Auntie toasts the VRMMORPG

40. Octopussy, Library and Stehaufmaennchen

After Flora logged into the workshop, she dumped the books in a corner and set up the page-turner.

Taking a sip from the Potions Guzzler, she returned to the still running simulation grounds.

In the morning, she had forgotten to check on the Blade-Rollers. The poor robots were both in bad shape. One showed severe damage through overheating, the other had four ruptured appendages, and both of their sawblades were blunt.

"Mine is the broken one, Milady. I pushed the movement and rammed a few trees. Aitoshuri did several long term tests. I'll transmit her data to you."

A row of stats appeared on Flora's HUD. Running continuously, the sawblades worked up to two minutes on their highest setting before overheating and half an hour in their lowest setting. Not bad, not bad at all.

"Outstanding job."

Flora returned to her workbench to work on the octopus. Now she had a pretty good picture of the joints and the motors for them.

She decided to equip two of the tentacles with tools as tips. With a heavy heart, she sacrificed one of her two Doom-Moon multitools and a knife/bender/gripper hybrid for the other arm.

The octopus should not only help her with crafting but also with fighting. Laser eyes were an absolute classic. She browsed the doom moon laser-turret manuals and the marketplace for ideas and appropriate parts.

Now, she had included all the functions she wanted.

Next came the fun parts.

Rationality told Flora to armor the octopus, but thinking about Aitoshuri's needs and real-life octopuses, she had a better idea: Display fabrics!

These fabrics could change their colors to such a degree, that they were used as TV-Screens. The military used them for camouflage and the fashion industry for special effects.

Her drawn picture with notes finished, she started to build the robot.

Mainly, she used the tier-1 materials from Doom Moon. Unfortunately, she couldn't create a whole laser system with them, so she had to substitute with tier-0 materials, that was also the case for the casing with the display-fabric.

With more efficient motors, she solved the worst of her energy problems, but her plans for skin and the laser eyes had thrown her back. She splurged on a high-efficiency mana battery that Aitoshuri could hoard mana while not working and use it for high-load phases.

The octopussy quickly took shape: Eight limbs equally spaced around a roundish head. For the eyes, Flora found some cute heart-shaped laser crystals and immediately bought them.

Comparing her creation to a picture of an actual octopus, she decided to stay more on the cartoonish side of design and forwent the beak and the mouth opening at the bottom. The ability to spew poisonous ink would be awesome, but she had enough on her plate for the first version - maybe in the future.

An easy solution would be using toxic materials for the tentacles. Aitoshuri could hug her opponents to death!

Flora experimented with fusing the toxic waste and the hull material of the Doom Moon and came up with suitable material. It wasn't as strong as the pure material, but she liked the toxic effect.

Suddenly she got another idea. What if she could integrate a kind of inventory space, so Aitoshuri could pick up and store things directly? Flora had disliked stooping down in the sewers and collecting dead creatures like the kingators.

After a quick research, she found a solution. Unfortunately, robots couldn't have a separate inventory. You either could include ordinary bags, or you could give them an access slot to your own inventory. When Flora thought about it for a bit, she realized that the latter had advantages as well. Flora included the inventory-access under the head.