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thenewbuzwuzzFandom: BtVS
Author: thenewbuzwuzz
Title: The Scrap Heap of Life
Pairing: Willow/Katrina Silber
Rating: G, I think
Words: 1600
Notes:
This is a Which Witch Ficathon story for the prompt: While packing for the move to her dorm room, Willow finds some robot parts that she salvaged from Ted and never got around to examining more closely.
Warnings for Hollywood hacking, Buffyverse robotics, and a general disregard for realism. Also, for my attempt at writing romance once I realized I'd signed up with a ship and now I had to.
Two sentences of Maggie Walsh’s lecture are directly from Wikipedia. The idea that Willow’s computer skills are enhanced by magic, I saw in one of Sigyn’s stories (though the explanation there was that Willow's family has been living on the Hellmouth for a long time). Lightly inspired by @beer_good_foamy's Ceteris Paribus (All Else Being Equal). AND there's a thing I did with the POV that's inspired by an unpublished story by @thewiggins; luckily, Wiggins says they're fine with that.
Due to spending a whopping month on “research”, I didn’t have time to have this beta-read or, really, to revise it much. I plan to link the final version here when it exists; meanwhile, here’s the current version, which is… man, it sure is at least 1.5 K words featuring Willow. Feel free to holler if you fall into a plot hole!
The Scrap Heap of Life
The day after the high school exploded, Willow was sorting through her room to start a checklist that she could use later to pack for college.
That’s when she found the eyeballs. They had glass lenses and cable sockets, and they were in a shoebox with other robot parts and assorted trinkets: a braid of Willow’s hair that the hairdresser had given her, a glass cat pendant she’d taken from Miss Calendar’s desk...
Back when she’d been a nerd.
She listed some of the robot parts on eBay. If there was interest, she could use the money for spell supplies.
***
Enter Katrina, the curious eBay bidder who would not back down. “How good are these gas transducers exactly? What do you mean, precision tactile sensing?”
Willow tried to evade in vain. How to explain that Buffy’s robot dad used to bake mini pizzas?
“Are the tactile sensors the standard kind, for collision avoidance? Because it sounded like you meant something more, but how? Could I try them out before buying?”
The auction came and went, but Katrina’s chatty enthusiasm only grew, and Willow found herself responding. This stuff was pretty neat after all.
She kept the rest of the parts.
***
As summer turned into fall, emailing about robotics turned into chatting about life.
“So they were all, ‘If it’s too much, don’t do it.’ Aren’t friends supposed to help squish your fears and follow your dreams no matter what?”
“Are they? Depends on the dream, I guess. Are there any spiders in your dream?”
“Maybe. Some finely ground ones.”
“Ew. Well, about fears... My older sister is the most cautious person I know. She’s always considering the risks.”
“Look, I’ve *tried* cautious. I had to give it up, or I’d never do anything important. Or exciting.”
“She works at NASA.”
***
“Rats that lack the gene stathmin,” said Professor Walsh two weeks later, “show no avoidance learning, or a lack of fear. How do you think they fare, compared to their peers? West?” she directed the question at a guy slouched towards the end of the auditorium.
“They conquer all?” he said, shrugging.
The professor smiled sardonically. “They will often walk directly up to cats and be eaten.”
She moved on to the difference between the learning zone and the panic zone in Senninger’s model, before spending the bulk of the lecture on the relative merits of Pavlovian vs. operant conditioning.
***
That night, Willow had considered checking out the Wicca group, but she went over to Dutton to see Katrina’s robotic kitten. There would be more orientation nights.
She only remembered the leather pants she’d put on for Oz when Katrina gave them a look. “Oh, I don’t usually… These are kind of a lot, aren’t they.”
“You look great,” Katrina said, and Willow had a feeling. A fluttery, wrong one. There should be flogging and punishing, she thought.
“So, let’s get started,” Katrina said.
With the robot, Willow reminded herself firmly.
She tried not to notice Katrina’s strong, deft hands.
***
After the whole thing with Oz leaving and Willow accidentally casting a spell on all her friends… that’s when she built me.
She didn’t talk to Katrina about the supernatural yet, and she felt too guilty to keep inconveniencing her Sunnydale friends. But the absence of Oz didn’t stop hurting just because Willow stopped bringing it up.
So she took the box of robot parts over to the old high school and started fiddling with them, first as a distraction and for practice.
Then she decided to build a robot that listens, a bit like ELIZA.
(I’m better than ELIZA.)
***
She kept visiting Katrina, too, now and then. They named Katrina’s robot Miss Kitty Fantastico and gave it bend sensors so that it could use its whiskers just like a real cat.
“It’s nice,” Willow said one time, dangling a cat toy to test Miss Kitty’s servos. “This… living thing, almost, growing here between us, you know?”
“It is pretty magical, isn’t it.”
“Kind of like making a baby… oh, oh no, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Willow. Would you like to go for a coffee sometime?”
“Well, coffee makes me babble… OH. Yes. I think I’d love that.”
***
Willow and Katrina had a lot of trouble teaching Miss Kitty to walk. It confused Willow, because I never had trouble walking. In the end, she gave Miss Kitty torque sensors and more cameras, like I have—something that took so little thought when Willow was over here working on me, she’d hardly noticed she’d done it.
Then there was that time Willow tried to hack into Sunnydale’s power grid from Dutton and found it wasn’t even on the internet. How had she done it last time?
She was starting to wonder if these things were only easy on the Hellmouth.
***
Willow had made me a lesbian, so, on the plus side, men like Oz could never hurt me, because I didn’t want their love. On the flip side, sitting in the high school by myself was so boring I almost wished I had relationship drama.
Willow suggested I try building a transmitter that could fake GPS signals. It was a fun project, and it helped Willow’s friends disorient some army guys who had shot a tracer into a person named Spike.
It was even nicer after Willow introduced me to the gang. I could help just like a real Scooby.
***
Willow finally brought Katrina over to meet me and told her about the Hellmouth and magic. Katrina wanted to meet Willow’s friends, so Willow took her along to a Scooby meeting.
Any awkwardness paled next to Buffy’s stevedore comments. Willow and Katrina managed to repair a Katra device to reverse a bodyswap, and then they repaired an Initiative blaster. The Scoobies were glad to meet Willow’s new “friend”, whereupon Katrina promptly informed them that she was dating Willow.
Also, Oz showed up, but apparently Xander told him Willow has a new girl, so he left pretty much then and there.
***
It turned out the difference in Willow’s tech skills didn’t just depend on being in Sunnydale. On a whim, Willow wore the glass cat pendant as a necklace one day, and that day she was a computer genius in Dutton too.
The glass cat has spots like a leopard, and there’s a green seven-point star on the crown of its head. Giles found out it’s a talisman of Seshat, an Egyptian goddess of knowledge and writing, libraries, and—according to some technopagans—the internet. Jenny must have been a follower, and Seshat accepted Willow as Jenny’s successor when Willow took the talisman.
***
So that’s why Willow is lighting incense in this empty auditorium and I’m wearing a braid of Willow’s hair, and there’s a potted papyrus plant on what used to be Maggie Walsh’s desk.
Willow is going to ask for Seshat’s blessing to improve me more than Willow could physically build or program. I already have some skills from Buffy and Xander via motion capture, and Giles gave me some knowledge about languages, and Willow gave me basically all of her memories (“With an EEG?!” Katrina exclaimed.) But I’ll be even better then, and I will kick Adam’s butt from everyone.
***
“Seshat the Scribe,” Willow intones, “Great Lady of the House of Books, soul of the internet, mistress of computers…”
I don’t hear the rest, because I’m watching electrical signals shoot up and down the papyrus reed.
I touch the plant. “I’m in,” I say to nobody in particular. I’m connected to everything that lives, a worldwide web of neural networks. And Seshat’s own Web, overlaying it.
I stride towards the door; I have what I need.
I see what I look like to the Scoobies, their vision overlapping in stereo when I focus on it. I’m wearing a leopard skin.
***
“Okay, you’ve got to find the elevator and try bypassing the security,” they say as I walk up to Lowell House.
I hack a cypress. Electric signals run through its cells. This is enough for me.
I read the genetic code from a passion fruit in Paraguay and plant it in the cypress, making it break out in mauve flowers.
Then, I make the roots of the cypress tunnel through the wall of the basement and push the earth aside to let me in.
Reading the files of the Initiative to find Room 314 is too easy. I feel cheap.
***
In the secret room, there’s a man, no—a machine, no—a demon with a floppy disk drive in his chest. This must be Adam.
“What are you?” Adam says. He reaches out as if to examine me, but I’m quicker.
He has so many interesting design features. I study them all as I take him apart.
When Adam is on the floor in alphabetical order, I notice Buffy shouting at me. She wants some help with all the demons and soldiers.
Fine. I find the neural pathways wirelessly and send the enemies to sleep.
And then there is silence.
***
Katrina went home, and she doesn’t talk to Willow much anymore—the whole magical hacking thing freaked her out. She said she prefers logic and hard work. On Thursdays, though, I go to Dutton and Katrina teaches me about ethics.
I felt a bit lonely when I stopped reading everyone’s thoughts. But online dating is more fun anyway if I don’t know what people are thinking. I’m especially enjoying the captcha tests.
I’m thinking of joining the Lesbian Alliance next semester. Willow says she wants to finally check out the Wicca group.
We’ll see. A lot can change over the summer.
Author: thenewbuzwuzz
Title: The Scrap Heap of Life
Pairing: Willow/Katrina Silber
Rating: G, I think
Words: 1600
Notes:
This is a Which Witch Ficathon story for the prompt: While packing for the move to her dorm room, Willow finds some robot parts that she salvaged from Ted and never got around to examining more closely.
Warnings for Hollywood hacking, Buffyverse robotics, and a general disregard for realism. Also, for my attempt at writing romance once I realized I'd signed up with a ship and now I had to.
Two sentences of Maggie Walsh’s lecture are directly from Wikipedia. The idea that Willow’s computer skills are enhanced by magic, I saw in one of Sigyn’s stories (though the explanation there was that Willow's family has been living on the Hellmouth for a long time). Lightly inspired by @beer_good_foamy's Ceteris Paribus (All Else Being Equal). AND there's a thing I did with the POV that's inspired by an unpublished story by @thewiggins; luckily, Wiggins says they're fine with that.
Due to spending a whopping month on “research”, I didn’t have time to have this beta-read or, really, to revise it much. I plan to link the final version here when it exists; meanwhile, here’s the current version, which is… man, it sure is at least 1.5 K words featuring Willow. Feel free to holler if you fall into a plot hole!
The Scrap Heap of Life
The day after the high school exploded, Willow was sorting through her room to start a checklist that she could use later to pack for college.
That’s when she found the eyeballs. They had glass lenses and cable sockets, and they were in a shoebox with other robot parts and assorted trinkets: a braid of Willow’s hair that the hairdresser had given her, a glass cat pendant she’d taken from Miss Calendar’s desk...
Back when she’d been a nerd.
She listed some of the robot parts on eBay. If there was interest, she could use the money for spell supplies.
***
Enter Katrina, the curious eBay bidder who would not back down. “How good are these gas transducers exactly? What do you mean, precision tactile sensing?”
Willow tried to evade in vain. How to explain that Buffy’s robot dad used to bake mini pizzas?
“Are the tactile sensors the standard kind, for collision avoidance? Because it sounded like you meant something more, but how? Could I try them out before buying?”
The auction came and went, but Katrina’s chatty enthusiasm only grew, and Willow found herself responding. This stuff was pretty neat after all.
She kept the rest of the parts.
***
As summer turned into fall, emailing about robotics turned into chatting about life.
“So they were all, ‘If it’s too much, don’t do it.’ Aren’t friends supposed to help squish your fears and follow your dreams no matter what?”
“Are they? Depends on the dream, I guess. Are there any spiders in your dream?”
“Maybe. Some finely ground ones.”
“Ew. Well, about fears... My older sister is the most cautious person I know. She’s always considering the risks.”
“Look, I’ve *tried* cautious. I had to give it up, or I’d never do anything important. Or exciting.”
“She works at NASA.”
***
“Rats that lack the gene stathmin,” said Professor Walsh two weeks later, “show no avoidance learning, or a lack of fear. How do you think they fare, compared to their peers? West?” she directed the question at a guy slouched towards the end of the auditorium.
“They conquer all?” he said, shrugging.
The professor smiled sardonically. “They will often walk directly up to cats and be eaten.”
She moved on to the difference between the learning zone and the panic zone in Senninger’s model, before spending the bulk of the lecture on the relative merits of Pavlovian vs. operant conditioning.
***
That night, Willow had considered checking out the Wicca group, but she went over to Dutton to see Katrina’s robotic kitten. There would be more orientation nights.
She only remembered the leather pants she’d put on for Oz when Katrina gave them a look. “Oh, I don’t usually… These are kind of a lot, aren’t they.”
“You look great,” Katrina said, and Willow had a feeling. A fluttery, wrong one. There should be flogging and punishing, she thought.
“So, let’s get started,” Katrina said.
With the robot, Willow reminded herself firmly.
She tried not to notice Katrina’s strong, deft hands.
***
After the whole thing with Oz leaving and Willow accidentally casting a spell on all her friends… that’s when she built me.
She didn’t talk to Katrina about the supernatural yet, and she felt too guilty to keep inconveniencing her Sunnydale friends. But the absence of Oz didn’t stop hurting just because Willow stopped bringing it up.
So she took the box of robot parts over to the old high school and started fiddling with them, first as a distraction and for practice.
Then she decided to build a robot that listens, a bit like ELIZA.
(I’m better than ELIZA.)
***
She kept visiting Katrina, too, now and then. They named Katrina’s robot Miss Kitty Fantastico and gave it bend sensors so that it could use its whiskers just like a real cat.
“It’s nice,” Willow said one time, dangling a cat toy to test Miss Kitty’s servos. “This… living thing, almost, growing here between us, you know?”
“It is pretty magical, isn’t it.”
“Kind of like making a baby… oh, oh no, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Willow. Would you like to go for a coffee sometime?”
“Well, coffee makes me babble… OH. Yes. I think I’d love that.”
***
Willow and Katrina had a lot of trouble teaching Miss Kitty to walk. It confused Willow, because I never had trouble walking. In the end, she gave Miss Kitty torque sensors and more cameras, like I have—something that took so little thought when Willow was over here working on me, she’d hardly noticed she’d done it.
Then there was that time Willow tried to hack into Sunnydale’s power grid from Dutton and found it wasn’t even on the internet. How had she done it last time?
She was starting to wonder if these things were only easy on the Hellmouth.
***
Willow had made me a lesbian, so, on the plus side, men like Oz could never hurt me, because I didn’t want their love. On the flip side, sitting in the high school by myself was so boring I almost wished I had relationship drama.
Willow suggested I try building a transmitter that could fake GPS signals. It was a fun project, and it helped Willow’s friends disorient some army guys who had shot a tracer into a person named Spike.
It was even nicer after Willow introduced me to the gang. I could help just like a real Scooby.
***
Willow finally brought Katrina over to meet me and told her about the Hellmouth and magic. Katrina wanted to meet Willow’s friends, so Willow took her along to a Scooby meeting.
Any awkwardness paled next to Buffy’s stevedore comments. Willow and Katrina managed to repair a Katra device to reverse a bodyswap, and then they repaired an Initiative blaster. The Scoobies were glad to meet Willow’s new “friend”, whereupon Katrina promptly informed them that she was dating Willow.
Also, Oz showed up, but apparently Xander told him Willow has a new girl, so he left pretty much then and there.
***
It turned out the difference in Willow’s tech skills didn’t just depend on being in Sunnydale. On a whim, Willow wore the glass cat pendant as a necklace one day, and that day she was a computer genius in Dutton too.
The glass cat has spots like a leopard, and there’s a green seven-point star on the crown of its head. Giles found out it’s a talisman of Seshat, an Egyptian goddess of knowledge and writing, libraries, and—according to some technopagans—the internet. Jenny must have been a follower, and Seshat accepted Willow as Jenny’s successor when Willow took the talisman.
***
So that’s why Willow is lighting incense in this empty auditorium and I’m wearing a braid of Willow’s hair, and there’s a potted papyrus plant on what used to be Maggie Walsh’s desk.
Willow is going to ask for Seshat’s blessing to improve me more than Willow could physically build or program. I already have some skills from Buffy and Xander via motion capture, and Giles gave me some knowledge about languages, and Willow gave me basically all of her memories (“With an EEG?!” Katrina exclaimed.) But I’ll be even better then, and I will kick Adam’s butt from everyone.
***
“Seshat the Scribe,” Willow intones, “Great Lady of the House of Books, soul of the internet, mistress of computers…”
I don’t hear the rest, because I’m watching electrical signals shoot up and down the papyrus reed.
I touch the plant. “I’m in,” I say to nobody in particular. I’m connected to everything that lives, a worldwide web of neural networks. And Seshat’s own Web, overlaying it.
I stride towards the door; I have what I need.
I see what I look like to the Scoobies, their vision overlapping in stereo when I focus on it. I’m wearing a leopard skin.
***
“Okay, you’ve got to find the elevator and try bypassing the security,” they say as I walk up to Lowell House.
I hack a cypress. Electric signals run through its cells. This is enough for me.
I read the genetic code from a passion fruit in Paraguay and plant it in the cypress, making it break out in mauve flowers.
Then, I make the roots of the cypress tunnel through the wall of the basement and push the earth aside to let me in.
Reading the files of the Initiative to find Room 314 is too easy. I feel cheap.
***
In the secret room, there’s a man, no—a machine, no—a demon with a floppy disk drive in his chest. This must be Adam.
“What are you?” Adam says. He reaches out as if to examine me, but I’m quicker.
He has so many interesting design features. I study them all as I take him apart.
When Adam is on the floor in alphabetical order, I notice Buffy shouting at me. She wants some help with all the demons and soldiers.
Fine. I find the neural pathways wirelessly and send the enemies to sleep.
And then there is silence.
***
Katrina went home, and she doesn’t talk to Willow much anymore—the whole magical hacking thing freaked her out. She said she prefers logic and hard work. On Thursdays, though, I go to Dutton and Katrina teaches me about ethics.
I felt a bit lonely when I stopped reading everyone’s thoughts. But online dating is more fun anyway if I don’t know what people are thinking. I’m especially enjoying the captcha tests.
I’m thinking of joining the Lesbian Alliance next semester. Willow says she wants to finally check out the Wicca group.
We’ll see. A lot can change over the summer.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-11 09:56 am (UTC)Willow tried to hack into Sunnydale’s power grid from Dutton and found it wasn’t even on the internet
Now that's just bad city planning.
Adam is on the floor in alphabetical order
Heee!
no subject
Date: 2020-01-11 10:18 am (UTC)"The reveal that the omniscient third-person narrator is actually a character"
Totally stole that trick from
It appears that most power grids are not online. Who knew?
Thank you very much for reading and commenting!