Synthetic Soul (Nuts & Dolts)

Chapter 3: Dream of the Sentient

Breath, Penny had given herself the ability to breathe as a means of cooling her internal components, this was the first of her "organic" upgrades as her and Ruby began calling them. As the next few weeks came and went, breath was only the first of many. The next thing they changed were Penny's "muscles" the servos that supplied for her movement and strength were prone to breaking, especially under heavy loads, so together they replaced them using instead bundles of thin tubing filled with a hydraulic fluid to mimic organic muscles, this of course required Penny to have a skeleton after a fashion but she was able to learn from the shortcoming of human and Faunus skeletal structures and built hers herself as well as optimizing her muscles. Her new muscles and skeleton gave her a better range of motion and dropped the amount of small mechanical failures she had suffered from before amongst numerous other slight improvements.

With the need for any kind of serious maintenance dropping as she improved herself Penny never left to go receive the weekly checkups she had thought she would, meeting with her father became short check-ins with via her scroll before leaving to go out for the weekend's activities, spending time with the team, her team. It hadn't taken very long for her to become part of the team, before Yang was making dirty jokes with her, before Weiss had softened up and opened up to her, before Blake had let Penny borrow some of her books, she was a part of them and she didn't want that to change.

Days passed and before she knew it Penny had been living with team RWBY for almost two months, she had also made more upgrades. The addition of a stomach like organ utilizing a semi-active level of her semblance to break down food into its useful materials and then sent throughout her body via a blood-like system to repair herself, to replace the hydraulic fluid in her muscles, close wounds among other things. Now she ate and drank with her team just like any other student and her body used the material to keep her healthy. Her breathing became more as her body now removed the sugars from food she conceived an organ to perform simple combustion just like a living body burns sugars to produce energy as long as Penny ate she didn't need to plug into a wall for charging. She felt herself becoming more like the people around her, she felt less like a machine and more like a synthetic soul.

Penny chewed idly on her food, it still didn't taste like much because she hadn't found a way to accurately replicate taste buds but she was working on it. Staring off as she ate in the midst of the noisy cafeteria she was becoming more life-like but there were still questions that lingered on her mind, looking down the table she saw Ruby, her head tilted back as she laughed at something Yang had said, the girl looked to her still smiling and without even a thought Penny smiled back. She still wondered frequently what Ruby thought of her, although now at least Penny was quite sure of what she felt for Ruby.

And she was hopelessly hopelessly in love, she thought back to the first moment she was really sure of her feelings.

Penny leaned on the railing of the balcony on the third floor of the dorm building, the area was large and normally used as a rec area for the dorms inhabitants, but at this time of night Penny was alone. She sighed morosely and trained her gaze up to the shattered moon surrounded by the innumerous stars of the night sky.

She heard someone approaching from behind her and she turned finding Weiss there.

"Weiss?" She asked the heiress.

Weiss smiled coming and leaning on the railing next to her. "What are you doing out here Penny?" She asked quietly.

Penny turned back to the railing breaking eye contact. "Just thinking."

"Yeah me too." Weiss sighed.

After a moment of silence Penny turned to her team mate. "What about?"