Castle Gulch

[Ashlie Minamida]

"He's hunting the same person I'm hoping to find. Who, I'd imagine, is doing their best not to be thanks to people like him. I wouldn't want to burden you with this mess, but I could use a place to go through his notes..."

[Genevieve Fontaine]

"Erm..." Genevieve said, trailing off for a moment in thought. "Right. A place to work..."

She hemmed for a moment, and then sighed. "Well, I reckon you better use my room, then. Not rightly safe in yours at the moment, especially if he has friends lookin' for him. Or if his friends find yer friend."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I'm thinking he's too paranoid to have many friends sticking their neck out for him. And much appreciated. I promise I won't be too long." she says and as if on cue her artificial arm spasms with a metallic grinding noise. "Okay maybe a little long."

[Genevieve Fontaine]

"Oh, honey, you're not going out like that," Genevieve said, with a sigh. "You come in here and take care of yerself, and we'll see if we can't rustle up a blacksmith or something for you. In for a penny, in for a pound and all that good news."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I should be able to fix it myself. I might have to ask you to hold a thing or two in place though..."

[Genevieve Fontaine]

"If I had a nickel for every time I'd heard that," Genevieve laughed, opening the door to her room. "Be impressed to see someone fix their own arm. Don't it hurt?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"It's not that sensate." she says as she steps into Genevieve's room, leaving Vincent's suitcase by the door along with her rifle before finding a table to settle at. "And once I take it off it's just a very fancy piece of metal." she says as she goes about doing so, twitching her arm just so to send the signal for the prosthetic to unclamp it's leather brace from around her stump and pulling three thin copper wires from small metal plugs in her flesh, wincing slightly as she does.

"Okay, that part's a little uncomfortable." she admits.

[Genevieve Fontaine]

Genevieve wasn't immediately looking at Ashlie, being as she was quick to attempt to clean off a space for Ashlie to work; something which involved pushing her own bags to the side and closing the armoire, once that was filled with not much clothing. Or, rather, with lots of clothing made up of not much.

"I reckon I can only imagine. Well, I hope I can only imagine, as I wouldn't care to be left with less than my normal self, fer sure. You lost that in some sort of accident?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Birth defect." she says, holding her arm up slightly. "See the lack of any severe scarring? Wear from the prosthetic not-withstanding." she adds as she points out the smooth skin only marred by some redness and mild abrasions.

"I do appreciate letting me intrude like this." she adds as almost bit of an afterthought to Genevieve closing the armoire. "And you needn't worry that I'll judge you for what I assume are your work clothes." Blasted 'truth serum'; it might not do exactly as it claims but the surge of adrenaline of dealing with Vincent had masked the loopiness enough that Ashlie had hoped it had mostly run it's course.

[Genevieve Fontaine]

"Like ah told you before, I'm an actress. One just...has to make ends meet, from time to time, 'tsall," she said, rubbing one arm. "Ahm certainly not going to go hungry after one day. And you've had a rougher day than ah have."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"It's entertainment, anything else is arbitrary lines of judgement." Ashlie says and decides she's going to focus on repairing her arm now since she seems to struggle to keep her thoughts inside her head anyway. "And the least I can do is pay you for your time and hospitality." she adds, glad to be busy unpacking her tools so she has something to distract her from how that sentence could be taken.

[Genevieve Fontaine]

"Well, let's just get you fixed up first, and then we can talk about all that," Genevieve nodded, sitting down in a chair and watching the door.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Right, yes, not that I... That is to say, I didn't mean to... Uhm, yes..." the hyper-intelligent machine-inside-a-meat-body eloquently says as she turns her attention to her damaged prosthesis. It's odd to work on something she, in some way, designed yet has no real memory of. The materials and techniques have limited it but she still recognizes her own work. It's how she would have built it given the limitations. Carefully fitted casing open up to reveal arrays of thin steel cables, wound around meticulously arranged pulleys and winches and a central assembly reminiscent of a gearbox, controlling which combination of cables are engaged or linked, reducing the required motors to a single one.

The outer casing has some superficial damage where it was caught between chair and floor but as long as she can get some waxed fabric to wrap around it to keep dust and sand out it won't cause any functional problems. The gearbox however needs fixing. Cables are snagging, some now too close to each other to move smoothly, others sprung from their spindles and entangling others. Unscrewing the casings is easy enough - of course she'd design it to be taken apart with one hand - but arranging the cables would require a series of hooks to hold them in place. Perhaps a workshop with that kind of assembly sprung into being on this world when she arrived but she doubts it; the actual way she theoretically build this in the first place remains an abstract idea somewhere in the logic of Conduit's meddling. Presumably. That's a mystery for another day.

"I... may require a helping hand or two. Just to hold some of these cables as I pull them out of the way."

[Genevieve Fontaine]

"They won't have, like, anythin' catchin' on them, will they?" Genevive asked, still coming over to lend a helping hand.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"No catching, no tension, see? I released the spools holding them tight so I can re-rig them." she says and starts pulling wires up, hooking them onto Genevieve's fingers. Every once in a while she pauses to deliberate before proceeding and then finally pulls out three damaged parts. A spool with a broken axle and two pieces that almost look like combs with very short teeth, some of which have gotten bend.

"This'll just take a moment." she says as she goes about straightening the wire-guides with a narrow plier and finally replaces the axle before going about reassembling the whole thing and relieving Genevieve from having a dozen thin wires arranged on her fingers. "It'd be less complicated to mimic regular human tendons, but it'd be hard to control them without the delicate web of nerves. So much complex signaling that goes into simply moving your fingers..."

[Genevieve Fontaine]

Genevieve pinched her nose up as she tried to carefully handle the wires. "That there is mighty impressive work. Where'd you learn to do any of that?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"My mother, I suppose. She was a scientist. Mathematics mostly but drafting engineering blueprints too. From there I mostly taught myself, taking things apart, learning how they work, putting them back together better, more efficient, smoother. So much work and effort is being wasted on doing things faster and easier when they could be better. For everyone. So they can pursue their passions."

[Genevieve Fontaine]

"Well, I don't know much about any of that," Genevieve admitted. "It would seem to me that faster and easier is better, ain't it? Afterall, can't pursue your passions if you're spending all your life working away."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Better means faster and easier in the long run, but I'll admit I might be taking work as my passion a bit far at times."

[Genevieve Fontaine]

"Well, all I can tell you is I wasn't made for hard work myself; no ma'am. Don't have the stomach for it."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Work doesn't have to be back-breaking to be hard." Ashlie simply says as she starts putting her arm back together, occasionally directing Genevieve to hold it in place to make it easier lining up screws one-handed.

"Hell, it doesn't even have to produce physical results. Back home I'd be lost without people able to explain what I want to do better than me." she shakes her head slightly. "My best friend once punched me for being an insensitive automaton. Not that they were my friend at the time, nor wrong. It was... My life is a complicated mess." she laughs slightly.

[Genevieve Fontaine]

"Well, I hope you don't get in a habit of bein' punched by friends. No way to treat a lady, if'n you ask me.

And you seem to be doin' alright for yourself. Well, if you don't count being drugged by strange men with phony accents."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Well I try not to say things that'll get me---ah hell. I promise it's not like that." she cuts herself off as she realizes even through the lingering drug-haze how that sounds.

"You know the funny thing is, I was absolutely willing to tell him things before he even drugged me. Didn't believe a word of it, which is probably for the best. Planes are probably close to being discovered anyway, at least if this world follows the same rough trajectory as mine." she says and freezes as she realizes what she's said.