Wishful Cheating

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When Pepper was sent to a quaint village to assist Doctor Crownsley, everybody knew what they were after and many were already setting bets as to who would find what. It was a rare mineral, too. They had little chance of finding it and had attempted multiple times in the past to gain possession of it.

Her hair was a sprightly red, and her face was all smiles because she had been looking forward to coming back and had always been positive about it one way or the other. The good doctor had held less than a cheery disposition and had always been pushed by his vivacious assistant to progress his discovery, and it helped that their bond had been greater than their obstacles. They cared only for results.

They had not gotten along at all at first, and when Pepper was new she made it very clear to him that she was going to be a lot to handle. It wasn’t all that pleasant for the aforementioned handful either. To endure much of his talk of old age and the good old days when one had no choice but to rely on mere smarts and no lilacs was annoying. She had a meme for every occasion and this honestly vexed him.


But it was their comradery that made them come to the same place once again. If they wished to obtain the scarce mineral they had to bring in more than just their brains. So when they built a small but potent army of robots, one-note, single-minded and acting as one; there was no way this mission would fall to ruins, and when they became doubtful, fretful, they only needed to look behind them to know everything would turn out just fine - if they were careful.


She never remembered seeing anything but their gray bots and the curious inhabitants of Rose Garden staring about, and as she always saw the same people and heard them whispering in awe, she gathered the one following them was a newcomer. A suspicious woman in a pristine white uniform with purple hair and open-wide cerulean eyes, tinted with a hazy seaweed tone. Giggling at nothing and at everything because there must have been some golden humor Pepper missed somewhere which would have more or less explained the strange behavior. But a part of her suspected something more than a missed joke.

“You come on with your nifty bots and give them legs? I foresee tragedy in your diminutive future. I’m only going to send my people back a thousand years and say,” came the laughter of the cop, “I don’t need a tarot card to predict the impending hot mess that is,” the woman seemed to have a little trouble pointing to the small bots, “this.”

Dr. Crowsley would be alarmed if he saw or heard the stranger giggling halfway into a comment.  “Your bots are going to need a lightweight build, and preferably a set of continuous tracks. Don’t thank me, thank the wonderful nerds that sit on their butts replying to other nerds like themselves on the lacnet. Being oddly specific and hypothetical here, you can find that kind of information at Robotix dot lac.”

The next burst of laughter annoyed Pepper into wishing she had not listened to half the trash that was coming out of her mouth. Crownsley turned round and faced her finally, doing so only after Pepper pushed for him to walk faster. “Ten, nine, eight, seven, -” there was a laughing mess following them; “-six, five, four, three, two,- Here it comes, guys, gals and non-binary pals!”

They saw nothing of her prediction for that last second. The window of doubt closed after the Rune Knight’s idiotic claim fell through, they looked at the name tag she had on her, and in the process of reporting her,  the legs of their automatons made contact with the smaller rocky formations the cave had to offer naturally and caused them to fall over like a pack of dominoes. Pepper screamed, Crownsley panicked, and Vera guffawed with glee.

It was the work of misfortune indeed that the Doctor had insufficient replacement parts. And Vera was the most carefree person there, as she danced to the sound of nothing and twirled her way through the cave alone like a spaghetti-armed ballerina, ignoring their concerned cries asking for her to come back. A good while had passed since then. She was standing in the middle of the darkness surrounded by flowstones when she stopped her lively jig a few minutes later. She felt formless, one with the blackness and was not sure of where she was anymore because she was beginning to fall and cry out ecstatically. It was quite fun until she managed to  land rather painfully  on her back.

How very dark.

The second thing she came in contact with aside from the floor had been rough-textured but not like that of stone. Like a blind person learning the ways of Braille, she brushed her fingers along a peculiar design and through pained laughter and determination grabbed whatever it was that tickled her tactile fancy and brought it closer to her chest. “My pain is,” she wheezed, “hilarious!”

“Oh, kindly human who summons me, I reward you with wishes eternity.” She heard one voice say. The owner of that voice was the brightest person there with her, and from what she could tell he might have been handsome. The long pink hair, the red eyes, and slender form. Another person would probably have cared, not her.

“I’ll be concise so you can get out of my hair, you’re a real disco ball in a funeral. Your wholesome glow is frying the ever loving heck out of my retinas. Be gone, cave dweller. I am living my best life.”

“Ah, ungrateful creature who commands me, I am giving you more than wishes three!”

“Ok, questionable being from my psyche, I wish for you to fix the lovely couple’s robots and make the upgrades necessary to guarantee their safety. We need to give the sugar daddy and his sugar baby something to smile about.”

“What a selfless wish, my master! I am Zeale, your loyal servant. Your desires are orders, my lady. But I must first see to it that you leave the cave in one piece. Please, please, do follow me, human!” The glow was starting to take shape, and in its place was a blue butterfly that illuminated the path for her to take.

Vera would stumble and laugh again, the process tedious for him, as she would wander off  merrily to observe the most insignificant details of  the natural environment, and he would have to somehow guide her back. It was a miracle Vera could have traveled such a distance in a dark cave, alone, and still be in good spirits. But it was the power of the LSD blotter she took that day. And it was glorious.

Not many things happened during her time away in which the assistant and her partner contemplated what to do, but Vera was not disappointed by the sight and the sound of mechanical parts appearing and being magically put together. She had emerged from the cave with great timing. The process was slow enough to observe, and everything about it interested her as she made clumsy mental notes of what to practice in her spare time.

When they awakened to the fact that their inventions were mystically improved, they stared at the loopy officer and praised what they thought had been the work of her inherited magic. Their words were perfectly ignored, leaving them to think she had done it all with her power as she strayed from them. Vera never knew herself to have been so forgetful of a magic lamp that size, but the proof was in the pudding.  It was gone forever.

But when she shoved her hand in her pocket to see if she had any gum, her fingers were met with something smaller. She always thought she hallucinated the whole interaction, so it was like a bolt out of the blue when she pulled it out for closer inspection.

“Zeale, you’re not a teenager's embarrassing wet dream come to life?” She said this cheerfully and quickly, “Why didn’t you say anything? You’re a genie with phenomenal cosmic power!”

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