Working With Phantoms

The Reject Line

September 1st

Madran arrived at lunch with all of her friends and sat down, with everyone beginning a conversation.

"So, how is everyone today?"

"I'm doing good. Haru, how goes things?"

"Decently well. I'm glad that we're getting closer to finishing the palace."

"Hey, Haru, how are you enjoying this whole Metaverse gig? It's ok to be wary about it, but I wanna know how you feel."

"Honestly..."

Haru sighed.

"It's pretty weird. Like, I never would've thought that such a place existed, let alone inside of my father's heart. It's odd, too, like, how he views not just me, but all of the workers inside of the palace. They just work away, only stopping to either try to stop us, or when they eventually break down."

"Yeah, it's pretty horrible how the broken robots are just thrown away. Imagine how many more they would have if they would just, like, repair them."

"Near the beginning of our line, we found a section of the palace full of Corporobos being built. Seriously, they have more than enough to spare, which is rather worrying."

"It gives us a really depressing insight into how Okumura views his workers. Instead of humans trying their best at a job, he just sees endless robots all ordered into various ranks that work until they drop. Then, when they drop, they get thrown away like a soda that one just finished drinking."

"That's only half of the story, too. The only reason as to why the Corporobos are attacking us in the first place is because they see Haru there. They always target Haru first, unless if she blocks an attack or someone else hits them first."

"That's weird. We've only had to deal with a few shadows here and there. None of the robots go for us at all. All that they do is just work away while we sneak around them."

"Yeah, the only times we've damaged Corporobos is when we lure them away from the others and take them down to steal their keycards. That's how we can basically access most of the palace now."

"Yeah, we did the same, except we had to deal with a few waves of those blue, yellow, and red robots before we got to take down a green one. The assault didn't stop there, either."

"Hey, if you have a green card, then, once you get to this kinda circular hallway with several doors correlating to the robot ranks, go through the one for the green guys. There, you can probably find who might be sending all of the shadows and robots after you."

"Oh, really?"

"Yeah, we managed to fool that robot into thinking we were GM robots, and he gave us the cards to get everywhere we wanted."

"Interesting. I'll be sure to try that out soon."

"Are you guys in the large room with all of the conveyor belts going every which way?"

"Yes, we weren't able to get through it too easily. There was this tram thing we could've taken, but our cards didn't allow us to."

"Oh, wow, we were able to do that."

"Ok then, we should then definitely try and get those better cards."

"Yep."

Lunch then ended soon after, with Madran spending the rest of her school day busy and eventually heading back home, with her then going to work on schoolwork after seeing that Elia was busy. However, after a few minutes, Elia poked her head out of her room and then went up to meet Madran, with Chicory trailing behind.