have questions, or take pictures, or live stream them for the whole world to see...

And they panicked even more when a car did eventually arrive, ten minutes later. A black Yabusa SUV pulled up along the side of the road, looking slightly incomplete without a fender or panel along the front. It looked just like the work-in-progress that...

Uh oh.

Lucas's dad stepped out of the car, holding some strange device in his hand, pointing it at the strange sight as he slowly approached. He was nervous as he approached, particularly because he didn't know exactly what we was looking at... Project Ichabod didn't look like that! How could someone hack together a front-module for the machine so easily? And what was up with that Meteor armor, looking so different?

"Ichabod R-034, report status," he said, keeping that device leveled at the strange hybrid machines he was looking at which he could've sworn had been idle in his basement just a day ago.

"Ichabod status online, power supply at eighty-six percent," Ivy said, without hesitation, despite her attempts to hold her voice from coming out.

"Wait a minute... Ivy? Is that you in there? Uhh," Gordon scratched his head, as he walked to the front of the centaur-girl. "Ichabod, maintenance mode, open up. Meteor, maintenance mode."

Against their best efforts, the paneling on the machines fanned out, showing the internals of the robots. Worse, the paneling around Ivy and James opened up, revealing human flesh and frightened faces underneath, to Gordon's **** surprise.

"Ivy? ...Linda?!" He said, staring at the face of his 'wife', at least a younger variant of it. Lucas had given James the shape of Ivy under the face of a young version of his mom, clad in a sports bra and some skintight shorts, similar to Ivy--who had kept her head, but still had the more voluptuous curves from the neck down, shaped in a familiar, motherly way but still with a youthful look to the body. A confused look only grew, and picked up some anger along the way. "Talk, whoever the hell you two are. Where's Lucas! How did you steal and modify my tech!"

Orange slime oozed out of the cracks of the Ichabod form, pooling on the ground and forming up into a human shape, taking on Luke's characteristics swiftly. "Dad, I can explain, it's a long story but--"

Gordon demonstrated the capability of the device in his hands almost immediately, leveling it at the orange slime and blasting an energy pulse out! The teenager splattered into bits of orange slime that scattered all over the robotic bodies behind where he once stood, in a frightening display.

"LUKE!"

"NO!"

For a few moments, Ivy and James stared in horror at their splattered friend, thinking he was gone for good. They underestimated the resiliency of slime-people, however, as the globules of orange rolled back into one lump, and re-formed. "God, dad, don't do that again! Put down your ****-gun! I said I could explain."

Gordon never lowered the blaster in his hands, but he at least listened to Luke's story, where it picked up at the 'miraculous recovery' all the way to the present. James and Ivy sat still, unable to do much else due to the lack of control they had over the mechanical aspects of their bodies. They could move their heads and arms, but legs seemed stuck in place like a strange statue. Every time Gordon seemed unable to comprehend one of Lucas's fantastic claims, Luke simply demonstrated it with the captive subjects--controlling bodies, changing shapes, altering the Yabusa technology almost instantly, going so far as to extract the Angel module out of where it had been stored in the Ichabod body, seemingly without harm to the other device.

"Uh, hey, think we could... move, and stuff?" Ivy finally said, squirming on her perch atop the horse-like body. "I'm starting to get kind of sore."

James nodded. "Me too. Mr. G, please, we won't go anywhere."

Luke's dad stared, bewildered by the realization of what Luke had demonstrated, after he 'fixed' Ivy back to her centaur mode without armor or a blank facemask, hoping that Gordon wouldn't do anything drastic if he saw Ivy clearly affixed to the machine. The same was true for James, adjusting the armor so at least the head was still visible, but the armor was containing her body again at least, creating that slim, sleek physique that looked nothing like James--Gordon had to take everyone's word for it that Luke hadn't somehow converted his wife into a sexy killbot.

"You really did it this time," Gordon finally said, looking between the three of them. "All of you. I don't care that Hideki had some miracle cure for my son and gave him these weird superpowers, I had one rule about the basement, and you all broke it. This is serious, this is millions of dollars of R&D tech that shouldn't have ever left that room! ...It really couldn't have, had it not been dismantled..."

Gordon made an adjustment to the device in his hand, leveling it at James. "W-w-wait, Mr. G!" Gordon fired, but this time the soft glow emitting from the end of the device didn't disintegrate anyone, it simply seemed to function like a sort of X-Ray, showing a surprising overlay of mechanical and biological material in the same place.

Gordon's anger at the teenagers disobeying his rules and orders didn't last long--that was just life with teenagers, there was little point in staying mad for long. Curiosity took its place, as he had to admit, the fact that Ivy could so effortlessly move the Ichabod frame, and James seemed unencumbered by the Meteor armor, was one of the most impressive things he'd ever seen from the Yabusa robotics projects. "Is this like a superposition that you put them in, Luke?"

Luke shrugged. "What do you mean? That they're there and not there?"

"Oh, they're definitely there. It's like you'd adjusted their phase... think complex numbers and such. But, much more complex. It's like, they're anchored to each other in places where the amplitudes align, but then elsewhere, I dunno, it's like you've been able to create some sort of quantum spookiness. A... phase binding to each other, or something like that."

All three of the teens shrugged, not understanding what Gordon was talking about, but all were feeling hopeful that maybe they were off the hook. "So... can we go home and forget about all this?" Luke asked, a half-smile on his face in hopes that his dad would drop everything. He knew it was a longshot, as Gordon gave him the strangest look.

"You think I can just forget about all this?" Luke's dad asked, his brow furrowing. Everyone gulped.