SPaMG: Sleeping Shield

    A few nights had passed since the last incident, the group had discussed their findings with Brother in a seemingly-normal conversation, they received a decent pay for said information, etcetera etcetera. Everyone was in the sleeping quarters, a room full of hammocks and chests of personal belongings off the ship’s central corridor, well, Jessie and Malksiv were probably upstairs playing some late-night card games, but everyone else was merely sleeping the night away. Elo, however, sat in his hammock and blankly gawked at the ceiling. They had given the Shard to Brother and the box to Lynn, but something still irked at him; was it the fact that the hammock could hold his weight? That’s when he effortlessly tore through it and fell onto the floor, which still wasn’t enough to drift his mind away. While Jessie may have worked with his kind in the war, making their resurrection horrific, he had nothing on the fact that they’re the same kind as Elo. The exposed wires, hanging circuits, shattered eyes and unnatural limbs; he wasn’t just scared, he was scarred. It doesn’t help that he had gotten so close to Luna’s power, a power that had filled his mind with millions of otherworldly thoughts.
    The machine crept out from bed, or off from the floor--whichever way it came off as--and headed out. He was careful to be quiet as possible, which wasn’t hard over Melissa’s excessive snoring. Why was she even in here? She usually slept alone in the ship’s cargo hold, but this time she had just slapped herself on top of Davy. There were no extra hammocks, so perhaps it was just the captain trying to act generous in the given scenario, but nonetheless, it was weird to him. He just shrugged it off as some kind of joke and crept through the darkened halls, the only light being the immense illumination from New Minerva’s cityscape, along with the beam of Elo’s eye. The bot eventually found himself tipping to the ship’s underbelly, flicking on the lights that cascaded down from the ceiling, or at least the few he needed. Organized piles of salvaged metal were scattered and stacked all over the place, some already gone into his workings. The entrance latched itself shut as the bipedal automaton made an untimely introduction to the lower hull of the levitating boat. Everything was surprisingly cold, as the engines had been deactivated for at least an hour now, engines that had been slotted in the flattened back of the ship and were railed off, the same boarder being of the hammerdrive and most large technologies the lab contained.
    He took his back-slotted toolbox over to the ship’s keel, his strange invention slotted in place. It was in a humanoid shape, the areas over joints baring miniature flotation connectors in order to act as a latch for whoever rested themself upon it. Elo had spent all his clicks on the five items, these being lower-grade of their kind, but they still got the job done. A yawn escaped from his artificial throat; he had no need for the biological function, it merely became a reflex for him to do such a task when sleep had been deprived.
    “I… I can’t sleep now…” A mutter of self-encouraging speech was provided to and from the droid, his eye aggressively twitching and spasming to try and force some kind of sleep, but he had work to do. Along the table to his left sat a large, homemade arm. The limb was far too large to be a simple prosthetic; did he plan on making some kind of crane? Truthfully, not even young Elo knew of his creation’s purpose, he just threw pieces of metal and morsels of time at the waster of said resources. That being said, he allocated and transferred over the correct pile of salvaged materials from across his den and began to make work of the brain-teasing passtime. Seconds turned into minutes and minutes had turned into hours as slab after slab of metal had been carefully welded on the limb. It just appeared to be a regular, albeit oversized, arm, aside from the large slot that had been engraved to its upper half. The object for that was sitting atop another workshop table, a large, rectangular slice of metal, the same kind that was made for hulls of ships. Against it were two more flaps of material, both folding and meeting to form a widened “A”. Elo clasped the item onto his own forearm, its back end nearly reaching his rectangular shoulder. He inspected the device that been made a new member of his limb, the two pieces of metal that folded now extending and slotting into their central hub, giving it the shape of a shield. That’s exactly what it was.
    Eventually, footsteps made way above the bot, though, his work was far too loud for him to consider the abnormality. Jessie crept down from the stairs, eyes glued to the machine as the device was twisted, smelted, and so on.. The co-captain didn’t interrupt the engineer, he merely watched from the unprotected stairwell, sitting on one of the steps where his legs would carelessly dangle over the edge. He sat there for a good hour, just watching as Elo slowly worked himself out of consciousness. The bot’s body gave out and merely fell onto its back, clanking against the floor like a heavy piece of discarded tin, the light ‘pink!’ sounding reminiscent of a can. The back of his head hit the ground like a hammer, ultimately turning to its side, facing away from Jessie. He hopped off the step and landed on the ground, both legs bending at their knees to provide suspension for the meter-high drop. The man walked over to the unconscious tinkerer and slid both arms out from his pockets. A sigh escaped his usually-silent self, the two limbs both taking hold parallel from each other along the long rim of his zipper, his jacket coming off like a bug shedding its old skin. The item was slid onto the cold-metal bot, it having no real effect aside metaphorical, but it is what it is. Jessie lifts his forcibly-sleeping comrade, sitting him down on one of the chairs in the room; Elo may have been light for a droid, but he was still a metal man, and there was absolutely no way that Jessie was going to drag something like that back up the stairs and into the sleeping quarters, only to set him against the ground again. The veteran stretches, his middle-aged muscles and joints not being as powerful as they once were, even if he was on the right side of his age’s bell curve in terms of condition.
    Jessie set himself back up the flight of stairs, making sure to be quiet in order to avoid waking anyone. Siv usually slept on the makeshift patient table in the infirmary, so he had nothing to worry about, but Jessie almost always slept in the quarters with everyone else. Even though he made no attempt to be silent, the fact his placement in the way revolved around it made stealth more of a reflex, but there was no way he was going to be able to crawl into his hammock and avoid detection, so he had to settle for the next best thing. The hubroom was dark and empty, the only light shining in from a wall-sized window along the starboard, the rightmost corridor leading directly to the hull, in which split and bent around the inner rim of the boat. He flopped down on the largest couch, its elderly frame lightly creaking as it springs under his weight. A sigh escapes the man, mixed emotions all having a singular escape from the inner folds of the mind. It’s not like having a rockable surface like the hammocks was even needed, as space and water work in two completely different ways; it was more or less just for the aesthetic. The first mate stretched one last time before laying down along the cushioned surface, it solely being enough for him to sleep, leaving him to do so with a single mutter.
    “Night, Kid...”