System Overclocked 3 -Ch 6-

Wrench turned the assembly housing over and looked to the corners.

There were no fasteners that he could see immediately.

Picking up a soft-tipped finger-sized pry bar he slotted it between the two panels and then wriggled it in.

Then lifted.

With a pop the panel came free and he could finally see the gear-box inside.

Lifting the panel away from the housing he put the head sized device down on his work desk and then inspected the contents.

From what he could see of the gears, they didn’t look as if they were broken. None of the teeth looked cracked, rusted, or worn down.

“Misaligned?” he murmured to himself as he gently reached in and gently pressed against a shaft that was the primary rotation point.

It flexed weirdly.

“Cracked shaft,” said Wrench after he poked it again. It wasn’t completely broken but it was most certainly not whole. “Sometimes it’ll work, sometimes it won’t. Especially if the orientation changes.”

There was a quiet pop of the door opening behind him, followed by several footsteps, and then the door closing.

Wrench had dialed up his hearing and his sense of smell before settling in to tinker with things. He could tell without looking that Stripe had joined him.

She’d been wrong about her time-frame and it’d taken her an seventeen minutes past the thirty.

Not that he could blame her.

He imagined her entire viewpoint needed to be altered.

Snorting, he suddenly felt like he was working on his own version of Stripe.

A normally operating machine running an intricate set of gears that sometimes didn’t work correctly due to a single broken piece. One that wouldn’t be visible unless you dug out it’s guts and really worked at it.

Only to realize it was just like Stripe said.

For her, he couldn’t fix her.

No Mender could fix her.

Nor did he want to.

Turning around he spun on his stool and looked to Stripe at the door.

She was dressed in a tank-top and a pair of shorts. Neither of which did anything to cover her or hide her shape away.

The full enormity of Stripe’s beautiful body was nearly on display.

“I scrubbed all my recorded footage of you. Saw that you went to see… see Squeak. Then I went to my den,” she said as her left hand came up and locked the door. “I could smell you there. I couldn’t deny anymore that you really did know. Know everything.”

“I did say that, Stripe,” Wrench said with a grin, holding his hands out in front of himself in a display of ‘what can I say’. He didn’t know what to add from here. “I’m well aware of everything and I’ve already confirmed it all. Then I came over to you and told you my feelings and thoughts.”

“You don’t want to fix me,” Stripe said, her hand still on the door handle. As if he might rush her, throw her to the side, and unlock the door.

“No. As long as who you’ve been so far is exactly who you are, then I’m good with it,” asserted Wrench. “I’m honestly just assuming that who you have been so far is your normal personality and you’ve just… controlled… the other part that I read about in the Den.

“I mean, we all have wild thoughts. There’s been more than a few times that I’ve had murderous thinking and then acted on it.

“Our lives aren’t exactly pretty or safe. It isn’t easy being Hume.”

“I’ve been who I am, yes,” Stripe confirmed. “I haven’t been acting differently other than trying to be the best version of me for you.

“As… as an example, if this was the old me, and you were after me and I wasn’t interested, I would have led you off somewhere quiet, killed you, and dumped the body. If I couldn’t do that, I’d poison a meal you were eating.”

That doesn’t sound that crazy to me, but I’m not exactly sane either.

Other than her extreme obsession with me, she doesn’t seem that bad.

I think her focus is really the only danger here and that any threat to her focus, me, is where the concern is. That if my perception of her could change, she would act against it.

Like Squeak.

“Seems pretty normal to me,” Wrench offered up with a shrug of his shoulders. He was having a difficult time not staring at Stripe at the moment.

She hid herself away in clothes more often than not so for her to strut in wearing what she was made him deeply conscious of her.

“You… just wanted to confirm you knew it all so I didn’t… act… against Squeak or someone else,” Stripe murmured, tilting her head fractionally to one side. “You want everything to be the same otherwise.”

“Yes,” Wrench agreed, grinning at her. It seemed like she was still circling the same exact points from earlier. Despite the time she asked for, it seemed it was more to confirm he did indeed know everything, rather than thinking it over.

“Okay. I… okay. It’ll help me to move forward like this,” murmured Stripe, finally releasing the door knob. Surprisingly, she went over into one of the beds and laid down in it. She did it in such a way that it exposed a shoulder and a great deal of her expansive cleavage. “The only thing is… I’ve been pushing on the brakes because I get-get really worked up at the idea of being with you.

“Intimately.

“I want to. Desperately.

“I genuinely love you, Wrench. Truly so. In a way that makes my mind crackle and pop like a fire. Raging back and forth.

“But I’m terrified of actually letting it happen as I might not be able to hold myself back. I might just-just-just… just hurl myself into absolute sexual abandon with you.

“It would’ve been hard to hide things after that. I’ve been trying to-to condition myself with you by taking things so.”

Wrench nodded his head at that. He could certainly understand how that could be a problem. Given how badly Tickaht could forcibly crank his systems without him wanting it, he could even empathize.

“Are you good, Stripe? Are we good as… whatever we were together? No changes?” Wrench asked, wanting to make sure he could feel secure in this. “We can just keep going?”

“Yes, please,” Stripe said in a soft voice, laying her head down on the pillow. “We’re a couple, by the way. No different than yourself and Seventh, Tickaht, or Nunnkish. I’m not very happy about it at all but… I’m the one who allowed it and invited them in. I can’t push them out now that I’ve done that.”

Wincing, Wrench felt like he needed to bring up Squeak.

“Yes, I know. Squeak, too. And this new Grae who already ran me down to talk to me,” grumbled Stripe, her mouth turning into a pout. “I refuse to let anyone else in though. I just barely got rid of all those beautiful School Hume and the like.

“Now… if we’re done with that, how about you come over here, undress me, and… fix me. Because I’ll be honest, I never really got acclimated. I think the only thing that’ll help is actually experiencing it.”

Not waiting for his response, Stripe hooked her thumbs into her shorts and then shimmied them down across her wide hips. When she reached her feet she slipped them over one, then lifted them with the other. She daintily let them slide from her toes to hit the ground in front of Wrench.

Even as he stood up and reached for his belt buckle, Stripe was casually pulling her tanktop down to her naval. Letting it rest around her mid section almost like an odd belt.

For the first time, Wrench could truly see Stripe nude.

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