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The Maintenance Logs Part 2: Chemical Problems For repanbo By Draconicon

Thankfully, the electrical damage from her injuries healed quickly. Tatyana was almost completely convinced that the robocorn was doing something to her while she was sleeping, using her unlocked programming and skills to take care of her despite orders to the contrary, but there was nothing that the tigress could find to prove that. At least, not directly. The cameras she'd managed to have her spider bots place around the room were suspiciously shorted out during the night, all but proving her point, but without the robocorn on camera doing the caretaking...

Well, without proof, she operated as if she was healing normally, though she mentally put that in the account 'against' the robocorn. She would check that on the scans the next time that she had a chance to examine her subject.

Though that would be a while off, considering the damage to her lab.

"What...did...you...do?!"

Tatyana couldn't hold her mouth shut as she stared at the damage in the small room. The whole place looked like it had been ripped apart since her unfortunate accident. It looked utterly impossible that one explosion could have done so much, though she did know from experience that it took a very little explosion to cause a whole lot of issues.

But this...

Every monitor had been torn off of the mechanical arms above the table. The generators that hadn't exploded on her must have exploded shortly afterwards, because the chassis on both had been blown out from the inside and the parts and burnt fuel was all over the floor. The ground was scorched in multiple places, including one spot where the ground was scorched with her footprints.

It must have hit me harder than I thought, Tatyana realized as she walked through the wreckage, her slippers crunching through metal and old glass.

"How...what..."

"I, um, might have gone a teeny-weeny bit overboard trying to get you to safety," Ellyra admitted, the robocorn following behind her, mane glowing softly but her horn subdued. "I didn't mean to break stuff, but..."

"..."

The tigress rubbed her face, shaking her head as she leaned against the exam table. It was the only thing still in one piece, and the only thing that she dared to trust her weight on.

This is not...a complete disaster, she reminded herself. Things had been wired wrong. We would have needed to take it apart, anyway. We just had the explosion do that for us.

That didn't make her feel much better about the situation, but anything was better than nothing.

"Did any recordings survive the explosion?" she asked.

"Um...nooooooooo?"

The tigress arched an eyebrow, slowly turning to look the unicorn in the eye. Ellyra was too busy whistling and looking away to actually meet her gaze, though.

"...You are a terrible liar."

"No, no, I'm suuuuuure that nothing survived that explosion. Nothing at all. I bet that it all burned down just as much as the cords did, or as much as your eyes -"

"Stop."

A reminder of being blind, temporarily or not, was not what she needed right at that point. She shook her head, taking a deep breath and then pushing it out through her nose.

"I'll find it. Or the dragon will. Either way, it will turn up. For now. Look for something useful. Anything that can be salvaged."

"Sure. Just let me find one thing first."

"What - no. Do what I told you to do."

"But, um, it's kind of important."

"Is it the recordings?"

"...No."

"Is it some dangerous chemical?"

"Um, not dangerous, exactly."

"Then it can wait. For now, clean up, and then help me organize."

"But -"

"Do. What. I. Say. For. Once."

The unicorn meeped, and then set to work, clearing away the debris on the floor and shuffling it off to the side. The tigress might or might not have seen her spontaneously turn her hands into dustbins, but at that point in time, nothing seemed too farfetched for her.

As for herself, she started shuffling through the debris, too, looking for any of the cameras that might have survived. They had a harder shell than the generators, and they had both an onboard and external memory capacitor. They'd have something...if they had lived through whatever had happened here.

Three hours passed, and the robocorn was busy in the attached penthouse bedroom sorting through the different pieces of machinery that they had managed to salvage. Tatyana, on the other hand, was busy sweeping through the different compartments of her lab, internally stewing about the possibility of Ellyra hiding something from her in here.

Admittedly, the lab did belong to the unicorn. The robocorn had invited her to take up a bit of space in the back of the penthouse, and she had done just that. It had been Ellyra's space, but that was the problem.

It had been Ellyra's space. The moment that it had become her lab, the robocorn should have taken everything out of it. The fact that there might have been some possession or other buried beneath all this...

She'll get it back, she reminded herself. But I am going to make sure that she didn't put something stupid in here that will affect an experiment later.

After all, one never knew the sort of things that an inexperienced hand would keep in a laboratory. The wrong sorts of chemicals, the wrong type of elements, different ores, toys, electronics: anything and everything could end up being an explosive in the wrong hands, or the right ones.

She was still turning over shredded pieces of metal, a pair of gloves on her hand to deal with the heat that still permeated the room and the debris, when a familiar scent caught her nose. Not familiar enough to name, but enough to hold her attention.

It was vaguely herby, bitter, but a breath of it had brought a sense of warmth along with it. Tatyana immediately pulled back from the pile, holding one hand over her nose and mouth.

Safety procedures would dictate a gas mask for this, she though, though where she would get one of those, she didn't know. It would be somewhere in the skyscraper, she was sure. If nothing else, surely one of the harem perverts would have one for their fetish play.

Regardless, she knew that she had to get whatever was burning out of there. Whatever it was, she'd already one breath of it and it hadn't caused any problems. If she was smart about it, if she held her breath, she should be okay for a few seconds.

She grabbed the chunk of metal again, ignoring the heat-seared end on the other side, and rolled it over. It would have to be collected by the stronger robocorn later, but -

WHOOSH!

The sudden flash of smoke from beneath shocked her, leaving her breathing it in by pure accident. She turned to the side, coughing and hacking as the hot smoke went down her throat, into her lungs, and through her system.

Almost instantly, she felt a sense of relaxation, a feeling of limpness that was slowly settling into her limbs. Her legs shook as she slumped back against the table, gasping for fresh air and failing as more of the smoke filled the room.

Nnngh...chemical...herb depressant...stimulant...

Her legs collapsed as she got around the table, nearly slapping her face against the floor. Straining to pull herself along, she reached the broken medicine cabinet. The metal front had kept the chemicals inside from being broken and spread across the floor, which was something. She fumbled about, grabbing for one of the emergency injectors that were on the middle level.

She grabbed one, checked the color code at the base of it to make sure that it was a proper stimulant, and jabbed it into her leg.

The sudden heat and tingle of energy that came with it left her gasping for breath, flopping onto her back. The smoke had nearly completely suppressed her ability to breathe from how strong it was, nearly putting her into a sleep that she wouldn't come back from. She gasped for breath, and since she was on the floor, she was no longer breathing in the smoke.

Yet...

Yet, at the same time, she had already breathed in enough of it to be affected by it. Her head felt foggy, her body relaxed. Soooo relaxed, as a matter of fact, that she felt like one of the puddling cats that she saw so often on the internet.

Rolling to her feet was not going to happen, she felt.

She laid there, her coat open and her breasts and sex exposed as she let the smoke course through it. The sedative-depressant effects were being weakened by the stimulant in her bloodstream, keeping her conscious against the stronger effects that it had, but that was only a small mercy. She could still feel it making her giggly and bouncy, unfocused and limp. Even as the stimulant hit her a bit harder, she still found it hard to put one arm against the ground and roll against it.

Mmmph...damn...

She managed to get onto her knees after nearly five minutes, the feeling of rolling around giving her an odd feeling of euphoria, almost like she was getting blissed out on something. But it wasn't the drug, or at least, not directly. It was just...just this feeling of being...

Playful.

...oh, shit...

Playful. There were very few things that could get a tiger playful, but one of them was a simple little herb that she had thought she'd scoured from the skyscraper. She groaned as she slumped forward, her head hitting the ground. By the time that she was able to lift it back up again, her growl had turned to a giggle.

Heh...catnip...it...it was...catnip...

Not the normal stuff, by any stretch of the imagination. There wasn't a natural catnip on the whole of the world that could kill a tiger by over-exposure, but the fact that it had belonged to Ellyra answered a number of questions.

Questions that were rapidly fading from the tigress's mind, admittedly, but questions nonetheless.

She giggled as she rolled onto her side again, looking up at the ceiling, poking her finger at some of the embers that floated overhead.

"Shiny...so...shiny..."

Tatyana knew that there was something important that she should be doing right then, but it was escaping her at that moment. Something involving getting out of here, maybe? But there were so many shinies on the ceiling.

"What the - Tatyana? Tatyana, are you okay?"

"Hee-hee, so many shinies..."

The robocorn was there a split second later, grabbing her under the arms and lifting her to her feet. There was a surprising amount of speed to their departure from the room, though she wasn't complaining overmuch about that.

She was still giggling as they left the lab behind, and she rolled off the couch that Ellyra dropped her on almost as soon as the unicorn left. As she hit the floor, she had a moment of lucidity, blinking.

Ow...okay, stuff still hurts. Might have given myself a flat face. Heh...then I'd be...hehe...a Persian tigress...instead of a Russian one...

For some reason, that was insanely funny to her, and she rolled over again, giggling to herself as the sound of fire extinguishers could be heard from a room over.

They were still going when the laughter finally stopped, giving her a chance to breathe. That was an effort, but she was able to get to her feet, though even then her legs wobbled as she just wanted to flop back down.

Gotta...gotta do...something?

She had a lot of experiments she had to run, didn't she? Lots of different things she could do, certainly. The mostly-naked tigress started fiddling about in her pockets, half-falling down every time that she moved, always wiggling about as she struggled to find something, or anything, in the pockets of her coat.

Inventions and gadgets she had in spades, but it was more a question of what to do with them, or which one to play with. The rainbow gun? She could see if it worked on people and things. Of course, the last rat she tried it on had gained a tail that would make a Celestia-lover envious, but hey, it might work better on the people in the magic city.

Maybe try the penis plugger. A little missile launcher that would send little plugs at the crotch of the nearest male. Her answer to rapists. Came with an explosive option, too, in case you didn't want the guy to be a guy no more.

She giggled at the thought of exploding penises, holding the pen-sized launcher between her fingers, fumbling about.

Wonder if it'd get someone from here? she thought, her finger missing the button twice before she managed to stabilize it. Let's find -

"NOPE!"

The launcher went flying, and with it went all of the little penis plugs that she wanted to send flying around for...some reason.

Tatyana hissed out of feral reaction, only to blink as a finger poked her in the nose.

"No. Bad. Bad kitty."

"...Mrow?"

Mrow? She had never done something like that in her life. Even back before the EVENT, she had never made a sound like that, not even as a kitten.

Mrow?!

She was still processing that little event as she was sat down again, her eyes still a bit hazy and vague from what was going on. She wobbled from one side of the couch to the other, staring straight ahead as the unicorn started going through her other pockets. Her 'employer' was through about half of them when she finally thought to the important question she needed to ask.

"Did you just boop me?"

"Yep, and I'll boop you again if you get mean."

"I'm not mean. I'm a kitty cat. Kitty cats aren't mean."

"Whooo, boy, that got you good..."

Kitty cats weren't mean. They were just...independent. She groped for one of her other pockets, reaching inside. The rainbow gun was there, and she giggled.

"See? I still got stuff that's happy."

"Tatyana, give me the gun."

"Naaaah, let me show you what it does first. You'd look so pretty with a rainbow horn."

"...This is adorable and terrifying," the robocorn said as the tigress leveled the gun with her horn. "Tatyana, please give me the rainbow gun."

"Come on, let me give you a rainbow horn."

"I can already make it rainbow, see?"

Ellyra stiffened, and suddenly, her horn was flaring with different colors of the rainbow. It flickered and danced across the walls, and the tigress grinned happily as she turned to look at it. It was so pretty, so colorful, so -

Distracting. Ellyra grabbed for the gun, and Tatyana helped, squeezing the trigger on accident. The multi-colored beam shot past the unicorn, bounced off a mirror, and shot straight through the open door to the rest of the skyscraper on this floor. There was a loud yelp of surprise - 'Why do people keep screwing with my tail?!' - followed by the gun being ripped out of the tigress's hand.

"You get this back when you're feeling better."

"But I'm feeling good nooooooow."

The tigress stuffed her arms under her chest, pouting at the fact that her toy had been taken from her. The fact that it had probably turned someone's tail into a nice rainbow, flickering water vapor held in a tightly-constrained form, only made her want to test it more. It hadn't killed anyone, after all.

She grumped as the unicorn stuffed the ray gun into another compartment of the room, then remembered that she still had pockets that were left to root through. Another grin leaped over her face, and she started groping about again.

No sooner had she stuffed a hand into her pockets before Ellyra was there again, grabbing hold of the lab coat properly.

"Uh-uh. No more coat for the naughty kitty."

Tatyana stared at the unicorn, once more at a loss for words. She could see the bulges of her toys and tools in the pockets of the lab coat, knew that they were right there, waiting for her to take them, but...

But she couldn't think of how to do it. She cocked her head to the side, tail twitching idly from side to side in tired, excited fashion.

What do?

Ellyra tossed the coat over one arm, then reached in, scritching under the tigress's chin. And just like that, Tatyana...

Purred.

She leaned forward, her shoulders slumping down as she leaned up on her tiptoes, cocking her head to one side and then the other, tilting her head to get the maximum scritches that she could from the robocorn.

Her purrs got louder and louder, her cheeks hurting from the smile that was slowly taking over her face, but it didn't matter. Chin scritches.

She let herself be led along to the bedroom, flopping into bed as soon as she was turned around and nudged into it. The robocorn followed, giving her a belly rub to go along with it, and the warm feelings from the contact just spread through her, leaving her grinning happily.

"Oooh, who's a good mad scientist kitty? Who's a good mad scientist kitty?"

"Mrrrrreeee?"

"Oh, yes, you are." The robocorn giggled. "Oh, this is sooooo freaking cute..."

Tatyana would have lashed out at that if she'd been entirely sober, but the combination of the catnip, stimulant, and the slow petting of her face and stomach were keeping her down, down, down beneath where she could care about all that. It got stored away in her head, for sure, but there was none of the anxiety that would often come with that feeling.

She just wriggled beneath the dancing fingers, letting herself drift along the feeling of being a good kitty.

Eventually, the pets stopped, and Tatyana mrowed again before she realized it. The robocorn held up a finger, but she wasn't in a state to understand that. Instead of heeding what it meant, to wait, she jumped for it.

"AH!"

Tatyana found herself hanging from a very started robocorn, her mouth wrapped around a finger that was very metallic tasting. She hung around the arm, nomming quietly against the digit, even as Ellyra stared at her. The unicorn swung her arm left and right, not trying to dislodge her, it seemed, but just seeing how tight she could cling.

The answer was, very.

As the tigress was swung around, the sound of barely suppressed laughter filled her ears, but that was a mild distraction at best. She had a finger to hunt.

Eventually, it popped out of her mouth, and she fell back to the bed. She landed on her back, tried to spring back up, and just flopped down again instead.

"Mmmph..."

"Just stay there for a second, okay? I'll be right back. I don't want to use the projector bindings. You be a good kitty, okay? Good kitty?"

"Mmmph."

"Okay, grouchy good kitty?"

"Mmmmmmmph."

"I'll take that as a yes. Be good, and I'll give you a treat later."

The robocorn disappeared, and as soon as she did, the tigress couldn't help but smile.

Don't leave a kitty alone...

She darted off the bed, grabbing for the little bits and bobs that had fallen out of her lab coat. Nothing more than various bits and pieces of a chassis, some little circuits, and the ends of a barely-charged battery.

But it would do.

Five minutes later, she had a good imitation of a chaos pulser, a little mad science invention that she'd only just come up with. It had no practical use in the slightest, barely more than a party trick...

Save for the fact that it could change just about anything.

Mmmm, this place is so interesting. What if this made it even more interesting? More sex? Or more fighting? Or more strange, powerful people like Ellyra?

The possibilities for positive changes and negative ones were literally endless. All she had to do was drop it outside and watch it go off, see everyone turn into something different. Endless transformation, the chaos of the changes feeding more changes, more transformations, until the entire city was consumed inside of it. The variables would be changing, everything going mad.

It would be glorious to watch, even on her.

She giggled, grinning in anticipation as she wobbled towards the door. She was almost there when the robocorn came back.

Ellyra looked down at her, arching an eyebrow.

"Tatyana? What's that?"

"..."

She slowly pulled her hands behind her back, shaking her head.

"Nothing. Nothing at all."

"...Wow. And I thought I was a bad liar."

"Noooot lying. Don't have anything at all."

"Then what's in your hand?"

Tatyana blinked. She was caught. Unless...

She slowly pulled one hand out from behind her back, showing off the front and back. Then she brought it behind her back, passing the pulser to it before pulling her other hand out, doing the same thing.

"See? Nooooothing."

"Uh-huh...And now, both at once?"

"..."

"Tatyana?"

"...Can't catch me!"

She darted forward, but was, of course, instantly caught by the robocorn. She put up a token bit of resistance, but was soon right back over Ellyra's shoulder.

"Come ooooon, let me experiment!"

"Sorry, pretty kitty, but you need to wait for this to wear off."

"Come ooooon."

"Nope, no matter how adorably petty you are."

The tigress grumped all the way back to bed, and continued to grump and pout with her arms crossed under her breasts. She was so close to throwing a tantrum that it was downright ridiculous, but she couldn't help herself. Nothing was going the way that it was supposed to, and she just wanted to get out.

Once more, her toys were taken from her, but this time, Ellyra handed her something else.

A pair of bongo drums.

"Kitty want to play?" she asked, dragging the feline's hands to the drums. "Go ahead. Give it a try. I bet you'll like it."

"Mmmph...want my stuff..."

"Play this, and if you do it good, I'll give your stuff back?"

"...Promise?"

"Promise."

Tatyana slowly nodded, bringing one hand down on the drum. Surprisingly, it made a very pleasant sound, one that tickled at her ears, making them twitch and leaving her with a small smile of shocked happiness.

"Oooooh."

"Try it again! Go on."

She patted it again, and again, soon getting up a rhythm. The drumming sounds were so pleasing to her ears that she forgot about everything else, her tongue sticking out in concentration as she drummed herself right to sleep.

#

The next day came with her faculties restored, and the first thing that the tigress realized was that there was a keyboard on her stomach, and a camera in Ellyra's hand.

...Oh...no...

She carefully reached for the camera, tilting it to face her before tapping the screen on the back. The photos and video files that spilled out across the screen confirmed her worst fears.

Acting like a kitten...looking...happy...

A smile on her own face. It looked so wrong. It looked so painfully wrong. The tigress barely restrained the urge to throw the camera against the wall, managing to make herself set it down on the side of the bed.

The motion woke the unicorn up again, and she sat up quickly, a smile on her face that slowly faded.

"You're back to normal?"

"Yes."

"Oh. Well, um, at least you're all healthy, right?"

"...Yes."

The tigress looked down at the camera, nudging it towards the robocorn.

"Don't let me see that again."

"But you look so happy."

"That's why I don't want to see it again."

"..."

"Keep it, but don't ever let me see it again."

"Why? What's wrong with being happy."

"Things I don't want to talk about. Now just take it away."

The robocorn finally did, and Tatyana rolled over, keeping her back to her employer. As she did, she took several deep breaths, forcing herself to not think about the pictures with her smiling.

They weren't her. Not anymore. They had taken the smiles from her. The only reason she'd looked like that was because of super-strong catnip, and that wasn't real. That wasn't real.

She pulled the blanket up tighter on herself, pulling herself into as tight a ball as a grown-up, two-legged cat could manage, nosing against the pillow and pulling that a bit closer, too. She didn't know what she wanted right then, but she knew better than to start thinking too much. Sometimes, the thinking was a great distraction from the bad stuff. Right now, all she'd do was think about the bad stuff.

The bed shifted behind her, and she knew that it had to be the robocorn, trying to either get up or cuddle her.

For a moment, she actually wished for a cuddle.

Then the moment passed. The robocorn got up from the bed, moved around, and then sat on the ground so that they were face to face.

"What happened, Tatyana?"

"What do you mean?"

"What happened to you?"

"Ask your master."

"No, I'm asking you."

"I'm not going to answer."

"You know it doesn't get better if you don't talk about it."

"If I talk, I break."

You talk, you break.

The warning from way back when came screaming back, and it took all of her mental strength to push it back down again. It wasn't going to take her down. Not when she was already clinging to the edge with everything she had. She refused to let it.

A hand touched hers, and on instinct, the tigress squeezed it. She didn't know if she was trying to break it or trying to hold it tighter than any helping hand in her life, and right at that moment, she didn't care.

All that mattered was that it was there, it didn't pull away, and it gave her something real to hold.

Tatyana closed her eyes, fighting back tears of bad memories. She managed to hold back most of them. The rest fell on the pillow.

She kept waiting for the words to tell her that it would be okay, that things would be better. She wanted to hear them so she could turn them aside, so she could focus on how logically wrong that was, so that she could just think about the fallacy of it rather than how much the past kept pulling at her right then.

Most of all, she didn't want to think about the picture, about the smile on her face. It hurt for so many reasons to see a smile on her own face after everything that had made it wrong to smile for little things.

But as much as she wanted the robocorn to say something, anything for her to argue with, Ellyra said nothing. Instead, she held the tigress's hand back, snuggling up to her as much as she could from the floor, and Tatyana was too weak to stop her.

Or at least, that was the excuse that she was going with.

The End