"Why am I even here?" Chelsea grumbled to herself as she stared up at the ceiling of the security office.
Officially, she was the Head of Security for Outpost Three, so she was right where she was supposed to be.
Unofficially, there was a new sheriff in town, and he was proving himself very effective.
Chelsea was good at her job and everyone knew it. Over the years she had stopped plenty of fights, de-escalated thousands of potentially dangerous situations and subdued dozens of crazed and violent Workers.
But where she had to work her shiny metal ass off to achieve those results, N's mere presence made people behave themselves. Even if Chelsea herself was far more likely to hurt them if they tried her patience, Schrödinger's Night Demon was a hard act to follow. He seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at any given time, and to call it unnerving would be a huge understatement.
So on one hand Chelsea was grateful for some competent assistance, but on the other it made her nights incredibly boring. Y'know, aside from seeing N scare the bolts off someone on camera every now and then. And the occasions where N stuck around the office just to shoot the breeze.
Much like pretty much everyone who actually took the time to interact with him, Chelsea quite enjoyed talking to N. She also quite enjoyed looking at him. And generally being around him...
"Stupid, sexy Murder Drone..." the fembot muttered. She finally runs into a great, hot, single guy who would never be intimidated by her Security Drone programming, and of course he's a genocide robot. Because that was her brand of luck.
Not wanting to dwell on her depressing love life and having nothing else to do, she inevitably fell back on what every single bored person has done since the dawn of the swivel chair.
One rotation, empty room...
Two rotations, empty room...
Three rotations, yellow lights...
By the time Chelsea realized what she'd just seen, her back was to the newcomer and she had to quickly spin the chair back around.
"Slow night?" N asked with an amused smile.
"...I'm gonna start locking that door," Chelsea said once her core stabilized.
"...Okay?" N shrugged, the meaning of that statement going right over his head.
*****
Chad grinned as he lined up his shot. Fresh out of football practice, he was still warmed up and locked in, so even a moving target was no challenge. He just had to wait for the perfect moment...
'There!' the jock-bot thought as his target turned their head to talk to some other nerd.
The purple weirdo may have been off-limits, but none of the other losers could have you removed from existence with a single word to their pet vampire, so they were still free game.
He cocked his arm back and launched his projectile, a hefty hardcover copy of some nerd novel called "Omega Bot", with pinpoint accuracy. The book flew through the air like an oversized ninja star...for all of two meters before it was caught by a huge hand and opened with a dexterous flair that Chad briefly found himself jealous of.
Y'know, before he realized exactly who he'd just been caught by.
"Ooh, this looks like an interesting one! If you don't want it, mind if I borrow it?" N asked with a plastic smile.
"S-Sorry, my hand, uh, slipped," Chad tried to smile back, but his quivering lips made it look more like he was about to cry.
His eyes darted around the hall, silently pleading for some kind of interference. But as he looked at the faces of his fellow students and whatever parents still remained and deigned to show up, he had an epiphany.
