I followed Starflower to the industrial district, running to catch up as she crossed roads with single lunging steps and bounced up buildings to get over them. By the time she stopped, I'd had to deploy my jets just to keep her in sight. If nothing else, she was very mobile... I landed next to her as she spun her head around, her eyes flashing as she scanned the area, her hair flaring out as she spun. Were the ringlets acting as an antenna? I couldn't quite tell how she worked yet, but it looked like she was using a basic sonar system that suppressed the sound ping to be safe for anyone around her.
"Boy, I'm picking up a lotta life signs around here!" she said, squinting one eye and looking around closely "I bet a lot of them are ne'er-do-wells!"
"How do you know if they're bad guys versus good guys?" I asked, turning on my own sensors. I didn't see too many life signs myself, but I was designed to pick up single life signs across wide spaces of aether, not penetrate buildings and ground to find people in a city. The flaws of being mostly designed as a FolDrone, I supposed. There were cities in the folds, of course, but those usually required whole teams of heroes to recover, we drones were mostly deployed to save the people trapped in smaller folds or 'islands' and carry them back to grounded reality. As it was, I could maybe see two or three people in my range, and they all were just sitting still, not doing much.
"Aw, I gotta go talk to 'em!" Starflower said "I'm really good at pickin' out intentions! Usually the baddies are pretty rude, where good ones are happy to see me! And of course, anyone who isn't happy to see little ol' me is mighty suspicious in my book!"
"Well, you can't just beat people up because they were rude to you..." I said "That's a violation of GGDS protocols, we need reasonable cause or to actually catch them in the act of a crime."
"Sure as shootin'!" she said, her head bobbing up and down in an exaggerated nod "Once I get a bead on the bad ones, I'll do a lil sleuthing to find out what they're hiding, works every time!"
"That sounds like a violation of procedure..." I said, but the little pop ups didn't flash to let me know I was breaking the law... Then again, GGDS procedure wasn't strictly a 'law', so maybe my systems didn't know?
"Come on, there's a real suspicious fella down this way, he's being sneakier than an elf with a monogamy fetish!" she said, bouncing up into the air and moving down towards a loading bay outside of my range
"I think that's... not appropriate to say..." I said, wincing as I followed her. She ignored me and landed in front of a personnel door with a sproing.
"Okey doke sassafras, I'll call him out, and we'll scope out his attitude, dig?" she said, her eyes flashing
"Just like, knock on the door?" I asked "Well... ok, that sounds fine, I don't see a problem-"
She rapped on the door rapid fire, her gloved hand making muffled thumps on the metal as she bounced excitedly. After a few moments of her knocking non-stop, the door burst open to an angry, tall elven man without a shirt on.
"What? Gods, what? I'm trying to work here!" he barked
"Hi howdy sir!" Starflower sang "Me and my cousin here were just wondering what you were working on so late in the evening?"
The elf looked back and forth between the two of us "Cousins? It's not that late, it's not even eight yet. Why do you care what I'm doing, anyway?"
"Ah, excuse me," I said "We were just on a patrol of the area, and we're checking in on people to make sure everything's ok. We're very sorry to bother you."
"So terribly sorry!" Starflower chimed in "Can we come in?"
"Come in?! Wh-" the man started
"Oh, thank you, I do believe I will!" Starflower said, and stepped nimbly through the space between his leg and the doorframe.
The man spun around and walked towards her, grabbing a steel pipe from next to the door, pulling it up over his head as he got closer to Starflower. She looked around, ignoring him, and started picking stuff up off the tables in the warehouse, making 'ooh' and 'aahh' noises as she did so. If she wasn't careful, the guy would smash her head, and I couldn't very well go in after her- or... could I? I could stop a crime in the act, and I could enter private property to do so...
I made the decision to classify Starflower as a person in my head, meaning the guy about to smack her was committing assault. I used that loophole to jet my way inside and grab the pipe as he swung it, yanking it out of his hand. I used my weight and momentum to bring him to the ground and quickly put zip cuffs on him from a compartment in my leg and jabbed him with a tranq from my clockwork arm. I stood back up again and looked over to Starflower, who was digging through a giant box next to the loading bay. I sighed, she hadn't even noticed that I'd fought him.
"Hey, you can't do that, that's still his property, even if he let you come in, he didn't consent to a search." I said, walking over.
"I think he's a mite deserving of this search, you see what he's got here?" she said, pulling out a long metal tube.
I frowned at it, it looked familiar, but I couldn't tell why. I took it from her and pulled it the rest of the way out of the box, and gasped in shock; the base of it had a grav-stabilizer, a trigger, a stock, and energy readings that were dangerously close to those you'd expect to see in the folds. This 'tube' was actually a long range reality displacement projector cannon, and it was primed and ready to fire.
"Wh-did you know about this?" I asked Starflower
"I mighta, I might not-a." she said coyly. "I bet sure as a sunrise that you'd have seen 'em though, with your fancy scanners!"
"I'd have to be scanning for displacement radiation in a populated civilian area, I- why would I be doing that?" I said, shaking my head "This is huge though, there's..." I counted the cannons "...Eight of these things! That's enough to take out a whole city before they ran out of juice!"
"Hm, yeah, I reckon' it'd be enough to take out just about anything, sure enough." she nodded "Ain't ya glad we came in here?"
"I... yeah, this is more non-holy destructive power we've seen in one place since The Great War, as far as I know." I said "Fuck, I thought the government was supposed to be using satellite scanners to track creations of new displacement generators, how did some random guy get his hands on these?"
"Please don't swear, it's unprofreshinal!" Starflower sang, peering down the barrel of a gun capable of warping miles of landscape into another plane.
"You need to be honest with me, Starflower, did you target this guy because of these cannons?" I asked, taking the one she'd picked up from her
"I'm nothin' but honest, butterfly." She said, her smile slipping "I told you tonight would be a doozy, didn't I?"
"So you did know..." I said "Are there any more around here?"
"You'd have to check!" she said, opening up the bay door to reveal a black moving truck backing up to it "We're about to be a wee bit busy for a while though, I hope you drank your milk this morning!"
I lifted into the air, my legs locking in. I slammed my hands against my thighs and the rough metal disconnected, twisting and shifting to become two hydraulic powered fists over my regular ones. I couldn't land while I had my combat fists out, because they were made of most of my legs, but with my jets that wasn't as important. As the first guy with a gun rounded the side of the truck to unlock it, I blasted forward, slamming my fist into the soft part of his torso, just under his ribs. He made a sound like a dying donkey, and fell over onto his face, curled up around his heavily bruised gut.
On the other side of the truck, the driver had jumped out, and pulled up a gun, unloading it at Starflower. She spun and danced, dipping under and around the bullets as she closed the gap faster than I could fly over to her. She wrapped her arms around the man, pinning his gun to his side, and spun, getting taller as her legs extended and twisted around each other before slowing down to a stop, her bow almost touching the ceiling of the warehouse. Suddenly, she snapped into motion again, spinning the other way so fast her shape was a blur, shrinking back to her normal size in less than a second and letting go of the driver as she locked into place after 'unwinding'. He flew across the room in a corkscrew twirl and hit the wall with a crash, falling down and laying still.
I quickly put zip cuffs on both the driver and the other man, and drug them over behind the truck, changing my fists back into legs and landing. I looked at the back of the truck, usually I wouldn't, but... I did have reasonable suspicion now... I broke the lock off with my good hand and shoved the rolling door open, peering into the gloomy truck.
"Drat! Looks like this was the first pickup!" Starflower said next to me, making me jump
"It doesn't look like there's anything in there, yeah..." I said "Do you think there were more planned pickups?"
"I vote we use those scanners of yours to see. Mine are... unreliable for a slew of reasons." she said, stepping up into the truck and jumping up and down, making the whole thing bounce
I frowned and looked around the room. It looked mostly benign, and there were no other obvious crates, so a general scan would most likely be the next option. Starflower stepped out of the van and into the crate, lounging on the cannons as if she was in a bath tub, and I stepped outside, taking off into the air to get a better view of the area while I scanned. I floated over the landscape, seeing the warehouses and factories spread out around me like a map, and I switched on my displacement radiation scanner, blanketing the area in a wave of lines and dots on my overlay.
I looked down at the warehouse we'd just come out of, and sure enough, there was a bright glowing spot where the crate was. I turned my scanner to the larger area, and saw another glowing section of warehouse off about three streets away, and another, very faint one at the edge of town. I turned the other way, and saw a section further off in the wilderness that was glowing, but in the faded, rainbow striped way that usually meant there was a fold distortion there. They'd been testing these, it seemed...
I dropped to the ground, and walked inside, where Starflower was still in the crate, pretending to scrub herself with imaginary 'water'. I gave her a polite smile, and reached my hand out to her.
"Hey, we have to call this in. This is big, like, it could start a second world war kind of big. Is there any reason you shouldn't be here when the response team shows up?"
"Me? Hm, I don't guess so, but if there's another spot you found, I'd like to go give it the ol scope out while you deal with the feds, if'n it's the same to you."
"There's two, one on the edge of town, and one closer." I said, and gave her the address to the closer one "I'll be by shortly to help, please don't do anything without me, ok?"
"Sure as spittin'!" she said, tipping her bow to me "I'll fish out the rapscallions quicker 'n a jiffy, you'll see."
"No- Starflower, don't fish out anyone, we- ah, damnit..." I said as she slipped out the door and bounded away
I sighed, and called in the criminals and the stockpile of banned weapons to the local branch of the PSTCU and sat down to wait on them. One of the men I'd zip cuffed stared at me, and I frowned at him, not liking his expression.
"Stop looking at me like that, what's your problem?" I said, crossing my arms
"...You're pretty, for a robot, that's all." he said, sneering
"I- I'll have you know I'm a fully registered citizen, I'm an artificial life form, not a 'robot'." I said, an anger growing in me. Flirting? With me? The woman who just kicked his ass and tied him u- Oh. Oh
I felt slightly self conscious at that realization. "That's not important, why do you have these weapons? What were you planning to do with them?"
The man leered at me and tried to sit up "I don't know, I wasn't even aware there were weapons in there. Far as I knew, it was a box of industrial rolling pins."
I stood up and walked closer to him "Well you had to know who hired you, right? And where you were delivering them to?"
The man shook his head "Sorry Miss, job was done over the phone, payment on delivery, to be delivered to a spot in the woods. I'd be happy to give you the information for the dropoff, though..."
I huffed. It's not like it'd help now anyway, the other party would be long gone by the time I arrived, and I still needed to help Starflower with her end of things. I stopped myself from kicking the man, barely, and walked stiffly back over to the crate of weapons. I'd done my job, the PSTCU would do theirs in helping track down where these weapons came from, I just needed to let the system do its thing.
Thirty minutes later, the team of PSTCU troopers showed up, one of them scanning the box as soon as they came in the door, their white fullbody containment suits masking their identities fully. One of them walked up to me and held up a clipboard, her voice coming through a small speaker in her mask.
"Mod, I presume? Of the Valley City Unchosen?" she asked, writing on the notepad
"Correct, I called it in, and I took down the suspects with help from another individual, a miss 'Starflower', currently un-affiliated."
"I see, and could you describe the events leading up to and including the capture of the suspects?"
"We were doing a patrol, and miss Starflower decided to knock on doors to speak to individuals. That individual" I pointed at the first man "answered the door, and when Starflower asked to enter, he said 'come in', so she did."
Not... a lie, per say. I was telling the truth as far as the facts were concerned.
"Once she was inside, the man attempted to assault her with a deadly weapon, so I stepped in to stop him. At that point, Starflower discovered the weapons, and shortly after the other two men showed up in that truck and attacked us, discharging a firearm within city limits while doing so. We stopped them non lethally with reasonable force, and reported the incident."
"I see, and where is miss Starflower right now?" the lady asked, looking up from her clipboard
"I scanned the area and found several other signatures of displacement radiation. She went to go check out the closest one. If I may, I'd like to go assist her in that. May I call you again when we've secured the other location?"
The lady took a step back "There was more than one signature?! Ma'am, we deal with less than one case of displacement radiation in the whole region per year, yes, please go check that out at once, I'm sorry for keeping you."
I gave her a polite smile, and stepped outside, taking off into the sky, arcing towards the second location. I'd cut the post-combat briefing short, yes, but the PSTCU weren't as concerned with the details of the fights as the GGDS were, and technically the fight wasn't even over yet, so I didn't feel the usual sense of guilt I got when I ran off from a crime scene early. I spotted a familiar shape of yellow, silver, and red down below, and dropped down next to her, my life form sensors not showing any signs there was anyone in the building I'd marked, aside from a few rats.
"Everything look good?" I asked her "I'm not seeing anyone in there..."
"I'm right as rain!" she said "It was all cleared out when I popped up, I bet they heard us coming and ske-daddled!"
"That's... not ideal, but it does mean we can breach the building without worrying about combat." I said "Traps, however-"
Starflower rocked back on one foot and kicked out with the other one, the leg reaching out across the street and smashing the door to the building open. I braced myself for an explosion, but nothing happened. I looked at her, and she grinned and winked, pulling her leg back in.
"Traps don't scare me!" she said "I can step on a landmine and not even leave my chair!"
"Would your leg survive it, though?" I asked, frowning at her as we crossed the street
"My leg? Shoot, that guy owes me money, why do I care if he makes it?" she asked, her head twirling around
"...I don't understand you, sometimes." I said, sighing
"You'd better get used to me soon, pardner!" she said, bouncing through the door "We just blew a whole case wide open, I figure we're stuck together 'till we solve it now!"
I walked in after her and looked around. Sure enough, there was another crate just like the first one, on the floor in the otherwise abandoned warehouse.
"I'm not against helping you solve the case, Starflower." I said "But in return, I'd like you to honestly consider registering, ok? I'd hate to see someone with your talent and passion locked up as an oddity."
"Aw shucks, just say you like me, why doncha?" she said, popping open the box "I'll get your meaning!"
I looked in after her, and saw a row of small, round objects, black and bumpy. Grenades... Even worse, grenades with small displacement generators on them... Just one of these going off could send a whole city block to nigh unreachable depths of inky black spacetime. I pulled up my coms and quickly dialed the number for the PSTCU. A familiar voice picked up almost instantly.
"Mod?" the lady asked "Did you find the location you left for?"
"I did, they have grenades powered by displacement radiation here, no people, though." I said
"That's concerning..." she said "We've seen the cannons before, we were speculating they may have been left over from The Great War, just refurbished, but we don't have any record of grenades existing before now. Thank you very much, would you mind doing another scan and letting us know the results?"
"Absolutely." I said, and took off into the air, going out the door and into the sky again. I turned on my scanner and looked around. Below me there was the cluster I'd seen before, and- another cluster next to it? Moving around quickly, with multiple signatures even. I quickly scanned the rest of the area, seeing that the blip on the edge of the town was gone already, and dropped down to investigate. I zipped in the door to see-
"Starflower, no!" I yelled
"What? What did she do?!" the lady on the phone asked
"She's juggling the grenades, I- I have to go, get here soon!" I hung up and flew over to her, grabbing the black balls out of the air quickly
"Do you not realize these will destroy you?!" I asked "And the whole block? And me?!"
Starflower's grin faltered, but it pulled back up again quickly "Dang, girlie, I'm the best juggler I know, t'wern't any danger!"
"That's not the point, we- you can't just take risks like that." I said "I know you've got a lot of energy and you want to have fun, but please, don't play with the weapons of mass destruction..."
"Alright, I'll watch my mitts, sure enough." she said, looking at me with a strange, plastered on look "Tell you what though, I don't have that much energy, truly. In fact, I'm feeling more worn out than the rug at a cancer screening clinic."
"I- you really can't say that." I said, drooping "...But ok, fine. I guess you have a recharge station close by?"
She nodded "Of course! I'll get out of your..." she looked at my molded porcelain hair "...helmet? I'll just pop on home, recharge for the next big day! Can I count on you to help me out?"
I looked at her, her face hopeful and innocent and sighed "Yeah, I'll... wait around for the PSTCU, then go back to my own charge bay. I'll help you tomorrow, but after that, we need to seriously talk about registration, ok?"
She saluted me, and winked "I'll do anything for ya, if'n ya scratch my back! See you tomorrow!"
As she stretched and bounced away, I couldn't help but feel I'd gotten myself involved in something I wasn't fully equip to deal with...