5818/And Teeth For Teeth

And Teeth For Teeth
Date of Scene:	21 April 2018
Location:	Deep City
Synopsis:	Pending
Cast of Characters:	632, Starbound Flotilla, William Pauwel

---

Septette Arcubielle (632) has posed:
     The lights aren't on in Septette's cabin. A trail of red blood leads, in drips and spatters, to her front door. The handle has been generously anointed with fumbling crimson clawprints. An soft unearthly glow emanates from somewhere inside, radiating out of the windows.

     This is a scenario that would be vastly more unnerving under any other circumstances.

     If Septette's ambiguously positive chirping over Flotilla radio is any indication, this is precisely where she's to be found- and the sensor readings back it up. So does the smoke rising from the chimney, although depending on how one reads the atmosphere, that could simply be a side effect of the smoldering hellfire no doubt required to produce the horror-movie lighting.

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    Seft regards the trail of blood with a series of digitally displayed emoticons that would get her banned from the SomethingAwful forums in three posts or less. O_O;!!, and then <_<;; and of course >_<!! all go on display as she feels concern, comprehension, and exasperation. Well of course she can't /see/ that she's trailing all this monster blood around like this. Same for the lights.

    She makes sure to knock, because Septette obviously can't /see/. "Anxious. Septeeeeeette? You're okay, right? Goodness, you went out to do more of your business without eyes? We need to get this fixed before that starts locking you out of more dangerous sorts of work." Making sure to stick to yes or no questions, even if this is a bit of the Dentist's Dialogue Paradox. Even with her Matter Manipulator, her array of parts is something she's rolling up to the place in a combination luggage and toolbox arrangement.

Septette Arcubielle (632) has posed:
     A bright, two-toned "chirp-CHIRP" echoes from inside the house, followed by clattering and rummaging sounds. Crunchy, resounding footfalls approach the other side of the door with all the deliberate and exacting slowness of an arthritic slasher villain. The door creaks on its hinges, and swings open...

     Septette stands in the doorway wearing a pink apron, eyeless and grinning. Her hands- mercifully covered in blood-free oven mitts- hold a tray of warm oatmeal cookies that smell positively delicious. With a warm giggling trill, she foists a cookie at Seft before turning and heading back inside the house. She beckons over her shoulder for the Glitch to follow.

     It's treacherously dark inside, even with Septette's core shedding a bit of dull crimson light. Fortunately, there are lanterns on the walls with crystalline 'fuses'; it seems apparent by their design that they're meant to be magically toggled.

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    Seft holds her "breath" on her cooling fans when the door opens, still intimidated even though she knows Septette doesn't... Mean it, per se. "Unnerved. Ahhh, erm, thank you, Septette!" She says, her tone a little more revealing in explicitness than it ought to be. "Enthusiastic. Ooooh, they smell wonderful! Just let me set my tools down and I'll have some." She DOES have one of those proper food-processing Glitch reactors after all. She takes the tray, looking in a worried way at those hands, and then follows in! As she does, she blinks her lights, trying to get clear vision in the dark...

    As she walks, she glances to Septette. Back to the door. Over to the lamps. Back to Septette... And then stops just long enough to pull a small wand out of her Matter Manipulator and slip a small 'activate please' spell towards the lanterns. She doesn't wanna bother Septette, and if Septette can't /see/, well surely there's no harm in doing a /little/ of this. Right? Right???

    Hopefully that all works out without something exploding. Seft moves on and in, eager to unfold her gear and set up her little workstation to get Septette seeing again.

Septette Arcubielle (632) has posed:
     The lanterns flicker and spark for a moment, and then all switch on simultaneously. The crystal wicks capture tiny amounts of mana and 'bounce' it within their internal structure, creating light at each internal collision, and the lightly frosted glass casings lend it a softer, warmer aspect.

     It's the little touches that make the difference between a house of horrors and a HOME of horrors.

     Fortunately, the splatterfest outside swiftly gives way to a familiar fastidiousness as the pair of robots enter the living room. At some point between the doorknob debacle and the cooking capers, Septette seems to have remembered to autoclave the blood off of herself.

     After setting the tray of cookies down on a table, Septette clicks a few times to estimate Seft's position. She carefully steps around her friend and back outside, then drags the remaining equipment in as a courtesy, like an insistent yet worryingly klutzy bellhop.

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    "Oh no, you don't need to trouble yourself!" Seft insists. Honestly, she's more worried about being polite than she is about Septette damaging her equipment. But she does obligingly take a bite of the one she was provided, and desite her occasional robotically-deliberate uneven swaying on her feet as she anxiously shifts her weight about, she settles down and gets to work on unpacking. "Friendly. Honestly, Septette, sometimes you're too generous and hospitable for your own good. Under circumstances like these, I'm supposed to be the one making sure I take care of you."

    She makes a few soft, somber boopy tones. "Nervous. Things haven't been too difficult for you, right...?" She gets out her tools! Plier-like ones for locating, extracting, and pinning the crystal magic connectors so that they can be reconnected, specially made to softly bind to their surface with minimal chance of damage. "Hopeful. 'll make sure they're all certainly better, though!" She says, eagerly. "Eager. Now, just tell me which--" She starts, before stopping herself with a sudden buzz. "Sheepish. Um, I mean, just /show/ me where--" Another buzz.

    "...Comprehending. Oh, this is going to be more difficult than I thought. Maybe if I..." She taps her chin with one of the pliers, looking about... She snacks on another cookie as well, contemplating the tray... And then says, "Oh! I have some spare sand in my Matter Manipulator! If I put it onto a tray or something like that... Your motor functions are all undamaged, right? I bet you could draw guidelines for me very precisely, and that would help me extract the specific crystal conduit."

    She seems hopeful about this plan. Having Septette write normally in her current state, even for a machine as precise as she is, is a recipe for the worst sort of disaster: The loss of a good pen.

Septette Arcubielle (632) has posed:
     For all Seft's equivocating and mannerly "oh-but-you-don't-need-to"s, Septette is still quite set on doing more than her share to drag in the crates. Her capacity for shifting large objects with distressing ease seems wholly undiminished by the holes in her hydraulic tubing, which- on closer inspection- have been temporarily patched with ice to keep them from bleeding dry.

     Septette pretends to sit in a chair in her normal furniture-sparing posture and runs her hands over the tools carefully, puzzling out their contours just enough to re-familiarize herself with each as she listens to her friend's stream of thought. "Things haven't been too difficult for you, right...?" A cheery buzz, vaguely like a doorbell.

     Rather than drawing in the tray of sand where it's set before her, Septette spreads out her hands in it like a baker preparing to work dough. Her fingers rapidly heat up until the sand glows red-hot and melts into liquid glass, which she works with an expression of deep concentration- pulling out strands, slicing off errant bits and pieces, and pressing it into the grossly correct shape with her palms.

     She finishes making a rough three-dimensional model of the magitech circuits of her eyes and the socket while the opaque unrefined glass is still red, then 'casts' it solid by quenching it abruptly with an ice enchantment. When it's finished, it looks like a network of multifarious serpentine wires connecting a central socket-held crystal to a trio of smaller crystals hidden behind the multiple lenses of the eye. Oddly, the central largest crystal doesn't seem to connect to anything at all, though it is held in place by a solid fixture.

     Septette turns to Seft and taps the side of her socket, angling her head so the Glitch can peer in. A red glow briefly pulses from deep inside as the central crystal is energized- it looks like that part's still intact.

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    Seft looks on in a sort of awe, her eyes wide in that classic O_O expression as Septette uses a /much/ more expressive technique than she was expecting. Ingenius! Why didn't she think of that? Well, she probably was underestimating Septette's precision. "Fascinated. Oh my goodness, Septette, that's amazing! Oooooh..." And then she examines it, checking in and out of the socket, peering repeatedly... "Comprehending. Alright, it looks like... The central segment is still intact. But the three smaller sections aren't. This looks like... Some sort of control relay? And the three crystals behind the lens..."

    "Curious. I have a few pieces to try here, and I really want to see if I can get the conductive wires to link with them! It's possible we can use Avian cameras and lenses, but I do want to see if I can try Glitch optics... Just as a test!"

    Seft works on extracting the remaining pieces of conductive wire and placing them in their proper position, and then moving them -- individually, with robotically precise motions -- into clamped positions where they can be "operated" on. From there, she has a tiny tool now for deploying those little double-ended-flower erchius crystal connectors, slipped over each wire, or gently slipped into the wire sockets of the deeper red core. And then, crystaline erchius conductors, designed to link directly into a trio of Glitch sight systems. "Are these categorized by receptor? Or by resolution? Or..." She'll test the general categorization systems until she can get something right, and then try to make the connection and put a nice violet lens over it if she can!

    If this works, Septette will have -- albeit a bit haphazardly -- a single eye with a fancy violet-on-black LED display, not unlike the faceplates of Glitch. Partially to see if this technique will work, and partially to get Septette a disposable solution to see out of while the other repairs get solved.

Septette Arcubielle (632) has posed:
     The little yggdroid can't help but titter proudly at Seft's amazement. She tries to put one hand on Seft's shoulder, fumbles through empty air with all the grace of someone who expected a staircase to be one step longer, and then course-corrects to an adequately amiable shoulder-pat. "This looks like... Some sort of control relay?" A soft buzz, and a firm shake of her head.

     The mention of conductive wires elicits a buzz too. Septette holds up one flat hand vertically- 'stop'- and reaches inside her eye socket with the other, before pulling out a frayed piece of what looks like 'insulated' fiber-optics. On closer inspection, the fine strand has a sort of crystalline composition evident in the way light dances across it like iridescent fishscales.

     As for the speculation on receptors or resolutions, Septette continues shaking her head and buzzing with varying degrees of vehemence for a few moments- until she reaches into her pouch and sets a quarter-sized crystal on the table and shines an LED on it, just in case the lights aren't on. It shows a strange fiery refractive pattern, distorting the light that passes through it into an iridescent smear. She taps the table with her other hand where she estimates the fiery rainbow has appeared, nodding for emphasis.

     When Seft does construct and attach the eye with the Erchius adapters, the lens nearly-instantly forms a hairline crack as Septette looks around... but the rest of it seems to hold. She grins and gives a thumbs-up, then- glancing out at a window with blood spattered on the outside, frowns and hums thoughtfully.

     Oops.

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    "Comprehending. Ohhhh! Something more like... A receiver? Sending the data to your other parts? Oh, but.. I hope it has worked! Oh!" Seft makes a happy, beepy noise. "Excited. Oh! Did it work? You can see me, right Septette?" She clasps her hands together eagerly and almost /bounces/ in excitement. "Cheerful. I had hoped this would work like it did the last time! I was worried about the smaller connectors."

    Then she looks outside, following Septette's gaze, and warbles awkwardly. "Awkward. Um, yes, right. The outside was very... Uncanny." She stares down at her own lap for a moment and fidgets with her hands. "Sheepish. I was honstly not sure if that was intentional or not." Then she gets more cheery! "Eager. But, now we can work on the voice synthesizing, right?" ^_^!!

William Pauwel has posed:
Will has had a...

Well. He's had a month. That's certainly one way to put it.

A month.

...Yeah.

But! That's all in the past now! And he can at least turn the last week of this month into something a little less traumatizing. Like machinework! Yeah, that's the ticket. A little bit of tinkering here and there and everything will be right as rain again.

P...provided he doesn't rip off a knob or something.

SPEAKING OF WHICH.

THERE IS A KNOCK AT THE DOOR.

Or rather, there was a knock at the door. The mailed fist what did the knocking accidentally seems to have knuckled a hole into said door. One can almost hear the wince of the knocker on the other side who peeks an eye through the hole he made and says: "S-sorry 'bout that! I'll go ahead and patch the door later. Uh. Y'all sent a signal for me to follow?"

Septette Arcubielle (632) has posed:
     "But, now we can work on the voice synthesizing, right?" Septette laughs and chirps in the affirmative in a single extended noise, then 'pinches' Seft's metal cheek gently with her mercifully-cooled fingers. For being so affectively constrained, Seft is incredibly adorable. Or maybe that just adds to her cuteness, like how a sonnet is all the more elegant for its restricted meter...?

     Septette 'zones out' into time dilation, and her new eye is fed all kinds of confusing inputs. Lazy microscopic saccades and gentle refocusing become a blitz of millisecond twitches and invisible adjustments that threaten to shred the eye's innards or wear them away into dust. A purple light spins around her iris faster and faster, like some kind of accelerating loading ring, until it smears and blurs into a solid purple ring as its rotation exceeds the framerate of a normal person's vision.

     At that precise moment, the sound waves from William knocking on the door reach her ears. For an instant, she ratchets up even further into 'threat assessment'-level dilation... and then she cycles back down, her eye making clicking noises, as she identifies the visitor.

     A five-foot-tall one-eyed Septette in a pink apron peers through the fist-shaped hole in the wooden door, then opens it wide and gestures for Will to come inside after foisting an oatmeal cookie on him. She peers around the corner into the living room ahead of him, giving Seft a meaningful look. If there are any Flotilla trade secrets on the table, she needs to hide them fast!

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    More of that >_<!! at the cheekpinching, but Seft has always taken this sort of thing in stride. Less taken in stride are the fascinating things Septette does, like the display of her eyes. Unfortunately for her, she can't see the fantastical time dilation effects, and so it just looks, from the outside, /really strange/, or like some sort of boot-up sequence. And then... A knock! She lets out a short, surprised buzz before Septette goes to get the visitor. "Curious. Huh? Oh!" Seft shakes her head, assuring Septette wordlessly that there's nothing too sensitive out here. No, her personal obsessive secrets were already hidden, or so she thought at least, even from Septette.

    As Will enters, Seft, friendly and kind as ever, gives him plenty of positive greetings. "Friendly. Hello, William! Good to see you, um, well in a sort of way!" She waves in machine-like ways, but has a properly friendly ^_^ on. "Eager. We just now got one of the eyes repaired. We need to try to get the other replaced with something less experimental, and to get the voice synthesizer repaired. And it looks like my Erchius adapters are working fine, so as long as you use those, we can integrate any parts we need!"

    She waves him over, letting him at the tools she has if he needs them. Then, she emits a surprised blip. "Realizing. Oh! And, um. Apologies about the blood out there! Septette still had obligations to deal with while she was blind, and that's a matter that was difficult to manage without sight." She makes a long series of awkward buzzy sounds, sort of flustered at being the only voice to explain this right now.

William Pauwel has posed:
    Getting a new pair of arms means learning all kinds of things all over again. How much power to put into a handshake, how to properly handle tools, and apparently how to open doors without utting holes in them. Will meets Septette's cyclopean eye with a sheepish smile that quickly ends up being filled with a delicious oatmeal cookie.

...This is probably for the best, as Will would probably have inadvertently crushed that cookie into crumbs with his MIGHTY ROBOT HANDS. Instead, Will gets to enjoy a mouthful of sweet and raisin-y goodness before making his proper entrance.

"Well hey there Seft," Will says, waving with an arm positively festooned with probably way-too-many pistons to be at all reasonable. It ends up waving a little too much-- or more likely, Will hasn't yet gotten used to telling it how to stop without using a second, mailed hand to force it. "I uh, I'm glad to see y'all are both doing... More or less okay! I'm... Coping, I guess?"

...

Sort of.

Will glances furtively back at the hole he put in the door.

Y-yeah.

...

"I uh. I think these things may be a bit too high powered. Might need to... down-tune them a bit, yeah."

Septette Arcubielle (632) has posed:
     Following behind Septette is a little strange- William would be able to see around her spine or through her mostly-hollow ribcage to the inside of her apron, lit dimly by the glowing components of her mechanical innards. She seems relatively unfazed by the property damage, and the exaggerated arm-flailing does wring a little staticky giggle out of her. After settling down on a reinforced chair in front of the cookie-and-tool-festooned table, she mimes arm-wrestling Will with a mischievous grin.

     Maybe that's her intended method of exacting revenge for the raid: being arm-wrestled by a girl. Clearly Will was lured here for an assassination of his pride.

     Septette brushes her hair out of her face, revealing the other ugly empty socket, and nods solemnly towards Seft. At the mention of "obligations", she holds her hands up like claws, leans forward, and makes a quiet growly "raaargh" noise with what's left of her voice synthesizer.

     Monsters.

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    Seft regards the arms. One of them looks like Seft's own arms! Thankfully, Will hasn't acquired /girl arms/, the gender was matching for the parts he got. Seft gives him a shrug. "Cheerful. I wasn't one of the ones who was defending the station! Nothing much I needed to cope for." A few cheerful beepy noises! "Awkward. I think it's Albert who's having the toughest time sorting his own emotions out..." And then her lower face unfolds into a kind of sticking-out-her-tongue expression. "Teasing. Well, I won't turn down your help, but you'll need to learn about your arms all on your own, or Pavo will never let me hear the end of it."

    "Explaining. Septette is a cruicial part of the local ecosystem. Well, not crucial for the ecosystem, crucial for people to survive in the ecosystem. So even while blind, she was having to do a lot of work!" Then she gestures William over. "Inviting. Here! Come work on the other eye. Just link the connectors with my Erchius adaptors, and try to fit three of these Avian sensors behind the lens." The Avian sensors appear to be weird violet gems with strange crystaline connectors emerging from their base.

    "Contemplating... Septette, can you show me what part is missing in your voice synthesis? And, um." She looks back and forth, awkwardly. "Awkward. We only have Glitch voice synthesizers, so I hope you have spare parts for this yourself." She isn't self-conscious about her glitch "accent", but she knows that might be a little silly for Septette to have to deal with.

William Pauwel has posed:
    Septette isn't the first robot-lady Will has seen strutting around in various states of disarray. He soldered an Abyssal back together, after all Though the juxtaposition of all of those... sharp pointy interior bits and Septette's ~amazing pink apron~ is a litle bit jarring to say the least.

Well. At least she gets a laugh out of Will's predicament. TERRIBLE.

"I- I ain't gonna armwrestle someone who just got back from bein' half blown to bits!" Will says, clearly just afraid of the indignity of losin' to a giiiirl.

He'd deserve the girl arms if he did. CLEARLY THEY'D BE BETTER THAN WHAT HE'S GOT.

A-hem.

Monsters, is it...!? "Uh. Well, I could maybe help out with that," Will says, uncertain. He goes to scratch his face with his AWESOME ROBOT ARM and then thinks better of it when he considers that he might end up accidentally punching his head off. Will is pretty sure they don't make cybernetic replacement heads. Best not to risk it. "I mean," he peers down at the /incredibly delicate/ bits arrayed before him and crinkles his nose a bit. "I could try this, too. Just... going to have to be careful."

Very, very careful.

...

...

This was easier (and faster) when his arms were fleshy and touchy.

Septette Arcubielle (632) has posed:
     "Half blown to bits"? Septette's face sets in a cold, impassive mask, but her empty eye socket pulses a dull and angry red like the caldera of a dormant volcano stirring to wakefulness. She leans forward by a couple of inches, hands folded flat in her lap. It is a look of simmering indignity. It is a challenging, threatening look. It is a look that says that William Pauwel does not know her limits because no man living does.

     It's also a look coming from a five-foot-tall robot girl, so it mainly comes off a bit petulant and grumpy.

     She stands up and ever-so-carefully scratches Pauwel's face with her knifelike fingers in roughly the area she estimates he was reaching for, and her expression melts into a mildly patronizing smile as she emits a crooning hum. Her other hand trails down to where the flesh of his arm meets the Glitch prosthetic. Oh, any other time she'd be delighted to let Will help with monsters, but not after he's been half blown to bits.

     Fortunately, Seft's prompting pulls her back to reality a bit. Septette sits back down and adjusts some of the hydraulic 'muscles' around the front of her neck with her fingers, pulling and stretching them out of the way to reveal a coppery contraption vaguely reminiscent of a music box. In the center are a pair of crystals on opposite edges of a circular metal disc, but the thin disc itself seems to have been partially melted, leaving only a thick slaggy strip connecting the two magitech manipulators. This ought to be an easy fix.

William Pauwel has posed:
Wha--

Cheek scratching!? Affectionate arm-patting!?!?! Will's jaw works for a moment as his brain struggles to process what's happening, and then...!

His face goes red.

WITH SHYNESS.

"O-oh no, y'all don't have to worry so much fer me, miss Alcubierre," Will stammers, twiddling his mechanical thumbs in a manner that is both too fast to track with the human eye and also paradoxically adorable. "It's fine! I can aim and shoot just right as I am now, and Judgment said he'd help me tune these things, so... I'll be fine, promise! But I sure 'ppreciate yer concern, miss! It does a man's heart good to know that there're folks out there who're worried fer him."

Oh no!

Septette's sarcasm has been rebuffed... By Will's PURE GOOD NATURED INNOCENCE. He's TOO MUCH OF A CINNAMON ROLL.

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    William gets a plaintive look from Seft. She gestures to Septette, regarding his worries about hurting Septette, and then his adorable reaction afterwards. "Teasing. Willam, I'm very sorry, but you have robot arms made out of solid metal, not robot arms made out of solid murder. If you make a bad slip, it's not going to hurt Septette, she's Septette. You can't hurt her on accident unless you hurt her feelings. Most people can't hurt Septette on purpose." She makes a few beepy giggly noises at what Septette's provoked, and then focuses again.

    It's not that Seft doesn't care about Septette's well-being. It's just that, after knowing her this many years, Seft knows better about her resilience. She also knows a bit about repairs, so she can work on this one. The disc... Hmmm, it just needs to be reshaped into a disc shape properly, right? "Curious. Septette, I think I have a good idea of what shape this needs to be in. Do I just reform it into that? Or does it require any surface adjustments to match your patterns?" With just enough highly concentrated heat, she ought to be able to match August's horrifying rushes of superheated air, enough to restore that speech properly.

William Pauwel has posed:
Will huffs. Huff! "Well, you never know! They could be made out of solid murder. I could have tried to poke at their internals and accidentally did something I shouldn't have. Hmph!" Will is still embarassed! All the blood he no longer has in his arms seems to have rushed to his face.

this poor sugarplum

Septette Arcubielle (632) has posed:
     Well, it's a good thing that Will hasn't hurt her feelings at all, right?

     Right?

     It's honestly hard to tell. As soon as she realizes that Will's mistaking her condescension for earnest concern, Septette's affect shifts to one of genuine(-seeming) sweetness and smiles rather than simmering down into quiet grumpiness as one might expect. It's like she has no emotional inertia, turning on a dime and flitting from one demeanor to another as it appears socially convenient.

     For example, as soon as Seft mentions being 'made of murder', Septette's posture becomes subtly more closed and fidgety. Her eye flicks downwards, staring at her restless hands, and the spinning light in its iris rotates a little faster as a cooling fan toggles on somewhere in her chest. The voice synthesizer in her throat visibly vibrates with a near-silent anxious whine. Is she... flustered? Someone doesn't cope with flattery well!

     Talk of technical problems rouses her back to composure. She chirp-CHIRPs in response to Seft and mimes flattening out the disc with her hands, then tilts her head back and widens the aperture again with her fingers to allow the blacksmith easy access. Her other hand fishes a disembodied yggdroid eye out of her bag and sets it on the table- if Will's adventurous enough to try shoving it in the socket, he can give it his best shot!

William Pauwel has posed:
Will, hurt somebody's feelings!? Never! He'd feel so awful if he found out! He'd... he'd... he'd go out and buy some apple pie to make it up to them immediately!

Will munches on another oatmeal cookie. He picked it up with his mouth. Resourceful!

The eye that Septette directs him to /isn't/ something he wants to just pick up with his mouth though. That would be gross. Super gross. Ultra mega awful gross. Instead, Will makes use of the arm that doesn't look like it could probably bend industrial steel. The gauntleted limb seems to have had /some/ built-in safeguards to make sure it doesn't exceed human strength by too much. So, very carefully, Will plucks the eye from the table, and...

Goes to JAM IT INTO SEPTETTE'S SOCKET. Carefully. He's an engineer and ancient technology is his forte, after all.

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    Seft peers at Will, and decides to more daringly poke at him. "Teasing. You know, those have Cultivator safeties. Even Platinum Ace hasn't found a way to break the emulation limitations. It's probably only overcharged because you're adjusting from trying to self-visualize as a biiiig strong adventurer." She does another sweet sort of giggle. Okay, that's enough of that, Seft isn't nearly as good as Septette is, she'd better get to work. Speaking of her...

    Okay, having the murderous skeletonbot get shy and flustered is such a surreal experience, and Seft will never get used to it. "Plaintive. Well, it's true!" She says! Then she digs into welding Septette's throat, which is something that isn't as uncommon as it ought to be, but it being FRIENDLY is at least. With caution and very light battering with a sort of incredibly tiny pile-bunker-style thing designed for Yggdroid-level materials, she ought to be able to flatten this out. With the sort of materials Septette's made of, she's actually brought out a pretty heavy apparatus, a piston-blasting gun that uses gas charges fed through a thick industrial pipe from a hefty toolbox-sized charging device.

    From the outside, it would look like Seft's repeatedly shooting Septette's throat with some kind of pistol. But ideally, with carefully calculated "shots" and finely-tuned heat, she should be able to flatten this out.

Septette Arcubielle (632) has posed:
     Will gets first dibs on shoving the eye into Septette's socket! Fortunately for him, this is a vastly easier procedure than assembling or retrofitting a foreign one- it's as close to a "standardized design" as Yggdrasil ever deigned to adopt, and slots in like a puzzle piece. Around the edges, he just might be able to see the ends of crystalline wires knitting themselves together, attracted as if by animal instinct or magnetism.

     Then it fully seals in place with a satisfying click. For a moment, the eye seems glassy, dull, and somehow 'lifeless'- it's easy not to notice how Septette seems viscerally alive until something lends her usual appearance contrast. Then a glow of purple-green actinic energy seeps out around the edges with a little kinetic 'kick' that disturbs the air, and the new eye abruptly focuses on Will's face with a glimmer of intelligence behind it.

     Septette grins, looking a little ghoulish as her eyes stare in opposite directions like some kind of humanoid chameleon. They snap into proper alignment as she shakes her head for effect, and then touches the eye with her fingers before giving Will a gleeful thumbs-up. Seems his mechanical prowess earns her approval!

Septette Arcubielle (632) has posed:
     Seft will find that the vocal membrane is mercifully pliant- at least, by yggdroid standards. It still takes a good few blows with the miniature pneumatic jackhammer to 'shape' any part of it by a noticeable degree, but Septette pitches in by placing one hand on the side of her own neck and using fire magic to help heat the apparatus until it glows.

     Once it's adequately flattened by Seft's careful power-tool craftsmanship, the reinforcing enchantments themselves do a decent job of smoothing out the finer details until the membrane resembles a roughly quarter-sized polished copper disc. From there, it's a matter of cooling the disc off with ice magic again and relocating the hydraulic muscles of her neck around it.

     Septette places a hand on her collarbone and strikes it once, then goes into a brief synthetic 'coughing fit' of trying to calibrate her vocalizations to the new, slightly-different shape. She opens her mouth, and a buzzing and rattling sound comes out at first- but slowly, syllables and words become evident through the staticky pall, like distant figures resolving through the fog. "-... ---l... mu-- bett-- -ow, Seft. Thank y--."

     She puts an arm around the Glitch's shoulders and lightly squeezes, giving her friend a shaky smile. "Really, I do."

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    There's that ^_^ again! It was a bit touch-and-go, but Seft feels happy with her handiwork here. "Celebrating. Ahhhh, wonderful! I'm glad it's working now! I think... For the most part! Aside from readjustments." She makes a few humming, happy sorts of noises. Her eyes flicker a little awkwardly. "Anxious. Though, is everything all okay? We can replace the eye now, too, that's definitely one we don't want to leave mismatched. Oh, and I can make sure everything's lined up properly on the throat, and..." She continues, fretting awkwardly.

    It's not that she's worried she hurt Septette, only worried about if she's helping /enough/. She seems so happy to make progress on helping Septette though, even the little bits of fretting can't get her down. She's carefully made note of when the reinforcing enchantment pattern started taking over again, where it started, and opther suchlike; after all, the greatest methods of healing focus on making sure the patient's body heals itself, more than trying to do all the healing oneself. Even if this is closer to fixing a tank than performing any kind of surgery.

    She's already setting up to get that eye swapped out. "Pondering. Oh, oh, and if we swap the eye back out, I can try to examine what sort of changes were made by your overrides, and then adapt new parts to extrapolate from those changes... I could make parts that might be pre-adapted to maximize compatibility!" She looks VERY hopeful about that particularly.

Septette Arcubielle (632) has posed:
     Septette nods eagerly, and starts to chirp- then remembers, sheepishly, that she can still talk. "Ah! Um. My voice is working wonderfully, yes." She rubs at her throat with one hand while smiling awkwardly, but it seems to be a purely affective gesture- it's nowhere near firm enough to (dis)lodge anything. "It's always wonderful to have your help, Seft. It's... reassuring, knowing that even if I can't spare time for myself, someone else can."

     She casually leans over the table, grabs a cookie and stuffs it in her mouth, then knocks firmly on her own temple. The Glitch eye cracks, then pops out as if under mild pressure from behind and falls straight down onto the cookie tray. It's followed by the three crystals- all of which are internally cracked and worn as if put through a rock tumbler- and frayed wires, then by a few droplets of liquid metal and frayed crystal wiring, and finally a few pinches of glittering dust.

     "I think the eyes are brittle because they need to be so hard," she notes, slowly rolling her head from side to side to get the last drops of slag out of her eye socket as if trying to fix a swimmer's ear. "There's a substantial amount of wear-and-tear exerted on them in the course of normal activity."

Starbound Flotilla has posed:
    Seft makes a happy 'eeee' sine-way sort of noise. "Friendly. You're always worth that sort of spare time, Septette!" And she happily grabs a cookie of her own! Then, she settles back to watch the process of... Augh! That's unnerving to watch. Jeeze! "Disturbed. My goodness, your systems must be putting out an absolutely massive amount of power! Much higher than the usual psionic output these are rated for. Not to mention the pressure of conforming to the reinforcement enchantments! I'll need to redesign them a great deal to accommodate that.

    She makes an awestruck sort of noise, gently picking up the materials as much as she can, gathering them into a small container to look at later. "Hopeful. But, /hypothetically/ we should be able to find... /some/ way of producing parts with that level of material resilience..." She looks optimistic just as much as awstruck by what she's seen there. "Helpful. Do you want me to handle the other eye, Septette?" Or presumably William would do that a second time. Otherwise, she's planning on lodging that in place as best she can and calling it a night as far as repairs go!