Hit or Miss

[THE BOXER AND THE BOT]

Yu-Min smirked, but only for a moment, for the next second, the plane of her organic shin collided with Lily's forearm as the girl blocked her kick with a swift movement. They rebounded off each other, and trade a few half hearted blows in an attempt to measure the other's strength, but none of these actually land with any force. It felt more like a dance than a fight, which was as Yu-Min intended; anything she was going to do with Teeg had to feel smooth and scripted, but look dangerous to a crowd.

Of course, Lily's strength and speed helped. The girl could move like a snake when she wanted to, and it took the enhanced movement of Yu-Min's prosthetics to keep up with her. Not to say that the mechanic was slow in any sense of the word, but Lily had the advantage of biokinesis or something like it, and the fact that the girl was so much taller than her didn't help. Lily managed to hook a foot around Yu-Min's ankle and toss her backwards, but the mechanic simply carries the momentum into a roll and sprung back to her feet. Her knee's piston wheezed slightly, and steam hissed from some of the corners of the machinery, throwing moisture up into over the metal and causing the LED lights in her canine teeth to flicker on. For a moment, she appeared as a specter with five eyes, the only parts of her face visible her four glowing teeth and her bionic eye.

The image seemed to cause Lily to hesitate, and Yu-Min took that chance to leap forward and clock her across the face. A bit harder than she intended, too, as the steel hit her jaw with an ugly twang. Lily sprawled backwards into the dirt, prompting Cennetig to leap to sis feet in alarm, and Yu-Min to swear colorfully. "Aw, Tigerlily, I got you too hard, didn't I? Ach!"

She scampered over to offer the downed girl a hand as Cennetig paced to her side.

[LILLIAN WILSON]

That one kinda hurt. For a moment Lilly didn't even think to get up, blurry eyes just staring at the canvas of the Big Top. She could feel a bruise blooming across her jaw and she must have bit her cheek or jaw cause her mouth tasted like copper. "Yeah, that hurt." And then she laughed. She took Yu-Min's and pulled herself up, experimentally opening and closing her mouth. "I don't think you broke anything, but oww."

It hurt to talk. Was she going to stop though? No. Of course not. Even if she had broken her jaw, Lilly would have found a way to talk. Learn sign language or something. As if nothing had happened, Lilly went about brushing the dust off of her clothes. Not that it mattered really. "Do you want to go again? Or does the steam thingy mean you're all warm now?" It had scared her, in all honesty. The first thought that flashed across her mind was that she had broken her friend. And then the five eyes thing... yeah no. She wasn't going to revisit those memories any time soon. "Just don't hit me in the face again, kay? I don't want my eyes taken out or anything."

That was a lovely thought, a screw gouging out her eye. Wonderful. That was going to be a nightmare later, she just knew it.

[THE BOXER AND THE BOT]

Yu-Min shook her head, still twisting it this way and that to continue looking at the ugly red splotch quickly purpling to a bruise. "Nah, I ain't gonna make you fight after I just threw a sock fulla nickels at yer face. Plus, I heard Teeg's gyros overcompensate when se stood up, so I'm guessing that means sis sensors were thrown off when sis eye popped. Less I get a new one stuck in sis head, our routine's gonna be awfully wobbly." Fiddling with some of the bindings on her elbow, she glanced over the scrapes and cuts on her own body. "So how about we go an' get some grub instead? I ain't eaten since lunch yesterday, and you can help me dig up a new peeper for Teeg if you want afterward."

[LILLIAN WILSON]

"Because I totally want to eat after having my jaw broken by nickels." Her mechanical body was definitely more than sacks of nickels. Hell, nickels would probably hurt less than the blow had. Still, she was just playing, and shows so by sticking her tongue out playfully. "I guess I could get something to eat. As for finding your friend a new eye..." She looked the robot over once again. Yep, still a little creepy. Yu-Min talked about the robot as if it really was self-aware, and it seemed to be, but... she just couldn't get it to click in her head. The transformer would probably always be a robot to Lillian. Nothing more than a smarter Cleverbot.

But maybe finding it a new eye would help her feel less uncomfortable around the robot. And it would remember the kindness when it and it's siblings finally took over the world. "Yeah, I could probably help. Hopefully. I wouldn't want to be a nuisance." Which she probably would be. It wasn't like she went eye shopping every afternoon. Still, it would be fun to be a mechanic for awhile. She had never really worked on things like that before.

Besides taking apart and putting back together a remote. That had been fun. Helpful for this situation? No. But the memory made her smile and feel a little better.

"Well come on then."

[THE BOXER AND THE BOT]

"Nah, you wouldn't be any kind of nuisance. Always can use hands when it comes to fixin' up my little bro here." Yu-Min smacked a hand across Teeg's metal thigh and se dropped onto all fours, falling into a slow trot beside her. Sis unbalance was much more obvious now; she could hear the piston missing the beat in sis arm and leg on the side of the shattered sensor, causing a strange limp that seemed more like se didn't know how to walk. Older programs often neglected actually delegating a portion of the software to movement, and instead heaped it all onto the sensors to stabilize the gods forsaken hardware. Some of the old Deamhan Inc tech was incredibly advanced, even for current standards. But this was not one of those areas in which it wowed.

As Yu-Min paced ahead next to Lily, Cennetig watched both of them with sis single working ocular. Humans confused sim. Yu-Min had just inflicted untold damage on this Lily girl, the likes of which se couldn't determined due to sis broken sensors, during what was supposed to be a routine harmless stage battle. And yet, there was no conflict. From sis observation of human behavior, their logic patterns dictated that a confrontation should arise from this.

Truthfully though, Yu-Min's behavioral track rarely followed the dictated norms of typical humans. It could not be the physical manifestation of machinery in her body; the programs that ran those were merely kinesthetic, and could not alter her calculation or contemplative brain paths. In a way, this Lily shared this anomaly, that weird alteration that Teeg could neither dissect nor predict.

[LILLIAN WILSON]

So she was going to have lunch with a partial robot girl and then go fix up her giant Transformer friend. Was Circo some kind of reality TV show? Maybe, just maybe. Actually, that would be pretty cool. She would go home TV star and...everyone would have more of a reason to be jealous... yeah no. She changed her mind. That wouldn't be cool at all.

Besides, that would mean that her mother was beating on the producer's door, screaming about how he or she allowed everyone to keep their rooms 'dirty'. And now she was thinking about her room, and how there was probably a sock or two on the floor. She probably needed to fix that. Yeah, once she was done with all of this she'd give her room a deep clean. She didn't want to finally get a roommate and have them grossed out or anything.

And she needed to figure out what she'd do with the door....

Lillian walked quietly next to her new friend, lost in her own thoughts. Her jaw was really starting to hurt. "Do you think they'll give me an ice pack for my jaw?" Hopefully.

[THE BOXER AND THE BOT]

Before Yu-Min could answer, Cennetig wound sis neck around to examine Lily's face. The injury was looking very bad, the flesh bruised and purpled and ugly. With a flick of sis wrist, se produced a plastic sack of beads from sis chest compartment and offered it to Lily. "I DO NOT HAVE ANY ICE PACK, BUT I DO HAVE A COLD CHEMICAL SACK. IF YOU SHAKE IT, IT WILL PRODUCE A COOLING SENSATION THAT MAY AID IN DULLING ANY SORENESS. I APOLOGIZE THAT I CAN NOT PRODUCE ANY MORE ADEQUATE SOURCE OF PAIN RELIEF."

Yu-Min smiled just slightly to herself, tucking both hands into her pockets as she walked. She knew that that software was learning. Eventually, she knew se would learn to be a bit...not better, but more in touch. She wanted sim to be, and se wanted it too. That much she knew. She would wake up some times, see sim sitting at the opening of their dorm with sis head popped out the door, watching people pass by. Se would plug into Yu-Min's ancient laptop and scroll through random news sites, skip around videos, find people to speak to for the shortest amount of time.

Sometimes, she wished se would share what se learned.

[LILLIAN WILSON]

A chemical sack? That didn't sound healthy at all. But what was she supposed to do? Tell the giant robot that she didn't want it? Sure, he was injured at the moment, but... She really didn't want to test that at the moment. Maybe after she'd been around the transformer for awhile, knew what he was like and what he preferred in fighting styles, then she'd chance telling him no.

Until then she was just going to put random sacks of who-knew-what on her face because he told her so. She had such an interesting life. "Thank you." Maybe it would actually help. Maybe her body would freak out and she'd have to get half her face removed. Would her power cause that to happen just by thinking that? Oh hell... Lillian took the pouch with a smile, shaking it just till it felt cold before resting it gingerly on the wound.

It actually felt...nice. No skin-melting feelings just yet. "Kinda sad that you have such an icy heart, Teeg." Of course robots didn't have hearts, she just wanted to mess with him. He was much fun to mess with. And if this was his heart.... Weird cold sack of chemical heart on her face. Great. Just great. That mental image kept getting better and better.