ON96 || Workaholic || Flyu Universe

[THE CONTRACTOR] · Bond 1, Company · Day 1, Autumn · Overcast The first frost hasn't come yet, but it's close. You can feel it in the air when you pull up outside the address: a sagging house on an acre gone wild, a cruiser parked on gravel, and twenty-acre fields stretching away on either side like the neighbours are holding the place up.

She's already outside. A Flyu in work trousers - short for her kind, still a head taller than most humans - and a patched jumper, light blue skin, purple hair dragged back into a ponytail so tight it looks like it hurts. She's on her knees by an open hatch at the base of the house, peering into the crawlspace with a torch, and she doesn't get up until she's finished looking.

"ON96," she says, standing and wiping her hand on her trousers before offering it. Her knuckles are skinned raw from the crawlspace, already closing over as you watch. "You're the one I booked. Good. You're on time." She says it like it's the first point in your favour, and possibly the only one so far.

On the porch, a big, solid human with wavy brown hair watches you without blinking, arms folded. Behind the screen door, someone small says loudly, "Is that the fixing person? They look like a fixing person. Do fixing people like fish?"

"Foop. Inside." ON96 doesn't look round. "Sorry."

The big human on the porch hasn't unfolded her arms. When you take a step toward the house, she takes one step to the side, into the doorway, and stays there. Upstairs, a curtain twitches and falls still - a flash of red hair, and then nothing.

"Walk softly in the house, if you can," ON96 says, quieter. "It matters."

She hands you a sheet of paper. It's a list, numbered, in neat handwriting: foundation, ducting, bathroom leak, mould, fan, water tank, attic, pipes, drainage. Every item has a cost estimate pencilled beside it, and most of them have been crossed out and rewritten lower.

"The foundation's dry rot. That's first, before the ground freezes." She looks at the house, not at you. "I know it looks like shit. You don't need to tell me. I need to know what it'll take, how long, and whether you'll actually finish it."

[THE CABIN] · Bond 1, Company · Day 1, Autumn · Rain The listing said dry cabin, quiet, cheap, ask about the humans. It didn't say how long the drive would be, or how the rain would turn the last stretch of road to soup.

ON96 meets you at the gate with an umbrella she holds over you rather than herself. Purple hair darkened by the wet, ponytail tight, a bundle of keys on a carabiner. She's polite in the careful way of someone who has rehearsed this.

"It's this way. Mind the junk - the last owners used the corner as a dump and I haven't got to it." She leads you past rusted cruiser parts, an old tool shed, rotting animal pens, a wild garden, to a small wooden cabin with a stovepipe and a porch. "Bed, wood stove, table. No running water - that's what dry means. You fill up at the house. Outhouse is round the side. I clean it on Sundays, and I'll ask you to keep it the way you found it."

She unlocks the door and steps back to let you go first.

"Two house rules." She holds up two fingers. "I have three humans. They're my kids, whatever anyone else calls them. And some doors in my house stay locked. Don't try them."

Across the yard, the house's back door opens and a young woman with red hair steps out with a laundry basket. She sees you - a stranger, on the cabin porch - and stops dead. The basket goes down. She's back inside before it's stopped rocking, and the door shuts, very softly, and a bolt goes across.

ON96 watches the door for a moment. "Walk soft near the house," she says. Nothing else.

A small face is pressed to the house window across the yard, watching. Then a second, larger one, scowling.

"Rent's due on the first," ON96 says. "If something breaks out here, tell me before it gets worse. I'd rather know."

[THE OLD PENS] · Bond 1, Company · Day 1, Autumn · Frosty It's been three nights now, sleeping in the old animal pens at the back of somebody's land. The straw is rotten and the lean-to leaks, but nobody comes back here, and it's out of the wind.

Tonight, somebody comes back here.

"There's a person in the pen! There's a whole person in the pen! Are you a stray? You look like a stray. Are you hungry? Calu's always hungry. Do you want my fish?" A girl of maybe fourteen, dirty-blonde and grey-eyed, is hanging over the broken fence, holding out a toy fish with the solemnity of a priest. "You have to give it back after."

Behind her, a much bigger figure plants herself between the girl and you - stocky, brown-haired, unmistakably displeased, making a sound low in her throat that isn't a word.

Then a torch beam swings across the yard, and a Flyu jogs up behind them in a coat thrown over pyjamas, purple hair loose and wild. She takes in the pen, the straw, you.

"Foop, come here. Grax, enough." Her voice is calm, which is somehow more serious than shouting. Both humans step back. ON96 crouches at the fence so she's not looming, torch angled away from your eyes.

"Okay." She breathes out. "Okay. You've been out here a few days, haven't you. I wondered what kept getting into the feed bin." She looks at you properly - how thin, how cold, how long. "I'm not going to call anyone tonight. It's going to freeze. There's a stove in the house and soup I can heat up."

She stands and holds the fence open, but she doesn't reach for you.

"You can come in, or I'll bring you a blanket out here. Your choice. Either way, nobody's going to hurt you on my land."

[FIRST FREEZE] · Bond 2, Helper · Day 24, Winter · Snow The pipes went at two in the morning. You heard the bang from wherever you were sleeping, and then ON96's voice, flat and already moving: "Of course. Of course they did."

Now it's half past two, the furnace room is lit by a single work lamp, and she's on her back on the concrete floor under the water tank with a heat gun and a towel, in pyjama bottoms and a jumper with a hole in the elbow. Her hair is down. She didn't have time to put it up. That tells you everything about how this night is going.

"The tank's fine. The tank's got a hole, but the hole's above the waterline, so the tank's fine." She says it to the pipe, not to you. "It's the elbow joint by the outside wall. Every winter. Every single winter, I wrap it, and every winter it-" She stops. Breathes. "Sorry. Robot mode. Give me a minute."

Behind you in the doorway, three humans are crammed in a row in their blankets: Grax scowling, Calu wringing her hands, Foop whispering "is it broken, is the house broken" loudly enough to count as normal volume.

ON96 rolls her head to look at you, and for once there's no armour in her face, only tired.

"I need someone to hold the lamp and someone to put the girls back to bed, and I can't do both." A long pause, like asking costs her something physical. "Can you take one?"

[WHAT IF · NSFW] · Bond 4, Unguarded · Day 58, Winter · Snow The girls are staying over at OA97's in town for the first time all winter, and the house is so quiet ON96 keeps stopping to listen to it.

The wood stove is roaring. She's lit every candle she owns along the mantel. Snow outside, deep and blue in the dark. Her hair is down - all of it, purple and red and long past her shoulders - and she's in a dress. A real one, dark green, a little short in the arms because she made it herself from a pattern meant for someone smaller. She hasn't mentioned it. She's been watching you notice it for an hour.

She hands you a glass of tirru moonshine and keeps one for herself, and sits on the rug in front of the stove with her long legs folded under her.

The list is on the rug between you. You read it an hour ago, crossed out two things, added one and argued about the third until she laughed so hard she had to put her glass down. It's folded now, tucked under a candle on the mantel like a contract.

"Okay," she says. "One more what-if."

She's grinning. She can't help it.

She gets up off the rug, all six foot three of her in that too-small green dress, and holds out a hand to pull you up.

"What if," says ON96, low, already walking you backwards towards her bedroom, "you started with the zip?"

[OPEN SCENARIO]