doihavetoexplainmath

After a pause of a few seconds, the metal door swings open, apparently on its own. Inside is a chaos of blinking lights and bursts of steam, crackling electricity and inscrutable screens glimmering as robots in various stages of functionality zip back and forth. There are also paintings of cute animals on the walls, and while there's no longer a bed (she repurposed the frame for parts long ago), there is a sort of nest surrounded by works in progress and piled with handmade stuffed animals.

Entrapta herself is bent over some fiddly bit of work at a bench and absolutely part of the artificial, mad ecosystem, but she looks up after a moment with a flash from her goggles and shoves herself back with her hair, her rolly chair skittering haphazardly into the middle of the floow. It doesn't dump her on her face, but it's a near thing. "Hiiii! What do you want?" It should be a rude question, but she asks it in quite her usual tone.

The combination of horrifying things and straight-up cute things makes the cabin kind of incomprehensible. He peers in and looks around without actually stepping inside, flinching a little at one of those electricity crackles, before Entrapta slides into view. He blinks at her mask a moment.

"Found one of your bots." He can tell it's hers because it has clear personality, and a lot of the joins look like they're made by the same person as the little mouse-sized cat bot. "It's hurt and I don't have any tools to try and fix it with."

He figures she must, since she made it. And looking around this room, he's pretty sure he's right.

"Oh, no, what happened to you, buddy?" Her hair forms into two hands that stretch between them to take the damaged bot. Looks like maybe somebody just kicked it by accident. "Maybe I better reinforce this panel a little. Most people wouldn't think to try to fix it." No bridge between these thoughts.

All he knew was the poor thing kept limping in circles, and he could easily imagine the kind of malfunction that might make him stagger around aimlessly, not sure where he should be going but knowing he had to get there. Like he'd literally done that before.

The touch of hand-shaped hair pulls him out of the half-remembered sensation. To his relief, it isn't as nerve-wracking as the touch of an actual hand, even if it is really weird. He shrugs awkwardly at her last statement. "I mean. Couldn't just leave it there."

While Entrapta isn't touch averse, she's rather more interested in the bot right now, and the hair-hands don't linger anywhere near him, instead diving into her toolbelt, her workbench, and two piles of the several scattered around the room. Each lock of hair returns with some tool or spare part. "It's not the altruism that's surprising. Lots of wardens especially cultivate that." She's not surprised by him being nice, exactly. "But you thought about fixing it, first. Are you interested in tech?" The look she sends him for a moment is piercing. He said he didn't know anything about his arm, but maybe he has hidden depths.

Part of the reasoning was so he didn't have to hunt someone down and ask for help, but... not all of it, he can recognize that at least. There's a pause before he admits to the actual answer, though, because interest still isn't a thing he's really supposed to show in things, per protocols. "Yes." He's not even sure why, beyond the practical where he's not letting anyone else touch his arm ever. "I've watched a lot of techs work on the arm. And. It's mine."

One more pause, then the actual, personal admission of opinion: "Besides, your robots are kinda cute."

"Aw, thanks!" She pats the damaged bot on the head and transfers it to the workbench queue. "I'd certainly want to know how to handle the basics myself if I had a robotic prosthetic. You should definitely figure it out." And get help from Entrapta. Who gets the blueprint of your arm, then. And maybe makes some improvements.

Don't get your hopes up too high, Entrapta. Nobody is touching that arm but him. Or getting close enough to really see inside. Not for a long time, anyway.

For now, though, he shrugs a little. "No tools. And I can't. The maintenance lab. Can't go in there. Haven't worked out what to do, yet." Ask one of the Steves, probably, ugh.

"Well, if you want to go through wardens, they love feeling like they're doing people favors." Entrapta has been learning all kinds of fun things about deception and cynicism from Bill Cipher, and sometimes this sort of thing just comes out. "You could also talk to Rhys. He's got one, too, and I'm sure he's got workarounds. But I could always just take a look, too!" Let. Her. Touch. It.

Yeah, he knew you were gonna say that, Entrapta. He shakes his head a little, looking further away, at one of the other robots. "You try, and I'll probably throw you through the wall. Not personal. Just a thing that'll happen. I have to do any maintenance myself." Three weeks away from the techs, and he's starting to think he doesn't want any ever, ever again. Handlers, he doesn't have a choice on, not with wardens assigned, but maybe this... maybe this he does.

Doesn't sound personal to her. "You'll have to get a lot more familiar with it, then. And you probably will need to lean on someone with more expertise in cybernetics, in that case." She has perfect confidence in her own ability to become an expert, given an opportunity, but she isn't one just this minute.

What, he can't just muddle through on instinct and half-remembered experiences with HYDRA tech? C'mon, Entrapta. "And get tools. Without going in the maintenance lab, somehow." He sounds kind of weary at the idea, but he'll figure something out. Steve got him a badass knife; maybe he'll have ideas. "Got to at least try. It worked hard before I died, could stand a tune-up."

"Well, you can always bother a warden about that, if you want to." Bill's always telling her she ought to involve them. "They like feeling like they're important, and if you make up an emotion and claim you're having it they'll probably be motivated." Since he seemed as disinclined as she is to actually talk about feelings, but crass manipulation is always on the table.

"I don't have one. So can't ask." As if he would ask a ~~handler~~ warden for anything on his own. Christ, he's going to have to ask Steve again, isn't he. He really doesn't want to ask Steve for yet another thing, even though he's sure the guy would help. Has basically already offered to help with this very thing.

Before getting there, he asks, without much hope, "Do you have any to spare I could. Borrow?" He'd like to keep them, but he knows how things work. Nothing belongs to him, after all. "Small wrenches, pliers, brushes?" Hopefully nothing needs sautering.

"Sure." Her hair begins rummaging in several drawers at once. "Though if you do need a warden, you don't really need to wait for them to give you one. They love feeling important. Mine this month was hard to get rid of, it you want to borrow him. Here we go." All the individual curling locks emerge at once with a wide assortment of tool related... things. Some are parts of neat sets, some extremely random, a few have bows or googly eyes on them...

Again with the so-alien-it's-not-scary thing. It's actually kind of cute in a weird way, the tentacles of hair starfished out from her head with tools in their coils (he never did find the signature HYDRA octopus all that scary). The bows and plastic bobbling eyes are baffling, but also make tools that might have been used to hurt him in the past somehow less potentially threatening. It's hard to be afraid of something with pretty ribbons, and plastic eyeballs that wobble when you move them. Christ, why do her tools have eyes?

But he does step forward to pluck a handful out of her hair's grip. "Thank you." Then, because it's just so weird and cute, he has to ask, "Why the eyes?"

Her hair twists into hands where he meets it. "The first time I did it I was testing how well a recon bot series could recognize people, and there were lots of other things in the testing setup. But after that I just thought it was cute."

"It is," he has to agree, and then snaps his mouth shut, because that's an opinion and even if it's in agreement with hers, he really shouldn't be offering those. He scoots to the furthest corner of her room-slash-lab from anything sparking and flips open a couple of the plates on his forearm to start poking at the innards.

Because he imagines he shouldn't take her tools away, and anyway, the company isn't... totally unobjectionable. He tells himself he's used to being surrounded by techs and handlers and the privacy of his room is just unfamiliar. And she is a very cute kid, for a potential technician.

Entrapta's only response, once she notices, is to push herself and her rolly chair off the wall and spin over his way to offer him a little lamp. She enjoys her strange, flickering, foggy nightmare palace of pastel purple, but you do need to be careful with lighting in here.

He glances up at her movement, tracks her as she approaches, then nods in thanks. He's worked in worse lighting before, he's sure of it, but his eyesight... apparently isn't quite what it was. Weird. Also, a lot of the bits inside the arm are small and fiddly, and that helps.

"Thank you. Please set it here?" Then, once he's back to working-- it's actually coming pretty easily, the bits to turn and tighten and tune up, like maybe he's had to do this before-- he asks, "How did you get all this stuff in here?"

She complies--good light is important! "Oh, this is all from home. I'm missing a lot of things, tools that fall under the admiral's definition of dangerous, I guess, but most of it came along with me." She pats a random counter covered in robot parts. "You can get lucky with cabins."

"Oh." He looks around again, thinking of his stark nothing cabin. More like a concrete jail cell with metal furnishings than any kind of cabin, to be honest. He had nothing that constituted "home" that wouldn't send him into a panic attack, so he got a mish-mash of holding cells he's been in over the years with the addition of actual furniture.

"I must not have been lucky," he mutters, mostly to himself.

"If I didn't have this I'd have to go through wardens," Entrapta agrees. There's no possibility she would simply not experiment with robotics engineering. She could just as soon stop breathing. But it'd be much more annoying if she had to explain everything she wanted to someone who'd want to tell her about how much making friends would improve her outcomes.

Not that he would have wanted robotics equipment in his cabin, frankly, but maybe... something other than the concrete and metal he does have would be nice. She has made an interesting statement, though, which makes him frown as he gets back to work. "The wardens get you things?"

That doesn't seem right. Why would they get inmates things? That's not their job. Is it? (What even is their job? Jesus, he still doesn't know.)

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sorry about the double comment, my dog managed to literally jump on the keyboard

what a talented dog you have