A Different Perspective

(Uzi Doorman)

Joseph was a weird Worker Drone.

Don't get me wrong, I was glad the guy had randomly crashed into my life. Less glad that it took Andrew (even if I barely knew him) suffering an identity death for Joseph to exist, but glad that he was here nonetheless. It took a while of actually having friends to start to fully experience empathy and sympathy again, but I really did feel sorry for Kelsey's loss. But at the end of the day, Joseph had had less than a month of memories to his name, but still took one look at me, decided to risk a surefire "in" with Lizzy to try and turn her and Rebecca around on their own attitudes towards me, kept an eye out for me, and even when I threatened to beat his ass with a wrench, still wanted to help me, came up with a plan to do it on the spot, and then went through with it.

He got Doll to hang out with me again after three years, got Lizzy and Rebecca to apologize for all the crap they put me through (that was probably as much on Thad as it was on him) and want to be my friends too, went out of his way to include me in the first place, and just… it was really fucking nice, okay! He didn't have to do any of that, but it was really kind of him, and I appreciated it a lot , but I was never gonna tell him that because that would be cringe and I'm cool! And he still kept doing more! Suggesting that I channel my interests and hyperfixations into helping Lizzy and Rebecca hack stuff for gossip gathering, or brainstorming sports gear with Thad and Darren instead of just designing weapons. It was enough that I felt kinda bad that the best I could do to pay him back was actually fleshing out that shotgun shell idea he mentioned the first time we talked and passing it onto him, but the way his optics literally brightened (and the demented grin that honestly reminded me of myself) made me think that he viewed it as more than enough repayment. Which like, ugh! Why'd he have to be so nice to me, and genuinely not expect anything in return? If he didn't literally have CPU damage I would have been sure he was faking it, but no, the guy just actually wanted me to be happy.

But Joe really was weird, because he'd be normal enough one second, and then the next he'd literally be thinking about creating his very own war crimes to use on Murder Drones. And it was nice to have someone else to bounce ideas about that with, but also not normal . I'd since realized (as Joe himself put it) that "normal was fucking overrated," but in the last few months, it's become clear that Joseph is really the only one besides myself and sorta Doll (less that she has actual ideas and more that she wants them dead in general, which, you know, super fair, that Murder Bitch literally half-ate Aunt Yeva and Uncle Mitch in front of her) to actually be thinking up plans on fighting or killing Murder Drones. Like, actual plans and weapon ideas, plots to set up cameras to spy on them and learn patrol routes and timings, serious thought on how to go after them, way more than just my own ideas to build a sick-as-hell enough gun and blow them all up and finally get my dad's respect. He had weird tastes too; a fixation with mixing Italian into his speech seemingly at random, sometimes going entire days in English and sometimes using Italian phrases over a dozen times in a single conversation, he had an obsession with media and memes that it took me a while to pinpoint as all being over a thousand years old, enjoyed Renaissance to Post-Atomic Era human history, and these last two months in particular, he's been slightly more withdrawn than usual, just barely noticeably tired, to a point where I think I might have been the only person to actually notice. When I asked if he was getting enough charge time at night, he waved me off, saying he was fine, but I was still concerned. He was, like, the first guy to get me , almost like he knew me prior to even meeting me. Not that I'd tell him that, but still, he went on and on about wanting to accommodate for me, wanting to be my friend, and being concerned, and then he seemed genuinely surprised that someone else would give a crap about him? Not even Thad is that wholesome!

He said he was doing fine, but still, when I wasn't enjoying actually having friends or my cousin being back in my life or thinking up weapons, I couldn't help but think back to the myriad of weird things I'd notice him do. He can keep a really good poker-face on his visor when he wants to, I've never seen him lose a staring contest, and sometimes he's just suddenly really driven. There was also that one time we were all talking at lunch, and I'd just finished laughing from a joke from Doll (and it made me really happy to see her able to joke again), and I'd glanced over and saw Joe just sitting back for a moment, a proud smile on his face, before he took a breath and got back into the conversation. He was also just as content to sit by and watch us talk around him as he was to participate in a given conversation, but sometimes he'd look at someone in our friend group and space out for just a moment, before snapping back to attention. Rarely, when that happened, I'd see the faintest flicker on his visor for the briefest of moments, and even replaying the memories on my slowest playback settings, I only really started noticing it at all because I'd thought I'd seen it once and had been looking for it specifically since. I was starting to think it happened way more often but I just didn't catch it, because it was that fast . I was starting to wonder if the guys who put him back together did mess up like he sometimes joked, or if he might have autism like I did (still can't believe he just said that straight to my face. I get by now that a general lack of social tact is a character trait of his, but still, I was about half a second from beating his ass after he said that).

________________________________________

But then, sometimes he wasn't even consistent with his weirdness. Like, another time, I'd been talking about an idea for a magnetically propelled solid-projectile railgun I had, and I'd been bragging about how I planned to make a million of them and kill all those stupid humans on Earth, and he'd just suddenly winced.

"Maybe, ah, don't kill every single human?" he'd asked me.

I blinked at him, and looked him in the optics, fighting down my own discomfort and getting more agitated when I still couldn't figure out what was going on with his facial expression. "Are you serious?"

He held his hands up. "I get killing the JCJ board of directors, CEO, and all the rich assholes who abuse drones, but like, every single human seems a little excessive, don't you think?"

"They literally sent the Murder Drones after us to genocide every Worker Drone on Copper 9," I told him, annoyed. "They're the reason mom is dead. They're the reason my aunt and uncle are dead. They're the reason that Rebecca's and Kelsey's parents are dead, why Lizzy's mom is dead, why Kelsey has to wear glasses, why we have to hide behind my dad's stupid doors, why your parents are dead, and why you had an identity death, and you want to show them mercy?!?" I was shouting by the end.

"Conversely, they're the reason why I'm alive and here right now," He said, with a raised finger.

I stared at him. "I'll give you that, but still, my other reasons still stand."

He shrugged, and I caught that flicker for just a single frame , but still there. "Fair enough," he conceded. "But, shouldn't we be better than them? Like I said, I support the revenge, and let's kill all the corpo assholes, you know, literal Worker's Revolution," he chuckled at a joke that only he seemed to get, "but like, what about the kids ? Because like, I'm not comfortable murdering literal babies , you know. And, uh, retaliatory genocide would kinda include that."

I looked Joe in the optics, and he stared back, sudden determination creeping into his gaze. I looked away first, because I still had trouble with that, and I knew he knew that, and I knew that I wouldn't have beaten him in a staring contest anyways, and when I glanced back and saw the grin he had I knew he knew that too, and dammit him being smug about it pissed me off. Doubly so when even I had to acknowledge that literally murdering babies was a bit too far.

I groaned. "Bite me!" I snapped at him. "Fine, I'll just kill all the adult humans instead!"

He'd given me a grin like he'd won a personal victory at that, and my poor social experience pegged him as either relieved or disappointed ? Maybe both , but still, why then? Uuuuuugh, I really wished I knew what was going through his head sometimes, but after how genuinely terrified he seemed that time I threatened to hack his OS, even more than the time I was about to hit him with that wrench, I don't think I'd actually be able to bring myself to do it. I'd also have to actually code something that could hack a drone OS in the first place. Hmmm, maybe something to do later.

_______________________________________

And even besides his weird "okay with murdering a lot of humans but only specific humans and definitely not all the humans" thing, he still did weird stuff seemingly at random. Like just today, we'd been going in for school, and he was the last guy to come in. We'd all been sat down, two minutes until Lizzy's dad was contractually obligated to actually teach us stuff that we could all just download but had to sit through anyways for some reason, and I'd heard music in the distance getting louder as its source approached the classroom, Joe's voice coming in as well as he sang along.

I never stopped to notiiiiiiice the fire in your hands!

A burning so consumiiiiing, but now I understaaaand!

By now the class had quieted down as all attention was drawn to the noise, and I was equally confused by the approach of heavy metal. Since when was Joe into that?

And now I'm faliiiiin, like Icarus to land!

Too late to kill the flame that I faaaaaAAANED!

I ran a search on the lyrics, and came up with the tail-end of Wings of Feathers and Wax by Killer Be Killed, a song that came out in freaking Two-Thousand- Fourteen . Man, Joe really enjoyed that old stuff… though to be fair, he did give me some good thousand-year-old nightcore to add to my playlists.

I NEVER STOPPED TO NOTIIIIICE (CUT FROM WIRE, BLIND OF LIGHT),

THE FIRE IN YOUR HANDS! (REALIIIIZE WRONG FROM RIGHT)

A BURNING SO CONSUMING, BUT NOW I UNDERSTAND! (HAVING VISIONS IN THE SIGHT)

AND NOW I'M FAAAAALLIN, LIKE ICARUS TO LAND! (WE LIVE ON THROUGH THE NIGHT)

A VICTIM OF THE FLAME THAT I FAAAAAAAANNED! (NIGHT OF ETERNAL FIRE)

The music died down just before Joseph got to the door, the guy pausing in the frame, taking a stretch for… some reason, and that's when I noticed the fact that he now had a freaking shovel on his hip, with an awesome looking sharpened spike on the rear of the shovelhead, parallel to the handle, one end of the shovelhead serrated, and what looked to be a hinge to let him rotate the head so that he could actually weaponize the spike by twisting the head to make it resemble a warpick.

The teacher took one look at him, didn't comment on the obnoxiously loud heavy metal at all, and instead asked, "Joseph?"

He blinked, suddenly going completely straight faced. "Yes sir?"

"Why did you bring a shovel to class?" the teacher asked.

Joe tilted his head. "It's an entrenching tool, sir, not a shovel."

The teacher sighed, pinching the non-existent bridge of his nose. "Why do you have an… entrenching tool?"

"In case I need to dig trenches, sir," he said, as if it was obvious, still keeping a straight face the whole time. As weird as it was, I was still impressed by his ability to consistently straight-face pretty much anything.

"You are aware you aren't allowed to bring weapons into class, correct?"

There was the barest flicker on his optics, before he raised an eyebrow, mouth twitching so minutely that if I wasn't looking for it I would have missed it. Seriously, how the hell did Joe manage that? "It's not a weapon, sir, it's for digging trenches."

For once in my life, I was on the same mental wavelength as the entire room and the teacher at that explanation, staring at Joe in befuddlement, because he was so straight-faced that he genuinely seemed to believe what he just said. "In a room with metal floors?" he asked, incredulity actually managing to creep into his constant apathy.

Joe took a breath… he did that a lot. "It's a titanium, carbon nanotube-reinforced entrenching tool, it can definitely dig a trench through the floors here, sir."

The teacher stared at Joe. Joe stared back. Neither blinked. A minute passed. Everyone ignored the bell ringing. Another minute passed. And then Lizzy's dad said, "And why is one end of your entrenching tool serrated ?"

"In the unlikely scenario that I might need to dig a trench through a Murder Drone's face , sir," still completely straight-faced. I wasn't the only drone who struggled not to snicker at that, because damn that was a funny mental image. Another 10 seconds passed as the two male drones continued their staring contest, before Joe continued his undisputed championship at that when the teacher blinked first.

"...You know what, don't use it on anyone here, and I don't care."

"Thank you, sir," he said, suddenly cracking a smile as he strolled to his seat, giving a nod or a smile to each of us as he passed by.

Joseph really was frickin weird, I thought. And now I was just starting to get curious as to why that was the case.

________________________________________

(Joseph)

Time kept ticking on, and my secret lair kept getting built further up. I'd been drilling into the earth outside the outpost's external walls (still far from the surface itself) to create the space for energy infrastructure, and was about one third the way into building a house-sized cold fusion reactor to power an industrial grade matter printer and really kick shit into gear. Which, when I considered the frankly absurd rate of my progress and the fact that I'd only been on Copper 9 for six months and was still working on all this solo, was not only really impressive from basically any perspective, but would also mean I'd have around 2 and a quarter years to build weapons, gear, and various hardware upgrades for when I got my teenage frame. Man , being literal industrial grade machinery that could work at maximum efficiency for hours on end every single night carried some good benefits when it came to mining and building stuff. Hah, maybe I should have chosen Steve as my name with the amount of Minecrafting I did… wow, I was never gonna air that joke on this side of the 4th wall, even Uzi would think that was cringe.

Anyways, If I had a nickel for every 8-year old girl's birthday party I've had to attend out of social obligation and being a decent hu-- uuuuuuuhhhh, sapient being, I'd have 3 nickels by now. Which is one more than the Doofenshmirtz meme. I'd have even more nickels when Kelsey and Uzi's birthdays rolled around, but for now I was stuck at Rebecca's. At least, unlike when we celebrated Doll's birthday at Lizzy's place, Rebecca's room wasn't the physical manifestation of the color pink. Lizzy, you're awesome, but even Pinkie Pie would say that was too much pink in your room, girl. Rebecca's hab was also a bit nonstandard. Like, she lived in it, and it had that lived-in feel to it, but only barely , because she stayed at the guest-room in Darren's hab just as often. Which, like, good on Darren's folks for being just barely caring enough to notice that the girl your kid likes is now an orphan and offering her a spot under your own roof whenever she needed it, but that was literally all they did on that front.

Those two were also totally going to end up together. They were already hanging out almost as much as Rebecca hung with Lizzy, and I'd caught them holding hands on the way to school that morning, before they realized I'd turned the corner on my route and was now behind them, and Rebecca suddenly yanked her hand away and pretended nothing was happening while Darren was confused. Now, I was a petty, sarcastic asshole, but I did have some standards, so rather than tease them like every other person who saw what I did would do, I pretended like I didn't see anything and said nothing before casually opening up a conversation with Darren about a project I was working on with Uzi for gloves with great grip strength. Ostensibly, they were for keeping a good hold of various sports balls, but in reality, they'd do just as well for holding onto guns in a high-stress situation. I was definitely gonna bring that moment up at their wedding, saved video-clip and all, though. Because at this point, I absolutely shipped them.

Anyways, the party was nice, and I learned the hard way that even as a robot eating something that wasn't actually chocolate but was modelled to be the robo-food equivalent of chocolate, that I still hated the stuff (people thought I was weird for that as a meatbag, how funny would it be if me not liking chocolate clued Uzi into me being an Isekai Protagonist?). But the joke's on my taste-buds, because after I got laughed at for hating the robo-chocolate cake, I just told everyone I was turning off my taste-buds, promptly did so, and then finished my slice. At least that round of laughter was with me instead. Some chats were had, gossip was shared, Uzi demolished everyone on MarioKart 374 (man, Nintendo really did run out of names for that and just started adding a number to the title with each new release), Doll was terrifyingly good at throwing darts, Kelsey was somehow the best of us at Pin the Tail on the Murder Drone (Doll did not play that one, and also holy fuck , why is that a game that drones actually made and distributed to children when a over a third of those children lost one or both parents to them) which was ironic when you considered her visual issues, Lizzy utterly shredded everyone else in Just Dance 962, which was doubly impressive when she beat me and all the cheated dexterity I'd developed from all the shit I downloaded. Except for the round where we were copying breakdancing; that one I got 3rd, Lizzy only got 2nd, and 1st was a tie between Thad and Darren. Like, that was some seriously impressive breakdancing on their parts.

I was just getting into a conversation with Uzi about figuring out how to actually make mass-reactive micro-rockets so I could try to recreate a bolter from Warhammer 40k to use on Murder Drones when the group chat got pinged.

Babeatron-Queenthousand: Hey, so I'm using the group chat because talking out loud might lead to rumors, but like, Dolly isn't feeling so hot RN.

Isekai Protagonist: What's going on?

KayKay: Is Doll okay?

Darkxwolf16: Cuz?

Thad_the_Chad: Anything I can do to help?

DarrenToDream: Need me to run a distraction so you can slip out?

TotesBestGirl: You can take her home if she needs to rest, I don't mind at all.

Кукла: I got a headache, and I ran a system diagnostics, and my oil levels are down for some reason while my internal temperature's also up.

My optics hollowed as I froze for a tenth of a second, before overclocking and fixing my outwards expression up. Hopefully Uzi was focusing on the chat and missed that, because I definitely wasn't fast enough to hide it there. Shit . 6 months in and Doll was already starting to manifest Solver symptoms? I knew I was too fucking optimistic to think I'd have a year or two before that became an issue. I mean, in canon, Uzi went from triggering it the first time by deflecting a bullet from J reflexively to actively needing oil and using its abilities in 2 months, max , and half if not less than half that time at minimum. Granted, Uzi was in consistently high-stress near-death situations for a lot of that, which probably accelerated manifestation, but still. I forced my thoughts to calm back down before I could properly start to panic, because even if I could condense it to less than a second, I needed to keep my head in the game. If anything, by helping Doll out here, I'd probably delayed the initial manifestation of any symptoms. And it was just low oil and high temp right now. As far as I was aware, she hadn't actively been using any Solver abilities, nor had a reason to. With 6 months from activation to the first symptoms, there were decent odds that as long as things stayed parallel to canon, she might not even be vulnerable to sunlight for another year or two at this rate. Plus, I had literally prepped for this…

How the fuck was I gonna bring up routinely siphoning my own oil to have an emergency supply just in case one of my friends suddenly became a robot vampire?

I glanced back to chat, barely more than a second passing in the real world.

Babeatron-Queenthousand: That distraction might be a good idea. I was gonna take her to medical since she hasn't been in a while now, and we can just get her an oil top-up there.

Well, that was a convenient solution to trying to figure out how to explain my synthetic blood-bank.

Darkxwolf16: I'll help Darren out. Feel better, Doll.

Thad_the_Chad: I'll help too

KayKay: Feel better Doll!

TotesBestGirl: Feel better girl!

Isekai_Protagonist: I got an idea for that distraction: We could play the Florida Man game.

DarrenToDream: The what?

Isekai_Protagonist: You open a JCJoogle search, type "Florida Man" and then put the date of your birthday, and check what the first article is. Mine is "Florida Man offers vodka spritzer to deputies during chase."

Кукла: What.

Babeatron-Queenthousand: The fuck?

Darkxwolf16: I just checked. Mine is "Florida Man arrested after attacking police officers with a frozen sausage after he got caught trespassing on a university and taking feet pics of students."

Thad_the_Chad: Okay. I don't usually swear.

Thad_the_Chad: But what the FUCK?

Darkxwolf16: What the fuck is WRONG with humans?!?

Isekai_Protagonist: Oh, I'm aware humans are fucking insane, but trust me when I say that Floridans are a special breed of insanity.

KayKay: That's an understatement, I got "Florida Man attacks tourists with an alligator's corpse!"

DarrenToDream: I'll give you this, Joe. That's unhinged AF, but a GREAT distraction.

Darren got up and started pitching my idea to all the other kids present, and I kept an eye out as Lizzy grabbed Doll and slipped out of the hab while everyone was in awe at the sheer insanity of the state of Florida. Was it fucked up that I was glad the Solver ate that entire peninsula and every living thing on it? Probably, but I genuinely believed that the universe was better without that cursed place. I let things mostly pass me by as I stopped overclocking and started thinking about what I needed to do here.

I had a decent supply of oil but I'd need more sooner or later. Matter printers didn't do a good job making liquids, but given that it was a future industrial Macguffin liquid and not liquified fossilized animal remains, I could print the individual ingredients to drone oil and mix that stuff to get it that way. Would be really inefficient, because I'd read up on it to see if that was a better option than routinely slicing my hands every two-odd weeks, and actually mixing that stuff rather than getting a supply via bloodletting and letting my own synthetic organs "naturally" replenish any losses was really time-consuming (like, 4 hours of near constant oversight to make 4 gallons of the stuff), but it would be a safe way to make large quantities of oil. I'd need to get the industrial-scale printer online to do that in any manner that would actually be worth printing the ingredients for, though. However, this would ideally be a temporary solution. In the long run, I could see about setting up oil donation drives like the tags on the AO3 version of Drone Fortress teased. Or maybe, if I could manage stop-gap measures for the interim, after I got my first industrial-grade matter printer running and my secret lair built into an actual secret lair instead of a walled off warehouse behind a secret door, I could make a second printer, and build a bunch of other shit so I could automate it just for oil production. I'd have to come back to feed it new materials as well as run maintenance often, but that was another option, albeit one for the future.

Still, all of that was a moot point until I could assemble a proper cold fusion reactor, fabricate the parts for an industrial printer, and then actually get that online. And that was gonna take a pause for at least tonight, because I needed to go get myself some diamond-tipped titanium syringes to fill with my oil in case Doll has an emergency in the future. And, you know, keeping at least one of those squirreled away in my myriad of pockets. Would be pretty dumb of me to make them and not have one on me in case I needed it, after all.

________________________________________

I forced down a yawn. It was already 13:23 pm (even after 6 months , I was still getting used to having an extra 6 hours a day), and I needed to be up for classes by 6:30 am, but I had checked and I could manage a night or two of 6 hours of charge time. Even as I grumbled and hit confirm on my print order on my personal printer, I was already going over a draft for the blueprints to a miniaturized cold fusion reactor to act as my teenage frame's power supply so that I'd never have to give a shit about pulling late-nights or all-nighters ever again. I suppressed another yawn, and resolved to ask Uzi if she had any tips on battery optimization. My emergency oil epi-pens/adrenaline shots (depended on how much oil the Solver drone in question had when they injected it) were finally being fabricated, so now I had a new dilemma: What to name them. O-stims as a homage to Fallout's stimpacks was a funny idea, but finally being able to play Bloodborne on something not made by SONY was making me strongly consider using the term "oil vials" or "o-vials," as well. Hmmmmmmm… Honestly, I could make O-stims be the official name and just say that oil-vials or o-vials was a perfectly fine thing to call them as well. I was inventing the shit, after all.

Though now that I had 20 minutes to kill while the machine printed 8 injector syringes, I went over to another project. Building the reactor or designing weapons could wait a bit. There was a piece of canon right in front of me that I could weaponize, after all. About two dozen meters down my warehouse, I had a remote control flash-bulb set up, a modern version of the type used on those really old-timey cameras to produce a flash for photos. The sentinels in Cabin Fever used an exact frequency of light to exploit a flaw in Drone's programming that would cause them to reboot if said exact frequency of light hit their optical sensors. I could counter the flash-bangs from the mechanical Tzitzi-Ya-Ku by literally doing something as simple as wearing sunglasses, as demonstrated by V in canon, but I was far more interested in weaponizing that flash for myself. Unfortunately, I had very little idea of where exactly the Cabin Fever labs actually were , especially in relation to Outpost 3, nor was I remotely ready to make a trek outside the Bunker even if I did know, so attempting to capture a sentinel to reverse-engineer their bootloop flashers was right out.

Which meant that trying to get my own hands on a non-lethal takedown for any drone that wasn't aware of the stupidly-easy countermeasures they could take basically boiled down to "repeatedly flashbang myself at slightly different levels of light for hours on end until I lucked out and knocked myself unconscious." So, with 20 minutes to kill while things printed, I might as well get started. Now, the flash in canon was pretty bright, so I could at least rule out low intensity settings on the light, but that was like looking for a needle in all of Earth's water and being told you could skip all the puddles, ponds, lakes, and rivers. Yeah, that helped , but there were still literal oceans to search. Still, nothing to it. I programmed the settings, pulled up a remote, looked at the bulb, took a breath, and pushed the button.

Aaaaah! My optics! I "blinked" as repeated shuttering of my optical sensors let them recalibrate faster (fuck you for making that a thing, JCJ), but I was still conscious, so no dice. Not that I thought that I would be so lucky on the first attempt, but still. I sighed, tweaked the settings ever so slightly, flashed myself again, blinked the flashes out of my visual feed, and realized I was still awake. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. No luck. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. No luck. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. No luck.

This was gonna take a long fucking time, wasn't it?

________________________________________

Well, enough time was passing that I was starting to wonder if Doll's episode was actually just a fluke… nah, it definitely wasn't. My luck was too shit for that. Still, two months with nothing else happening made me start to feel hopeful. Maybe my paranoid preparations were just overly paranoid for once. Maybe Doll wouldn't have any other issues until like, another year from now. I finished my reactor just last week, and with a power supply that could support three industrial printers and then some, I was getting to work on fabricating the parts for one of those and then actually putting it together, at which point I'd really get snowballing. Things were looking up, everything was going okay, Kelsey's birthday came and went without issues, as well as Darren and Thad's, and Uzi's was coming up, at which point I'd be starting to look forward to being one year closer to that frame upgrade myself. Which I suppose is why Murphy decided to remind me that hope was the first step on the road to disappointment .

We'd been hanging out at Darren's place (his parents were out) after school, and I was internally debating the merits of actually telling Lizzy to shut up and stop going off on "Why does Rebecca get two rooms?" again . Like, robo-Jesus, woman, you were awesome and funny, but it is not rocket science that she's totally going to end up with Darren, and that she lives here just as much as she does in her own hab to bond with him as a means to cope with her own trauma… I suddenly had an epiphany. I mean, if this timeline's Uzi had autism, maybe this timeline's Lizzy, due to having a single dad who was apathetic to everything at least 90% of the time, genuinely had trouble experiencing empathy. Would definitely explain how bad her canon self got, even if she was way better here and now. Huh, probably something I'd have to attempt to address, and probably with more tact than I did getting Uzi to realize her own issues. Not that I was scared of any single individual ( without an active Solver) in Outpost 3 by this point, what with all the martial arts and methods of using my entrenching tool in combat that I'd downloaded, but more that I'd feel really shitty if I ended up making Lizzy cry. She was a great friend, and didn't deserve that. Same for everyone I knew… Man, actually having friends really was something else. I… I genuinely wanted these people to live happy lives, and here I was, just hanging out with them while knowledge of what was coming loomed over my head like the proverbial Sword of Damocles.

Doll had been in the middle of debating with Uzi the merits of a railroad spike-launcher to use on Murder Drones, but without either magnetic or chem-rail assistance, I didn't really think it'd go anywhere. She'd just opened her mouth to give a rebuttal to her cousin's latest argument, when she suddenly gasped, and bent over, stumbling back and falling onto the couch, right optic flickering for just a moment before she covered her visor with her hands. Everyone was asking if she was okay less than two seconds laters, but I'd reflexively overclocked as soon as she gasped, and that was the only reason I'd caught what happened during that flicker. I'd calibrated my optical sensors to take 360 frames a second during overclocks instead of the usual 180, and what I saw was only there for a single one of those frames, completely unnoticed by anyone but myself, but as I pulled it up to double check, there was no denying it.

Her right optic light had been replaced for that single frame, 1/360th of a second, perhaps even less, with a red hexagon with three triangular arrows pointing outwards, equidistant from one another. The symbol of the Solver of the Absolute Fabric of Reality, The Void, and the Exponential End.

Fuck.

In the real world, I shoved my pants-shitting levels of terror (thank robo-god I coded a manual override code that could seal my sphincter shut at will as a countermeasure to anyone acquiring my diarrhea virus, that I only turned off when I actually wanted to shit) down in a fraction of a second as I fought to keep my primal terror off my face, darting over to the couch and asking, "Doll, are you okay?"

" I… I got a migraine, all of the sudden, " Doll said, groaning as she kept her hands over her visor.

"Cuz," Uzi was the next drone to speak up, "What's wrong? Can you run a system diagnostic?"

"Doll?" Lizzy asked, her own complaints forgotten as the girl practically teleported without the Solver to the Russian drone's side.

Doll sucked in a breath, wincing as she rubbed her optics. " My… my oil's low and my temperature is up again ? But… it's only been two months, " she said, trailing off.

"I don't think medical is gonna just give you oil again, so soon after the last time," Thad commented.

"Shouldn't you be making enough of your own?" Kelsey asked. "Are you eating right?"

"Is there anything either of us can do?" Rebecca asked, Darren stood next to her and nodding.

" I…" Doll trailed off again, suddenly nervous, and then she groaned as she winced once more.

Fuck it, I thought. I still haven't really come up with a good excuse, but better to nip this in the bud than let it become a problem. "Uh, I might--"

Lizzy cut me off, optics determined. "I'll take care of it."

Everyone looked at the blonde girl. "Liz?" I asked. "I have an--"

"I'll take care of it," she said again, tone firm.

"Lizzy?" Uzi asked. "She's my cousin, I might be able to come up with--"

"I'll. Take. Care. Of. It." Lizzy repeated. Stepping forwards and grabbing Doll's wrist, pulling the girl up with a surprised gasp. "She's my bestie." A little bit of nervousness crept into her determined grin. "I'll walk her home, figure out what's wrong, and she'll be fine tomorrow."

" Liz? " Doll asked, lifting her hand from her left optic to glance at the diva, who got a little more nervous, but simultaneously buckled down on her determination as her digital eyelids narrowed, looking Doll in the optics.

"I got this, Dolly."

She tugged the Russian witch-to-be out of the room without another word. A couple seconds ticked by, and then I asked aloud, "So… was that weird to anyone else?"

"Oh, totally weird," Thad agreed.

"Yeah/Yup/Uh-huh/Totes," Kelsey, Uzi, Darren, and Rebecca added, respectively.

"Sooooooooo…" Uzi trailed off. "I'm gonna… head home, because I'm not comfortable hanging out while worrying about Doll."

"Nah, that's totally understandable," Darren said.

"Yeah," Thad said, "It kinda does kill the vibe."

"See you all tomorrow then?" Kesley asked.

"Sure," I said.

"Are you staying the night, Becca?" Darren asked his totally-not-girlfriend.

Rebecca looked away from the door, seeming to snap back to attention. "Yeah, sure Darren."

And that was possibly the most awkward end to a hang-out I'd had since I'd gotten here.

_______________________________________

So, actually funny thing happened that morning in class. The uh… the door to the room got jammed. Wasn't me! I know at least some of my 4th wall audience will be thinking that, but sometimes hydraulic doors do , in fact, jam randomly. The funny part is that it's a side-opening door, rather than one that drops from the ceiling, meaning that my trusty entrenching tool, which I'd been carrying (and spending an hour training with every day; that joke that I'd dig a trench through a Murder Drone's face hadn't been entirely a joke, after all) ever since I'd actually gone and fabricated the thing, could be used as an impromptu crowbar to force the door open in a manner that would have assuredly given Khan a core-attack. It was also the first time I'd actually seen Lizzy's dad smile at anything, too.

Speaking of, it was only with less than a minute left to class that the Teacher's daughter and Doll actually came into the room. Doll herself seemed fine, none of the issues she had last night evident. But she seemed concerned about Lizzy trailing in behind her, who seemed just a tiny bit dazed, something I wouldn't have recognized without having been her friend for eight months. Out of paranoia, I swapped my visual settings to thermal. Lizzy was hotter than normal… in the literal, temperature sense. Dude, she was literally eight , I was not thinking about that yet, especially considering that I'm mentally twenty-five! And on top of that I was damn well determined not to end up being an Isekai Protagonist who somehow had massive amounts of rizz and amassed a harem. Fucking horny bastards on the other side of the 4th wall, I swear… Anyways, between being just a tad bit out of things and running a noticeably hot temperature, I had a hypothesis, but I switched back to my normal vision to check Lizzy's hands, and yep , she was wearing (pink, because of course they were) fingerless gloves. Gloves that would be perfect to hide a bandaged palm.

So, Doll's oil needs were apparently sated, Lizzy was displaying symptoms of having drained just slightly too much oil from herself in one sitting, Doll was concerned about Lizzy more than usual, and Lizzy was wearing a clothing article she usually didn't that was perfectly positioned to hide a cut on her palms. Did not take much more than that and my meta-knowledge to figure out that Lizzy had had the same idea I did, and had literally sliced her own palm open to give her own oil to Doll. Though unlike me, she didn't do any research to check just how much she could safely drain in one sitting, and overshot the mark a bit. From her appearance and her temperature, she'd be fine in a day or two, but she'd need to be more careful if she did it again. And I already knew she'd do it again, if she did it once. Which you know, annoying , because I'd been ready for this, and had a bit over two gallons of my own oil on standby, but Liz just jumped the gun, with the same thing I did but in a less safe manner.

Though at the same time, even as I watched them sit down, I had a smile creep up on me. Because, like, that was super wholesome of Lizzy, almost certainly not something she would have done in canon, and I realized that this was because of me . She might struggle with empathy, but I'd gotten Lizzy to be a better person in this timeline, and she went and did that for Doll completely of her own volition. It was also kinda adorable, because I totally shipped Dizzy, and that scenario was a perfect way to get that ship sailing, with pretty much no direct interference on my part…

Man, it was definitely fucked up that I was planning the love lives of like half of my friends, even if I never intended to actually act on any of those plans beyond engineering circumstances to make things more likely to happen. But at the same time, I was really fucking stressed constantly in the back of my mind, what with the apocalypse looming overhead, and this was a mostly harmless means of coping with that. And if drones I shipped genuinely ended up happy together, was it really a bad thing in the first place? Probably, because I was taking away the agency of others, but call me hypocritical, because I really didn't fucking care. The shipping made me happy and helped keep me grounded amidst the storm of bullshit coming my way, and it was purely romantic and not sexual, so I was gonna do it. Hate me if you must, but I firmly believe that J and Tessa would make a great couple, and I was willing to die on that hill of doomed yuri, damnit! And hey, at least I had mostly sane ships. Not like some of those nutcases who shipped J and Khan… or Doll and Uzi… or gods forbid, Cyn and Louisa . Actually kinda glad that being on the other side of the 4th wall meant I'd never have to see the ship name Absolute MILF ever again.

Anyways , unhinged ramblings of a questionably sane dimensional traveler on a self-appointed mission to prevent over half a dozen deaths of people he knows and many more deaths beyond that aside, now I had to wait until Doll's increasing oil needs meant that just Lizzy giving some of her own oil wouldn't be safe anymore, and they started to get desperate before I could offer that solution without looking super suspicious. I mean, I'd still look really suspicious regardless, but I felt like I'd done enough shit like bringing my entrenching tool with me everywhere that I could probably get away with it being "just another weird thing that Joe does." And also hope they didn't resort to murder without trying to talk to one of us first. I would very much like for Yeva and Mikhail to be the only corpses in Doll's hab, if I could help it.

The bell rang, the lesson started, and I tuned it out once I realized it was a life science lesson. On a planet where any remaining biological life was either extremophilic bacteria that could survive the subzero temperatures, or was flesh and bone that was a manifestation of an Eldritch Nightmare beyond mortal comprehension who didn't care to obey silly things like the laws of biology… Actually, there's canonically at least 9 outposts, and at least Outpost 9 survived long enough to give Khan a door-related award in the Pilot… a quick delving to my memory dated the reward as 3060-something, the handwriting being illegible to me when I had paused to look at that frame, meaning that at least one other Outpost could be around even now. And if Khan shared his door specs with them like he had them available to the public here, they could have very well built Khan-tier barriers to their own Outposts. Huh, I'd definitely need to go get a map of where they were once I was ready to go above ground. Besides other outposts with workers and Murder Drones of their own that I could recruit (or recruit or kill in the case of the latter), one of them might have a sealed atmosphere with plant life preserved in it, or something like that. And if they had grass, then I'd legitimately get to joke that I went through Murder Drones and touched grass at the same time. Still, this was literally like 3rd grade life science, I was not paying attention to that shit a second time.

I opened up The Neglected Children of Outpost 3 (And Thad) , smirking at Thad's poorly repressed snigger when he saw the notification for the chat ping on his HUD. The fact that he still chuckled at the name every now and then made me unreasonably proud, even now.

Isekai_Protagonist: Hey >Doll, >Lizzy, you two okay?

Кукла: Yes!

Babeatron-Queenthousand: Yes!

They both literally replied within a tenth of a second of each other. Yeah, totally not suspicious at all. Then again, I was fucking one to talk, the midnight-haired skinwalker calling the robo-vampire-witch out for being different.

Darkxwolf16: You guys sure? Doll wasn't doing good last night, and you left quickly.

Кукла: Everything's fine.

Babeatron-Queenthousand: All taken care of.

Thad_the_Chad: You ever figured out what the problem was?

Babeatron-Queenthousand: Just some girl stuff.

Isekai_Protagonist: I don't wanna be that guy.

Isekai_Protagonist: But I'm gonna be that guy.

Isekai_Protagonist: We're robots

Isekai_Protagonist: We don't have genitals

Isekai_Protagonist: You can't HAVE periods.

DarrenToDream: Holy crap, why am I only realizing this now?

TotesBestGirl: (Has shared an image)

KayKay: Lol that's a great facepalm GIF!

Isekai_Protagonist: Are you SURE everything's okay?

I got a glare from Lizzy and Doll IRL, and raised both my hands from their position on top of the desk (without lifting them up, because I didn't want to get called on) in a placating manner.

Isekai_Protagonist: Cool your internals! I'm concerned, as a friend, and you're deflecting, which is making me MORE concerned!

Darkxwolf16: Gonna agree with Joe. We're worried, cuz.

Кукла: It's fine, cuz. It won't be a problem anymore.

Babeatron-Queenthousand: I got this shit on lock, just like the Girlboss I am.

It was genuinely depressing that I knew them both well enough by now that I knew they both fully believed that, but I myself knew it wouldn't last. And I had no reasonable way to tell them that right now. The best I could do is carry an oil vial on me and remain on standby for when the situation inevitably spiraled out of control. Still, I could at least leave an open offer.

Isekai_Protagonist: I'll take your word for it, but if it STOPS being on lock for whatever reason, I'll leave an open offer of help, no questions asked.

Darkxwolf16: Same.

Кукла: Thanks Uzi.

The chat dried up quickly after that, and I opened up a new tab to go browsing for maps of Copper 9. Just because I wouldn't be headed to the surface until I was 10, didn't mean I couldn't download maps and plan routes to other Outposts, after all. Just… had to keep an optical sensor out for Lizzy and Doll on top of everything else now. Man, this shit could get mentally exhausting , sometimes. I think once the industrial matter printer was done and plugged into my reactor, I'd take a week off from all the Isekai shit. I needed a fucking break. Yeah, that was sounding like a good idea. I could pirate a bunch of 40k stuff since Games Workshop and all their copyright BS was dead with the rest of earth. There were some Ciaphas Cain books I'd never read, after all. Hell, I might even get some inspiration from that poor sod. Still find it utterly hilarious to this day that Cain managed to actually retire and die of old age as a normal human in the 40k universe. Oh! Maybe I could get everyone to sit down and watch RWBY over a weekend. Wonder if they'd like Penny… RWBY Penny, I mean. Actually, it would be really funny if at some point someone said that she reminded them of MD Penny. Eh, thoughts for another day. For now, I had some maps to download, and a matter printer the size of a semi-truck to finish constructing, a friend manifesting the power of Satan and Anime to worry about, and a 40k: Darktide inspired entrenching tool to master for combat purposes. I was gonna slam this thing against a Murder Drone's face at least once, damnit.