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The Maintenance Logs Part 5: Final Notes For Repanbo By Draconicon

Ellyra made good on her binary promises, though seemed rather shocked when the tigress immediately wanted to get back to work. Tatyana shrugged, leaving the bed and dragging the robocorn along with her. There was still work to be done, and she was feeling too refreshed to stay in bed and cuddle.

Besides, cuddling still didn't feel right to her. There might have been one barrier dropped between her and the robocorn, but that didn't mean that all of them were gone. Regardless of how, ahem, explosively that one had been dealt with, the others were still standing strong.

They returned to the lab, this time with more safety standards incorporated into the construction. The robocorn sighed as she laid down on the table again, reaching up and resting her hands on her stomach.

"Do we have to do this? I wanted cuddles."

"You'll get them from the other members of his harem," Tatyana said as she started pulling the appropriate wires from the wall. "You'll not wait long."

"But wanted them from you. You have sex, then you cuddle."

"Others do that. I do not."

"Why not?"

"Because I do not like extended touching."

And that wasn't entirely to blame on her past, though that had been extensively responsible for any number of other issues. She hadn't been a big hugger or someone that was fond of touching others before she had been brought to the Mountain. That had just encouraged that little tendency to go further than before.

The fact that the robocorn wanted to cuddle was fine. The fact that Ellyra had been on the edge of pulling her back into bed and forcing her to stay there to be nuzzled and who knew what else was a little bit less okay.

Understandable, though. It was the normal way of things, and she, much as others would have preferred her to be, was not normal.

Tatyana put the thought out of her mind, going about her various hook-ups across the robocorn's body. Ellyra shifted from time to time, not so much to hide the ports, but more to make her work for it. The first time or two, Tatyana went along with it, chasing after her subject a little to get her properly hooked up. When the robocorn actually dislodged one of the wires, though, she stopped, looking down at the petulant girl.

"What is wrong?" she asked. "You've been very helpful up until now. Why are you changing?"

"You're leaving after this. I don't want you to go."

"That's true. I am leaving."

She'd made that decision just after they finished having sex. It wasn't meant to be a permanent departure, particularly not when she hadn't unlocked all the secrets that the robocorn had to her body, but no matter her progress, she knew better than to stay here. She had a barely-there grip on the ragged edges of her sanity, and the longer she spent in the company of other people, the more that grip frayed away.

She needed alone time, and that was impossible to get here in the skyscraper.

"That doesn't mean I will stay gone."

"Means that you could stay away. I don't want you to go. Didn't we do good? Didn't I help?"

"...Does it matter if you did or didn't?"

"I need to take care of people. It makes people better."

And it makes you better, Tatyana imagined was the part that wasn't being said.

She hadn't expected this, and she grumbled at herself internally for not having come up with this possibility. The robocorn defined herself by how she was able to help others, by wanting to be good enough to make things better for everyone. The snuggling and the cuddling were part of that, and she had little doubt now that a good bit of this job had been a distraction to get her out of the mountain so that she could be 'helped' by Ellyra.

It had worked, to some degree. She had opened up in a way that she had never done before, and the stuff that had been in the vault in her head were never going to get stuffed back in properly. They'd come too far out for her to just shove them inside and ignore them again.

But that didn't mean that things were all the way better. It didn't mean that she could leave the mountain behind and just live here. She needed to go home, not just for herself, but for...

Well, there were a lot of reasons, a lot of very good reasons that she couldn't just leave the mountain to manage itself.

She grabbed for a crate, sitting it down by the exam table so that she and the robocorn were able to look at each other eye to eye. Ellyra turned her head this way and that, pouting as she did, until Tatyana sighed and pulled out a shock-probe.

Zzzzzzt!

"Gah!"

Ellyra jumped as the shock zapped her right in the side of the neck, forcing her to turn her head and look at the tigress properly. Tatyana shook her head.

"Are you going to be completely childish about this?"

"You're the one shocking me, meanie!"

"You're the one that's refusing to listen."

"What, you have a monopoly on being all grumpy, grumpy cat?"

"For the moment."

Putting the shock probe away, she crossed her arms, leaning back slightly as she looked over the robocorn. Her subject was still pouting, still sad looking, but there wasn't much that she could do about that. All she could do was address the elephant in the room.

"You did...help. But you also made it hard for me."

"I didn't mean to. I just...wanted you to be happy."

"Happy." Tatyana shook her head. "The best I can be is content. At least, for right now."

It was better than a lot of the things she could be, at the very least. There were times when she had been angry enough to want to blow up the world, or at least herself. There had been times where depression had settled in to the point where she wanted to remove her own brain, or spine, or whatever felt like it was so much less than it should have been. She had gone through a lot, but happiness...

Her fingers curled into fists against her knees as she remembered the picture on the robocorn's camera again, that photo of her smiling. That still hurt to think about, and she knew that it would keep hurting for a long time.

That isn't me anymore.

Catnip or not, that hadn't been here. That was someone from years and years ago, someone that didn't have everything that Tatyana had in her head. Too many things had gone wrong, had gone bad for her to ever go back to that without a lobotomy.

And that was not a price that she was willing to pay. Not drugs, not a lobotomy, nothing. She would not forget. She could not forget. Not and be okay with herself. She sighed again, and patted the table near to the robocorn's hand.

"It will pass. You will see, one day. You will understand. Or not. It doesn't matter. What matters is that things are better than they were. Just not as good as you want them to be."

Even that wasn't quite enough to bring the robocorn up to a happy place, it seemed. Tatyana shook her head as the robocorn continued to pout, looking at her with narrowed eyes.

"You can be happy! I refuse to believe that you can't be happy. Everyone can. It's hard, and...and it hurts, and it doesn't always make things better, but anyone can be happy if they try hard enough!"

"Can you be happy without helping other people?"

Ellyra opened her mouth -

"Don't answer so fast," Tatyana stopped her. "Stop. Think. Be a machine for a few seconds, and think. If you get bad, sad, mad...do you get happy without helping others? Do you get better on your own? Do you just make yourself 'better' without having to do things? Is that happiness, or is that just a rush for feeling useful?"

"..."

"Nobody can just make themselves happy. Even you. All you do is make others happy and then take a little bit of it to help yourself. Which is fine. But don't pretend that it's easy. Because it's not."

"But -"

"No. Stop."

She shook her head a few times. There was no point in arguing with an eternal optimist, she knew. There'd been enough attempts at it before, and there was enough that had changed for her that she knew that she needed to reexamine her worldview before starting to push it as fact. That said, she knew that this was true, and she knew that Ellyra needed to hear at least some of this before going back to whatever it was that she did while Tatyana wasn't there.

"You can help others. You can do a lot to help others. But you have to remember, that's helping. You can't fix people. Not fast. Not quick. Not painlessly. Any changes come with pain and with struggle, and you have to want it."

And I'm still not sure that I want this change, but it's already happened, so there's not much I can do to change that.

Shaking her head, she started pulling her tools out, connecting a few more prods to the power supply as well as a few more wires. She put her datapad on the table, letting it sync with the robocorn's systems, and then looked her in the eye once more.

"You did some good. Don't think you didn't. But you don't have all the answers. Cuddling doesn't fix anything. It's nothing but an emotional painkiller, a little bit of Tylenol for the heart. It doesn't do anything to fix the problem. It just takes away some of the hurt for a bit. If you want to help people, you need to be ready for the long haul.

"But you're a horse. You probably have the strength to do it."

"...Unicorn."

"Robocorn," Tatyana corrected the correction. "Now, are you ready?"

"Hmmph. Fine, Ms. Grump."

"Certainly, Ms. Grumpy."

The tigress threw the switch, and the electricity started flowing, the robocorn immediately arching her back against the metal table and huffing through her nose. The life-like eyes soon faded into binary numbers, and the usual schematic popped up on the screen in front of her.

Tatyana took the datapad with her to the far side of the lab, sitting with one leg crossed and her lab coat half open. She twitched one foot up and down as the readout continued, feeding her the latest map of the young woman on the table.

She really has far more to deal with than most people, she thought. Whether she remembers where she came from or not, she knows that there's something that she doesn't want to do, and she keeps pulling as far from it as she can.

In a way, she felt sorry for the robocorn. In another way, she knew that Ellyra was as much in denial about the world as she was, and that made her worry for the young woman. It would lead to pain and suffering in the future if she didn't find a way to come to terms with it, and that wasn't something that Tatyana could help her with. Not the way that she was.

Maybe the dragon will be able to help her, she thought, though even that was something of a long shot. Her old colleague didn't know much about tech, and she doubted that his magic would be something entirely compatible with the robocorn's systems.

Knowing where her thoughts were going, Tatyana pushed them onto a different track before they could settle on being the robocorn's personal watchdog. That was not a life that she was going to take up, and she was not going to let herself be tempted by it.

Instead, she looked at the different dots and memory banks that were being revealed. There were several that were new to her, from the emotional memory bank to the sexual one. The latter was more a back-up to the primary one in the crotch, and she imagined that there were memories and little thoughts attached to them there, probably including some about the scene that they'd shared in bed only an hour or so ago.

It was a thought to check it out, but she resisted the urge, knowing better than to check out the memories of someone else. It never ended well, no matter who was doing the checking or how. It just meant that you were invading someone else's privacy, and they had every right to get mad at you later.

That said, she had to admit to curiosity as she looked at the emotional core. She had seen Ellyra get all worked up about a number of things, and she doubted that the memories there were of the same sort that the other banks held. It would be safer to poke and prod around that particular section, particularly considering that she might be able to find something to help the robocorn out a little bit.

She opened the emotional bank, and immediately realized a problem.

She's feeling everything at two or three times above the baseline, she thought, shaking her head at the readouts that she was getting. Not simulated, either. She's advanced enough for real emotion, but something's turned up the input and output levels to give her a massively high feedback for it.

No wonder the pouting and the grumping and the sadness had been so intense. Ellyra was feeling everything on a level far higher than those around her, and likely had been doing so for a while. It was a literal empathy machine, forcing itself to feel so much more than the average person until they were compelled to care, compelled to go along with whatever a person needed just to make them feel better.

And because of that, they started to feel better, too.

The temptation to turn those empathy levels down was almost overwhelming, but Tatyana restrained herself by the barest margin. She doubted that Ellyra would miss what had happened to her, and there was no way that the robocorn wouldn't know who had done it. There was only one person with that level of access, after all.

She put that out of her head, focusing on the information, instead, studying it so that she could work with it later, and with the robocorn in general.

Feeling everything at a minimum of twice what a normal person would feel. Emotional input getting analyzed and then replicated, giving her a similar feeling to what others are going through. Feeling anxious for anxious people, depressed for depressed people...it's like an emotional sponge, trying to feel what they feel so that others don't have to...

It was a sophisticated idea, but it was something that would never work without something to actually pull emotions out of others into the robocorn. As it was, the most it could accomplish was shared suffering, a genuine knowledge of what the other person was going through. Useful, but it didn't do anything to alleviate the pain down at the core.

And to be honest, she didn't want to turn the robocorn into someone that could do that. Turning Ellyra into an emotional sponge, something that could suck up the pain of another person, would turn her into a constant piece of metal baggage, forcing her to suck the emotional data in and then suppress it.

It would turn her into more of a machine, and less of a person.

She made another mental note. She did not want anyone to start getting that idea, so she put the idea into the mental shredder and moved on, only making the note to keep anyone from developing that.

The examination continued, pouring through the robocorn until they found something that was a bit...different.

Tatyana saw herself in the robocorn's emotional memories, saw her own fluffy coat, her half-naked state that she always walked around in, and she half-expected to see some sort of lusty reaction, some sort of thing that explained why the robocorn treated her the way that she did.

She expected 'mistress.'

She expected 'sexy.'

She expected 'fascinating.'

What did she get?

"Fluffy...grumpy...pet...kitty?!"

If Tatyana hadn't been sitting down, she would have probably exploded into a rant. As it was, her jaw just dropped, staring at the screen as the words and data kept pouring out of the emotional core. She kept flicking from one memory to another, trying to find something that proved that Ellyra looked at her a bit differently from time to time, but all she got was more of the 'grumpy pet kitty' tags.

What the...is that really how she sees her mechanic? Her friend, her...

Tatyana was grumpier than she had been in a long time, and that was saying something. She felt like steam was whistling out of her ears, and if she hadn't uninstalled that implant a few years ago, she might just have been doing that.

I am not a pet kitty. I am not a kitty cat that is made for laps, or for cuddles, or - oh, gods, she saved that thing to her memory.

She saw a memory of her in bed, still high, and for the love of all that was holy, purring. The abomination of a memory needed to be purged, but there was no way for her to do that. As soon as she tried to get at the memory to get rid of it, a hologram of Ellyra popped up on the screen of the datapad, sassily wiggling her finger from side to side.

"Ah ah ah, you didn't say the magic word!"

"...Trust this one to make a Jurassic Park reference..."

She shook her head, leaning back in her chair with a deep sigh. It was going to be stuck there for a while, at least until she could find a way through the other woman's firewalls. That would likely take something like an eternity, too, something that she wasn't looking forward to doing, but with something like that...

Ugh.

Tatyana shook her head, exiting the memory core before she could get more riled up about it. She knew that there was more to do, and she knew that she needed to get it done before Ellyra decided that they were done.

That said, she could at least put in a few things for...revenge.

She opened the sexual core again, this time going through it and doing a number of small things. She tweaked the hard-light projectors, adjusting their settings. She worked with a number of different things in the robocorn's body, ensuring that they were tightened and grown in the right way.

And then, she started working on the voice...

#

A few hours later, Tatyana was sitting in the robocorn's room, waiting for Ellyra to come out of her little sleep cycle. She had a cup of tea on her lap, a book in her hands, and she was just counting down the seconds until -

"AAAAAAAAGH!"

The scream was music to her ears, despite how masculine it sounded. Thump, thump, thump went heavy hoofbeats, and when the robocorn turned around the corner, it was not the same Ellyra that had gone to sleep.

Now that will teach her a lesson...

Tatyana smiled at the heavily masculinized woman that stood before her. A number of tweaks to the fluid and nanite producers in her body had created a muscular horse that would have looked Amazonian if it weren't for the fact that her breasts had been pulled back into her chest. The horn had been sharpened, some of the features pulled into a straighter, more blade-like horn.

Of course, the robocorn's muscles had been enhanced to a massive degree, giving her bulges along the arms and legs, making her butt pop out like a good pair of bubbles. Down between her legs, a hard-light projection of a horse shaft had covered her mare sex, giving her even more of the look of a stallion.

"What did you do to me?!" Ellyra shouted, and even her voice had been deepened by no less than four octaves. She sounded like she had been smoking for years. "What is this?! I'm a mare, not a stallion!"

"You're still a mare. I'm just seeing what else your body can do."

"I thought you were leaving!"

"And I thought I was a mechanic, not a 'grumpy pet kitty.'"

"...Oh."

"Yes. Oh."

Tatyana put her book down, humming softly to herself.

"So, my...little...pony. Bounce Time."

The robocorn thrust her hips forward, her ass twitching as she flexed her cock, making it bounce up and down like a conductor's baton, the shaft throbbing despite being nothing more than a projection. Of course, even projections could give pleasure feedback, as she well knew. As she had programmed this one to do for the robocorn.

Ellyra was immediately gasping, panting, biting her lips. Tatyana smiled, letting the command go on for a few seconds before calling it to a stop with 'End Bounce Time.'

"What did you do to me?" Ellyra asked again. "I thought you were just checking things."

"Checking things, and adding to them. There's a series of commands hidden throughout your code, now."

"How many?"

The feline smiled, slowly shrugging.

"...You're worse than master. I thought dragons were smug, but you just have it down to an art form."

"I'm a cat. We do that."

"I'll get them out."

"Oh, I have no doubt. But there's quite a few, and it will take a while for you to find them all."

"Not that long. I can -"

"Twerk Work."

Suddenly, the robocorn leaned forward, slowly turning in place as she popped her ass out, throwing it back and making it bounce. Even with all the muscle that she had put on, her ass cheeks still jiggled and shook. Tatyana watched, not so much with a sexual eye, but more one of curiosity, one that left her smiling to herself.

The command lasted one long circle as the unicorn kept twerking her ass, exposing the puckered, ridged hole between the cheeks before she was able to stop herself. She was blushing worse than ever.

"I thought you didn't like sex!"

"I don't. But I do like to remind people who is in charge."

"You didn't have to do that. I asked you to come here, I listen to you."

"And yet, you look at me like a pet."

The white tigress got to her feet, slowly pulling off her lab coat and tossing it over the back of her seat. Her hips swayed and her tail followed as she stepped forward, large, fluffy feet carrying her across the carpet.

"Let me be clear, little robocorn. You are advanced. You are amazing as a piece of technology. There have been few things that have given me a fascination such as your body and your equipment.

"But you are still the machine in the relationship that we have...and I am the user. I am the admin. I am the IT technician that runs you."

She grabbed the robocorn by the neck, pulling on the USB cord that was still hanging from it like a leash. She dragged Ellyra down until they were face to face, something of a feat considering that the transformation had rendered the 'male' robocorn taller than her by some way.

"Do I make myself clear?"

"..."

"Or do I have to show you some of the other commands I installed in your code?"

"...You're hot when you're like this."

"I suppose you are still distracted. Perhaps I should leave you for Stud Time."

The robocorn slumped back, grabbing at one of the tables nearby. She was huffing already, her hard-light cock throbbing. No surprise, really. That command was one that let her feel like she was in the middle of breeding someone, being forced to rut them to impregnate them, giving them the horsedick nice and hard.

Of course, it was combined with one of the other little commands that she'd left floating around in Ellyra's programming, one that made it so the robocorn couldn't cum unless she was given the order to do it. It was a nice little study, in a way. It meant that the robocorn couldn't actually get off without having someone give her permission, and it gave her incentive to hunt down one of the commands - either the Stud Time one or the chastity one - and kill it.

At the same time, she would be awash in pleasure-data, something that would make it very hard for her to focus. It would be interesting to see how long it took her to pull herself together, or if she would even be able to.

As the robocorn thrusted against the air, humping against something that only her data-input sensors would be telling her was there while her visual and scent and other sensors were telling her that it wasn't, Tatyana sat down and pulled her book back up. There were various cameras around the room, as she well knew, and they'd catch the whole scene.

Minutes went by, minutes that were filled with whimpers and gasps, frustrated groans, and admittedly rather hilarious grunts of exasperation. More than once, she heard the whispered begging to cum, and each time, she ignored it.

"Why...what...how long...how long will..."

She looked over the book to find Ellyra slumped over a chair, that hard-light dick thrusting between the legs, humping against a smooth surface or against open air. It didn't matter, really; the stimulation was programmed to be the same, regardless, that of humping into a nice, slippery, milking tube that was constantly pulling at her to cum. Tatyana chuckled.

"It will keep going until you orgasm. Of course, you can't."

"Why not?! This is mean!"

"So is looking at me like a pet."

"But - Nnngh! That's not - ah, ah!"

The 'stallion' robocorn rolled over, humping into the air, unable to stop herself as she fucked the imaginary mare that was probably squatted right over her at that point. It was rather amusing, so Tatyana let it continue, the moans and groans no different from some of the experiments that she had run before.

Minutes passed, all the way to a half hour. She looked over the book again, seeing the robocorn on the bed, her pussy dribbling mare juices down her legs as her fake-cock looked like it was about to beat a hole through a wall. There was already an indentation in the hard concrete from the repeated thrusts, looking like the head of a horse cock.

Hmm, I suppose that's probably enough torture, she thought.

"End Stud Time."

And just like that, the robocorn slumped down. Her hands twitched towards her fake cock, one wrapping around the base and squeezing it.

"I swear...if I thought it'd do any good...I'd shove this inside you, grumpy cat."

"It wouldn't. You'd need to be told the other command to actually finish."

"And you wouldn't like using me as a dildo?"

"It's a thought. Not a compelling one, but a thought."

Sipping at a cup of tea, Tatyana folded her hands in her lap, the naked tigress looking the robocorn up and down. The masculine features really didn't suit the young woman, but it had been a nice way to remind her that someone else was really in control. It was a way to point out that 'pet' was not the role that she should be assigned or thought of.

As the robocorn panted for breath that she didn't need, Tatyana picked up her book once more, flipping to another page.

"I will be leaving for the mountain tomorrow. I will return after a week or so, after I've had time to collect myself and ensure nothing has gone off the rails there."

"Mmmph...can I come with you?"

"You'd have to get permission from your master, a permission that I'm fairly sure that he will deny."

"Why do you think that?"

"He prefers your style of rump."

"Hehehe...he loves the horse butt."

"Yes. Don't remind me."

"Why?"

"He had one for a while, some time ago."

"Ooooooh?"

"Ah ah." Tatyana shook her head. "That's his business. If you want to know about that, you can ask him. I'm not going to get in trouble for blabbing about something private."

The robocorn obviously wanted more information, but thankfully seemed to understand that any further interrogatories would be shot down, possibly with another command to the altered body.

Which one should I experiment with next? she wondered. There's so many...

The rest of the afternoon shifted by quickly, and soon, they were well into the evening. The tigress had been asked out by the dragon and several other members of his harem to see the city, but she declined. After all, if she was having this much difficulty with people in the limited setting of the harem quarters, she doubted she would do well with the people of the city.

She was in the middle of altering some of the equipment in the lab, setting up for a personal project when she got back, when Ellyra came up behind her and hugged her.

Or rather, she felt with relief, the robocorn hugged the air around her. She let out a breath that she hadn't entirely realized that she was holding, patting the equine's arms gently.

"Gonna miss you," Ellyra muttered.

"It's a week."

"Doesn't matter. Like you. Miss you."

"You're tired."

"Yes, doesn't change it."

The tigress rolled her eyes, but not as much as she might have done in the past. She turned in the air embrace, patting the robocorn on the bicep. She couldn't quite bring herself to give the other woman a hug, but she could at least touch.

"I'll be back next week. And maybe by then, you'll have the rest of the commands deleted so I can put in new ones."

"Those were mean. You put a 'good whorsie' one in that'd make me cum anytime someone gave me a compliment!"

"Perhaps you'd start believing them, then."

"It's not fair. How come you get to do this to me and I can't do it to you?"

"Because you can handle it. I can't."

It was the simple truth, and yet, it was that much harder to say it because of how simple it was. She shook her head, patting the robocorn one more time before turning back to the lab.

"I'll say goodbye when I leave, don't worry. I just have to finish this first."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

The End