Mechanical heart (Viktor x OC)

39

Two years had passed since Silco died and Elvira got her powers back. The undercity had been in turmoil the first 6 months after Silco's passing, and Elvira suddenly got a lot of work on her hands. There was fighting in the streets, the chembarons were fighting over power and territory, and Elvira's medic ward was flooded with wounded civilians. 

And after the turmoil had settled down, the popularity of augmented bodies became more popular, and the people in power took notice of her robotic arm and requested that she started working with augments and prosthetics. 

She had been against it at the beginning, but after Ash had convinced her to do it, she gave in. His arguments were that if she did that, she would get more influence in Zaun, which meant that she had more power to help the unfortunate civilians in Zaun. 

She had too much shit on her plate these days, but she loved it. For the past two years she had been on autopilot, constantly moving and doing something.

"Elvira!" Ash yelled from the entrance of the med ward. She was about to respond when she saw Ash rushing in, carrying a young child around the age of ten. "Holy shit, what happened to her?" she asked as she helped lay the girl onto one of the beds. 

"It's those god damn glorious evolved people," Ash started. "Tell me more after we've stabilized her," Elvira said before she walked over to the cabinet and grabbed her tools. Elvira quickly got to work on the girl, looking over her body.

Her legs were covered in melted steel, and it seemed like the steel had melted all the way down to her bones. "What the fuck were they even trying to do?" Elvira cursed under her breath. "Failed augmentation," Ash quickly explained. 

"Failed augmentation? Did they even know what they were doing?" Elvira asked as she grabbed her needle and injected a sleeping draught into the arm of the girl, causing her to sleep for the heavy procedure she was about to perform on her.

"Does it look like they knew what they were doing?" Ash asked as he grabbed the scalpel and tweezer, before going to work on trying to cut and peel the melted steel off of her legs to see what was salvageable. 

"Fucking idiots," Elvira sighed before she also got to work. The steel had melted into the skin on the legs, so it was incredibly hard for them to separate it, but they wanted to try as hard as they could before they just chopped her legs off. 

After working on her legs for two hours, Ash and Elvira finally peel off the last piece of steel from the skin. But, there wasn't much left of her legs to salvage, so they had to think of another plan. "We could amputate them?" Ash suggested. "Yeah, and send a ten-year-old child without legs to survive in the Zaunite streets? Gosh Ash, you act like a Piltovan," Elvira said disappointed in his stupidity. 

"We have to give her robotic legs, but I don't have anything for her size," Elvira said while wrapping the girl's legs up in a moist bandage. Her legs were stripped to the muscle, with parts of the muscle around the feet missing, leaving the bones open to the air, so they had to make sure it was always wet.

"You have to watch over her and administer pain medication whenever she wakes up. Can you do that while I make her some legs?" Elvira asked as she peeled her gloves off her hand and threw them in the trash bin.

"Make her some legs? How long do you plan on wasting on this?" Elvira shook her head. "Ash, I already have blueprints and everything for that, I just need to make them smaller. And some small adjustments, but it will only take me a few days. Just watch over her, ok?" she asked him and waited for a response. 

"Sure, whatever." 

"She's not gonna wake for a while though, so do you mind coming with me to my office, and telling me how you found her?" Elvira asked, and Ash nodded as he got up and followed her to her office, taking the most comfortable seat in there. 

"So I was out buying chemicals for your lab stuff when I came across a group of those fuckheads from the church of the glorious evolved," Ash started, and Elvira rolled her eyes at the mention of the cult. 

The Church of the Glorious Evolved was a stupid cult that believed in metal over flesh and valued augmented bodies over not-augmented bodies. Some members of the group were somewhat normal, but there were always a few idiots who were crazy, wanted to augment their bodies for no reason at all, and went to great lengths to do so. 

"They were gathered in some sort of temple, and I think they were performing a ritual or some shit. They were all chanting shit about the gray lady and the machine herald or some fucktard," Ash explained. 

"What the fuck is a machine herald?" Elvira asked, never having heard the cultists mention any machine herald before. The gray lady was familiar to her, as she had heard mentions of her before from the clients she had augmented before. But the sane members of the church, only augmented what was already faulty or broken from before. The insane ones are those who ruin their perfectly good and wealthy bodies just so they could be remade in steel.

"It's this dude they are all worshiping now, I think he's kinda new, I haven't heard about him before either," he explained. Elvira tapped her fingers on the surface of the desk, as she was thinking through his words. 

"I'll look for him." Ash lifted his head up as soon as the words left Elvira's lips. "What?" he asked in disbelief. "I said I'll look for him," she repeated herself. "Why the fuck would you do that!" Ash couldn't believe his ears. Was she dumb?

"Because he's literally making people hurt their children for fun, whether he knows it or not! I can't just sit here and watch his followers to this shit to other innocent people!" Elvira argued. 

"Whatever they do to themselves is not my concern, they can fuck up their own bodies any day, but this is a child Ash, she's ten! And if he doesn't take responsibility for his followers, then I will find him and make him," she said as she crossed her arms across her chest. 

"And how are you gonna do that? He's called the machine herald, I'm pretty sure he's decked out in all sorts of robotic shit," Ash asked, raising his eyebrow in question. 

Elvira lifted her hand and summoned her magic. She lifted a piece of metal from the corner where Ash was sitting and levitated it over to where she was standing. She flicked her hand, and the metal piece got crunched together to a tiny ball. 

"He may have steel, but I have magic," Elvira grinned at Ash, who sighed in frustration. "I was gonna use that steel..."