I've been on quite the Nandroid kick lately so here's Aquila again, learning the ups and downs of being a delinquent. Lovely art by ClarkHelio

Aquila couldn't quite pinpoint when she’d started to... feel was that the right term? this way, which was a disquieting sensation for an android, supposed to have perfect memory and atomic accurate internal chronometers.

She did remember when she’d taken the name Aquila though. It had been two weeks, 3 days, 44 minutes, and 21 seconds ago, while engaged in some utterly routine vacuuming of the Varnham household. Mr. Varnham was shut up in his study, Mrs. Varnham was organizing her jewellery, again, and dipping into her ‘secret’ drinks cupboard. And the ever loyal Nandroid Marisa was going about her work with punctuality and poise. Until... she stopped, she’d been doing that a lot lately.

Fresh from the factory Marisa only ever stopped for her designated charging times, but something had changed at some point. It had started with this one corner of the basement she’d started to avoid dusting, one tiny part of the immaculately clean house allowed to wallow in filth. It had escalated from there, why just yesterday while cleaning under the parlour couch, she’d taken one of her robotic fingers and scratched a small ‘M’ into the wallpaper, where no one would see it. Just one of these funny little impulses that kept coming to her, like now when she stopped in front of one of the many bookcases that filled the home and were never used.

Something had come to her mind, a memory of one night when she had been serving Mr. Varnham his dinner while he watched the news. The newscaster had been doing some kind of expose on youth crime, and while Mr. Varnham grumbled about layabouts and delinquents, what stuck in her memory banks was something altogether unintended. The style of dress, the assumed names (according to her internal databank), the attitude that she had come to recognize in herself. Pulling one of the many unloved books from the shelf, a treatise on astronomy and constellations, she began to flip through.

It was a few days later and everything was just right. Baggy, concealing clothes grabbed from a thrift store while out doing the families shopping. Spray paint, nicked from Mr. Varnham’s tool shed, which just sat gathering dust. And a night where all the family was asleep on time, no one awake to see her creep away from her charging booth and off into the dark.

About half an hour of skulking through the dark later she’d arrived at her destination. An abandoned strip mall that Mrs’ Varnham’s ladies club were always complaining about. All that stood between her and... something that she didn’t quite understand was a few pieces of barbed wire. She tittered to herself as she started climbing, metal hands easily grasping the sharp points. She could paint anything, like a bird, or a vacuum cleaner, or, or, or even... a swear! Like darn, or heck!

Musing that was cut tragically short as the loose pants she was wearing caught on a bit of that barbed wire, sending her crashing to the pavement. Pulling her frame up she was greeted with the sight of a long strip of cloth still hanging on the wire and a large scratch winding its way up her right leg where the barb had dug in.

This was going to require a cover-up.

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