Work Text:
"Alright, everyone, we've got a very special visitor for you today! Does anybody know who this is?"
The class of preschoolers stared at their guest. "A robot," said one of the children, excitedly.
"Nuh-uh, he's a weploid," his neighbor corrected him pointedly. He seemed unaware that he had not yet at all mastered the R sound, but then, the oldest of them weren't even five years of age. It was forgivable.
"That's right, but do you know what his name is?" Ms. Brown, the preschool teacher, prompted her students. It wasn't actually right, not exactly, but X had long ago learned that nobody was that interested in the academic distinction between a reploid and an android. "And remember to raise your hand, please. Jeni?"
"It's Zero!" announced the child brightly, her arm still high in the air.
"Ah, close, but not quite," X said, with a nervous smile. He'd finally agreed to a single preschool visit, after much arm twisting and wheedling on the part of the Maverick Hunters' PR team. They'd been going to enormous lengths lately to try and rehabilitate the general image of what the Hunters were, and by extension, what reploids were. The world was beginning to view them as violence waiting to happen, they'd said, and X knew they were right. A little positive exposure would go a long way, they'd said. They were right about that, too. Visiting schools and showing little kids that they weren't scary, that they were just here to help, and that they were people like anybody else would be a great way to go about it, they'd said. X couldn't debate that, either. It was just true.
But he didn't really see why they'd had to involve him. Anybody could have gone. Plenty of reploids liked children, or at least had more experience with them. X had none at all. He didn't dislike children; quite the contrary, actually, he thought they were charming. But neither did he know what to do about them, having never really been exposed to them directly.
PR had recruited his navigator, Alia, to help twist his arm, though, and nobody knew exactly how much torque to apply for maximum results like she did. It was hardly playing fair, X thought. He'd ended up suggesting that if she wanted the kids to have a Meet a Maverick Hunter Day so much, she should host one herself, too. She was currently at an elementary school on the other end of town, probably having the time of her life, and here was X, feeling incredibly out of his element and a little bit like a loaded gun in a nursery.
Well, if he wanted to feel better, he needed to look no further than the knowledge that as they'd decided to select some recognizable, high-profile Hunters as well as relative unknowns, Zero had also been roped into doing a day at a kindergarten. X could only imagine how that must have been going.
"Why don't you introduce yourself?" Ms. Brown said, and X nodded, swallowing down his anxieties and putting on what he dearly hoped was a friendly smile. He hadn't had to practice it often, which maybe should have indicated something, he thought, but he didn't have time to analyze that. He had twenty tiny humans staring at him with their eyes wide and expectant, waiting for him to say something.
"Hi," he said, to the classroom, feeling silly but keeping a cheerfully straight face. "My name is X. I'm the first reploid to ever exist, and I'm a Maverick Hunter. That means I work really hard every day to keep Abel City and the rest of the world safe from bad guys."
"Let's say hi back to him," the teacher said, then, in chorus with her students, "Hi, Mr. X!" Then, going on again on her own, "Mr. X is going to spend some time with us today, so make sure he feels welcome, okay?"
Being made to feel welcome was involving a lot more stickers than X had expected.
He was seated in a comically small chair, at a comically short table. The children were gathered around him, split between doing Important Tiny Human Things, which were largely inscrutable to him, and busily asking him some very random questions, which were equally inscrutable. There was something refreshing, X had to admit, in the fact that they were just too young to be impressed by him. Then again, some of them were too young to enunciate clearly, and that was its own difficulty to navigate, but at least it was novel to him. Ms. Brown had had everyone introduce themselves, but X had understood about two-thirds of the answers at most, and while everyone had a name tag for the occasion—drawn on red or green construction paper, cut in the shape of an apple, and hung around their neck on a length of yarn—many of them were flipped backwards.
"What's your favorite color?" a boy asked.
X hadn't thought much about that before. "Er…red, maybe?"
"What's your favorite shape?"
Now that was a tough one. X had given exactly no time to deciding something like that. "I'm not sure I have one…what's yours?"
"Triangle," the boy said, with a tired sigh, as if the entire weight of the world was on his shoulders, and if one more person asked him about his favorite shape, he might give up on it all. X couldn't even begin to comprehend what being a preschooler was like, he decided. "But only this one kind. Look, I'll show you. This is called a saucily's triangle." He proceeded to draw a triangle that had somewhat more than three sides, and would not have been an isoceles triangle even without the extras.
"Can you eat?" a girl asked. Her name tag read 'Sara' and was at least visible, which was a great improvement over many of the others.
"Sort of," X answered. "It doesn't give me energy like it does for you, but I can taste things the same way you can."
This unlocked a new round of questions. "Can you eat spicy food?" asked another boy.
"I haven't really tried," X admitted.
"Here. You need this," said a girl who'd been engrossed in her self-assigned task for a while now, very solemnly patting a sticker of a zebra onto the armor plating of his arm. The words 'GREAT WORK!' framed the striped animal, which was giving a thumbs up, despite the fact that it shouldn't have had thumbs.
"Thank you," said X, because he hadn't the slightest idea how else to react.
"Can you eat ice cream?" Sara asked. "My mommy can't. It makes her have to go."
"Oh. That's, er, unfortunate," X said. "I don't really digest food at all, so, er, that doesn't happen to me. But I could eat ice cream, I guess. I don't have time for anything like that, usually."
"Can you eat…poop?" the boy who'd asked about spicy food said, clearly inspired.
"Zachary," Ms. Brown said, in a warning tone, even as the other children giggled. "We don't make bathroom jokes at school."
"Do you have a doggy?" another child asked. His name tag was also thankfully visible and read 'Jonas.'
"Ah, no. I sort of had a reploid dog, but that was a long time ago," X said.
"We just got a new puppy and he's a dover man pincher and his name is Barry and he's gonna be this big when he grows up," said a different girl whose name tag had gone all the way around and ended up unhelpfully on her back, spreading her arms arbitrarily wide to indicate the vast projected size of her dog's eventual growth.
"That's pretty big," said X.
"I'm gonna be a dog when I grow up too. Or maybe a horse," she asserted, as matter-of-fact as anything, returning to her coloring book page. She began scribbling pink directly over the green she'd just finished, though neither of them struck X as a normal color for the cat in whose vague direction she was coloring.
"You need this one," sticker girl announced, and peeled another sticker off of the sheet she held, pressing it next to the zebra. This one was a smiling ear of corn that said 'CORNgratulations!' on it.
"Oh, definitely," X agreed, utterly bemused. There was a kind of zen in not worrying about what it all meant, he decided.
"Does your hat come off?" Zachary asked.
"It does," X said. "See?" He reached up and, with a soft click, removed his helmet, revealing a mop of brown hair that couldn't seem to decide if it wanted to be flattened by the helmet or naturally unruly.
"Can I wear it?"
"I think it'd be pretty big on you, and it's kind of heavy, so probably not," said X, apologetically, and put it back on, tucking his hair up underneath it. "Ask me again when you're a little older."
"This one," sticker girl said. "It has to go here." X had no idea what logic she was using, but all the same, he let her pat another sticker, carefully and seriously, next to the congratulatory maize. This one was a hamburger. Just…a hamburger. It had a smiley face on the bun, but that was it as far as identifying features.
"How can you tell?" X finally asked, curiosity getting the best of him.
"The zebra is gonna get hungry, but he can't eat the corn because they're friends. It would be really bad."
"Ah, I see," said X, feeling enlightened.
"Okay, everyone," Ms. Brown started. "Are we ready to show Mr. X what we've been practicing? Let's tidy up first. Crayons in the crayon box, markers in the marker box. Coloring pages in your coloring folder." The children clearly knew their routine, though it still took a little herding to get them all squared away as they kept getting distracted by X's presence.
"What have you been practicing?" X asked, expecting a song or something of the sort.
"Well, since Maverick attacks do happen sometimes, we've got a drill system in place," she said. "And we've been practicing really, really hard to make sure everyone stays safe if anything dangerous happens."
"Ah," X said, suddenly keenly uncomfortable, though he tried hard to not let it show. "Is that what I'm going to see?"
"Even better," Ms. Brown said. "It's what you won't see that counts. Close your eyes, and count to sixty seconds."
"Sure," X said, and did so.
"Okay, everybody. Safety drill time. Go." There was some rustling of little feet and a few excited whispers. Things audibly moved around him. Hinges creaked quietly, and latches clicked open and shut. His risk assessment tracked it all by sound and cross-referenced it with his memory of the room's layout, though he behaved and kept his eyes closed. By the end of the minute, he heard nothing unusual at all.
"Okay, it's been sixty seconds. Can I open them?" X asked.
"Go ahead," said Ms. Brown, so he did.
The classroom was empty, aside from the two of them. X looked around. "Huh," he said. He'd heard sounds, and knew generally from where they'd come, but at a glance he couldn't see anything notable anywhere in the bright little classroom. As far as he could tell, the children had just vanished.
"What do you think?"
"They're somewhere safe, right?" X asked.
"That's right," the teacher said with a nod. "This is one of the newer buildings. It's got reinforced hiding places all over it, sized for our students but not the vast majority of reploids. They're difficult to find and even harder to reach."
X looked around again. Wherever they were, they were quiet and very well hidden. Though if the hiding places were only sized for students…
"In the event of a real attack…what would you…?"
Ms. Brown gave him a very tight-lipped smile, the closest she'd come to breaking façade in front of X so far. "I've got a safe place to go, too, so you don't need to worry about me."
"Good to know," X said, voice level, though his expression, unseen by any of the students, told a different story. "They're, ah, really good at hiding, huh?"
"They sure are. Here, let me give them the signal to come out." She pulled a simple whistle from her pocket and blew it, three times, and suddenly preschoolers were pouring from seemingly nowhere as panels cleverly hidden in the designs of the walls and cabinets popped open and children climbed out in threes and fours.
"Wow, great job, everybody! I had no idea where you went," said X, to the children and in as chipper a voice as he could manage. Then, to Ms. Brown in a much more normal tone, "Are all the schools being built this way now?" He hadn't heard anything about it, but then, he'd never had a reason to be near a preschool before, let alone wonder what safety features one might have.
"As many as we can fund," Ms. Brown replied with a nod. "That's just the reality of it."
"I guess it is, isn't it," X agreed, trying very, very hard to not envision the kinds of hostile situations that would require preschools to be built with hidden child-sized bunkers in the walls. "I think…I think I might need a few more stickers after all."
Recess came, though X wasn't entirely sure what the difference was between recess and class, other than recess was outdoors and class was indoors. Then again, the point wasn't so much to hold the kids to any rigorous academic curriculum as it was to teach them to socialize.
X was rapidly learning that socialization, for a three or four year old human, was a work in progress with a very specific and strange little definition.
"This way, Mr. X, I gotta show you how high I can swing," announced a child, and seized X by the hand without any further warning, dragging him off with tremendous strength for someone who didn't even come up to X's waist.
"I wanna play in the sand with him," said another, and took his other hand, leaving in the opposite direction.
"I haven't got to see him at all yet, it's my turn," yet another said, and grabbed one of his fingers.
"Ah, hey, now, let's not fight," X said, but nobody was much listening to him already.
"Noooo, he's gonna play tag with us," announced another preschooler, and took another of his fingers.
Within moments X had a kid on each finger, all of them squabbling and trying to pull him in different directions. Had he been biological, he thought, he'd have been deeply concerned about having a finger or three dislocated. As it was, his joints still weren't built to be twisted in so many directions, and while he was more than durable enough to handle it, it wasn't exactly comfortable.
"There's time to play with everyone, right?" X said, hoping that they'd listen to him. Whatever power their teacher held over their attention, he simply did not seem to have it, but he tried. "Maybe there's a game we can all play together?"
"Yeah," one of the older girls said. Older still placed her at not quite five years of age, but then, at their age that was proportionately a lot. "We have to share." She pronounced it with so much emphasis that it split the poor word into two syllables and it came out more like 'shay-yor.' "So let's play doctor's office."
That didn't sound like a compromise to X, but it must have qualified enough that everyone went with it, dragging him en masse (and still, to his chagrin, without letting go of any of his fingers individually) over to a playground structure with a toy box, in the shade. Ten excited little preschoolers sat him down on a bench, and sticker girl, whose name tag would evidently not turn around for love nor money, put on a child-sized play stethoscope from the toy box.
"Okay," she said, still as serious as ever. "I'm gonna listen to your heart now." She pressed the business end of the stethoscope to X's chest and listened for several long moments.
"Well?" X asked, but she shushed him immediately, and he fell silent.
After nearly thirty seconds and a lot of searching around, she took off the stethoscope, and looked up at X with such solemnity that it took every bit of willpower he had to not laugh. "Sorry," said sticker girl. "You don't have a heartbeat, so, that means you're dead."
That was not at all what he'd expected. "E-excuse me?" X stammered, taken aback by the proclamation.
"He died!" Zachary exclaimed, latching onto the idea with a gremlin joy. "We have to bury him and have a funeral!"
"I'm not dead, though. I don't have a heartbeat because I'm not organic," X insisted, but it was too late. The spectacle had drawn the rest of the kids, and an entire class of tiny children was now dragging him to the sandbox, half of them unaware why they were doing it. He could easily have resisted, but that risked hurting them. There was nothing for it. He was going in the sandbox.
A pack of twenty preschoolers could be very industrious when they put their mind to it, X realized, as they dug a hole that didn't at all fit him and directed him to lie down in it, dragging him a bit more when he didn't immediately cooperate. X found himself doing it for no reason that he fully grasped. Maybe he was worried about knocking into them too hard if he resisted? Or maybe he just didn't want to disappoint anybody. He considered his life choices up until that point while they heaped sand and slightly wet leaves onto him at random with little plastic shovels. It wouldn't harm him, at least. His armor and gaskets would protect him from far worse than a little sand. His pride, on the other hand, reeled quietly in the corner by its lonesome.
"We have to do a youla-gee," sticker girl said.
"What's a youla-gee?" another child asked.
"It's when someone's dead so you say nice things about him. I'll go first. Here lies Mr. X. He was very blue, and he was nice to us at school until he died. The end."
"I saw on TV where he was fighting a bunch of Mavericks and he was like, pow pow, vreeeee, bwooosh! Pkhhh!" Zachary added, doing finger guns and making explosion sounds for added effect. "But he's dead now. Rest in peace."
Some of the children, just old enough to sort of understand death and just young enough to find it quite upsetting, began to look a little distraught now that they'd had to actually consider the supposed circumstances. The slightly older girl who'd dictated that they should all play doctor's office didn't seem to notice and charged ahead with a youla-gee of her own. "He was a great man," she said, with as much gravity as she could muster. It was like watching a kitten try to act serious, X thought. "He did a lot of important things for us and kept us safe from bad guys. But he's in a better place now. Amen."
Seeming to have grasped the enormity of the situation but not the fictionality, Jeni began to sniffle, then to cry in earnest, going off like a sad little siren. X internally panicked. "W-wait, it's okay," he said, sitting up abruptly. "I'm not really dead. Don't cry, okay? It's all make-believe. We're just prete—"
"Aah! Zombie!" Zachary screeched, still with a chaos gremlin grin and loudly enough to make X jump, and then tore away at top speed. The entire pack of preschoolers scattered, shrieking in what could have been excitement, terror, or just the herd mentality of a sudden game of tag. X blinked in confusion.
"Not running you too ragged, are they?" Ms. Brown asked, approaching X from where she'd been watching the entire series of events unfold at a nearby table and bench.
X was still sitting in the sandbox, covered in grit and leaves and stickers, plus a little scribble of marker where Zachary had decreed just before recess that X needed a tattoo. "I've, er, had worse," he said, and got to his feet, brushing off the sand and most of the plant matter. The stickers were more firmly affixed.
"They do really appreciate you coming out and playing with them. I do, too. I'm sure you've got more important things to be doing than," she raised an eyebrow in amusement, "being buried in the sandbox with the action figures."
X shook his head with a wry smile. "Actually connecting with the people I'm trying to protect is important, and I hardly ever get to do it. It's ended up a good reminder of why I fight, honestly."
"After recess, their parents will be picking them up. They weren't told ahead of time which Maverick Hunter was coming to the school, and we don't have parking space for everyone to stop and come in to meet you, so…"
X nodded, understanding the implication. "I get it. I'll keep my head down for that part."
"I appreciate it. If you'd like to clean up a bit, the teachers' room is open to you," Ms. Brown offered.
"I probably should, huh?" X said, smiling awkwardly. "I don't suppose you've got anything that'll take stickers off…?"
"Thank you again for coming out," Ms. Brown said, as X tried and generally failed to peel the stickers off of his armor. "Something to drink before you go? Coffee, tea? I know you don't need it, but you did mention you can taste."
X hadn't had either in so long, he couldn't remember what they tasted like. He didn't want to seem impolite, though. "Er, sure, coffee would be nice," he said, hoping his lack of conviction wasn't obvious.
"Cream or sugar?" Ms. Brown asked, taking two mugs out from a cabinet.
"Yes?" X replied, already out of his depth. Fortunately, that must have been a normal-enough answer. The mug that the teacher placed on the table in front of him smelled amazing, he had to admit. "Thank you."
She sat down with one of her own. "No problem. And thank you again for coming out to visit the class. It really means a lot to all of us."
"Of course. I just hope I wasn't too awkward. I've never spent time around children before," X admitted, taking the mug's handle but not lifting it yet.
"You haven't? That's a shame," Ms. Brown said, and sipped her streaming cup of coffee carefully. "They say children are our future. They're not wrong, of course, but I think whoever first said that couldn't have known that it was going to need some adjusting much later."
"What's that?" X asked, and also took a sip of his coffee.
"I think children and reploids both are our future," Ms. Brown explained, as X made every effort to conceal the face he wanted to make. Why was it so bitter? It tasted like something had burned to a char, then been lightly coated with whipped cream. Humans drank this? Really? From his very lacking documentation, he'd always been given to believe that he had human-equivalent gustatory processing, but he couldn't imagine that was true if so many of them loved this stuff, but it tasted like this to him.
"There's no putting the genie back in the bottle, you know, with reploid integration into society. We already wouldn't be able to function without you all. Reploids are here to stay. I'm not smart enough to know if that's good or bad, but it's just a fact, even if a lot of people want to deny it lately," Ms. Brown continued. "And you've only been around as a race for what, fifty years or so? Not even that long. I have coworkers who remember the day your discovery was announced. You're all still kind of children yourselves, in a collective way. I mean, oh, I hope that didn't come out wrong," she said, realizing that she'd been rambling and might have just said something offensive.
"Not at all," X said, keeping his face straight despite the taste in his mouth. Nanofluid was still worse, but not by that much. "You're right, I think. Most of us are so new, still. There's a lot to learn in the world and no reploid preschool for us. We sink or we swim."
"Doesn't seem fair to me, you know? Humans get eighteen years and help all along the way to figure out how to be an adult. Reploids get a mandatory fifteen-day orientation, longer if they're lucky maybe. It's a shame, because you're our children, too, but we're not taking very good care of you. Anyway, listen to me, talking your ear off about depressing things. I'm sure you don't need that. Did you enjoy today, at least a little?"
X nodded. "I did. I didn't really expect to, but it was nice. I think I needed it…even if they did bury me in the sand a little." He forgot to not take another drink of the mug in his hand, and before he could cancel the automatically queued action, he'd already done it. He at least kept the expression off of his face, or so he thought, but Ms. Brown smiled knowingly at him.
"If you don't like it, you don't have to drink it. I know we've got some pretty cheap stuff. We go through it too fast to get better," she said.
"Ah," X hedged, feeling caught. "I appreciate it all the same, though."
"I'd probably better let you go, huh? It's about that time," Ms. Brown said, glancing up at a clock on the wall. "Thank you again for coming out. If you ever decide you need a day off to get buried in the sand again, we'd be happy to have you back any time."
"If I only had the time," replied X, with a rueful smile. "But thank you for having me, truly. I did need this…and maybe I'll keep the stickers on for a little longer after all."
"What the hell happened to you lot?" Douglas asked, poorly suppressing a smile.
X sat at the table in the break room, still covered in stickers. A leaf or three remained adhered to his armor. Next to him, Zero had been drawn on extensively with crayons, and his long, golden hair was full of cheap, colorful barrettes as well as one tragically entangled dinosaur figurine. Alia was across from them, grinning brightly and wearing a ring of flowers on her head.
"We all went to different schools today as part of our new community outreach program," she reported, with a spring in her step that X could hear in her voice. "It was great! I got to spend time with a bunch of second grade students and they made me this flower crown." She happily showed off the halo of slightly wilting daisies adorning her hair.
"I got attacked by a feral pack of kindergartners with a box of crayons," Zero deadpanned. "And then they wanted to style my hair."
"Some preschoolers declared me dead and buried me in the sandbox," X answered. "Also, this zebra sticker is friends with this corn sticker. But not the hamburger. He's going to eat the hamburger." He helpfully indicated the stickers in question.
"Damn," said the technician, pulling a can of nanofluid out of the cabinet and cracking it open. He sat down and took a long swig of it. "Remind me to not sign up for any of that shit."
"Oh, don't worry! You don't have to," Alia smiled, suspiciously innocently. "I put you on the schedule already for next week."
Douglas sputtered, nearly spitting his mouthful of silvery nanofluid out. "What," he finally managed.
"Don't worry, it's fun," Zero said, and smiled with far too many teeth for it to be anything but a gleeful threat display.
"Yeah. You'll love it," X agreed, more mildly but with no less amusement. "It's good to get out of HQ and remember what we're protecting now and then. Just leave your dignity at home where it'll be safe and you'll be fine."
"You weren't using it for anything, anyway," Zero added. "Also, I'm going to need to schedule some maintenance time. I might or might not be full of cookie crumbs and fruit punch."
Douglas raised an eyebrow. "The hell you doing, trying to get ants?"
"The kids insisted that I join them for snack time," Zero shrugged. "What was I supposed to do, say no? It's not like it was going to damage me, and I thought it'd be more relatable if I went with it."
"I had to say no to actually eating lunch," Alia said wistfully. "But I sat with them, at least. It was still a lot of fun."
"Maybe I'll sign up for another shift," X mused aloud. "It was more fun than I expected…and I think I could fit a lot more stickers on my armor."