Day Six

The solitude was starting to get to Trill. She was sort of a private person and liked to be alone most of the time, but this was too much quiet. Her only neighbors were flesh-eating reptiles, her only home was a crashed emergency pod, and the only gun she had she didn't dare test for fear of annihilating a square block of jungle and being left weaponless again.

Yes, life was certainly starting to suck. A lot.

And hard.

Trill drummed her fingers over the nearest piece of metal, only eventually realizing that she was tapping her medical droid's head. Feeling sheepish, she gathered all of the robot's scattered parts. It wasn't an easy search, since judging by the number of pieces poor Toob was in, she'd apparently used him to break her fall. Ouch. Still, better him than her, since reassembling a droid was a far sight easier than putting a Corellian back together.

There was all a matter of missing pieces to consider. She had used a few odd components in her recent ballistic experiments. Nothing serious, but Toob wouldn't quite be the droid he used to be if this trend of unfortunate "omissions" kept up. At least all the major parts were still intact.

Intact and, in one case, in dire need of a good scrub. Toob's spinal linkage was still coated in raptor gore. Dried gore to be specific, which was not going to wash out easily. The linkage was a mono-edged coil of wire about a hundred microns thick and four feet long. Its shape had made it a deadly weapon against the dinosaur, but it also made getting the thing clean a bigger screaming bitch than she'd been lately.

And that was saying a lot, considering parts of the jungle were probably still echoing with her opinions on Marr-ek, Darrus, herself, the universe, and her deep seated need for a stiff drink.

It took two hours of hard work to divest the linkage of its detritus. Winding it back into Toob's dismembered torso was another hour of meticulous effort, the kind of work her sister would have been far better suited to do. Millinae had always been the more technical one. If it didn't have something to do with computers or the Holonet, Trill was normally the clueless one.

Unfortunately, Mill wasn't here to lean on. So it was just Trillinae the Gunbunny, a datapad with Toob's schematics, and a lot of ill-fitting pieces. She knew this was probably a lost cause but there were three pressing reasons to get her med-droid back in operation.

The first was very straight-forward. In somewhere between five to six months, she'd be having a baby. Trill prided herself on being very independent but there were limits to how much a person could accomplish alone. Delivering an infant was likely beyond her so avoiding that unfortunate fate meant having Toob functional.

The second was preventative. This was an unknown world chock full of who-knows-what by way of illnesses and infections. She was already starting to feel a little rundown lately. That could have been fatigue but why take the chance? Toob could run blood tests, manufacture vaccines, and identify problems before she fell over and died. All Trill could do was the falling and the dying things. Not an attractive option.

Third and last but certainly not least, Toob would be someone to bloody talk to! She could tell she was going stir crazy. The droid might not have been the best conversationalist in the world but he was something. Toob had opinions, could listen to her rant, and played a pretty mean game of battleboard. Between being alone and having him for company, her choice was easy.

The choice was easy but the work was hard. She was so not a mechanic. Most of the tools she was using had to be looked up on her datapad before she could even knew what they did. Was it really necessary to have seven different hydrospanners? Apparently so. Did a toolbox actually require nine identical flux rods? Yes, it turned out. And why did one droid have six different kinds of bolts needing six different kinds of wrenches?

The answer, she was beginning to suspect, was to drive her CRAZY ~ !!!!!

Somewhere between struggling with Toob's left arm actuator and beating her head against the crash couch, it dawned on Trill that her histrionics were pointless. As upset as she was, no one would be moved by them to help her. Indeed, there was no one to move. The biggest fit in the world, which she was currently throwing right now since this planet had no other sentient lifeforms and thus nothing to compare to her temper, would accomplish nothing.

That was a sobering thought. She stopped, looked at the metal limb she was holding like a club, and considered just how little she was affecting anything in the universe with her tantrum. Literally, the only thing she was managing to do was make a lot of noise and dent the side of the pod. That was it. Nothing else. Not a damn thing...

Trill turned her head to the side, taking all that in.

"Yeah. That works for me."

Wham! Wham! Wham!