Archive of Our Own ^beta

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"Boys, stop arguing. What did I say about using ballistics in the citadel?!," Mikhail Cossack screamed, disheveled from working intensely on his latest project. His hair was a mess, as he hadn't had the time to comb it over the past few days between having to pick up Kalinka from school and having to finish a project for a deadline. He insisted on making dinner and such for her, but the girl insisted that he had to work on his project or else there wouldn't be food on the table. It really wasn't that dire, but Mikhail was surprised that his own daughter would tell him to leave her for his work. He even got chided for trying to shower, which was pretty funny to his robots, spawning a running joke between them about who really was in charge of the citadel.

Before him now were almost half of his robot masters thus far, and he turned on the lights. One who looked like a regnant mummy rubbed his eyes, trying to recalibrate his light sensors, while someone who looked to be a mixture of a man and a submarine cocked a smile, laughing, his chest cavity open. On the other side of the room, it appeared a lightbulb attached to a person was having a panic attack, hiding behind one of the work tables, showing burns on various parts of his body.

"You want to see how these feel at close range, King Tut?!," a gruff, low voice asked angrily cocky.

"Please, I'm weakened right now, let's do this later," a voice with an accent not too dissimilar to a Coptic speaker pleaded, his voice sounding regal despite trying to hide his fear, his voice almost as low as the submarine's despite their size difference.

"Did that stop you from hitting Bright where it hurt?," the larger robot asked.

"To be fair, he started it," the smaller one replied in a matter of fact manner. "He flashed his bulb at me, and I had to defend myself."

A voice interjected, "You have time to explain this later, everyone come with me," Mikhail said. "I will not have you using those weapons in my citadel without reason, you're lucky this room is extra resistant to robot damage because I reinforced it when I started renovating here years ago. Do you know how hard it is to command those little Mets around?"

Only the submarine robot could move, with there other two being paralyzed by bright lights and burn damage respectively. "Okay, bring the other two to me, Dive Man, you better explain why there were ballistic missiles flying around my citadel outside of a testing room," Mikhail said, realizing the other two were out. The only reason the place wasn't a complete mess was because the attacks where targeted, oh how he wished he had a carpentry robot to fix the constant damage the citadel was getting. Had this been a living area, the entire room down to the outer wall would have been destroyed, so at least they tried to mitigate the damage.

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Dust Man was eagerly using a small stick vacuum to get the stuff off of the carpet with his one hand. He wished he could just use his own built-in vacuum, but it was too strong. Seeing small cookie crumbs get sucked up was so satisfying, it was nice to clean up some things. Kalinka had been so overeager to give them to her dolls when playing tea party that half of one crumbled, right into the carpet. After tea parties, she brought the remaining cookies to her friends at school, as she realized that it was wasting food, and it was impossible to measure out less than 100g of flour, so they scaled the recipe to that. Drill Man, on one of his visits, had complained that it was harder to scale things with imperial measurements on one of his digging missions. Even Kalinka tried to do the math in her head to scale it, but she hadn't had enough practice or gotten that far in the curriculum.

Pop, went the debris compartment over the garbage can as Dust Man cleaned it out after unplugging it. While it was designed to be used with two hands, he could manage it with just one and lean it against the smaller opening on his non-hand apparatus. This part was very satisfying, why couldn't he just get a job cleaning dust instead of what were to him corpses, he thought. Surely, a parts recycler doesn't have to be sentient to do its job. He felt bad for the ones he had to shoot because they were still online, but he had no choice but to do so. Why would you send them while they were still conscious? he thought, It's not supposed to be my job to kill, only to deal with the dead after they've been killed. He's seen manged bodies of police robots, still conscious and begging for mercy, after a major crime, or an industrial robot that was repairable but the employer was too cheap to do so, as getting a new one was less expensive in that case. He also had ones who came into his facility on their own, begging to be killed, and had to turn them away. They'd get themselves damaged in a fight just to die, just to escape whatever had caused them to desire death. Dust Man had seen it all, people who insisted on being there as their employee took their last simulated breath after severe, irreparable damage, and cried, or those who brought perfectly functioning robots who didn't want to die just to get rid of them.

After all of that mental anguish, it was no wonder Dust Man found comfort in the little things. He especially liked doing laundry, as it was like taking care of something and cleaning at the same time, his cleaning would have the positive effect of allowing the fabric items to be used again, not to be discarded too soon, unlike when he had to clean at work. He softly hummed, sounding like a musical fan. A slight wind blew in front of him as he happily swept the floor.

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Kalinka bounded into the side door of the citadel, right into the living room where Dust Man was cleaning. She stayed in the foyer removing her outdoor garments before stepping into a pair of furry slippers and bounding over to the trash compactor robot.

"Hi, how was your day?," the girl asked, not wasting a breath. "I had so much fun at school today. We went into the snow for PE, then Natasha brought these great chips at lunch that she shared with everyone, then the teacher had us practice our reading, we had history and math today too. We have math every day, Ms. Pavlova told us that math is everyday because we always have to use math, especially at the grocery store, though she should have said that to Bright Man."

Kalinka paused, realizing that Dust Man had just noticed that he was being spoken to.

"It was the same at work, and it was morbid," Dust Man's gusty voice replied. "You're too young to know the details."

Kalinka had noticed that Dust Man had become more depressed since returning to his regular job since that incident. She wanted to cheer him up. "Why don't I get you an e-tank while you finish up?," she asked, not waiting for an answer before going to the lab to fetch an e-tank. She wondered why they weren't stocked in the kitchen, but her papa had said they'd be a fire hazard if they kept more than two in the living area. She was sure there had to be a solution to that, but she didn't want to make her papa angry, so she agreed to keep things the way they were.

Dust Man finished patting out Kalinka's coat in the snow, she had insisted on doing it herself until she got sick for a week and had to miss school because of it, she only does so in less frigid weather now. The cold got to Dust Man's systems and he felt sluggish, but he thought it was better that he feel this than Kalinka. He heard Kalinka's voice, and realized it must be after school snack time, so finished up before heading back inside. He had to wipe his feet at the door too, no use tracking snow inside, then headed to the dining room table where the girl sat with a few dolls surrounding her. She perked up when he went to sit down with his e-tank.

"I was just telling Snowy here about how school was," she said cheerfully over a hot pastry and some herbal tea. Dust Man knew she was referring to the fluffy cream colored rabbit with a pink bow. When she got it, he didn't know, but she was fond of this particular doll.

"Do you want any more tea, ma'am?," Pharaoh Man asked, holding a kettle. He was assigned to the stove since he could light torches pretty easily and keep them under control.

"No thanks," she replied quickly but politely.
"Then I'll get started on dinner for the doctor, then?" he asked, seeking to confirm what his next task was.

"It's too early for that, you know how late he takes his meals when he's working on a deadline," she replied, chiding the tomb exploration robot, but still cheerful.
"I'm not here often, but thank you for reminding me, ma'am," he replied.

"No problem, happy to help," she responded. "Isn't that right Meadow?," pointing to a plush lamb with a pale green ribbon around its neck.
"Baaa," Kalinka said, voicing Meadow. "That means yes in sheep, Pharaoh Man."

Pharaoh Man just went along with it, and managed to hold an entire conversation with a plush lamb whole Kalinka slowly ate her snack, and Dust Man consumed the contents of the e-tank just as slowly. Tick tock, time went on, but they all appreciated the chance to savor slow moments like this.

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"What would you think if I sang out of tune," a croaky voice sang from the upper floor of the citadel loudly enough for Mikhail to instinctively cover his ears from what he thought was a sound-proof basement lab. It was at least the latter two things, though. He got a pair of construction earmuffs and kept working on a small mechanaloid.

"Would you stand up and walk out on meee," the voice continued, with the scientist getting more irritated with the last peaked note causing him to drop his work and go upstairs to the source of the noise. He should have made that robot less toad-like, and probably not as waterproof, though that would defeat his entire purpose.
"Lend me your ear and I'll sing you a song"

"No, no, do not sing anymore!," Mikhail Cossack said, clenching his right fist and jaw as he went up to the ground floor of his citadel, answering the song.

Meanwhile on the first floor, Dust Man was vacuuming, because he liked doing so even when it wasn't strictly necessary. He felt one with the vaccum, mostly because he is a trash compactor, which work similarly. He didn't mind the noise coming from upstairs, he'd heard worse at work.

This was why Dust Man was the only one to accompany Toad Man and a reformed Shade Man to kareoke when they were visiting the Lights once, Guts Man sounded like an ethereal angel compared to those two, even if he did sound like Duran Duran's lead singer doing a spoken word cover on a single track of tape. Horrid singing wasn't that bad compared to death screams, the trash compactor robot thought to himself. Those sound more all over the place and jarring than bad singing. He hummed happily to another tune, his compactor mildly whirring with excitement, a jaunty one reminiscent of a ragtime children's song sung while jumping rope.

"Why did it have to be that damned American music?!," Dr. Cossack screamed, almost looking as if he was going to pull his hair out and entering the living room without removing his lab shoes. He had dabbled in some of those imports once the government shower signs that it would change, but didn't see what his colleague Dr. Light saw in them. He wrote his doctoral thesis while playing a smuggled Lynard Skynyrd album. Nothing like writing about the molding process of a new alloy in an improved wire type in robots to a song about a brothel. Ah, good times.
The scientist went up the second flight of stairs to see what exactly was going on up there. He knew, Toad Man gets dirty from his job out in the farm fields and comes back with several days' worth of soil buildup on his armor, tinting it brown.

The timing was off, so the next line was uttered with a delay. "And I'll try not to sing out of key."

"It's not working!," Mikhail yelled, still tense and climbing stairs. "Give up already!" He was exasperated, panting with nervousness. He was going to get Toad Man a membership to the bathouse if this kept up, he thought to himself, they'll have to deal with his singing then. There'd be far worse there, surely, he thought to himself. He huffed, having reached the top of the stairs, and pulling out an external comm device, he command lined out 'stop singing, *redacted swearing*', sending it to Toad Man. He didn't like command lining his robots for petty reasons, but his ears felt like they were bleeding even with the ear muffs, so horrific shower singing wasn't a petty reason. Good thing nobody else but Dust Man was home at the time, or else this would have caused more panic than when Pharaoh Man tried making tea before the power got reconnected and set the kitchen on fire. He wished he had an ice or water robot master, Dive Missiles were going to do nothing against fire, and would make it worse, if anything