RP: YSS Miharu Mission 4: The Fame and the Fury

Gallant said:

"No, anywhere in the room will do," Yuzuki answered, "It doesn't actually matter. The componants in this room that do the fabricating are in the air."

She had already been browsing through available alloys and compounds, compatable with the purposes she was going to put whatever metal she decided upon to. Some of the combinations were useless. Some of them were too difficult to mold, or create, with the atoms that the matter collector had accumulated. She chose a middle-of-the-road alloy; An offshoot of platinum. According to the readout it had similar conductivity, but Yuzuki hesitated using it, especially with the way the ship drew power. It hadn't been tested or certified under this high of a load. It grated her nerves, but there was no other choice.

She selected it from the panel, and dragged it to the appropriate place in the schematic notes.

"See?" the sprite-Heisho said as she swept her hands across the screens, "Watch this."

The air around the capacitor rippled and warped like the intense heat off a furnace. Then, just as quickly, the whole image resolidified. It was the same capacitor. The traces of tampering, however, had been removed and a new resiliant mount had been fabricated beneath it to replace the one that had been brutally hacked away.

Yuzuki crossed to the distance to the capacitor, the volumetric windows trailing, and opened one of the panels. After a brief look, she motioned the two Hei closer.

"The way the fabricators work, is there's these little machines in the air. They take and reform molecules using compounds gathered by the ship's matter collectors. Sometimes they take already existing molecules and reform or replace them according to a schematic that the ship stores in its memory. Like, look."

She put her hands on a pale green panel and, after a brief struggle, removed it. She turned it over in her hands, displaying it. "Sometimes materials are salvagable, like these little tan lines spiderwebbing here. This is a monitoring chip for the capacitor that links into the main computer, and these are the electrical conduits. Now..." Glancing back into the gap she had created, Yuzuki put her hand on another panel, and yanked. She put the new, wafer-thin panel on top of the other, and said, "Look. They're silver now, right? That's the new alloy. It's worked in with the old one, and in some places here, it's completely replacing the conduits that got burnt out by the ship's power demands. These capacitors are meant to be maintenanced like this with the right materials on a three-month basis, but with the way we're deployed, it doesn't get done that often, and we'll have to do it all over again, the textbook way, when we're back in a port and can, but that isn't..."

The Heisho suddenly broke off, stifling a yawn with her off hand. When she had finished, she looked wearily back to the panels. Without another word, she turned back to the capacitor, locked them in, and shut the grate.

"Sorry. I shouldn't be wasting time like this. Go ahead and take this one back down, and bring the other one up. Next time, Rin, you're doing the fabricating. I'll show you how."

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