Untitled Story

Retrieving a wheelbarrow from his garage, he carefully lifted the ball-form of the robot and put it in. The rest of the pieces were large enough that he could easily notice, but it'd be difficult to say if he'd be able to collect all of them.

After thirty minutes, he put everything he gathered in the wheelbarrow and rode it back to his cluttered garage. Gadgets and broken tools decorated the shelves and walls. Though, much of it seemed to have gathered dust.

With a grunt, he put the robot on the table and scratched his head. He had never worked on machinery before, especially not something of this caliber.

'An instruction manual would have been nice,' he thought, sweeping his eyes over the rest of the parts.

Before anything, he studied the shapes of the broken pieces and tried to fit them into the robot, like a puzzle. It had achieved some success, but since he didn't have super glue, they would just fall off.

With a sigh, he then spent hours tinkering with the robot before he was interrupted by his roommate.

"Hey Zack, did you leave the milk out again? It's turned green." Jones said.

With a wave, Zack responded. "Nah, I think it was one of the raccoons. I told you not to pick stuff up from the trash."

As if a light bulb lit up, Jones's face contorted into realization. " Oh yeah, I thought the kitchen looked different," he nodded to himself. "By the way, what's all that you're working on?"

"It's something I found on the trail. Maybe if I can fix it up, we'll have a proper maid around this house."

Jones stared at it for a hard second before sticking his finger inside of its gaping holes. Zack's jaw slacked in panic as he hurriedly tried to slap it away. As soon he made contact, a surge of electricity ran through both of them before they collapsed on the floor.

Several hours have passed since the incident and the first one to wake up was Zack. Considering that he had been hit indirectly, it was expected that he would be the first to wake up. When he had come to his senses, he noticed that Jones was still a finger deep inside the robot. Panicking again, he swiftly unplugged all and any devices that may have been connected to the robot. He wanted to pull Jones away but before that he thought that the wisest thing would be to put on some gloves, better safe than sorry and Jones wasn't going to hold that against him either way.

After some gruelling effort to pull Jones's finger out, Zack decided to take a break. The finger was stuck and did not budge, several times had the thought of cutting it off and getting things over with cross his mind but each time common sense took over and he ended up not doing it. Suddenly he got an idea, why not use the universal grease that he had laying around.

"Hey buddy, are you there?" Zack slapped Jones lightly and sprinkled some water on his face. A moment after he did it, he realized that it may not have been such a great idea to do that to someone who was just shocked. Luckily, Jason moaned and opened his eyes just slightly "What the hell happened?" he asked. Before Zack could tell him what he had so foolishly and carelessly done, Jason closed his eyes and fell asleep.

"Well, I guess its bedtime huh?" Zack remarked. He picked up his friend and carried him to his room, laying him gently on the bed. "Sleep tight buddy." he closed the doors behind him. Now that the issue had been resolved, Zack could finally go back to tinkering with the robot. All this time some unexplainable excitement had taken him over, despite all that had happened, he did not lose hope that the robot could be saved.

Several hours passed and he managed to fill in some of the empty space inside the robot. However, with all that said, there were still hundreds of pieces left.

Zack leaned back in his seat, but it didn't have a spine so instead he just fell on the garage floor. He groaned as Jones rushed in at the sudden thump.

"What happened?" He said.

Zack looked up at him as he waved his hand. To his shock, Jones was wearing a clown mask. "Nothing..." Zack said as he stood up.

Jones looked down. "You're still messing around with that robot? Didn't it try to kill us?"

"No, you tried to kill us. I'll have to add a new rule on the fridge that saids don't stick your finger in exposed electronics."

Jones shuddered as he recalled the 156th rule, 'Don't open the door for strangers.'

Zack let out a sigh as he aimlessly kicked a piece across the floor. He felt like he was missing something important, and it wasn't the puzzle in his garage. A crucial part of the robot was missing, something that gave it life.

Jones pulled up his clown mask and walked up to him. "Yknow Zack, I think you need a break. If this robot's really so important to you, then I'll fix it."

He looked at Jones with a snicker. "Jones, you can't even make scrambled eggs, are you sure you can handle something like this?"

With a nod, Jones pulled out a black bafrom his pocket. "Of course, I've been meaning to try out this gift one of the raccoons gave me."

Zack shook his head. "I thought I told you-" His words quickly died as he looked at the black box, it was a premium-grade power brick.

"What! They just found that lying around?" Zack quickly snatched the box, examining its underside.

"Yeah, I know I broke rule 94, but his eyes just spoke to me."

Zack patted Jones shoulders. "Don't worry about that rule anymore, it's gone, this time, I mean." He quickly corrected himself.

Jones silently celebrated as Zack turned to the robot. The power brick was genuine and shared the same serial number as it. However, whether or not it was still functional was yet to be seen.

"Just to be sure, why don't you stand back a little?" Zack lifted his brows adding an ironic smile to the whole gesture. Unfortunately, Jones was a bit of a klutz that could not read social cues. "Preferably back there, at the door. While you're at it, why don't you also close them" Despite knowing his roommate for so long, even he got surprised when Jones blindly followed whatever he said. A loud thud signaled that he had left the garage and immediately after the door creaked open a little.

"I mean, I can't miss this crucial moment can I?" Jones peeked through the opening. If a third person would have been present at that moment, they would think that Jones was the one who had found the robot because of how excited he was. It was bursting out of him. So much so that he had felt like he could wet himself right then and there, but then he remembered rule 18 and clenched his bladder as much as he could.

Before plugging the robot into the socket on the wall, Zack too hid behind a large round table that hosted a plethora of his tools and trinkets he had found. He grabbed one of his inventions, an improvised arm that spanned over two and a half meters in length. It had a completely functional fingers and a grip. He was rarely sure in the reliability of the items he either crafted or brought home, that he would willingly stand right next to, when testing them.

The moment of truth had arrived and Zack managed to grab the cable with his contraption and finally plug the robot in. He clenched his teeth and narrowed his eyes just waiting for something to go awry. To his surprise nothing at all had happened. The robots eyes flickered for a moment and turned off the second after. Confused and a little irritated, he went for the tried and true method, unplug and plug it in again. Yet again it yielded no results expect that Zack kept getting more and more annoyed by the whole thing. His anger reached its peak and he forcefully kept doing the same thing over and over again without any results.

Jones could not believe it. What he had expected to be a grandiose moment, turned into a grandiose let down. "Well, I'm not gonna stand for this." He opened the door and unplugged the cable himself.

"Now wait just a second! Do you want to get shocked again? Or moreover killed? Are you mad!?" Zack tried knocking some sense into him by poking his back with the extended arm.

Jones did not budge at all, he set his mind to make that thing work and he was about to do everything it took.

"Get away from that thing you madman! Remember rule 12! Rule 12! Never do something again if it caused you harm the first time!!!!" As soon as Zack finished that sentence, a flash of light blinded them both.

Not only did the light temporarily blind them, but the shockwave of energy that the robot blasted sent Jones flying. He had missed the the wall where Zack kept his sharper end of the tools by a sliver. Unfortunately, Jones had been knocked unconscious again, still wearing that ridiculous clown mask.

Zack's jaw dropped to the floor, his roommate laid next to him unconscious and the robot that had showed no signs of life moments ago now stood upright, scanning the room.