Chapter 5 - Batteries and broken birds

Posted on https://books.clockworkcaracal.com/dragons-heart/old-beginnings/ch5 - if you aren't there, this is a pirated copy!

As Cyan stepped into the shop, Minmax looked up with a friendly wave. They were busy totalling a customer's order, so Cyan just nodded back and slipped behind the counter, linking up to the receipts and records box to review the morning's activity. The bulk of the sales so far seemed to be refurbished drones, with a handful of home security cameras and a portable recording device. Cyan glanced up at the shelves as he pulled up the shop inventory on his arm, checking the drone stock. There were still several left on the shelves, at least - not many empty spots at all, which spoke to Minmax's efficiency at keeping them filled from the back.

The stock in the back was another story. The backroom stock was down to half a dozen in working order and about the same in the assessment pile - which could mean he had a dozen total, or it could mean he still just had six.

Cyan frowned, thinking back and trying to remember when he'd last sorted through the pile. The repair-and-sell pile had dwindled down to just about nothing, so it must have been a while....

A hand waved in front of his eyes, startling him into a yelp.

"Finally!" Minmax pulled their hand back, looking satisfied. "Started thinking you fell asleep with your eyes open or something."

"No, I'm just thinking." Cyan ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. "Hey, do you remember when I last did an assessment?"

"Yeah, it was like a week ago."

"A whole week?" He grimaced. "No wonder we're almost out."

"Now you notice. I keep saying, hey boss, you gotta go through the shit pile again, and you just nod and wander back upstairs to your cave."

"I do not live in a cave," Cyan protested.

"Uh huh." Minmax eyed him thoughtfully. "You know what you need is a break."

"Because I'm behind? Sure, that makes sense."

"I'm serious. You're all over the place this week, you gotta take some time off. Go hang out with someone."

"I hang out with people all the time--"

"Work people. Doing business and shit. C'mon, you know I'm right."

Cyan hesitated, then gave Minmax a sidelong glare. It was true that Cyan didn't really do much in the way of casual socializing these days, but--

"What about that guy who came in last week?" Minmax was clearly not about to be deterred. "You know, the one with the robot bird, you two seemed to hit it off."

Cyan groaned and put his head down on the counter with a quiet thump.

"Oookay, wasn't expecting that. You okay?"

"Why'd you have to remind me," Cyan muttered. He'd been doing so well at not dwelling on how he'd totally and completely screwed up the last time they'd spoken. Why the hell had he thought making a joke about stalkers was a good idea? (The answer, of course was because it had gone over well, the first time. Fang - well, Derek - had laughed at it and everything.) Cyan had thought maybe repeating the same joke would jog a memory or something. Or at least get a chuckle.

But this time? Based on the awkward and uncomfortable pause, the other man probably thought Cyan was a stalker now.

"Ooh." Minmax patted his shoulder sympathetically. "Guess the problem isn't working too hard after all, huh?"

"Isn't that exactly what I said?" Cyan turned his head sideways, glaring up at his sole employee-slash-friend.

"Nope." They grinned widely back. "Don't you have that pile of stuff to go through? You can sort through your shit while you sort through your shit."

"Oof. That was terrible." Cyan grimaced, hiding a smile. "Keep trying jokes like that and I'm going to dock your pay."

Someone entering the shop put an quick hold to the exchange, Minmax doing their usual new-customer thing and leaving Cyan to his shop records. Which, he had to admit, wasn't actually getting any work done; they'd do fine if he only checked them once a day, at most.

With a sigh, he pushed himself back to his feet and headed into the back room to get something useful done and tackle, as Minmax insisted on putting it despite Cyan's ongoing protests, "the shit pile".

It wasn't even a pile, to be honest. Cyan tried to keep his materials at least sort of organized, so the incoming broken material and devices were sorted by type when he first added them to inventory. Flicking on the light, he scanned quickly over the storage bins, settling on the "mobiles" label and, with another sigh, pulling it out from its slot on the bottom shelf. The six drones were mixed in with only a handful of other remote-controlled devices, making it easy for Cyan to pick them out and lay them out on the nearby floor.

They looked to still be in reasonably good shape, although some had some very obvious missing or broken pieces. Cyan pulled a tablet down from his work table and started tapping down notes. One of them had lost almost half of its casing. Another had only the shattered stubs of its flight blades left on the axles. Picking up the third, Cyan turned it over a couple times, frowning at its lack of visible damage, then fished out a screwdriver from his pockets and carefully popped off the casing. The internals looked all right, too, but nothing came into his shop in working order, so it probably had a wiring or chip malfunction. With a shrug, he noted down "chip?" in his list; if he was lucky, it would be a wiring or connector issue and not need any parts at all.

The fourth one had some significant cracks in the casing and was missing the power supply and battery. The fifth looked fine on the outside, but the internals made him cringe. Cracked chipboards, corroded wires, and an extremely suspicious-looking battery pack that Cyan thought might spontaneously catch fire any moment. He made a mental note to salvage the frame and casing for parts, then gingerly put it down on his workbench. The sixth and final one got a much quicker examination; he marked it down for a new power supply as well, then moved the five to the "inbox" at the end of the workbench which he used as a to-do list.

That sorted, he turned his attention back to the disaster waiting to happen, taking a moment to make a plan of attack. The worst possible thing he could do at this point would be to accidentally puncture the battery pack somehow and start a fire - or worse, explosion. But the thing was jammed in there with a bunch of rusty screws and broken plastic, which he definitely was going to need to cut through.

"Guess I just have to be really, really careful," he muttered to himself, getting out his protective gloves and weaving a quick reinforcement into the pre-existing spells before pulling them on.

By the time he finally got the battery and PSU out of the drone, he felt like he'd been working on it for hours. According to the clock, though, it had been more like thirty, maybe forty minutes. Cyan shoved the fire hazard into a disposal box and dumped some sand over it before closing and latching it with a decisive and relieved click.

"Now maybe I can finally get some work done," he complained, playing up the melodrama since no one was around to see. Picking up the tablet again, he scanned down the list, rifling through the labelled parts bins for matches that looked like they might be for the right models.

As he was in the middle of that, the door back into the front of the shop creaked open.

"Hey boss." Minmax stuck their head in the room. "Got a repair job for you, but they don't wanna leave it."

Cyan looked up with a small frown. "With you, or at all?"

Minmax shrugged.

"All right," he sighed, "I'll be right out."

Most of his clients understood the idea of "leaving it at the shop", but sometimes they'd get someone new who was just a little too possessive or controlling about their things to accept the idea of handing their expensive toys over to a stranger. Cyan could usually persuade them by being charming and harmless, but there was only so much effort he was willing to put into convincing the unwilling. He made more than enough on his custom work to foot the bills; losing the business of a difficult, soul-sucking client wasn't a hardship at all.

With that in mind, he stood, stretched, and made his way back to the front, glancing around for the alleged repair job. A curly-haired woman was standing near the counter, shifting her weight nervously from one foot to another, and noticed him immediately as he walked into the room.

"Hey! You're Cyan, right? I need you to fix this for me."

"That's me," he agreed, then fought back a surprised start when he glanced down at what she was holding. A custom robotic bird. If it wasn't the same one that had rode in on Fang's shoulder, Cyan would hang up his metaphorical hat and give up tech work. "Mind if I take a look?"

"Yeah, sure, go ahead."

Cyan raised his eyebrows as he inspected the machine. One of the wings had gotten snapped off - no, it wasn't so clean a break as snapped. More like torn. The rest of the body was in pretty good shape - a good number of dings and scratches, but it'd clearly been built for durability.

The wing, though.... "What happened to it?"

She crossed her arms, looking defensive and chagrined. "Well. It belongs to my teammate, see, and I was doing some, uh... exercises, and I might've gotten... well...."

Cyan studied her for a moment, then smirked. "And then your predator instincts took over?" he offered.

"Ugh." She grimaced, which he took as enough of a confirmation. "And now I have pay for repairs A.S.A.P. from my personal account, which is so unfair."

Cyan nodded, mentally noting it would be a rush job. "When do you need it back by?"

"Back?" She looked at him in clear incomprehension.

"I can repair it, but it'll take a while and I have other work lined up already," he explained, conveniently leaving out that his other work was mostly low-priority restocking. "If you need it by a specific date--"

"You can't just do it right now?"

Cyan raised his eyebrows again. "I can," he allowed, "but it'll cost more. A lot more."

"Noooo." She slumped down on the counter, putting her arms over her head. "But Trace said I can't come back until it's fixed! He even hacked the door code," she added, with the tell-tale sound of what Cyan liked to call the werewolf whine. Just enough canine to make it unmistakable.

Not that he'd had any doubt, but the name Trace confirmed it - this was definitely the same robot bird. And the despondent werewolf had described Trace as her teammate, which, well, there was only one kind of team that Cyan knew of where you'd have a technomancer, an elf, and a werewolf browsing a "perfectly legal" repair shop.

The thought of Fang being a lancer would have to wait until after business.

"You did a good job wrecking the wing on this," Cyan mused. "Even if I give the repair top priority, I don't think I can get it finished before tomorrow morning."

The werewolf groaned, not looking up from the counter. "... Can I crash in your shop for the night?"

Minmax coughed in a sound suspiciously like a muffled laugh. Cyan managed not to make a sound, himself, but since their customer had her face down on his shop counter, he allowed himself a broad, amused grin. Just for a moment.

"I don't think that'd work out." He said it as gently as he could, putting the broken robot down on the counter. "What's your name?"

"Oh well. I didn't really think that'd work..." She lowered her arms back down to the counter and lifted her head, looking woeful. "Jade."

"Well, Jade, how about this. I'll give the owner of this robot a call - Trace, right?" he added, as though he wasn't completely certain, "and give him the ETA myself. Maybe he'll be more lenient if he knows you're not just trying to get out of paying."

"...what if I don't have enough for the extra?" The thought had clearly only just occurred to her. "How much will it be?"

"Hmm." Cyan looked down at the bird, lifting the detached wing and lightly brushing his fingers across the surface. The spell runes worked into it had been damaged as well, which actually would make his job a little easier since he wouldn't have to work around existing spells when repairing the physical damage. But the physical damage itself was... extensive. At minimum, he would have to tear out and completely rebuild all of the signal and motor connections to the wing, and that was assuming there was no further internal damage. Which he was not willing to assume at all.

On the bright side, while it was going to take a lot of work and some raw materials, he shouldn't have to charge for replacement parts, custom-built or otherwise. Pulling the tablet out from under the counter, he jotted down some quick calculations.

"The base job isn't too bad - more than for fixing up one of those," he said, indicating the shelves with a tilt of his head, "but less than a full custom piece. But with the rush order to get it done by morning...." Cyan paused, then slid the tablet across the counter. "That's your estimate."

Jade glanced down, read the number, and let loose a colorful string of expletives that got Cyan's eyebrows raised and Minmax outright laughing. "Nope! Nope, I definitely don't have that kind of money," she declared. "I'm screwed."

"Here, just dial up your teammate and I'll handle it." Cyan held out a hand, giving her his best reassuring smile, and waited.

She eyed him for a moment, then shrugged and swiped a few times at her phone before holding it up to her ear. "Hey. I'm at-- yeah, that's where I am right now. No. There's um, a bit of a-- here, talk to him yourself." Jade practically shoved her phone at Cyan.

"Hello, this is Cyan at CMY Repairs," Cyan said cheerfully. "I understand this is your robot bird?"

"Yeah, hi, and I need it back, and working."

"I can fix it, but the earliest it'll be ready is tomorrow morning--"

"Ugh, okay, that's fine I guess."

"--and," Cyan continued, "it appears that your friend doesn't have quite enough of a savings account to cover the rush-order fees."

"Seriously? How much do you need?"

Cyan repeated the costs. The information was met with a lengthy silence, but he waited patiently.

"Right. Give the phone back to Jade, would you?"

"Of course." Cyan held the phone back out to Jade. "Here you go."

"Thanks." She put the phone gingerly back up to her ear, wincing almost immediately, then lapsing into a listening posture with the occasional wordless nod.

Minmax leaned over to Cyan. "So," they stage-whispered, "this gonna be another charity case?"

Cyan coughed. "No, I don't think so," he murmured back. "I gave full price to both of them, you know."

"Yeah, but I know you." Minmax grinned. "And you got that sympathy face on."

"I am going to repair it," he admitted after a moment. "But if the owner wants it right away, they'll have to pay the fee themself."

"Softie," Minmax teased. "You better take the day off tomorrow, then."

Cyan eyed them sidelong. "I thought we agreed I don't need a break," he grumbled.

"After pulling an all-nighter doing a rush job? Damn right you will."

"...You have a point." Cyan grimaced, rueful. "Okay, I'll take a day after I finish this, or at least a half day."

"Deal." Minmax patted him on the shoulder, the gesture halfway to a friendly slap on the back. "I'll bring you breakfast when I open up tomorrow."

"You don't have to--"

"Okay!" Jade interrupted, pocketing her phone with an expression of relief. "Trace says send him the bill and he'll handle what I owe himself. Can you do that?"

"Absolutely," Cyan agreed with a smile. "I have his contact information from earlier, so I'll send it directly. Which means you should be all set."

"Earlier?" Jade blinked, then laughed. "Oh yeah! You're the guy-- well, anyway," she continued, in a painfully obvious attempt to pretend she hadn't been about to say something else, "thanks for taking care of this for me."

"You're welcome." Cyan scooped up the broken robot. "Anything else we can help you with?"

"No.... nope, that's it." She waved, with a cheerful, toothy grin. "I'll be back to pick it up tomorrow!"

"I'll see you then," Cyan answered after her as she left the shop.

"You gonna work upstairs?" Minmax asked.

Cyan nodded. "It'll be a lot of detail work and I'm going to be at it a while. Ring me if anything comes up, I'll be awake."

"Will do. See you tomorrow, boss."

Cyan headed out the back, stopping in the store room briefly to pick the drones up off the floor and put them on the work table. It looked like he wasn't going to get to replenishing the sale stock today, either....

Well, that kind of thing was why he charged so much for rush jobs. If he lost some sales because of working on this, the fee would cover it.

Letting himself into his rooms, he went straight for his worktable and put the robot down, then shuffled through his tool bin to pull out what he'd need. First, he wanted to open up the casing to disconnect the power and make sure there were no traps left behind. Lancers were a paranoid bunch (with good reason) and it wouldn't be the first time someone had forgotten to deactivate their security measures before handing him something to fix.

Half an hour later, Cyan had a much better appreciation of how durable the robot really was - and by correlation, how tough Jade the werewolf must be. Or at least how strong.

"She must've been shifted," he muttered to himself as he finally lifted off the chest cover, shining a light inside.

And laughed. The interior of the robot was definitely not lined with traps. Instead, Trace had removed every, ha, trace of the device's normal operations. Not only was there a large empty space in place of a power supply, but the interior was also completely lacking in memory, data storage, network connectors, and processors. Every single core component of the thing had been neatly stripped out.

"Talk about paranoid." Cyan put his tools down and stretched, still chuckling. "Well, I would've needed to get that open to test the connections at the end, anyway, so I'll count this as overall saving time. ...He said to the empty room," he added ruefully. He really needed to get a fish or something to talk to. At least then he could pretend he wasn't just talking to himself.

With the rabbit hole of turning off the non-existent PSU out of the way, he turned his attention to the wing, wincing again at the damage. Several wires had been ripped right out of the body through the wing joint, along with the primary shoulder motors - although those, thankfully, seem to have come out generally in one piece, tearing at the connection points instead of being crushed or split in half.

The internals of the wing, on the other hand... Cyan would've made a joke about it having been "chewed up and spit out", but he didn't really want to contemplate the possibility of the description being, well, accurate.

"All right, Polly," he told the bird-bot. "We've got a long night ahead of us; be a good patient and we'll get along just fine."