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"Do we have to do this?" Chai grumbled. His shoulders were practically drawn up to his ears, hands buried in his pockets, and an admittedly adorable scowl on his face. Still, it wasn't cute enough to earn any sympathy from Peppermint.
"You have to be familiar with the layout of campus in case any Project Armstrong members have questions you need to answer," she said. "And I know that if I just give you a map you're not going to remember any of it."
"But like, a tour? I've already been all over campus, I know where things are."
Peppermint checked her map. They were close to their first stop. "No, you know where some things are, and routes between them that only you can take. Not everyone likes to use mag rails."
"Well, maybe they should," he mumbled.
"Chin up, dude. It's just some walking."
"Today's a fuzzy day, though."
Peppermint didn't understand what that meant. She'd learnt that he just had little Chai-isms that it was better not to question. He had a much more vague and interpretive way of viewing the world than the rest of them. It made sense. Peppermint and Macaron were engineers and Korsica prided herself on her grounded and practical evaluations skills. Chai was… Chai.
"Look, I'll try to make it as painless as possible for you," Peppermint said. "It's already weird that you're not getting a tour from someone lower on the totem pole."
Chai considered this for a moment. "Thanks for volunteering for me."
"Don't mention it. Now, for a real look around production…"
Peppermint loved Chai like a brother, but dear God was he dragging his feet. Peppermint gave up walking next to him around when they went by processor production and just let him lag a few steps behind. He had longer legs, this should be easy for him. Whatever. Peppermint had told herself this morning that she would be glad if he showed up on time, and he had. Bare minimum achieved.
"Hey, Pep, can we take a break?" Chai spoke up as they walked the halls of the QA Center.
"Do you mind if we just finish going through production?" She asked, checking her map. "We've only been at it for forty five minutes and we've got a lot of stuff to get through today."
"I… don't think I can wait?"
The tone of his voice shot a spike of concern through her chest. She turned around. Now that she was actually looking at him she could see that he was rather green around the gills.
"What's going on?" She sounded more demanding than she meant to be.
"I need to lay down."
Chai had barely finished the sentence before he started tipping forward. Peppermint lunged towards him but came short by about half a foot. Thankfully, he caught himself on his hands before fully collapsing on the floor. He was shaking, breath coming in great, shuddering gasps.
She dropped to her knees next to him. "Chai?! Are you okay?!"
"I'm-I'm fine," he wheezed. "I jus-just need a few minutes."
Peppermint looked around the hallway. One of the benches was pushed up to the side. Man, she was glad Kale kept those around even when most of the employees were robots.
"Can you stand up long enough to get to the bench?" She asked. "I'll help you."
"I'm fine," he repeated.
"If you can't do it that's fine, but I don't want you laying in the middle of the hallway."
"...okay."
Chai put one hand on her shoulder and the other on her arm. She rose up slowly with him, bit by bit, then got him to the bench as quickly as she could without making things worse. She got down on one knee next to the bench to stay around eye level.
"Hooo, head rush," he said with a slight laugh as he laid back down. Peppermint stripped off her vest, balled it up into a makeshift pillow, and stuffed it under Chai’s head.
“I’m sorry I don’t have something more comfortable,” Peppermint said.
“You’re cool,” Chai’s breathing caught around the edges of his syllables, though it was starting to even out.
“What happened?” Peppermint hated that her voice sounded cold. She just wanted to fix the problem so Chai would be okay again.
He exhaled slowly with visible effort. “My heart.”
“Do you mind if I look at your core?”
“Be my guest.”
With some exertion the two of them took Chai’s jacket off, which Peppermint added to the vest pillow. Now that it was out of the way Peppermint lifted off the hem of his shirt until the core was revealed. There didn’t seem to be any apparent damage to it. She gently pressed her fingertips against the glass, feeling the steady beat of the player inside. Peppermint frowned. She reached into the pouch on her hip and retrieved her implant monitor. After plugging it into the port she waited for it to finish calibrating.
Her eyes widened. “Chai, this says that your heart rate is at one fifty!”
“That sounds about right.”
“Well it isn’t good. We’ve only been doing some light walking, that’s about thirty beats above a normal range for that kind of activity.”
“I’ll be fine after fifteen minutes,” Chai said dismissively. “Probably.”
“Probably?”
“Usually when this happens it’s fine after fifteen or thirty minutes. Sometimes the after stuff sticks around for another day or two, but it usually doesn’t.”
“When this happens…? How regular are these episodes?”
He hummed in consideration. “They used to happen more, before I got my core. But now, like, a few times a month? It kind of depends. Sometimes it doesn’t happen for more than a month and sometimes it’s twice in one week.”
Peppermint’s mind was racing. Okay. That meant Chai was probably getting a heart implant to begin with for Project Armstrong. Logically, it had to be that way, the machinery wouldn’t have just made a random implant. It was making a core and then reformatted around the music player. In which case that would have overridden some of the original firmware. It was interacting with his heart but not in the way it was supposed to.
Defect. That’s what the former Vandelay execs had always called him. It wasn’t just because he had features they hadn’t planned for with the musical robot powers, his heart implant was actually defective.
“Uh, Peppermint?” Chai said “You’re looking kind of intense.”
She blinked herself out of her head. “Sorry. I was thinking about some things.” She sighed, running a hand through her hair. “Listen, we don’t need to finish the tour today. We’ll get you home and start it back up whenever you’re feeling better.”
He made a face. “Sorry I ruined it.”
“You?” Peppermint snorted, smiling wistfully. “You couldn’t stop complaining about it at the beginning.”
“Yea, but I wanted to get out of it by convincing you I didn’t need it, not this.”
“It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
She sat next to him until he told her that he felt well enough to start heading home. Peppermint stuck by his side this time all the way until they reached the hideout again. Once there, Chai dropped onto the couch. 808 scurried out from whatever corner of the room she was hiding in and hopped up to lie on his chest. Peppermint bit her lip. He didn’t seem altogether too worried about it, so she figured she shouldn’t fuss over it. Like he always reminded them, he was an adult.
Peppermint was altogether pretty happy with her hybrid schedule. She could work on software and schematics from the comfort of the hideout while still getting the satisfaction of hands-on engineering and face-to-face interaction in the building.
But it did sometimes lead to moments like this morning where she hadn’t realized she’d forgotten the hard drive containing the files she was working on at home until she’d already gotten to work. Peppermint ran down the street as fast as she could. She missed the days where she could teleport onto campus.
She threw open the door. Just a straight shot to her desk and back, then she could take the L.I.F.T. around the corner and-
Peppermint’s foot caught on something and inertia sent her hurtling forward. She gasped, only barely managing to break her fall before her face smashed into the floor.
“What…?” She rolled over to find out what tripped her to see Chai laying on the floor. “Chai!? What the hell are you doing?”
When he didn’t immediately respond with some kind of quip, Peppermint got a bit worried. She watched him more closely. He was shaking and rather pale, curled around 808.
“Chai?” she said softly. “Is your heart acting up?”
“Mhm,” he nodded. “‘m okay.”
“You’ve got to come up with another solution besides laying down on the floor.”
“It just kind of happens.” Chai buried his face into 808’s fur. “Don’t plan for it.”
It really bothered Peppermint to see him at such low energy. Chai always seemed to feel everything to its fullest, a ball of anger, joy and energy. He’d assured her the other day that his condition wasn’t fatal, but it didn’t mean that it didn’t concern her. He always had a cavalier attitude about dealing with problems, she just thought that maybe he’d take his own health a little more seriously.
“Do you need anything?” She asked.
“No. Just rest.”
She got back up and crossed over to her desk. “Alright. Whenever you feel up to it please at least get yourself to the couch. 808 can help you, I upgraded her thrusters the other day. Should be enough to support at least half your weight, if not all of it.”
“Sure.”
808 looked up at Peppermint, raising a paw to her head in an imitation of a salute. Hm. That was a bit off putting. Maybe Peppermint needed to put some limits on the anthropomorphic expressions.
Before she went back out Peppermint turned to look over her shoulder. 808 was nudging Chai’s head. He seemed to be shaking less now. She trusted 808 to monitor him. If anything really went wrong she could ping Peppermint.
Huh. That could have some potential. Peppermint had enough time to stop by R&D during lunch and talk to Macaron.
“Chai. Wake up.”
He groaned, rolling over on the couch. “Just a few more minutes.”
“It’s three in the afternoon. Get up.”
“Fine, fine.” Chai sat up, stretching his arms and legs. “You interrupted a quality nap, you know.”
Peppermint raised an eyebrow. “Well, I think you’ll be pretty happy once you see the reason that I did.”
That perked him up a bit. “Ooo, didja get me a gift? Is it food? Is it something for my guitar?” He gasped. “Is it a gift basket?”
“Uh, no. None of those things. What is it with you and gift baskets anyways?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. I guess it just bothered me that I was promised something for doing work and I didn’t get it."
“That makes sense, I guess.”
Chai jumped up to his feet. “Alright then, what’s this super special Peppermint gift?”
“Don’t hype it up too much,” She couldn’t help but smile at his enthusiasm. It was grating at first, but it had really grown on her.
“Come on, Pep, just show me!”
“Okay, okay. 808, over here, girl.”
808’s head perked up from where she lay on the back of the couch. She jumped onto Chai’s shoulder and nuzzled against his cheek.
“Enter test mode, project forty two,” Peppermint said. 808’s eyes flashed red to indicate that testing mode was active. “Run alert program.”
808 leapt down to the floor in between them, waving her tail back and forth to show a holo image of a symbolic heart and an exclamation point. She meowed up at them, rather pleased with herself.
Chai blinked. “Is this…?”
“It’s an alert system for your cardiac events. Since she’s already been synced with your core all I had to do was write up a program for interpreting the data coming from it and when it gets into unsafe parameters. Though those’ll probably need some tweaking because your body works differently than most, so I’ll work on that when it comes to it.” She put a hand on her hip, watching 808 for any bugs. She’d already tested it several times, but it never hurt to check.
“That’s…”
“Oh, also, just in case something glitches with your sync Macaron helped me develop sensory components so she can detect it the old fashioned ways.”
Peppermint looked back at Chai. He was disturbingly neutral, just staring down at 808 as she waved her trail with a self-satisfied expression. That didn’t bode well. Chai wasn’t exactly one to not express his feelings the moment he had them.
“Exit test mode.” 808’s eyes returned to normal and her tail stilled. Peppermint bit her lip. “You… don’t like it.”
Chai’s head snapped up, eyes wide. “What? No! This is…” He raked a hand back through his hair. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m sorry, I just assumed that it would maybe be useful for you.”
“Peppermint, stop.” Chai took a deep breath. “This is, like, one of the most thoughtful things anyone has ever done for me. What am I supposed to say? This is insane.”
She scratched the back of her neck. “It’s really not that big of a deal. I just wanted to help you.”
“Well, this is a really cool gift.” He picked 808 up and lifted her into the air. “And who’s the best girl in the whole world? It’s you! You can do so much!”
808 was purring like a jet engine, which was a bit higher spec than her setup. Peppermint smiled at them. She had a similar memory of dancing around the house when she got home with her new leg.
“She’s just set up to give you an alert so you have enough time to lay down before anything happens,” Peppermint said. “But if you ever need help from me or the others she can ping us if you tell her to.”
Chai stopped swinging 808 around. She took the opportunity to clamber back onto his shoulder. “I wouldn’t want to bother you guys.”
“You led a corporate coup d’etat on my behalf, I owe you about a million favors. And beyond that… I want to. You’re like family to me.”
A beat. Chai sniffled. “You didn’t tell me you were getting me two presents.”
“You better not be fake crying for the joke.”
“Only about twenty percent of it is for the joke.” Peppermint tensed up as he suddenly threw his arms around her. “Thank you.”
His voice was so sincere it made her chest ache. She noticed that he had deliberately positioned himself so that his left arm blocked her from as much contact from his robotic one as possible. Just a little detail of consideration that she only noticed because of how lackadaisy he usually was. She returned the embrace, patting his back.
“It was my pleasure.”