moral of the story | a ninjago highschool fanfiction

[24] we would all die for ryu, let's be honest

pixal

She called in for a 'sick' day on Friday. Pixal was not sick. The reason, laughably, was because she was a robot.

Curled up in her favourite spot in her room - the hanging chair where Zane had first told her about Evan - Pixal stared at the bowl of soup warming her hands. If she was a robot, where did her food go? How did she sleep? How was her power source running if no Elemental Master had given her it? Ultimately, how? She wanted these answers so badly, but she was equally mad at her dad.

The good thing about living in a ginormous, over hundred floored tower, was that there were many lifts and floors to avoid her father in. Despite her earlier comforting words to her boyfriend, Pixal was shattered inside. Everything she had known, all her 'childhood' memories, all of it had been a lie. She was living a lie. Her fingers brushed against the knitted fabric of her cream sweater, over the most logical location of her power systems. Even though she hated her father right now, her curiosity was killing her.

Pixal was the cat, robotic or not, and she had to find out. She set the bowl of tomato soup aside, now lukewarm, and hopped out of the chair drawing the cuffs of her sweater up to her wrists as she padded to the private lift in her room. Time to confront her father. Time to get some answers she deserved. Time to find the truth behind those white lies.

On Friday mornings, Cyrus Borg took inventory of his new products going out into Borg Stores the following day for restocks. It was closer to lunch now, and if Pixal judged correctly, he would be holed up tweaking his drawing board of new ideas on his 80th floor. The 80th floor was where most of his harebrained plans were born, slowly adjusted to make more sense and realistic. Pixal's lift stopped in the lobby of floor 80. She picked her way through a sea of scribbled notes and blueprints, honed on the single sound of pen scratching against paper furiously.

She found him hunched over his desk, legs confined to a wheelchair that had been elevated with another invention of his so he could write comfortably. She stood silent, unsure of what to say as she waited for Borg to notice her presence. When he did, he let out a startled yelp and dropped his pencil.

"P—Pixal! What are you doing here? I thought you were...mad at me?"

"I think I was. But now I just want answers." she replied shortly, pulling a squat stool out for her to sit on. He blinked twice.

"Oh, of course! Anything you want to know!"

"How did you make me?"

His eyes widened and he tapped twice on the arm of his wheelchair. It lowered him down and he swivelled around to guide himself over to a locked cabinet. It took a scanning of his face, eye, fingerprint and a voice authentication for it to unlock. Gingerly, he retrieved a folder stuffed full of the thin, almost translucent paper he used to design inventions on and rolled back over to the desk. He then shuffled through the papers and selected two labelled Primary Interactive eX-ternal Assistant Life-form in classic inventor scrawl.

"Here," he handed Pixal the first sheet. "Your blueprints and diagram, all labelled."

She took the paper from him delicately and scanned the contents. A drawing of her, a little messy, but it was Pixal mapped out on graph paper. Arrows stuck out of her drawn body, messy scribbles and notes underneath. She'd assumed correctly that her control panel was located in her torso, though there was a side panel located in her lower arm with several switches.

"How did you find my core?"

"Hiroshi's Labyrinth." he responded automatically. She gasped in surprise at the name of a legendary location. Hiroshi's Labyrinth was a thick tangle of jungle, named after the explorer who had cut through it and supposedly found the heart of the jungle.