[Mekatra]

"Do you pity me?" Engel asked curiously as he made his way to the table and climbed up on it to get into a position that would be easier for Seven to work on him. "She pitied me. She would cry while working on me, saying she had broken the laws of god and given me a burden." His eyes flashed as he ran diagnostics on his shoulder.

"It is troublesome to not work as intended. It is fortunate that I do not function as a human. It takes minutes or hours to fix me and replace my parts. It takes much longer to fix a human." The motor in his shoulder had a damaged gear toward the top of his range of motion. "Is it repairable or will it require replacement?"

[Worm]

Seven scoffed. Of course she cried over a robot. It was so hard to imagine Kastos without her hard shell of a personality. Of course she would crack via her own creation. "Well, you could definitely say that being human is a burden." He peeled open the plate on the back of Engel's shoulder with a satisfying pop.

"Not that you're... human." He sniffed, looking into the mash of gears that made up Engel's shoulder. "I suppose if she gave you any sort of morals, emotions, or free thought - its basically a curse. So I can understand why she'd be upset about doing that to you. My question is why she'd want that in the first place..." He pulled out a specific screw head and turned a knob under his plate, it spun a gear which moved Engel's arm forward without his control.

"Yeah, its a simple fix actually. Just have to restring your gears, and you're a little low on lubricant." He squinted, peering deeper into the matrix of his machinery. "What caused this injury?" He realized that it took a lot of impact to shove Engel's gears so out of place.

[Mekatra]

Engel sat impassively while he spoke of his creator. Watching her cry had been a strange experience for him. It had been the first, and so far only, time he had ever seen a human cry, and it still unsettled him a bit to think about.

The android did not try to resist the movements of his arm in any way, letting him do this maintenance unhindered. "She introduced a learning system into my programming early on that allowed me to emulate human responses. She spoke of wanting to bring me more stimuli to build my experience base but died before she enacted that plan. She believed it would allow me to generator a wider range of realistic responses for any scenario."

He fell silent when asked about his injury. "Another machine that Doctor Kastos altered in a similar manner... Doctor Kastos had a lab assistant that was in charge of our maintenance. When she came to delete our information and put us permanently offline the other machine categorized her as a threat and attacked her. While it is no longer in my required programming to defend human life, it is an action I may choose. She fled after I disabled the machine."

[Worm]

Seven remained mostly silent, besides the occasional puff of a cigarette. Then he said - "More stimuli..." He sucked in the words, examining them. He finished up Engel's shoulder after a few sparks and the bvvvv of the power drill and soldering. He had to wonder if Kastos' lab assistant was Soot. Soot worked closely with Seven on Kastos' original engineering team. But of course, Kastos probably managed many others after them.

The truth was that Soot had been tracking loose cannons like Engel all over the map now. She'd helped disable a few in the past, but now there were so many and some were learning how to hide. Kastos was still producing machines somewhere, hidden even to the FBI. But Soot was doing her best to figure it out. Her arm was taken out by a malfunctioning robot, along with a chunk of her torso. Both areas were replaced with metal skin and robotics. Her parts were onyx colored, perhaps to match her nickname.

Short, red hair whipped around her face as she waited outside. Her ear was to the ground through a microphone. She was sure that there was illegal machinery nearby. Working for Kastos had taught her many things, including the unique frequency to which her machines vibrated. It was tough to catch, but they generally also had a pattern so she could tell how far away they were and how well they were functioning. She sat inside of a hovering bus, reading the script feeding onto her screen. "13777" She muttered. Two figured beside her nodded and opened the back door without speaking. Soot remained at her post as they both left, fully loaded.

Seven closed up Engel's shoulder, the sound of it sealing quite satisfying. "Now that we're finished, I'll find you a place to stay... For the time being." He began walking through the isles of half built machines and chimera weapons. "There's a charging station back here." He pointed to the left corner of the warehouse of a basement. "And these tables sink down a little bit if you want to lay down." He patted on a table, the metal echoing through the basement. "Not sure how human she tried to make you, but if ye need blankets or a pillow, I s'pose I can figure something out." He scratched the back of his neck, feeling his hairs raise.

For some reason, he felt like someone was watching them.