--Bertha Oneshots--

Doctor TOM

-SHORT-
Thanks to CherrimSquad on Twitter for the idea!

This morning at Spottiswood and Co, Bertha is going to make dressing up costumes for the local fancy dress shop. Celebrations, jubilations, inspirations to play as an entirely different character from a book or television show. The joys of creativity. The joys of entertainment. The thrill of dressing up. The big machine smiled when she learned she was going to make fun, fancy outfits.

Bertha loved being busy, having to have been programmed to follow a task and complete it flawlessly. So you could imagine how excited she was about starting another one, check marking and pinpointing the important details from Ted's coding. Lots of colourful fabric were needed, along with some thread to stitch everything together. Large fabric for the adults, smaller fabric for the children. A snip here, another snip there, sew it all, pull it out, repeat. Snip. Snip. Sew. Pull. Repeat. Snip. Snip. Sew. Pull. Repeat.

The machine copy and pasted the code throughout her system before starting. After making the first ten costumes she felt one of her inside gears hitting the edge of the green casing over and over. Bertha timed the steps as she worked through the order, pushing herself further and further to exhaustion. That's odd. It wasn't like her to get tired so quickly after making a few stacks of clothing. Yet at the same time, she didn't want to let anyone down by speaking her thoughts. So she kept on moving. The gears clanged against her casing more, tiring her to the point her conveyer belt started going slower. No, I can't give up now, I'm a strong machine, she thought and began to move quicker. The sooner she finished the order, the sooner she will be able to relax for a bit. Maybe a nap will cure the aching? Maybe she could find a way to lower the pressure on her metal gears?

Bertha was only halfway through the order when her factory friends started to notice how she was working more lazily then usual. Ted was the first to spot it, having to have worked with her for years. The machine tried to find an excuse for going slow but it didn't do as much convincing as she hoped. She usually fools them, but now this has reflected back at her at the worst time. She didn't want to stop work. The workers knew she didn't want to stop work, but poor Bertha isn't healthy enough to do any more work. Suddenly, out of nowhere, her computer started making strange beeping sounds before letting out a gust of air from her 'mouth'. Awoosh! Awoosh! What a sneeze!

Ted hurried over to her lever and switched her off. It was plainly obvious that something's wrong with Bertha. She would usually go beep, boop, whirr, honk. Now she is going beep, boop, whirr, awoosh, whirr, awoosh, honk. Her computer was lukewarm but it became difficult to input any codes, only displaying error messages on her monitor. The workers have tried everything to make her better. Ted and Roy tried to restart the computer by pressing a few buttons, nothing happened. Then they pulled a few small levers, it didn't fix anything. The machine was still going slow and was still feeling queasy. She was basically squeaking and sneezing her gears off. "I don't know what we are going to do now." Ted said in defeat, "Bertha is still feeling ill and the order just won't wait."

Then, came a robot. A rather friendly robot. But something looked unusual. "Isn't that TOM? What is he holding?" Nell wondered to Flo. "What is he wearing?" Flo agreed. Dressed in one of the kids costumes, the little robot wheeled in with a rather peculiar box. He wore a slightly long lab coat along his body, a head mirror wrapped around his head and a surgical mask was worn incorrectly over his eyes (he must've mixed up the mask's concept with a superhero mask's concept). As you would expect, the mask blocked his vision, and poor TOM bumped into both the boxes of costumes and the workers.

"TOM, this sort of mask is meant to go over your mouth and nose, not your eyes." Ted said to the robot, removing the mask from his eyes before noticing the box. "What are you doing with all of this?" TOM pulled out a small thin card from inside the box he was carrying and gave it to the machine operator. On the card, was a picture (which was really a drawing) of the small robot along with his date of 'birth'. Above all of these two things is his name, which he wrote himself the title of Doctor TOM, or as TOM wrote it by accident, Docktar TOM. Bertha chuckled at the name change before having a coughing fit. How is TOM, I mean, Doctor TOM going to help her get better? She knows that he will be by her side all the time, but what else? He must be up to something silly...