Chapter 54: Cherries Blissed!
As a plate of cookies and two cups of tea were delivered upon their table, the automaton girl cracked her limbs, bent stretched and....cracked, slowness that would have the (past) grandpa Demond cacked before her plastic pumps settled on the seats before them.
"M-my god...somehow you have worse symptoms of <flooded> than my friend." Demond sighed, picking up a piece of cookie, observing curiously the color of pink surrounding the cookie, before frowning. "How many years have it been? What numbers of records and datas have you tried to clean?"
"REPORT: This machine’s well oiled and fine! It has been 45 years since our home became a swimming ground for mermaids and water spirits! 20 years since the reported <main server> dies at the hand of Adalalon the Tyrant!" The utter high-pitchness and the unchanging emotions only belied the rotted cogs that functions barely to register sadness, a broken child abandodned by her home and her owner. "And it only has benn....30 YEARS! 30 years since the symptoms of <flooded> turned me into a half-child! Number of records and datas....erasure has started from the 21st record of the first human who visited our Dwarvern Home, all the way to the 89, 579th record of the <main server>’s destruction!"
"...so you don’t remember Zero, huh?"
The frown didn’t deepen to a scowl, but loosened like a string cut for a silent acceptance. <Flooded>, or flooding by junk data as her old friend would put it. When a dwarven automaton left their home for too long without access to the <Motherbrain> to assist in evaluating and clearing junk datas in her mind, paired with the ’forced eviction’ that came when their home is literally, well, ’flooded’, most of the automatons now wandered around the Kingdom of Alakarans, some nameless with too much junk datas become crazed wildlings and were treated as beasts to slay on an adventurer’s quest board, others remain in hiding like this elf in the shop, and some....like Zero did, became an adventurer so that they would put the crazed automatons to rest, only forming a party when enough trusts can be spared, ad Demond happened to be one of the honoured ones chosen by Zero.
"Have you given yourself a name, brat?"
"This subject requests you cease to call me brat!" The tone unchanged, yet the combination of words once again shifted from an excited child to a loyal minister, an illustration of the utter carnage that splitted even the ability of speech <flooding> marred by batches of meaningless processing and inefficient routing.
"Yes yes...uh, don’t tell me you named yourself as a number...?"
"Hell yeah! This woman’s name is 556-09-30. One of the many mass automatons created for basic functions such as cooking and making teas or coffees!"