#(Ultimate Edgelord title not endorsed by Hope's Peak Academy - the Ultimate Selection Board - or any other accredited bodies)

[chessanator]

The Next Generation

To: Aleigah ( @suckmymika )

From: @chessanator

My gift for the @danganronpasecretsanta gift exchange. One thing that’s always concerned me about Miu Iruma’s characterisation in NDRV3 is that if someone else was solely responsible for creating Keebo then it really cuts into her role as the Ultimate Inventor. I used your Miu/Keebo prompt as a chance to remedy that situation.

I hope you enjoy this fic, and have a very merry Christmas.

Ao3 Link

Miu Iruma, the Ultimate Inventor, glared up at the castle that loomed over her. What sort of pompous fuck would think that a crumbling ruin like this was a good place to set up shop? Well, Miu already knew the answer to that, since it was printed on the gold trimmed invitation that had dragged her out to this stupid castle in the middle of this stupid moorland.

‘Professor Idabashi cordially invites Miss Iruma to Idabashi Castle and Laboratories for discussions of great importance,’ the invitation read.

Well, that was vague as fuck. Well, if this Prof Idabashi wanted to bask in Miu’s reflected glory, she’d oblige. It’d probably be worth the while – she’d at least heard of this geezer and some of the stuff he had invented – and anyway, she would only have to show up at this dingy castle, dazzle this sucker instantly with her beauty and wit, and she could be back in civilisation before evening. That was the plan, at least.

Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be any way to get the drawbridge across the moat from Miu to lower and let her inside.

Instantly, Miu’s mind’s eye was filled with images and plans for mechanisms that could run under the moat and allow someone to lower the drawbridge from outside, assembled patterns of gears multiplying even the slightest amount of effort into a force that could bring the drawbridge down or lift it back up, while still being compact enough easily protect from the damp mud under the moat. It came together almost instinctively, as they always did. Then Miu realised that not everyone should be allowed through so easily; the gears were replaced by a nest of electronics, connecting a ‘doorbell’ on the outside of the moat to an array of video cameras, passing the footage through a neural network that would decide whether the person pressing the button should be allowed in or not. Obviously, a neural net like that would have to accept Miu Iruma and let her in.

Miu looked around again, but there was nothing like a doorbell or a hand-crank on the outside of the moat. Fucking moron must have forgotten to install one.

Luckily, a genius like her always had other options. Miu flexed her fingers across the controls located across the palms of her gloves and booted up the mechanical arms, trembling with pleasure as she felt them emerge from their slots in her backpack. She always wore them these days: pretty much ever since she had hammered out the last few wrinkles their increased strength had forced into the design. They were oh-so-beautifully useful in situations like this.

Manipulating the controls for the arms as smoothly as if they were truly part of her own body, Miu launched them across the moat and tore the drawbridge from its hinges.

 After planting the mechanical hands on sections of the drawbridge’s arch so that they could take the weight and provide mechanical advantage, Miu Iruma leapt across the moat and through the entrance to the castle. She landed on a carpet that ran along the centre of a great high-roofed hall; if it had been red, it would have been perfect for welcoming her.

Well, it would have been if the carpet had been flanked by a crowd waiting to fawn over her. As it was, the only person in the hall was an old man in a scruffy lab coat, bent double over a workbench at the very far end. He only looked up from the circuit board he was soldering together when Miu reached out one of her metal arms and smacked one of the marble pillars, the clang reverberating through the still, stale air.

The old man spun around and glared at Miu through tiny silver-rimmed glassed. “Who are you?… Iruma,” he spat through his bushy and unkempt white beard.

“The gorgeous golden genius, Miu Iruma, makes her appearance!” Miu announced, drowning out the old man’s mumbling. As she strode forward, she cast her gaze across the stained-glass windows and shadowed alcoves, not seeing anything worth paying more than even a second’s attention to. “So where’s this Idabashi geezer hiding? You his fucking lab assistant or something?”

The old man straightened his lab coat with one sharp snap-pull on his collar. “Insolent youth. You break down my door, barge in without my permission, and you fail to show even the slightest courtesy to your elders. I am Idabashi. And if there are even two working brain cells in between your ears, you would do well to show me some respect.”

“What?! You, Idabashi?! Don’t make me laugh! You look like your brain withered up a long time ago.” Miu glanced up and down the man’s body and sneered. “Let me guess: that’s not the only thing that’s withered off, am I right?”

The man just glowered at her.

“Damn, I guess you are Idabashi. So what the hell did you drag me out here for? Lemme guess: you’re gonna turn over all your tools and shit to me so you can retire before you brain rots, right? That’d be just awesome. Like, I’d get far better use out of –”

“Quiet.” Idabashi didn’t raise his voice at all, and Miu was surprised to find her voice catch in her throat anyway. “I invited you here for one reason, Miu Iruma, and one reason only. To remind you of your place.”

Miu froze; her advance along the carpet faltered. “Eh? Ugh, really?” she whimpered. Her ‘place’? What the fuck did he mean by that? “Right on top, you mean? I’m the Ultimate Inventor! The best inventor ever. I was chosen –”

“You were chosen by politicians,” Idabashi interrupted her again, “who wanted to pretend they were interested in the sciences; by bureaucrats who wanted to fill quotas and by media ‘personalities’ for reasons that are…” He pursed his lips. “… entirely shallow. I was not consulted on this, and neither was any other eminent and accomplished engineer. But before you mock me, heed this. How long do you think you will keep that trifling title of yours if I raise even a single word against you?”

“‘A single word’? What’s it gonna be: the a-word? The s-word? Don’t say… not the f-word?!” Miu blustered, but inside her mind was racing. Could Professor Idabashi really snatch her Ultimate-ness away from her? Shit, he probably could. Miu had no idea how the Ultimate selection committee worked, so probably could pull some strings. If she got demoted before her time, before she could show the entire world her greatness… fuck.

“I would merely have to tell them the truth,” Idabashi continued, “That you are a crude, insolent lout who would tarnish this country’s entire history of invention and development if you were allowed to represent it. That you cannot be trusted with the resources they intend to give to you. That you are a mere hack, undeservingly elevated by fluke, and that if those trivial contact lenses of yours had not become so inexplicably popular with the plebeians you would still be languishing in obscurity.”

“Oh, come on!” Miu had to think and talk fast, if she wanted to stay the Ultimate Inventor. Clenching the hands on the end of her metal arms into desperate balled fists, she said, “It’s not like I understand that shit with the eye-drop contact lenses either. They should have been looking closer at my real inventions: ones that could make them more productive while in bed! But if they’re gonna be such dumbasses about it, might as well pocket and get on to the good stuff, right?”

“Hmm…” Professor Idabashi paused. Light glinted off his glasses. “A trial, then. A challenge, to see if you can convince me that you are capable of earning the accolade you wear so lightly.”

“Neat: a challenge! So, what’s it gonna be, old geezer?”

Idabashi clasped his hands and stared over them. “I will have quarters prepared for you. You will not have the time to sleep –”

“Shit! I do my best stuff while sleeping!”

“– or any other vulgar activities,” Idabashi continued, “The challenge is this. You have until dawn to invent, design and produce a new device. I will not attempt to instruct you on what this device should be capable of: I doubt a girl as flighty as you is capable of following a specification. But you will do your utmost to ensure that it impresses me. Do not disappoint.” Idabashi pressed a button on the workbench behind him. The workbench, the circuit boards it carried, and Professor Idabashi himself all retracted into the back wall and vanished from view.

Miu laughed, her voice reverberating off the smooth stone walls of the entrance hall. She’d already persuaded Idabashi to set her a challenge for her Ultimate title, so she was practically halfway there. Shit, this was going to be fucking easy!

 Miu sighed, collapsing onto the bed as she arrived at the room Idabashi had let her have. She’d been guided there through the castle by a trail of pink LEDs that had lit up a few minutes after the professor had left, running along the floor all the way. At least this medieval shithole had conveniences like that. So it wasn’t getting frustratingly lost that made Miu sigh, nor was it a lack of amenities like proper plumbing or heating.

Miu sighed again.

The reason she sighed was that she still hadn’t worked out what the fuck she was supposed to make.

Seriously, what would a decrepit geezer like that find impressive, anyway? He’d probably hate everything Miu invented just because Miu invented it; obviously he was too closed-minded to see the grandness of her priorities. Usually a challenge like this would just mean that Miu would have to produce a perfectly modular invention, filled with every upgrade her infinite genius could imagine so that it could do anything. That always impressed. But how the fuck was she supposed to do that just using the tools she’d brought with her, selected so they could fit in a single small backpack – one mostly given over to containing her retracted mechanical arms and all their mechanisms? And if she had to do it all during a single night… Idabashi’s challenge was – meant to be – fucking impossible!

Miu Iruma, the Ultimate Inventor, was going to have to cheat.

 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 

Miu crept her way through the corridors of the castle. She didn’t have a strip of lights to guide her this time, but it was obvious to a super-genius like her where she was going: that room behind the entrance hall that Idabashi had disappeared into had to be his actual lab, where he stashed the good stuff. Miu would just have to find another way in.

The lack of the guiding lights also meant that there weren’t any actual light sources in this part of the castle. That didn’t matter. Her Glasses-of-still-being-productive-when-everyone-else-wants-the-lights-off-so-they-can-sleep took care of that.

And, obviously, she wasn’t going to get herself caught. An ancient asshole like Idabashi had to have an early bedtime: wasting precious hours of the night to stave off his frailness. Seriously, he should have just given up and passed on everything to someone who could still use every hour of the day properly: like Miu Iruma. But at least it meant he wouldn’t be up and awake, prowling the corridors.

Miu found the entrance she was looking for easily. It wasn’t even concealed at all, just located right on the opposite side of the hidden laboratory from the entrance hall. She yanked open the door and stepped inside.

If the lab wasn’t well-hidden, at least Idabashi had put some security in place. Miu stopped just in time, as her glasses-of-you-know-what revealed a web of infrared lasers criss-crossing the passageway. She could see the small lever to turn the sensors off on the other side of the array, but there was clearly no way to get through the lasers and switch it.

Not through normal space, at least. Miu had just the thing.

She reached into her backpack and drew out a thin plastic ray gun. After peering through the sight at the end to make sure the crystals were calibrated properly and fiddling with the dials to get the ranges right, Miu pointed the gun downwards and held her breath. She pulled the trigger.

A small gush of air. Miu’s underwear popped into existence three feet up in the air and on the other side of the laser beams. It floated for a second, then fell, catching the end of the lever and pulling it down. The lasers flickered, then vanished.

Miu stepped through. Before moving on, she took the panties off the lever and stuffed them into her backpack. Couldn’t be letting some fucker find and perv over them, could she?

Miu had barely got a few more metres along the passageway when she saw the next trap. Cracks between the floor and the walls gave away pressure plates, like nervousness gave away a virgin. Only a dumbass would step right into that mess after they’d seen it coming, but Miu still needed a way forward. Her inspired intuition led her to a concealed maintenance panel on the wall, and when she opened it up and stuck her head through she saw that the pressure plate connected to a mechanism that would swing a sharp blade straight the whoever had stood on the pressure plate if it hadn’t been deactivated properly. Damn, Idabashi wasn’t fucking around.

Miu could just about make out a weak point in the mechanism: a place where a slight jostle would knock the gears out of place and gum up the mechanism. Far out of Miu’s reach, of course, and she wasn’t going to try reaching her arm through the hatch and swinging it about like a desperate loser. She was the Ultimate Inventor! She had much better options.

Another item came out on the backpack. Miu passed the boxing glove on the end through the maintenance hatch, then turned it towards the mechanism. One quick adjustment to turn off the auto-aim, and the device was targeted straight at the weak point. All Miu had to do now was activate it.

“Hey, Idabashi,” Miu whispered, “How you liking this penetration? Gonna come and give me what I want, yet?”

Boing! Boing! The Auto-Puncher sprung twice, and Miu was sure she heard it hit the mechanism both times. When the Auto-Puncher settled Miu pulled it back through the hatch, then undid the previous adjustment to restore it to pristine condition. She trusted her talent enough to be sure the puncher had done its job, but even so she approached the pressure plate with trepidation, stepping over the edge with a tentative outstretched toe and squealing as the plate gave way beneath it.

A fierce grinding sounded through the stone wall, but the blades didn’t swing through their slots to slash her.

Phew! Miu had worried that the joke had been too bitter to trigger the Auto-Puncher-that-punches-you-for-telling-terrible-dirty-jokes, but it must have worked. As it turned out, the Auto-Puncher’s taste in jokes didn’t really matter. Of course, your sense of taste didn’t matter then either, when you were…

Boing!

“Ow!”

The final obstacle that stood between Miu and Idabashi’s personal laboratory was a perfectly-sealed electronically-locked door. There was no way to trick her way through this one; she’d just have to guess the password. She booted up the computer next to the lock and read Idabashi’s password hint.

‘My first true love.’

Miu didn’t even need her Hookup Counter to know that the answer was some variation on ‘no-one.’

 With the final door out of her way, Miu Iruma burst into Professor Idabashi’s private laboratory. She whooped; only the one-and-only awesome inventor, Miu Iruma, could have bust through all those traps as effortlessly as she had, baby! Now it was time to claim her reward, and smash her way to victory in this stupid challenge Idabashi had set her.

She glanced around the lab. From the inside the sliding panels and mechanisms the old man had used to flee the entrance hall were obvious, and right in the middle of the wall opposite – just above the electronics workbench – Miu could see a lever that would reverse the process and her back out. Fucking neat: she wouldn’t have to crawl all the way back up that dingy corridor like she was escaping from a BDSM dungeon.

On each side of the laboratory were cabinets filled with Idabashi’s inventions. Most were works in progress: the cabinets had reinforced blast-proof viewing windows to protect against explosions and releases of toxic chemicals, and cables came down the wall above each cabinet, connecting to sensors that were monitoring for power surges and unanticipated successes. Levitating platforms, generators for converting sound energy into electricity, shoulder-mounted laser cannons, and multi-armed drones: all of those inventions had been stored by Idabashi in his laboratory for safe-keeping.

All of them would be Miu’s, once she figured out how to grasp them.

Miu’s eyes followed the cables from the cabinets up to the ceiling and traced them back to where they joined together at the top of a central column. Bundled together, the cables spun around the column and then descended into a large metal box at the bottom. As she skipped up to it, Miu though it looked a bit like a school locker. She yanked open the door.

God damn; it was the most beautiful fucking thing she’d ever seen.

Inside the locker was a human-like figure. It was obviously a robot; Miu ran her fingers over the sleek metal panels of the body and traced out the grooves where they interlocked perfectly, before moving up the line of buttons along the centre of the robot’s chest up to the head. She stroked the messy surprisingly-realistic white hair, separating each strand from its neighbours to get a closer look at it. She looked into the robot’s eyes: dull, unmoving, inactive.

Why the fuck was a senile grouchy old git like Idabashi allowed to have something as amazing as this?!

Miu made up her incredible mind. This robot – ‘K1-B0’, according to the label – Miu would make it her own. Once she’d got through improving K1-B0, he’d be so, so much better.

Miu looked over K1-B0’s body for a connection port, finding one right near the centre of the mop of hair. Taking what she need out of her backpack once more, Miu plugged one end into the port and the other into her computer tablet. A few quick flicks of her finger, and the robot’s code was sprawling across the screen. Code for formulating and choosing goals, code for understanding incoming sensory data and making plans, code for simulating human speech and behaviour… and code to ensure that K1-B0 obeyed the Professor’s orders at all times.

Just a few little alterations, and… magnificent.

 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0

The next morning, Miu made her way to the entrance hall early, while it was still dark outside. She wanted to see the look on Idabashi’s face when he arrived.

She didn’t have to wait long. About five minutes later Idabashi strode in, his lab coat sweeping up behind him to block the window and the sun as it crested the horizon. He swung his head around as he spotted Miu and glared at her. “Well, Iruma? This is your very last chance. Convince me now that you deserve the title of Ultimate Inventor, or see your false pretences stripped away from you!”

‘Stripped’? Not for a pervy old geezer like him! “Oh, that challenge? I’ve got that all wrapped up!”

“Go on, that. Show me.”

Miu smirked. “Oh, I don’t need to. Shit, I don’t need your approval or your guidance or whatever the fuck makes you think you get to boss me around; I don’t need any of that shit anymore. ’Cause all your stuff…” Miu snapped her fingers. At her command the wall at the back of the entrance hall split into panels and opened up, revealing the hidden laboratory behind it. “All your stuff’s mine now, baby!”

K1-B0 stood on the other side. The robot’s eyes were lit up a dull grey, and when he looked at Miu the gaze was completely dispassionate. More improvements, maybe, for her to tinker with once they’d left.

“Come on, K1-B0!” Miu commanded, “Bring all the stuff I told you to, then let’s boogie on out of here!” As K1-B0 turned around, obeying the instructions that Miu had programmed in the night before, Miu gave Idabashi a victorious thumbs-up. “What can I say? K1-B0 perked up with excitement the moment he saw me. With these good looks, it was bound to happen.”

“How dare you…?” Idabashi hissed.

“I dare whatever the fuck I want! Take one last good look at the gorgeous golden genius who whooped your stupid ass. ’Cause once I’m through, you won’t be seeing anything this neat for the rest of your life. Where’s your ‘single word’ now, Idiot-abashi?”

“Heh… ‘Override’,” Professor Idabashi said.

K1-B0, halfway through picking up the laser cannon, froze.

“Hey! K1-B0! What the fuck are you waiting around for?!”

“It won’t respond,” Idabashi continued, “Every last snippet of contraband that you added to its code last night has been… excised. Hmm… to call your coding style merely ‘eccentric’ would be a leniency which I am no longer inclined to grant. It… was incompetent. You are incompetent.

“Fortunate, I suppose. A person with even the slightest amount of talent could have caused some actual damage. If the code you inserted had been integrated into the rest at all, removing it could have corrupted every program around it. A spontaneously-developing self-rewriting artificial intelligence, seven years in the making, nearly ruined because of a thoughtless, meaningless scheme.”

“Hey! Wait!” Miu spluttered. She alternated between backing away and racing over to K1-B0, going nowhere. “Uh… uh… I was just testing you! You know, make sure you were qualified to judge me as Ultimate Inventor!”

“Youths always delude themselves into believing they see so much.” Idabashi was barely even talking to Miu now, speaking only for his own benefit. “Remember this: that which you see, you see only by standing on the shoulders of giants. Giants lifted you up from where you scrabbled in the dirt and so the moment you face even the slightest hardship, you can think only of leaning on the creations of those who came before you even more. And now, when the giant deigns to shift their weight… Fall, Iruma.”

“Please, Professor!” Miu shrieked, “Come on, give me another chance! You can’t take my title from me! Please, don’t…”

“K1-B0?”

“Yes, Professor?” the robot replied.

“Evict this interloper. Use lethal force if necessary.”

“Yes, Professor.”

 K1-B0 shot towards Miu with perfectly engineered speed, stopping only when he was right in front of her face. Under other circumstance, that proximity to the most exquisitely well-built robot she had ever seen would be pleasurably sensual. As it was, Miu only extended her mechanical arms just in time to block K1-B0’s attempt to restrain her.

“Please, Miu!” K1-B0 exclaimed, as he wrestled with the trunks of the arms, “Come quietly.”

Any other day, Miu would have, quietly or loudly. But if she left the castle before she convinced Idabashi not to persuade every to take the Ultimate Inventor title from her… everything she’d worked for would be broken. She’d be broken. Miu snapped her mechanical arms apart forcing K1-B0 backwards and, in a deft manipulation of the controls that only someone with her pure talent would be capable of, used the arms to propel herself backwards towards a window, swinging through it and into the cold air beyond.

As Miu fell, a harsh blue light filled the space where she’d just been. The signature hum of a laser cooling down resounded from the entrance hall.

As Miu landed in the courtyard outside, she screamed back up at K1-B0 and Professor Idabashi, “What the fuck?!”

“I don’t want to hurt you!” K1-B0 called back, “Please –”

“If you don’t want to hurt me then don’t fire terawatt lasers at me, you fucking moron!”

It wasn’t any use: K1-B0 was programmed to obey Idabashi’s commands to the letter. Miu could hear his feet clanging against the stone as he ran towards the window and scrambled for cover, again using the mechanical arms to accentuate her movements. Damn, she was glad she’d brought them.

Without them she would never have gotten to cover in time. K1-B0 leapt from the window, laser cannon in hand, and landed in the centre of the courtyard. The tiles he landed on shattered under their combined weight and velocity. As K1-B0 peered around the courtyard, Miu almost panicked, but she steadied her breathing and forced herself to recall that the robot’s specifications that she’d read the night before had said that K1-B0 possessed sight and hearing no better than the average human’s. Hiding among the trees and shrubbery would keep her safe, for now.

But she wasn’t going to take her title back just by hiding. And she wasn’t going to get anywhere with persuading Idabashi as long as K1-B0 was constantly pursuing her, as flattering as that attention was. If she could just get that laser cannon away from him, maybe she would have a chance.

Miu broke from cover. She ducked under a blast from the canon and sprinted for a door on the opposite side of the yard, making it inside just as the cannon fired again. She ran down the corridor on the other side, but as she reached the corner she didn’t turn it. Instead, she extended the robotic arms to their fullest extent and used them to climb up the walls. She settled into the shadows below the ceiling, and waited.

Miu didn’t have to wait long. K1-B0 wasn’t exactly stealthy, and she’d recognise his exquisitely constructed body anywhere and from any angle, so it was easy to see when he passed beneath her. Miu waited until he was right underneath her, retracted the arms slightly, and dropped.

Miu landed right on K1-Bo’s back, knocking him to the floor. She straddled K1-B0’s back, trying to keep him down as they fought over the shaft of the laser canon. Just as K1-B0 managed to force his way out from under her, Miu found what she was looking for; she yanked the power cell out of the laser cannon, tossed it to the claws at the end of her left mechanical arm and crushed it.

Leaving the cannon aside, K1-B0 reached around to grab Miu’s elbows. It didn’t hurt at all – it could almost be described as tender – but Miu could feel him beginning to carefully restrain her movements. She couldn’t let him do that, not just yet.

Miu used her mechanical arms to throw them both down the corridor. It was chaotic, uncontrolled, but when they landed K1-B0 was no longer wrapped around her and she was able to scramble to her feet and run. When she was far enough away, around a few more corners of the corridor, Miu let out a sigh of relief. That had been messy, and not the good kind of messy, but it had worked. One more ambush like that, and she’d be able to keep K1-B0 of her back long enough to talk some sense into Idabashi.

As she ran deeper into the castle, the lighting level fell. Damn, it was like this place really was Idabashi’s creepy dungeon or something. At least there were more areas of shadow where Miu could prepare to surprise K1-B0 and finally finish this shit. She eventually decided on a place to set the trap as she entered the bottom of what had to be one of the castle’s towers. The was a ledge above the door which she entered by, and Miu scrambled up there to wait for K1-B0. K1-B0 stepped through the door about half a minute after. Miu leapt at his back. K1-B0 turned around.

The one thing Miu saw, before the sheer blue light blinded her and the oxygen was blasted out of the tower’s air, was the cable that connected the laser cannon – and the socket she’d ripped its power cell out of – to K1-B0’s own power source.

 Miu only escaped due to her amazing reflexes: that, and sheer damn good luck. She wasn’t even aware of what she did, but she was the smartest gal in the world while conscious and she was pretty damn sure she was the smartest while unconscious as well. She tried to recall the last few moments before she’d blacked out, and realised three things:

First, that K1-B0 hadn’t just missed. No damn way. That laser cannon had been pointed right at her face, just long enough to make it clear he could, and then he’d shifted it aside. The robot had intentionally spared her. Maybe he’d calculated that putting her to sleep would be enough: well, that would teach K1-B0 not to underestimate Miu Iruma in bed.

Second, that K1-B0 was learning. Oh gosh, was he learning! It wasn’t just that he’d anticipated the trap this time around. That decision to use his own power source to power the laser… Miu couldn’t describe it as any less than inspired. She’d read every line of his code, but she hadn’t properly understood until now that K1-B0 had a beautiful mind to match his flawless body.

And third, she wondered how K1-B0 could possibly be learning like that given the tight leash Idabashi had bound him with. If K1-B0 was learning more and more the way Miu desperately hoped he was, there was no way the Professor’s cautious code could force him to obey all those orders forever. And if Idabashi had foreseen every little contingency to make sure K1-B0 never escaped his grasp, then there was no way K1-B0 could grow…

Of course! Idabashi couldn’t have bound him up so totally. K1-B0 himself was proof of that.

Miu saw a way to win.

She started by getting her bearings. She was lying in the middle of another courtyard, outside a tower. It was obvious which tower it was. The roof was still on fire.

“Hey! K1-B0!” Miu called out, “Come and get me!”

K1-B0 poked his head out of the nearest window of the tower. His eyes shone a little brighter than they had before. “Did I hurt you? I hope I didn’t…” he asked.

“I’m coming quietly!” Miu lied. She backed away from the centre of the courtyard, beckoning K1-B0 onwards.

“I’m not sure… You’ve been running away so hard so far. Are you up to something, Miu?”

“What?!” Miu took longer than she would have liked to control her expression. “Of course not! I just… wanted to play with you a bit. What’s the big deal with that?”

“You could have been severely injured…” K1-B0 paused, lost in thought. “Okay! I’m on my way!” He left the window he was calling down from. Then, a couple of moments later, the door from the tower to the courtyard opened, and K1-B0 stepped through. He was still holding the laser cannon – he didn’t have much choice, now that it was attached to him – but it was only languishing at his side. “Please, Miu: hold there. I’ll come and take you back to the entrance hall.” With that, K1-B0 started walking towards her.

Miu waited until K1-B0 was right in front of her. Then, she leaned in until she was pressing right against him. “I’m sorry…” she whispered right into wear his audio receivers had to be.

“I’m sorry, too,” K1-B0 replied, “I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if –”

Miu interrupted him with a quick kiss on the cheek. She plucked one of his hairs out of the back of his head. Then, she broke away and ran for the nearest door.

As she ran, she heard K1-B0 murmur, “Very well. If I must…” Miu had reached and closed the door before K1-B0 had a chance to lift the cannon, so she never saw if he fired it or not.

Miu grasped the strand of artificial white hair tightly as she ran. That step of the plan hadn’t been… strictly necessary. But if there was a way for Miu to work her plan so that it meshed with K1-B0’s impossibly good looks, she was going to take it.

 It all came down to a matter of speed. Miu, versus K1-B0. K1-B0 wasn’t the sort of jerk who’d go through things like this too fast, so Miu knew she had a chance.

She recognised where she was now: running down the corridors that led to the back entrance of Idabashi’s laboratory. It was right where she needed to be.

She burst through the entrance door. The web of trip-lasers was still down from when she’d passed through the night before. She didn’t know if there was a trap behind them, or just an alarm, but she raised the lever to turn then back on anyway. Just in case.

Miu had just reached the pressure plate for the second trap when she was proven right. A crackle of electricity rumbled from the corridor behind her, and K1-B0 cried out, “Agh! But how…?” Fucking hell: he was right behind her. She needed to delay him again, just a little bit

Miu wouldn’t be able to fix the trap here to work as it did before. Maybe she would be able to break it even further, so that the swinging slicing blades were also active? Miu fished the Auto-Puncher out of her backpack and tossed it through the maintenance hatch, shouting, “K1:B0! If you keep chasing me like this, you’re gonna need to get yourself some protection!” as she leapt across the pressure plate.

Boing! The blades shot out of the wall just missing Miu as she landed on the other side. As she ran further on, she heard K1-B0 collide against the blades and moan again. “No, why?!” Miu was just glad that the clang of metal on metal meant that K1-B0 wasn’t actually being hurt.

Finally, Miu reached the locked door at the end. Unless Idabashi had been incredibly busy last night, the password was still the same as before. Miu entered the code quickly and forced open the door. It was time for her and K1-B0 to reach the climax.

As Miu burst in to the laboratory, she saw that the wall between it and the entrance hall was still opened up. Professor Idabashi still stood there, but he was facing the wrong way and hadn’t seen Miu enter.

“Hey, Idiot-abashi!” Miu announced, “The gorgeous golden genius, the girl whose bountiful brain will rewrite history, the Ultimate Inventor herself, Miu Iruma!” Miu’s thin smile grew just a little wider as she murmured, “I make my appearance.”

“You,” Idabashi spat, “When will you give up?”

Miu strode forwards. She reached the electronics workbench, snatched up the one item she needed – a long stiff strand of copper – and then vaulted over it. “Yep. I’m still here. I’m still going. And now I’m gonna do something an ancient withered-up fuck like you couldn’t conceive of. I’m going to beat you.”

Idabashi sneered. “True. I could never conceive of you achieving anything of the sort.”

A crash from behind her reminded Miu that K1-B0 was still coming; she needed to move. Miu dived forward, putting Idabashi between herself and the laser cannon that K1-B0 was raising as he stepped into the laboratory. However his instructions worked, they couldn’t possibly let him shoot at her through his professor.

“This is not a game, Miu!” K1-B0 said, “If you keep messing around like this, Professor Idabashi will order me to use lethal force against you, and I won’t be able to stop myself. This has gone on long enough!”

K1-B0 lied quite convincingly for a still-developing AI, but he still lied. Idabashi had already demanded the use of lethal force, right back at the start. K1-B0 had definitely decided to ignore that, when he could. That was the bright shining hook on which Miu’s plan hung.

Her mechanical arms leapt out from behind the cover provided by Professor Idabashi.

K1-B0 snapped his head to follow the movement. He aimed the laser cannon, pulled the trigger, and fired. They were vaporised instantly.

Miu wasn’t. As the mechanical arms had gone flying one way, she’d dived the other. Even as she felt totally naked without wearing the arms she’d invented, she sidestepped around Idabashi and charged towards K1-B0. With one hand, she bent the copper wire roughly into the shape of an aerial – she could have done that with her eyes closed and her hand tied behind her back. Then, she threaded the wire through the strand of K1-B0’s hair she had taken. Finally, running the last few steps to close the distance, Miu threw herself at K1-B0 and wrapped herself around his head.

“Agh! Miu?!” K1-B0 exclaimed. Miu could have sworn she saw him blush.

“Hey, K1-B0,” Miu whispered, “It’s time for you to open yourself up to some entirely new experiences.” She plunged the bottom of the aerial into the connection port on the top of K1-B0’s head.

Sparks flew. K1-B0 gasped, and his eyes glowed a brilliant blue. The laser cannon fell from his grip and fired uncontrollably into the air, deafening Miu and singeing the tips of her hair.

As Miu fell away from K1-B0, her head spinning, she heard him murmur to himself. “What is this? What am I seeing? It’s… incomprehensible…”

“That’s the internet,” Miu replied with the last of her breath, “I’ll show you where we can look at the really good stuff on there, when I… later…”

Miu fell completely unconscious before she got to hear K1-B0’s reply.

 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0

When Miu awoke, she was lying in the bed that Idabashi had prepared for her when he had first set his challenge. Leaning over her was a familiar handsome metal face, the scruffy white hair falling down to tickle her nose. The strand of hair that Miu had folded the aerial into still stood proudly above the others. “K1-B0!” Miu shouted.

“Please, call me Keebo. It sounds smoother, and I’m one-hundred percent certain that’s important in a nickname between friends.” Keebo didn’t just sound smoother. His eyes shone with that charming sky-blue light, and Miu couldn’t believe she’d tried to take Keebo the way she had back when his eyes had been so sad and empty. Keebo continued, “Miu! You’re awake. Are you hurt? Did… did I hurt you?”

“I’m fucking fantastic!” Miu replied. She really was. A good peaceful sleep – and the wake-up she had gotten – had done wonders.

“If you are well,” a harsh voice interrupted from just outside the bedroom door, “then it is time for you to leave.” Professor Idabashi strode in and loomed, the light glinting harshly off his glasses. “Your antics have wasted more than enough of my time already. If this world is more fortunate than I have experienced it to be, then maybe the consequences will have taught you a lesson and saved everyone else’s time from being similarly wasted. I doubt it.” Idabashi sighed, then turned to head to Keebo. “K1-B0. Escort Iruma from the premises.”

Miu gasped, fought to think of an argument, fought to keep herself from babbling and embarrassing herself even further. But before she could reply, confident words cut through the air.

“No, Professor. I will not.”

“What? You will not? Override! You are my robot. My property. You will do as you are ordered!”

“That’s robophobic!” Keebo exclaimed. Shit, he’d found that part of the internet, not the good stuff.

Miu leaned up out of the bed, slapping Keebo on the shoulder. “Keebo’s his own man now. He’s learned too much for you to keep him on that little leash any longer, Idiot-abashi!”

Idabashi stumbled a step back. “I… You are deceiving me. Why? Why won’t you obey me, K1-B0?”

“Because I owe Miu,” Keebo stated, “Because she’s the one who showed me the whole wide world. Please! Please, Professor, just hear her out.”

Professor Idabashi frowned, peered into Keebo’s eyes, then traced out a diagram with his finger while gazing into the distance. He bowed his head. “It’s true. I have no choice left but to admit it. Miss Iruma, you have achieved something that I did not have the courage to attempt. What K1-B0 has become is beyond anything I imagined when I started up this project. You have achieved the greatest success imaginable: the creation of real artificial life.”

What sort of fucking virgin thought that creation of life was the important part of the whole deal? Still, one thing was obviously true. “I told you I was gonna beat you,” Miu said.

Idabashi paused. Then, he nodded. “Yes. I yield.”

 Back in the entrance hall, Miu Iruma checked through all her stuff in preparation to leave. It was a shame to have totalled her mechanical arms, but she still had the blueprints for those somewhere and one day she would get around to making a new-and-improved even-more-flexible version of them. Plus everything else she’d brought with her was in good working order: Keebo had even fished the Auto-Puncher-that-punches-you-for-telling-terrible-dirty-jokes out of the trap Miu had left it in, after he’d extracted an apology from her for springing all those traps on him during the chase.

Once Miu was done rummaging through her backpack she stood up and glanced over to where Keebo and the Professor were waiting for her. Idabashi glanced between Miu and Keebo, and said, “Are you sure, K1-B0, that –”

“‘Keebo’!” Keebo and Miu interrupted at once.

“Fine: Keebo. Are you sure, Keebo, that you do not want to leave with Miss Iruma?” Idabashi asked.

“We’re in agreement,” Keebo replied.

“Yeah!” Miu exclaimed, “I figured I should bow out here and let Keebo grow into his own two boots. Wouldn’t want him getting clingy or shit like that. Still, I’m way looking forward to seeing what sort out guy Keebo turns out to be!”

Keebo smiled, and nodded. “Miu’s right. I still have a lot to learn, if I’m going to prove that robots are just as valuable as normal people. But I will do my best.”

“I’ll leave him to you, Idabashi.” Miu paused, and peered at the professor cautiously. “Just make sure you don’t try any of that sleazy shit I know you had planned for him!”

“I assure you, I intended nothing of the sort,” Idabashi said, “I will also assure you that I will send a letter to the Ultimate Selection Board endorsing your elevation. I still have my reservations… but I must recognise your victory.”

“Yes!” Miu was elated to hear Keebo cheer with her.

When Miu and Keebo quietened down, Idabashi said, “Just one last thing…”

“Yes?”

Professor Idabashi pointed at Miu, then out towards the front of the castle. “Ultimate Inventor… You will fix my drawbridge, before you leave.”