Serial Sickness Continues

I think I may have skipped an upload week. I honestly don’t know. I was sick…and then I got some kind of infection…and after a week of pretty intense medication, I’m finally recovered enough to get sick again, or maybe it’s just allergies? I’ve been doing a lot of spring cleaning at the old Smomestead and that kicks up a lot of dust, mainly because I only clean in the spring. But I’m a bottom line kind of person and the bottom line is, I don’t remember much of February and I kind of want to sleep until March. I would have given this upload a miss and just gone to bed if I wasn’t like 80% sure I already did that once. So here I am! Uploading! On schedule, sort of, maybe?

So once again, there is a new chapter of my fanfic, Everything Is All Right, Part IV: New Faces, Old Bones (ugh, I just sat here for a solid thirty seconds trying to remember the name of my own book before giving up and looking at the open document…and now I just forgot where I was going with this…I should really write these posts in the morning. I have all kinds of energy in the morning. I’m like Cinderella, I turn into a zombie at eleven. That’s how Cinderella went, right? Oh yeah! I remember what I was going to say now. Thanks for attending my parenthetical aside. It was a journey), so if you’re reading along, head on over to archiveofourown.org or fanfiction.net and check it out! In the meantime, I have a snippet! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m taking a double-shot of Nyquil and going to bed. See you in a fortnight! Hopefully.

I swear I’m not always sick. Sometimes, I’m injured. Or asleep. But mostly, I’m sick.

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It took nearly an hour just to take all the pictures he insisted on before he was ready to start taking things apart, and then it was her turn to bring momentum to a crashing halt while she impressed upon him the importance of listening for the beep. She didn’t really think she had anything to worry about as far as that went. Technology had advanced considerably over the last fifty years and unlike the men who had disregarded a young Fred Faust’s warnings to follow the protocol before removing hardware they knew nothing about, Yoshi had probably fried a thumb drive in his time. When she told him to listen for the beep, he agreed immediately and his enthusiasm for following that rule did not wane no matter how many times she said it.

The practice run was a dissection of Freddy’s dismembered legs and it was there that Ana began to understand just what a grueling process this was really going to be. Freddy’s left leg was composed of one upper leg bone, two lower leg bones, three joints—hip, knee and ankle—and a foot. How many parts was that, seven? One would think so, but no, because the bones were capped with connecting plates and fasteners, the joints were complex mechanisms in their own rights, and the foot…there had to be a hundred separate parts in the foot alone. Plus, there were pumps acting as muscles, tension springs acting as tendons, numerous sensor pads acting as nerve clusters, separators, contractors, flexors and stabilizers. Each of these components had to be matched to their Toy-sized equivalents, from which the new endoskeletons would be assembled, and those corresponding parts scanned into the system, and even that wasn’t as simple as it sounded, not just because the scanner took for-freaking-ever (although it did), but because Yoshi had to first create a file for each piece, identify all its component materials with his analyzer, get its precise weight and measurements, and then teach the program how that part connected to other parts, and give the program a way to cross-reference the files for those parts, and if they needed auxiliary objects of function, most of which had to be ‘built’ inside the program from their own separate parts, all of which needed to first be scanned in, which meant Yoshi had to create a file…

It was a painstaking process and of course, pains should be taken. This repetitive, brain-melting tedium was what was going to restore her animatronics to their full potential and keep them alive for years to come. One mistake could mean the difference between Freddy Fazbear and Freddy Fazmobile. She was glad to see Yoshi taking it seriously, she just wished he’d take it seriously a little faster.

She suspected he was taking longer than he had to, but if he was trying to impress her with how methodical he could be, she had no one to blame but herself. That she even wanted to blame someone was only a testament to her own mood, which had steadily eroded under the strain of thinking through her headache and steadying her trembling hands, until all she wanted to do was…whatever she had to do to make it stop.

But she didn’t. She was not an alcoholic.