#don't worry having someone to snipe at is enrichment for both of them

[elexuscal]

Ficlet prompt idea! Interactions between ART and Pin-Lee and/or Mensah in the time after NE but before SC.

More thoughts if you wanted more inspiration than a single line. Does Pin-Lee teach ART some new curses ('cause ART curses alot more in this book, and I wanna blame Pin-Lee like how Rhatti mentions the overlap between MB and Pin-Lee's curse vocab)? How great would their banter be, lawyer vs know-it-all-AI?!

Is ART still kinda shy/excited by meeting Mensah?

Thank you~ I really love your work!!!

Awwww thank you very much!

Oh man i was so spoiled for choice here but i really really struggled to think of an interesting take on this

Big thank you to @specialagentartemis who i paraphrased a significant chunk of this from as well as general Vibes

Asshole vs Asshole

So here's the thing. Here's the fucking thing, okay?

Twenty-three days. Twenty-three fucking days of waiting, of worrying, of preparing. Of nearly chewing her own arm off. Of thinking she was walk into a fucking blood bath.

And the Preservation Alliance rescue team finally gets to the scene of the crime, and no one is dead. Which is fucking good, obviously. Okay. She gets it. No one's dead, no one's lost any limbs, and praise the dark gods of yesteryear, no one has even been kidnapped. This is literally better than the best-case scenarios they concocted.

But surely, surely, Pin-Lee can't be the only one who thinks it is fucking weird to be having tea with the person who did the kidnapping in the fist place?

"Thank you, Perihelion," Ayda says, as a shiny blue drone finishes pouring tea into a cup. Just a whiff and a glance is all Pin-Lee needs to know it was brewed exactly the way Dr. Mensah prefers it.

The drone turns to hover to her. It pours a drink into her own mug. Pin-Lee glares at it.

Ayda doesn't look at her, doesn't so much as tilt her head. But they've worked together for a long, long time now, and Pin-Lee nonetheless reads the subtler body language. She grinds out, "Thank you."

She sips the drink. It is coffee and it is extremely bitter and it's warm-but-not-quite-hot and Pin-Lee has a sneaking suspicion it is at least a few hours old.

[You're welcome~] Perihelion's trills as the drone zooms away.

Peri. Fucking. Helion.

Turns out, it's the one that orchestrated this whole thing. The super-secret advanced spaceship that SecUnit apparently befriended while it was off on its journey of self-discovery or whatever decided that it knew exactly who could handle its little pest control problem, and hadn't much cared which innocent civilians got stuck in the cross-fire.

"There were extenuating circumstances," SecUnit had explained, face set like it was ready for a fight.

"It's all fine, water under the bridge," Ratthi had said. "No harm done really."

"Except for the new layers of fresh trauma," Overse had groused.

"But we're handling that, too," Arada had said, with a too-bright smile. "And it's a good thing we're here to help the colonists."

"Yeah yeah and you should see ART's hydroponics bay, it's super cool," said Amena, tugging on her arm.

So suffice to say she was kind of getting some Mixed Signals about this whole thing.

But okay! Corporates descending to steal the livelihoods of hundreds of innocents! Fine! There's a lot at stake! And this is what Pin-Lee is good at, and (sort of) what she was dragged along to handle, so she is willing to put this all aside for the greater good.

Pin-Lee sips at her under-handed-insult coffee and reads over the legal feed documents of this whole cluster-fuck of a case. "Okay," she says at last. "Okay, this is salvageable. But I'm going to need to some more info before I can fully revise this.."

"Of course," says the captain of The Perihelion, a note of genuine relief in his otherwise professional voice. "What do you need?"

"1: A full list of all the symptoms associated with the contamination, and its speed of spread. That'll influence what level of breach this is classified under. 2: Estimates for all of the colonists deaths that were directly caused due to their being stranded. 3: Monetary evaluation of all the colonists' remaining assets..."

"Of course," the captain agrees

Which is fine. Except fifteen minutes later some teenager not-much-older-than-Amena shows up and hands Pin-Lee a stack of paper.

"What's this?" Pin-Lee says, her eyes immediately skidding off of the hand-written tables and charts.

"That's our evaluation of the colonists' assets, like you asked for," the teenager (Turi?) says.

Pin-Lee looks at Turi, to the papers, and back at Turi again. "Can I get this in the feed?"

"Well.... You can..." Turi says, a bit of red in their cheeks. "But..."

"But no guarantee the numbers won't be doctored there," calls Karime from the other side of the lounge.

Teeth grinding in the back of her mouth, Pin-Lee manages, "What?"

[My numbers are perfectly accurate,] Perihelion protests. [It is hardly my fault if none of you are capable of following the calculations.]

Martyn snorts. "It would help if you bothered explaining all your sources."

[Find them yourself.]

Pin-Lee can barely believe what she's hearing. "Are you telling me... that your AI keeps fucking with the numbers so bad that you need to get a teenager to do the accounts by hand."

"I'm not a teenager, I'm twenty-three." Pin-Lee huffs; as if that's a meaningful difference. "And I'm a very, very good accountant." Turi pauses, then admits, "But that's the long and short of it, yes."

Pin-Lee can't help it. She drops her head to the table and hides it under her arms.

[Do you have a problem with this state of affairs?] the very aptly re-named Asshole Research Transport oozes in her private feed.

[You really don't need me to answer that.]

[You're right. I don't.]

She uncurls her finger and makes a rude gesture. Presumably one of its thousands of cameras will see it.

That summons SecUnit into the conversation. [Are you two fucking with each other again?]

[No,] they say in unison.

[Cut it out,] SecUnit says, and then drops away. Truly a master of conflict resolution, that one.

'I'll cut it out when you learn to make nicer friends', she almost sends, but catches the obvious come-back and stops herself. Instead she takes sip of her shitty coffee and gets to work trying to interpret hand-written accounts.