Calibration

"You're gonna shut up now, or you're gonna go back out on to that battlefield short an arm."

"Yes ma'am."

The only noise after that was the gentle buzz and whirr of Alexandra working her tools. Cranking away at bolts and screws, welding bits of metal or wiring into place, and occasionally prying bent or melted material out of the way of what she needed to do. She was a diligent worker, and one of the best cyborg mechanics this side of the Aragan mountains. But good lord, did she hate when clients tried to talk while she was working.

It was the unfortunate part of working on living creatures. Half the time they were still conscious while she was working, and more than that they were men, which frequently meant she had to deal with being hit on while she was doing her repairs. Men wanted their 'cute' girls by their side, and if those girls could keep them functional, up to date, and give them 'upgrades' while they were at it, they were going to push as hard as they could to try and get that. Hell, even half the ladies she worked on were like that, and most of them didn't even swing that way. There were just too many benefits to having a mechanic as a girlfriend.

Thankfully, you also didn't get on your mechanic's bad side. In the beginning, they had taken her words as empty threats, but it only takes a few soldiers sent back onto the field with minimal repairs and missing limbs before people realized that if your mechanic tells you to shut up, you shut the hell up.

She enjoyed her work. She enjoyed knowing that she could take bits and pieces of boring, inorganic materials and slap them onto a living being and make them function like organic tissue. She could take a dying man and walk him away from the edge, turn him into something more than he had ever been before, and keep him that way longer than he had any right to be. She was a seamstress of life in oil covered clothing. And her thread was cold hard steel.

If she was just allowed to put them out cold before she started working, her job would be the best in the world. But everything had to have its downsides, she supposed. And her downside was that being single meant nobody shut the hell up about it. She'd invest in a ring if she didn't know that it would simply change what the conversations were about. And there's no way it would stop all the slaps on the ass as her upgrades walked out the door. One of these days...