"Mr. Hammerhand," Jessica13 called and the Excalibur stopped and turned to face her again. "Hammerhand? Hammer?"
"Hammerhand is fine," he replied in a quieter tone.
"Hammerhand it is," she said with a nervous chuckle. "As you can see, my mech is in need of repairs, and—well, it seems a little wasteful to see all these mechs around here and simply leave them to whatever vultures might come to collect them. I thought we could probably…uh, maybe…scavenge them ourselves before we go to the bunker?"
There was no response for a moment but then the large shoulders began to rock alarmingly. When he shook his head, she realized he was laughing.
"Welcome to the Knights Mechanica, my girl," Hammerhand said finally and chuckled. "I think you'll fit right in."
The massive mech moved away, and Jessica13 wasn't sure what to make of his statement until Tinker nudged her in the shoulder again.
"I think the big man likes you," he said and laughed.
"Is that what that was supposed to be?" she asked. "I thought he made fun of me."
"We don't leave anything for the pirates to take again," Tinker said. He glanced at the crushed Balthazar and nudged it with his boot. "Nothing they can use, anyway. Anything useful is collected and carried to where I can put it to good use in one of the other mechs. It was my and Hammerhand's idea to set things up that way, and you have the same spirit of a scavenger in you. Like the big man said, you'll fit in right with the Knights Mechanica."
It was quick work to scavenge most of the mechs. A good portion of them had been reduced to little more than scrap metal after Hammerhand had destroyed them with his hammer, but those that had been eliminated by the other mechs were still in good enough shape.
Once she had the parts she needed, Jessica13 retrieved her tools from the Minato and laid it on the ground since she didn't have the harness to hang it while she worked. She used a pair of cutters to peel away the sections of metal she wouldn’t be able to use in that position anymore.
Even so, she hated to waste anything. The chunks were shoved in a bag she could fit on the back of the Minato and kept going without so much as a pause.
Tinker watched her work as she began to install the new front panel in place of the one that had been torn off. As she continued to fit the new piece, a few of the other Knights moved in closer as well and tried to get a good grasp of what she was up to.
Most talked on the private comms she wasn't privy to, but as they leaned in closer, she wondered if they hadn't seen Tinker work this way before.
The panel fit rather well and only required a few minor cuts and adjustments to settle into the place she had created for it. While it wasn't a pretty fit, she had already decided she would have to get used to something like that since she was Outside now. It seemed logical that she would have to accept that her mech wasn’t as nice and clean as she was accustomed to.
"Nice work on that panel," Tinker said once she had finished fixing it in place. "How do you think you'll see through it, though?"
"There isn’t a problem with that," Jessica13 said and patted her finished work before she pulled a few of the armor sections up from the panel itself. "I only need to fit it with the sensors in the Minato. That, plus the ones I need to fix on the head section, means I'll be able to settle in there with a full view. They didn't design these with see-through panels. They were always meant to work with full armor and visuals provided through sensors on the outside."
The wiring was jumbled near the head of the mech and she began to sort through the issues manually.
"Why would they make a mech you couldn't see out of?" the Knight riding the Watson—Taylor was his name if she remembered correctly—asked. "What if the sensors go down and you can't see anything at all?"
"Minatos were fitted with AIs originally to resolve that," Jessica13 said. "They were finicky bastards, every one, but you can work the sensors without the AI. If you do have one in, though, you get to see why they didn't want panels with a weaker structure on the front."
"It's when you go down on all fours, yeah?" Carson, the pilot of the Sherlock, said, likely having watched her run from the pirates like Hammerhand had.
"That's right," she replied, finished her work with the sensors, and set them to a timed restart to bring all the systems up again. "When you run on all fours, you don't want to have the underside of the mech weaker in case something catches the bottom and breaks it. It’s best to have the whole thing as structurally sound as possible."
"Agreed," Tinker said. "Though I’d still rather have a way to see something with my eyes out there than have to rely on machines."
"We already rely on machines," Jessica13 pointed out and patted Mini's hull. "Do you think you can get up now?"
"What's that?" he asked.
"I wasn't talking to you," she responded and after a few seconds, her mech began to move on its own and managed to climb slowly onto his feet and settle without issue.
"Repairs are…adequate," Mini said through the external speakers. "Running diagnostics now in case you missed something."
"It’s odd to let your AI talk back at you like that," Tinker told her as she pulled the door open and climbed into the cockpit. "I'm lucky if I can get me three or four words out of the one running mine. Not that it runs much."
"Like I said, the Shimura-Sendai manufacturers
