Jenny Everywhere: A Comedy of Eris
Dec. 31st, 2024 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scott_sanfordHere’s the last Jenny Everywhere story of 2024!
A serious invasion from another dimension calls for a serious response by serious people. What it’s getting are these kids.
Jenny Everywhere sees Sophie again in
A Comedy of Eris
by Scott Sanford; 31 December 2024
Jenny Everywhere was at home on the couch, idly doom scrolling on her phone and trying to figure out the new blue-butterfly social media thing she’d been pointed at. Then she felt the universe get bigger and knew she had better things to do.
She was up and going to the door before the knock came, opening it while her guest’s arm was still up.
“Sophie!”, she cried happily.
“Hi, how are–” She was cut off by Jenny stepping forward and hugging her joyfully, which she returned with one arm. “Nice to see you too Jenny.”
“Nice to see you back in my universe!”, Jenny told her, letting go and looking her over. “Are you here to visit Eric again?”
“Maybe, but I wanted to talk to you first, since you’re this universe’s Jenny Everywhere. Kind of on business?”
“I am, yes…”, she agreed guardedly.
“Can I come in? I want to show you something.”
“Yeah, yeah, come on in!” Jenny made room and waved for Sophie to come into her apartment.
Sophie did, and Jenny got a better look at what she was carrying under her arm.
“This is my problem,” Sophie said, and laid her burden on the dining table. Jenny thought it looked like a large doll or small robot, resembling a humanoid crow wearing metallic armor. “This is a Discordia, a trouble making robot from another dimension. My cousin noticed a dimensional transport coming to your dimension from, uh, a place we’ve heard about before. So when he told me I came to check it out, and look who I found sneaking around in your universe.”
“What does it do?”
“That’s a lot to unpack, actually. It’s a robot you probably don’t want hanging around in your universe, how about that? I’ve seen them before.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Kind of, yeah, but not in the shooting death rays way. They love to mess up people’s relationships. That’s why I’ve brought her here instead of letting her run around loose.”
“And it’s... off? Is it off or broken?”
“Not exactly. I’ve caught her in a time distortion so she’s running maybe a few hundred times slower than the rest of the universe. It’ll be okay but we shouldn’t leave her alone. She’s going to be pretty cranky.”
“Oh, that sounds bad…”
“Yeah, but she’d be cranky anyway. She didn’t want to listen to me before, so I’m bringing her over here, both for you to see and to let Eric have a look at her. If she won’t shut up maybe he’ll install a mute button and I can get a word in edgewise.”
“...okay.” Jenny looked over the little robot again and said, “I don’t think I’ve seen one of those before. Eric makes robots sometimes, but they don’t look like that.”
“Lucky you. Anyway, Eric’s not home from school yet so I’m going to pop forward a few hours. Want to come with me?”
“I’m already up at the crack of noon and you want to know if I want to time travel to this afternoon?” Jenny flashed a grin. “Of course I do! This will be fun!”
“Okay! Need anything before we go?” Sophie picked up the time-frozen robot, tucked her under her arm, and held out her hand to Jenny, who took it without hesitation.
“Not really,” Jenny told her. “I’m not– whoa!”
Without warning the sunlight had changed around them.
“Jenny?” Kim appeared at the kitchen door with a cup of tea in her hand, and said, “Oh, hello, Sophie! I didn’t hear you two come in; did you shift in from somewhere else?”
“Yes, but through time!,” Jenny told her, giggling happily. “It’s like shifting universes but it’s not – I don’t think I could explain it to another me, much less anyone else, but it’s cool and different!”
“Hi, Kim,” Sophie said, not nearly as excited by the novelty of time travel as the local Jenny. “I just dropped by to show Eric a robot.”
“I see,” Kim claimed, said, looking over the visiting teenager. “In that case, don’t waste time here; you’d better get downstairs to see him.”
“I don’t think there’s a big hurry,” she protested.
“You won’t know until you see him. If he’s not home you can always come back up and see us.”
“She makes a good point,” Jenny agreed.
“I guess so?”
Sophie’s half-hearted protests fell on deaf ears; she quickly found herself turned out of the apartment with the Discordia in her grasp and headed down the stairs.
Bowing to the inevitable, she knocked on the door of the apartment below. In a few moments Eric answered the door.
“Sophie!”
“Hi, Eric.” She smiled at him and said, “I found something I think you’d like looking at, if you have a few minutes.”
This was, in its way, a lie. Now that they were together Sophie was ready to ensure that he was going to have as many minutes as he needed, and the rest of the universe could darn well work around them.
“Uh, sure!”, he agreed, looking with fascination at the peculiar robot that she held dangling upside down by one ankle. He obviously had more than a few questions.
“Do you have somewhere I can put this down? Somewhere with tools?”
“Yeah!” He showed her in, lead her into his bedroom, and showed her his desk, which was surrounded by tools and partially-assembled gadgetry.
She laid out her captive on what she meant to become an improv robot operating table, and took a deep breath.
“So it’s like this…” Sophie quickly explained the situation, as she’d done for Jenny Everywhere. “I don’t want any of them to come back to this universe, but if I tell her that they’ll come around more just to annoy me. So I figure that if we send her home knowing that people native to this universe already know about them, they should decide that there are easier worlds to pick on elsewhere.”
“Is that okay, to let them mess around with innocent people?”
“It’s not great, but I can’t stop them from doing it at all, to anyone,” she admitted. “For reasons I don’t want to get into right now, I can’t just do whatever I want. But you, you belong in this world; you can do whatever you feel like.”
“Huh,” Eric said thoughtfully. His eyes went back to the robot and he admitted, “I kind of want to take it apart to see how it works.”
“Fine with me. She was yelling a lot when I caught her, I figured you could disconnect her voice or something so I could yell back before sending her home.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“Do you have a screwdriver on you?”
“Is this a trick question?”, he asked, reaching to a belt pouch and producing a multitool. He unfolded a screwdriver and set it down on the desk. Then he reached into a pocket and pulled out a smaller multitool, and twisted it to reveal a smaller screwdriver. Then he reached into another pocket...
At the third tool Sophie burst out laughing.
“Okay, okay, I get it!”, she said. “I believe you!”
“You asked…” He shrugged sheepishly, not very sorry.
“I did!”, she giggled. She brushed her hair back into place, where it stayed only briefly. “But anyway… when you’re ready I’ll let her wake up and we can see if we can talk sense into her. And if not, we could tell her you’re willing to pop her open and take parts out until there’s room for new ideas?”
“Sure, if you say so,” Eric said. He sat down at his desk and turned on a work light. “How do we start?”
“Like this.”
Sophie touched the Discordia’s head and the robot un-stiffened, stirring into motion. Eric quickly laid his hand over the robot’s torso to keep it in place.
“Aaaaaahhh – What?” The suddenly animate robot’s head turned back and forth, taking in the new surroundings. “What was that??!”
“That was me,” Sophie said. “You weren’t listening so we’re somewhere else now. Let’s try starting over. Hi!”
“U+2BF0 you!”
“Like I said earlier, this isn’t a good universe for you. You guys need to spread your golden horse apples to some other world.”
“I have a job to do, human scum!”
“I was afraid of that. Okay, Plan A was talking nicely and Plan B is to threaten you. Discordias understand that, right? Eric, those panels should come right off, would you see what’s inside?”
“Sure, happy to.” With a few sharp clicks several of the robot’s exterior panels were off and laid out on Eric’s workbench.
“Hey!”, the Discordia objected. “Those are important! They keep the outside world outside of me!”
“He can put it back later,” Sophie said.
“No user serviceable parts inside?”, the Discordia claimed, uncertainly.
“That’s what you think.” Sophie unzipped her hoodie and produced a large paperback book that proclaimed itself a Cherub Repair Manual, Mark II. The cover had a picture of a round-bodied metallic robot only vaguely like the one on the table. “I’ve got a mad scientist and a service manual.”
“Where’d you get that?”, Eric asked.
“I borrowed it from a friend of my mum’s; she’s got extra copies. This isn’t for the right model, but a lot of the systems should be pretty much the same. Maybe.”
“I totally want to read that later. But for now, what should I do first?”
“Nothing!”, the robot on his desk protested. “Close me up and find my apples!”
She tried to get up but Eric held her in place and reached for a screwdriver, and a magnifying glass, and some tweezers...
“What are you doing?”, the Discordia demanded
“Don’t worry, this won’t hurt,” Eric said. He winked at Sophie. “Besides, in a minute you should be incapable of feeling pain anyway.”
“What? That’s not comforting!” It reached out, trying to grab his tools.
“Huh. Hey, Sophie, is this bit part of the motor controls?” Eric did something and the robot fell forward onto the desk with a thump. He grinned. “Yeah, looks like.”
“Hey! Put that back!”, the robot demanded.
“Yeah, yeah, in a minute. Hold your horses.” Eric laid the evidently important component aside for later.
“I have no horses!”
“They’re not really good at relaxing. At least, not normally… Although if you’re really disconnecting things...” Sophie pointed at one part of the exposed mechanisms and asked, “Can you unhook that spring?”
“Sure.” Eric’s tools flicked over and the part was freed. He lifted it out with a pair of tweezers.
“Whoa…”, sighed the robot. “That feels… weird...”
“That’s the anxiety spring,” Sophie explained. “Maybe she’ll be calmer now.”
“I feel so… mellow…”
“An anxiety spring? Are you kidding?”, Eric asked.
“Don’t look at me, I didn’t design these things.” She shrugged.
“Me, neither. Check out the wings – they’re articulated way more than they need to be for being decorative, but they’re way too small to let her fly.”
“Oh, she can fly. See that thing? That’s the antigravity module.”
“Antigravity? Seriously?” Eric skeptically poked at the indicated component, noting that it was screwed into the frame members more robustly than other things around it. Almost without thinking his hands found a Phillips head screwdriver, and he began unscrewing things.
“Yeah, some worlds have it,” Sophie told him.
The subject of Eric’s curiosity muttered, “Flying is fun...”
“Jeez, who uses Frearson at this size?”, Eric asked, possibly rhetorically. He passed Sophie a screw that to her looked pretty much like any other screw.
“Five sixteenths BSW!”, interjected their patient.
Sophie was saved from having to have an opinion about screws when the antigravity module fell out of the Discordia’s chassis and tumbled up to the ceiling where it landed with a loud thud.
Eric looked up at it.
Sophie looked up at it, and at Eric looking up at it.
Eric nodded.
“Okay…”, he said. “Antigravity, check. The wings are supposed to be like that.”
He shrugged and pulled the desk lamp over to shine into the depths of the machinery.
“These hoses are too small to be for hydraulic actuators,” he said, possibly only to himself. “Is this a fluidic processor?”
“Maybe?” Sophie flicked through the technical manual, which was both technical and for a different robot made by a different mad scientist in a different universe.
“So I’m all for getting her to go home and tell all her friends not to mess with our universe, but I don’t think I can program that directly into her brain,” Eric told her. Then, because he was a mad scientist and certain tropes recur across universes, he added, “I mean, not here and now, anyway. I don’t have the right tools.”
“You shouldn’t do that,” the robot murmured. “My brain would leak. I don’t want my brain to leak. How would I remember things?”
“I may have messed up her brain anyway,” Eric admitted. “What else is that spring attached to?”
“I dunno… It’s in the manual, probably.” Sophie made a show of flipping through the manual, despite having no clue if anything relevant was in the book. Her eyes stayed on Eric rather than the pages anyway. “I just want to make sure she goes home and tells everyone not to mess with this universe.”
“Hmm,” Eric said, his head down in the machinery and his mind deeper in mad science. “I think I can do something about that. I saw just the right gear...”
He did something and the Discorida’s entire body went limp; he straightened and held up a single gear in his needlenose pliers, and announced, “This.”
He put the gear aside and extracted another very similar one. “And this one. See? Now I’ll put them back.”
“Okay,” Sophie said, nodding thoughtfully as if this made perfect sense. Because Eric was not her first mad scientist, there was both curiosity and caution in her voice when she asked, “Why?”
“Because they’re ordinary helical gears, which are better than spur gears for a high speed shaft but when they run there’s thrust along the axis. You see there’s a stop to keep the gear in place, here. But if I put it in backwards the thrust goes the other way and the gear is going to push itself along the shaft until the whole thing fails.”
“She’s going to break down?” Sophie's experience with mad science let her not get diverted by monologues about what machine parts were better, more colorful, more graceful, or just friendlier than others, and she easily extracted the important part of this explanation.
“If it’s left like this, yeah,” he affirmed. “It’s not a big deal and it’s easy to put them back in the right way around again, but she can’t do it herself.”
“So she’ll have to go home to the other Discordias.”
“That’s what I was thinking, yeah.”
“How long will she have?”
“Depends on how tight this stays and how much torque is on the driveshaft. Hours, maybe? A few days?”
“Okay, that should be enough time to get her home and have her say her piece. Let’s get her back together.”
“No sweat,” Eric said, reconnecting some of the things that he’d undone but leaving the anxiety spring where it lay. In fewer moments than Sophie would have expected he was fitting the exterior panels back into place.
“Home!”, their unwilling guest cooed happily. “Yeah. I’ll go home… That will be nice.”
“And you’ll tell everyone not to come back to this universe, right?”, Sophie prompted her.
“Sure, why not?”
“I think that’s as much as she’s going to care about anything unless I put the spring back in,” Eric said.
“Whatever,” Sophie said, blowing off the problem. “It’s okay; I’ve heard about official Cupid missions that were stupider than this. Thanks, Eric; I really do appreciate it.”
She picked up the mostly re-assembled intruder.
“As for you, I’m taking you back to your ship. You’ve got a message to deliver to your homeworld.”
“Groovy.”
< See all of Scott Sanford’s Jenny Everywhere stories >
The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.
A serious invasion from another dimension calls for a serious response by serious people. What it’s getting are these kids.
A Comedy of Eris
by Scott Sanford; 31 December 2024
Jenny Everywhere was at home on the couch, idly doom scrolling on her phone and trying to figure out the new blue-butterfly social media thing she’d been pointed at. Then she felt the universe get bigger and knew she had better things to do.
She was up and going to the door before the knock came, opening it while her guest’s arm was still up.
“Sophie!”, she cried happily.
“Hi, how are–” She was cut off by Jenny stepping forward and hugging her joyfully, which she returned with one arm. “Nice to see you too Jenny.”
“Nice to see you back in my universe!”, Jenny told her, letting go and looking her over. “Are you here to visit Eric again?”
“Maybe, but I wanted to talk to you first, since you’re this universe’s Jenny Everywhere. Kind of on business?”
“I am, yes…”, she agreed guardedly.
“Can I come in? I want to show you something.”
“Yeah, yeah, come on in!” Jenny made room and waved for Sophie to come into her apartment.
Sophie did, and Jenny got a better look at what she was carrying under her arm.
“This is my problem,” Sophie said, and laid her burden on the dining table. Jenny thought it looked like a large doll or small robot, resembling a humanoid crow wearing metallic armor. “This is a Discordia, a trouble making robot from another dimension. My cousin noticed a dimensional transport coming to your dimension from, uh, a place we’ve heard about before. So when he told me I came to check it out, and look who I found sneaking around in your universe.”“What does it do?”
“That’s a lot to unpack, actually. It’s a robot you probably don’t want hanging around in your universe, how about that? I’ve seen them before.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Kind of, yeah, but not in the shooting death rays way. They love to mess up people’s relationships. That’s why I’ve brought her here instead of letting her run around loose.”
“And it’s... off? Is it off or broken?”
“Not exactly. I’ve caught her in a time distortion so she’s running maybe a few hundred times slower than the rest of the universe. It’ll be okay but we shouldn’t leave her alone. She’s going to be pretty cranky.”
“Oh, that sounds bad…”
“Yeah, but she’d be cranky anyway. She didn’t want to listen to me before, so I’m bringing her over here, both for you to see and to let Eric have a look at her. If she won’t shut up maybe he’ll install a mute button and I can get a word in edgewise.”
“...okay.” Jenny looked over the little robot again and said, “I don’t think I’ve seen one of those before. Eric makes robots sometimes, but they don’t look like that.”
“Lucky you. Anyway, Eric’s not home from school yet so I’m going to pop forward a few hours. Want to come with me?”
“I’m already up at the crack of noon and you want to know if I want to time travel to this afternoon?” Jenny flashed a grin. “Of course I do! This will be fun!”
“Okay! Need anything before we go?” Sophie picked up the time-frozen robot, tucked her under her arm, and held out her hand to Jenny, who took it without hesitation.
“Not really,” Jenny told her. “I’m not– whoa!”
Without warning the sunlight had changed around them.
“Jenny?” Kim appeared at the kitchen door with a cup of tea in her hand, and said, “Oh, hello, Sophie! I didn’t hear you two come in; did you shift in from somewhere else?”
“Yes, but through time!,” Jenny told her, giggling happily. “It’s like shifting universes but it’s not – I don’t think I could explain it to another me, much less anyone else, but it’s cool and different!”
“Hi, Kim,” Sophie said, not nearly as excited by the novelty of time travel as the local Jenny. “I just dropped by to show Eric a robot.”
“I see,” Kim claimed, said, looking over the visiting teenager. “In that case, don’t waste time here; you’d better get downstairs to see him.”
“I don’t think there’s a big hurry,” she protested.
“You won’t know until you see him. If he’s not home you can always come back up and see us.”
“She makes a good point,” Jenny agreed.
“I guess so?”
Sophie’s half-hearted protests fell on deaf ears; she quickly found herself turned out of the apartment with the Discordia in her grasp and headed down the stairs.
Bowing to the inevitable, she knocked on the door of the apartment below. In a few moments Eric answered the door.
“Sophie!”
“Hi, Eric.” She smiled at him and said, “I found something I think you’d like looking at, if you have a few minutes.”
This was, in its way, a lie. Now that they were together Sophie was ready to ensure that he was going to have as many minutes as he needed, and the rest of the universe could darn well work around them.
“Uh, sure!”, he agreed, looking with fascination at the peculiar robot that she held dangling upside down by one ankle. He obviously had more than a few questions.
“Do you have somewhere I can put this down? Somewhere with tools?”
“Yeah!” He showed her in, lead her into his bedroom, and showed her his desk, which was surrounded by tools and partially-assembled gadgetry.
She laid out her captive on what she meant to become an improv robot operating table, and took a deep breath.
“So it’s like this…” Sophie quickly explained the situation, as she’d done for Jenny Everywhere. “I don’t want any of them to come back to this universe, but if I tell her that they’ll come around more just to annoy me. So I figure that if we send her home knowing that people native to this universe already know about them, they should decide that there are easier worlds to pick on elsewhere.”
“Is that okay, to let them mess around with innocent people?”
“It’s not great, but I can’t stop them from doing it at all, to anyone,” she admitted. “For reasons I don’t want to get into right now, I can’t just do whatever I want. But you, you belong in this world; you can do whatever you feel like.”
“Huh,” Eric said thoughtfully. His eyes went back to the robot and he admitted, “I kind of want to take it apart to see how it works.”
“Fine with me. She was yelling a lot when I caught her, I figured you could disconnect her voice or something so I could yell back before sending her home.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“Do you have a screwdriver on you?”
“Is this a trick question?”, he asked, reaching to a belt pouch and producing a multitool. He unfolded a screwdriver and set it down on the desk. Then he reached into a pocket and pulled out a smaller multitool, and twisted it to reveal a smaller screwdriver. Then he reached into another pocket...
At the third tool Sophie burst out laughing.
“Okay, okay, I get it!”, she said. “I believe you!”
“You asked…” He shrugged sheepishly, not very sorry.
“I did!”, she giggled. She brushed her hair back into place, where it stayed only briefly. “But anyway… when you’re ready I’ll let her wake up and we can see if we can talk sense into her. And if not, we could tell her you’re willing to pop her open and take parts out until there’s room for new ideas?”
“Sure, if you say so,” Eric said. He sat down at his desk and turned on a work light. “How do we start?”
“Like this.”
Sophie touched the Discordia’s head and the robot un-stiffened, stirring into motion. Eric quickly laid his hand over the robot’s torso to keep it in place.
“Aaaaaahhh – What?” The suddenly animate robot’s head turned back and forth, taking in the new surroundings. “What was that??!”
“That was me,” Sophie said. “You weren’t listening so we’re somewhere else now. Let’s try starting over. Hi!”
“U+2BF0 you!”
“Like I said earlier, this isn’t a good universe for you. You guys need to spread your golden horse apples to some other world.”
“I have a job to do, human scum!”
“I was afraid of that. Okay, Plan A was talking nicely and Plan B is to threaten you. Discordias understand that, right? Eric, those panels should come right off, would you see what’s inside?”
“Sure, happy to.” With a few sharp clicks several of the robot’s exterior panels were off and laid out on Eric’s workbench.
“Hey!”, the Discordia objected. “Those are important! They keep the outside world outside of me!”
“He can put it back later,” Sophie said.
“No user serviceable parts inside?”, the Discordia claimed, uncertainly.
“That’s what you think.” Sophie unzipped her hoodie and produced a large paperback book that proclaimed itself a Cherub Repair Manual, Mark II. The cover had a picture of a round-bodied metallic robot only vaguely like the one on the table. “I’ve got a mad scientist and a service manual.”
“Where’d you get that?”, Eric asked.
“I borrowed it from a friend of my mum’s; she’s got extra copies. This isn’t for the right model, but a lot of the systems should be pretty much the same. Maybe.”
“I totally want to read that later. But for now, what should I do first?”
“Nothing!”, the robot on his desk protested. “Close me up and find my apples!”
She tried to get up but Eric held her in place and reached for a screwdriver, and a magnifying glass, and some tweezers...
“What are you doing?”, the Discordia demanded
“Don’t worry, this won’t hurt,” Eric said. He winked at Sophie. “Besides, in a minute you should be incapable of feeling pain anyway.”
“What? That’s not comforting!” It reached out, trying to grab his tools.
“Huh. Hey, Sophie, is this bit part of the motor controls?” Eric did something and the robot fell forward onto the desk with a thump. He grinned. “Yeah, looks like.”
“Hey! Put that back!”, the robot demanded.
“Yeah, yeah, in a minute. Hold your horses.” Eric laid the evidently important component aside for later.
“I have no horses!”
“They’re not really good at relaxing. At least, not normally… Although if you’re really disconnecting things...” Sophie pointed at one part of the exposed mechanisms and asked, “Can you unhook that spring?”
“Sure.” Eric’s tools flicked over and the part was freed. He lifted it out with a pair of tweezers.
“Whoa…”, sighed the robot. “That feels… weird...”
“That’s the anxiety spring,” Sophie explained. “Maybe she’ll be calmer now.”
“I feel so… mellow…”
“An anxiety spring? Are you kidding?”, Eric asked.
“Don’t look at me, I didn’t design these things.” She shrugged.
“Me, neither. Check out the wings – they’re articulated way more than they need to be for being decorative, but they’re way too small to let her fly.”
“Oh, she can fly. See that thing? That’s the antigravity module.”
“Antigravity? Seriously?” Eric skeptically poked at the indicated component, noting that it was screwed into the frame members more robustly than other things around it. Almost without thinking his hands found a Phillips head screwdriver, and he began unscrewing things.
“Yeah, some worlds have it,” Sophie told him.
The subject of Eric’s curiosity muttered, “Flying is fun...”
“Jeez, who uses Frearson at this size?”, Eric asked, possibly rhetorically. He passed Sophie a screw that to her looked pretty much like any other screw.
“Five sixteenths BSW!”, interjected their patient.
Sophie was saved from having to have an opinion about screws when the antigravity module fell out of the Discordia’s chassis and tumbled up to the ceiling where it landed with a loud thud.
Eric looked up at it.
Sophie looked up at it, and at Eric looking up at it.
Eric nodded.
“Okay…”, he said. “Antigravity, check. The wings are supposed to be like that.”
He shrugged and pulled the desk lamp over to shine into the depths of the machinery.
“These hoses are too small to be for hydraulic actuators,” he said, possibly only to himself. “Is this a fluidic processor?”
“Maybe?” Sophie flicked through the technical manual, which was both technical and for a different robot made by a different mad scientist in a different universe.
“So I’m all for getting her to go home and tell all her friends not to mess with our universe, but I don’t think I can program that directly into her brain,” Eric told her. Then, because he was a mad scientist and certain tropes recur across universes, he added, “I mean, not here and now, anyway. I don’t have the right tools.”
“You shouldn’t do that,” the robot murmured. “My brain would leak. I don’t want my brain to leak. How would I remember things?”
“I may have messed up her brain anyway,” Eric admitted. “What else is that spring attached to?”
“I dunno… It’s in the manual, probably.” Sophie made a show of flipping through the manual, despite having no clue if anything relevant was in the book. Her eyes stayed on Eric rather than the pages anyway. “I just want to make sure she goes home and tells everyone not to mess with this universe.”
“Hmm,” Eric said, his head down in the machinery and his mind deeper in mad science. “I think I can do something about that. I saw just the right gear...”
He did something and the Discorida’s entire body went limp; he straightened and held up a single gear in his needlenose pliers, and announced, “This.”
He put the gear aside and extracted another very similar one. “And this one. See? Now I’ll put them back.”
“Okay,” Sophie said, nodding thoughtfully as if this made perfect sense. Because Eric was not her first mad scientist, there was both curiosity and caution in her voice when she asked, “Why?”
“Because they’re ordinary helical gears, which are better than spur gears for a high speed shaft but when they run there’s thrust along the axis. You see there’s a stop to keep the gear in place, here. But if I put it in backwards the thrust goes the other way and the gear is going to push itself along the shaft until the whole thing fails.”
“She’s going to break down?” Sophie's experience with mad science let her not get diverted by monologues about what machine parts were better, more colorful, more graceful, or just friendlier than others, and she easily extracted the important part of this explanation.
“If it’s left like this, yeah,” he affirmed. “It’s not a big deal and it’s easy to put them back in the right way around again, but she can’t do it herself.”
“So she’ll have to go home to the other Discordias.”
“That’s what I was thinking, yeah.”
“How long will she have?”
“Depends on how tight this stays and how much torque is on the driveshaft. Hours, maybe? A few days?”
“Okay, that should be enough time to get her home and have her say her piece. Let’s get her back together.”
“No sweat,” Eric said, reconnecting some of the things that he’d undone but leaving the anxiety spring where it lay. In fewer moments than Sophie would have expected he was fitting the exterior panels back into place.
“Home!”, their unwilling guest cooed happily. “Yeah. I’ll go home… That will be nice.”
“And you’ll tell everyone not to come back to this universe, right?”, Sophie prompted her.
“Sure, why not?”
“I think that’s as much as she’s going to care about anything unless I put the spring back in,” Eric said.
“Whatever,” Sophie said, blowing off the problem. “It’s okay; I’ve heard about official Cupid missions that were stupider than this. Thanks, Eric; I really do appreciate it.”
She picked up the mostly re-assembled intruder.
“As for you, I’m taking you back to your ship. You’ve got a message to deliver to your homeworld.”
“Groovy.”
The character of Sophie Everytime, created by Aristide Twain, is available for use by anyone. All rights reversed.
