Day Seven

"Ghgestfhathel juktavashi olgatanek!"

Trill tilted her head and looked at Toob. "Excuse me?"

The lights in her medical droid's severed head flickered twice, eventually coming fully on and remaining steady for more than a minute. Its vocabulator unit, a microphone-like mask she'd only just attached to its face, crackled slightly. A spark flew out of the side as smoke wafted up from its grill slits.

"Vish vish nanna kovortani. Ulak! Aganwei."

Trill shook her head. "Something's not right here. Maybe I wired the thing in upside down?" She was honestly lost; robotics was so very not her field. Trying to put a droid together out of more parts than a razor cat had teeth was a challenge for a real techie. For someone like her, she might as well have been shoot gnats out of the air with a carbine. This was just never going to work. Why did she always have to be so useless? Yelling in frustration, she slammed Toob's head against the floor of the pod.

A burst of static came out of its mask. "Ah, that is much better, Mistress. My language recognition circuit was loose. That seems to have tightened it." His eyes flickered again.

Trill laughed and hugged the med-bot's head. Finally, someone to talk too! "Toob, you're alive! Well, sort of!"

More static. "Well, Mistress, yes in a manner of speaking. I do seem to be functional again. I appear to have... Where is my body?"

Trill sighed and turned his head so that he could see the nearby crash couch and the tangled mass of limbs and torso resting there. "I am working of that, Toob. You see..."

"I do indeed see! And vision is my only useful function right now! My body is in a terrible state of disrepair. What happened to me?!"

With a low sigh, she put Toob's head down next to her and breathed in deep. All in one long run-on sentence, she explained everything from the crash to the raptor attack and then some. She didn't stop talking until the air was completely gone from her lungs. She'd been alone for days now; rambling was a welcome relief from the silence.

"I think I made all that out, Mistress. Might I offer a suggestion?"

"Anything! I am at wit's end trying to figure all this out."

Toob's eyes dimmed for a moment, a sign that he was accessing his memory banks. Since most of them were in his torso and as such unreachable, he had to be searching the hard storage in his cranial computer. Trill didn't know robotics worth a mynock's toss but she did know computers. He was as functional in that department as she could make him.

"If you will follow my suggestions, I can use my diagnostic program to guide you in my reconstruction."

She looked thrilled. "Really? You can do that? I was worried your monitoring routines were in your chest. I couldn't really tell what you had up here." As she spoke, she tapped his head with a spanner.

The eyes flickered wildly and for a moment, Trillinae was worried she'd knocked something loose again. Then, "There is not much in my head storage, but my main programs are all intact and my system checks are online. I believe that we can work together to repair me, Mistress."

"Fantastic, Toob! Let's get started." Trill picked him up, carried him over to the mass of wires and pistons that had, until she'd gotten to them with a soldering laser and a socket wrench, been his arms and legs. Now they were like something from a Jawa's nightmare. Toob's tact protocols, which were fortunately active, kept him from commenting.

Trill, oblivious to her droid's holding his none-existent tongue, settled down to work. "You know what? I think I am getting better at this. Here's a part I can fix!"



"Ow."