wrong number, sorry! ~ irondad & spiderson

CHAPTER 15

After Peter proved to the receptionist that he indeed was the new intern and they finally let him in, an intern came up to him and told the boy she'd show him around where he'd work and what he'd have to do. They were just simple tasks like screwing something tight and helping the other interns, but it was still much better than the coffee job other high school interns had to do.

Shayla, the intern showing Peter around, told him it was because he got 100% on the test he had to do to apply for the internship. He even would've worked in the upper labs if he wasn't that young, it was just too dangerous for his age.

About an hour after Peter entered the lobby, he finally was able to start working. There wasn't anybody needing him to do anything, so Shayla told him to just do whatever he wanted to do, as long as he didn't set anything on fire. Apparently, they already had one fire in this lab this week, and it was still Monday.

So Peter took out his crappy old laptop and continued to code his AI. He had his headphones plugged in and was listening to music to help him focus even more on fixing a problem he didn't seem to understand, so he didn't see or hear Shayla looking over his shoulder behind him.

"You forgot something in the code just right above this one. It should work if you put [insert coding knowledge or whatever] right there," the girl said and pointed to where she found the mistake.

Peter jumped and turned his head to the other intern. She was smiling apologetically for startling him.

"Yeah you're right," the boy responded and quickly fixed the mistake. "Thank you."

"It's no problem, we all help each other here. By the way, what are you programming? It looks really impressive for a high schooler."

"Oh! I want to build a little robot and this is the AI I want it to have! And thank you!" The boy smiled brightly when Shayla praised him.

"Do you have the robot with you? You could work on it here, we have enough scraps you could use," she gestured to her own pile of scraps and to the ones of the other interns. "I'm sure the others wouldn't mind if you took some of theirs, they probably don't need it anymore. And if you need something completely else, just ask me and I might be able to get it for you, depending on what it is."

Peter was stunned of how nice Shayla was to him. He definitely didn't expect anybody to be nice to him because he was still a high schooler and theoretically too young to be in these labs, but it surely was different than expected.

"You really don't have to do that! I'm perfectly fine with the scraps I have!"

"Then let's see if they're really enough, if I'm allowed to see it."

Proudly smiling, Peter took out the little box he kept the unfinished robot spider in. He opened it and put everything on the table in front of him. There was the robot, some blueprints (even though most of them were on Peter's laptop) and some scraps and small tools.

Shayla took the robot in her hands after Peter nodded, allowing her to take it, and looked at it from every angle.

"This looks good kid, but I'm sure this could improve a lot with the stuff we have access to here," she spoke, still examining Peter's little creation.

"You don't have to do that for me, I should be the one helping you and not you me!" Peter exclaimed, looking at the other intern with puppy-like eyes. Shayla laughed.

"I know I don't have to, but I want to. And I've already told you, we all help each other here. It's already enough that you're here, I miss having someone to talk to. But let's get started now. What do you need"

Together, the two of them worked on Peter's little spider robot and on the AI. When they took a short break to get some food, they met up with Shayla's partner, Azul. They were very friendly towards Peter, who fortunately had enough money to buy himself a little bit food from the cafeteria.

All three of them then went back to the lab. Azul went to a coffee maker to get coffee for all of them, while Peter and Shayla continued on working on the spider which they lovingly named "Scraps", simply because it was made mostly out of scraps. And maybe because none of them were creative enough to give it a better name. Actually, Azul had a better name, but they were too slow and when they were finally at the other two intern's work benches, they had already decided on "Scraps" and refused to give the robot a different name. So it stuck.

When they finally decided to look at the time after what felt like only a couple of seconds, they found it was already 7 pm, two hours after they took their last break and around the time everybody started to go home. The trio went out of the building together and said their goodbyes there, already planning on meeting again the next day.