"Gather round, children, it's Viewing Time again!" Teacher Lucy clapped her paws happily, looking around the classroom at the children under her care as their form teacher, her feline face smiling beatifically as she walked around rounding the kids up from their afternoon free hour.I wrote a furry robot story. I apologize in advance if this just feels wrong. - handle2
Color Pencils and pastel sticks carefully gathered up by tiny hands and stacked away carefully with half-scribbled papers, bookmarks shoved into half-read books and returned to shelves, napping kids gently shaken up by Lucy's paws as she nods at them.
Elliot half-opened his eyes. He was a little exhausted from dancing for a bit earlier, and had opted for the nap option. Lucy's cute cat face loomed over him, grinning. "Elly... it's Viewing Time. You should get up."
Elliot nodded and sat up, his dopey look not exactly improved by the mussled brown hair and overlong sleeves hiding most of his hands. Viewing Time lasted an hour and was the last period of the entire school week here at Little Sanctuary's "Special Little Sparks - School for Select Children". Just another hour and he would be home free...
Lucy stood on tip-toe, her tail swishing lazily. She was maybe one or two heads taller than the tallest child in the classroom, a sort of shortstack trying to pass herself off as a matron several times larger. It generally worked. She tapped the power button on the old vision set she had brought in, sliding in a cartridge with the week's video. Her white-tipped ears twitched, the same white as the fur covering all her paws where her fur hadn't faded into a warm brown carpet.
The kids didn't question the presence of a bipedal lady cat in their classroom. They hadn't after the initial introductions were made ages ago. Lucy licked her muzzle a little, making a show of struggling to get the cartidge going.
The week's video came on, a sort of cartoony intro playing. Anthromorphic vehicles representing firemen, ambulances, and repairmen buzzed around a toy house on fire. Injured people were evacuated, the fire was carefully put out, and the repair vehicles barfed out a small crew to work on making the damaged building brand new. as a choir offscreen sang:
"Life can be great
life can be good
but just so often sometimes
things don't go as they should
We're the Reset Corps
When things break that really shouldn't
We come in and fix things
Even those they said we couldn't
Life can be great
but when it's not good
look to us here
at Reset Corps, dudes..."
It was corny. Horrendously corny. But the kids didn't know corny, and Lucy sang along enthusiastically as well as if she didn't care.
The video continued by introducing a group of men in various colored full-body hazmat suits, one color for each branch of some group.
"Here at Little Sanctuary, we try to keep life perfect. But sometimes, things don't always go as they should," a tired-sounding old man spoke up, narrating a montage of various repair and rescue activities. "That's why we have the Reset Corps. We save people from accidents, we stop problems from going out of control, and we fix things so they're brand new again..."
The video continued away into a self-aggrandizing series of interviews with various staff from the Reset Corps talking about their duties while staged scenarios played out in occasional cuts. Eventually, the video ended, and Teacher Lucy glanced at the clock on the classroom wall. "Well, kids, it's 5pm, you know what time it is!"
The class, previously a group of mostly attentive, well-behaved angels, erupted into cheers as students rushed for their bags to wait at the porch for their family jalopies to pick them up, discussions flaring about the weekend's possibilities like all children did at any school really.
Teacher Lucy walked out to the porch to guard the students. This year, there had been about 30 students assigned to her class. It wouldn't take long to empty out this group through the gate, as a jalopy came to a halt and a student whooped while jumping into it after a brief check by another Teacher, this one a female black and white calico of similar build and simple blouse/long-skirt dressing as Lucy.
Things did not go quite according to plan.
=======================
Marcus Manners eeped as he got out of the jalopy about two hours late by the mostly closed school gate. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" He bowed to Teacher Lucy in embarassment, then glanced at his son. The poor kid had expected to be home by now for dinner, and he was quite literally snoring to conserve his energy for more fun things besides waiting for his dad to pick him up.
Lucy shook her head and wiggled a finger in the air. "Mr Manners, you simply cannot be this late to pick up your children from school. it eats into their weekend time on Fridays, you must know that, right?" She had the frustrated look of a teacher whose charge had been denied some of their rights, a look partly softened by the kitten-like face that she had. "This is the third time this year. You simply must learn better to manage your schedule."
Marcus looked crestfallen. "My meeting took a little longer than planned. My brothers- my bosses, had a bit of a genius moment and stopped following the agenda totally..."
Then Lucy suddenly stood on tiptoe and patted his stomach. "But I know you're trying to do your best for your son, aren't you? I'm just asking you to try better, please." She looked up at him, half-closed eyes and smiling. "And this time, make sure he does his maths homework as assigned. I know he'd rather do something artistic, but a poorly scribbled horse isn't a correct answer for Fermat's Theorem." Her eyes looked up at the evening sky briefly. "Mind you, it was a pretty good horse if you ignore the anatomical inaccuracy. Perhaps we should shift his homework to include more artistic pursuits..."
Marcus blushed harder as he gently scooped up the limp, sleepy form of Elliot and deposited him into the back seat, taking care to buckle him up. As he did so, a white hazmat-suited man walked into a van near the porch and deposited some cleaning equipment, having finished his share of the duties assigned to him by his job, and started pulling away for the back exit of the school.
Teacher Lucy sighed and stretched her arms in the air as if tired, her yawning showing rows of oddly cute white fangs and teeth, like someone's stylised idea of what a cat should be. She turned around and walked into the school building. It had certainly been a good five years so far. She wondered briefly what the next five years would bring: new students. new points of interest? Maybe new birthdays to celebrate, even though they were all clustered into the last Friday of each month generally...
Teacher Lucy did not notice as the back exit to the school compound admitted another van of the same kind that had brought in cleaners to 'reset' the school for the week. This one was yellow instead of white...
The halls briefly rang with the faint humming of Lucy, who didn't bother with the Lyrics of the Reset Corps theme song, simply focusing on the notes as her hind paws padded the floor.... then her world went oddly sideways as the ground rose to meet her. She kept humming the notes, but they were now drunken, slowing down with each note as she stared blankly at nothing, before falling completely silent.
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A yellow hazmatted suit guy struggled with a small gurney down the school corridors, into the lift that serviced the two floors that were visible to most visitors, staff, and students of Special Little Sparks. This had been an onerous job for the past few years, really. Nobody would have volunteered for this. There were more 'prestigious' and 'easier' postings in the Reset Corps. This was the last one left after everyone drew straws on the day he first signed in.
Patter smiled a little wistfully. He did make a lot though, partly to cover the potential medical bills from working weird hours and also all the heavy things he had to carry on the job. People were heavy, even if half of their bodies were made of lightweight materials rather than flesh and blood. He could definitely afford to go to his favorite furry conventions without slumming, and that was enough for him.
Patter walked past a mural of a circle of schoolchildren dancing while a furry catgirl looked on, clapping her hands happily. The schoolchildren were not within his responsibility usually, save the occasional accident in-school here. No, he was usually tasked with the teacher units. Tonight, he was replacing one of the units that had served its full five years. It probably still had life in it for a couple more years, but kids being kids, they were probably wearing down at least on the outside. Better to flip them out for a new unit before kids noticed ugly stuff: blue plastic no longer hidden by fake fur that had worn down, glitching irises, speech impediments...
On the gurney was a brand new Teacher Unit, lying as if simply dozing off. He briefly noted the pet tag on her collar read "Lucy", even as he swiped his Reset Corps card to make the lift travel down to the allegedly non-existent basement. It did exist really, mainly to hold the uglier stuff that made the school tick. He wheeled the gurney into one of the rooms, a strange sort of holding pen. Various anthromorphic animal women lined the walls: mostly cats, one or two dogs, a bullfrog in a cafeteria apron who worked on school lunches for all types of students in the school...
Patter facepalmed as he located the alcove that Teacher Lucy was meant to be charging in. It was empty. It was not supposed to be empty. Right, first things first... The lanky tech struggled to place the new Teacher Lucy unit into the alcove, showing little of the strength his bear fursona supposedly had. He quickly tapped on the maintenance console and started streaming the backup for Lucy into the new unit. In about two days she would wake up, greet the children, and there would be next to no sign that this was a different person from the previous Teacher Lucy who had seen them off for the weekend.
Patter stood back and wiped his brow. This might be the only major plus of this shift and tasking really.... being surrounded by furry chicks was a dream come true for him. He had even asked if the Arendtcore Families programme had any furry girls he could take as a ''wife" or "sibling" for his home a while ago - they had sadly told him every woman outside of the school building was human-formed, and taking a furry unit would 'cause problems'.
Right, now that the new unit was installed, he should try and see if he could find the old unit that was meant to be taken back to base and 'recycled'...
==================
Patter took a while to find the old Teacher Lucy, but eventually he pinged in on the collar she was wearing. She was lying on one side on the polished floors, eyes wide open, her muzzle slightly opened. A brief check on her collar revealed that she was totally flat out of power, like a fluffy soft toy abandoned by a kid. He sighed and started lifting her up into the gurney, oofing as he realised that five years ago, they made them a bit heavier. Still, he managed to start pushing her out the porch doors and into his work van.
Patter got in his driver's seat. No autopilot for this vehicle, one had to drive it manually. The only concession to modern vehicles in the Little Sanctuary area was a automap one could set to find a drivable path between two points. With so many places in Little Sanctuary, something like this was very necessary for the newer generation of inhabitants... He took his hazmat helm off, exposing a decent looking young man, albeit one who might reek a little after two hours in a suit with no air cooling. He wished his section would spring for the newer hazmat suits that offered actual cool dry air to kill the sweat, as he checked his work tablet...
SON OF A B-
There was a notice on the tablet -
"The Disposal Line assigned to your section has suffered a major breakdown. Due to increased work loads, we are unable to offer completed repairs until at least 14 calendar days from now. Please deposit collected units temporarily in your home garage,or base garage until then, if overflow occurs." Patter groaned. He could probably fit one or two disposals in his garage back home, but he hated the idea of his workplace commandeering his private space.
He sighed. Then thought a little... He looked back at the Teacher Lucy unit on its gurney, carefully secured in its lifeless form. A small smile played across his face. Well, he did have an excuse now... right? He wasn't supposed to get a furry unit in his home but...