The first thing that tipped me off as strange that day was the fact that I woke up alone.
While it was confusing, it wasn't like it was the first time that the girls had not been sleeping in the bed with me when I woke up. Lynn almost always woke up early, though Pepper usually slept in late unless she had something she felt was important.
After a quick shower and a change of clothes, I walked into a room that'd been added onto my apartment in the last few years. Novem's room.
It sat there, inactive, in the most plain, basic clothing options that one could possibly made, a white shirt and dark-colored pants. Currently, it was laying inside a single-person chamber that I'd created specifically for it. Its hibernation chamber, or charging pod.
It must have gone in on its own after finishing up with Cynder in the village's makeshift hospital. Novem didn't really do 'excess', so it'd probably just plugged itself in to update its software and logic paths since it didn't have anything else to do.
Aside from the basic framework of its mind, hard-coded restrictions and logical basics, I did my best to allow Novem as much room to grow as possible, allowing it to update and write its own advanced, more complex personality-oriented code. I didn't want to build Novem's mind from scratch. I wanted Novem to do that itself. Decide its likes, dislikes, little quirks, all on its own. That was my goal with it. Whatever it wanted to do, I'd just watch.
For now, though, Novem's identity wasn't very firm. It didn't really seem to care about anything beyond efficiency. When asked what gender it'd wanted to be, it'd just said 'Unnecessary'. When asked to choose appearance-based things, it'd chosen the most bland things it could. Plain clothing, skin colors that matched that of the village natives, black hair in the laziest shape it could think of without making itself bald, a bowl cut. As far as anything beyond that went, it'd listen to orders, and when it didn't have any, it'd sleep in that hibernation chamber, silently increasing its knowledge database.
Like usual, today, I was working on Novem's only weakness. Its battery. Pulling the android's shirt open, I started working on the complicated mess of wires, circuits, and various other materials inside the service hatch on the android's chest.
Novem's body was a marvel of technology, far beyond anything that Gero could've made at this point in time, and far beyond what that battery it used was created to support. I'd used Fire Eater materials liberally. We only had one corpse so far, a clone that'd had a sudden brain aneurysm, but I'd used around 90% of the materials from that corpse to create various polymers that now made up the vast majority of the base materials that made up Novem's body, from skin to bones, to even the 'blood' that coursed through the android's false veins as lubricant, a very diluted combination of fire eater stomach acid, magical water that froze anything it touched, and a few other stabilizing compounds.
All in all, the fire eater components had given Novem an interesting ability. Its body was almost entirely immune to ki. It could literally just sit there and absorb any ki-based attack not strong enough to instantly overload its battery.
Which sounded nice, but the battery wasn't particularly powerful. Strong enough to power the rest of the planet for several days, probably, but it gave the android a concrete ceiling that wasn't particularly high.
The focus of Zeck's research wasn't in advanced battery technology. He didn't really see the use of creating a battery capable of storing large amounts of chi energy. His focus was on ki energy conversion and application. If he could store the equivalent of 2,500 units of ki power in electrical form, he considered that more than he'd ever need.
And if you weren't considering combat, even that was technically waay overboard Enough power for just about anything that you could possibly use, even interstellar flight. But my own mind refused to rest until such an obvious weakness had been fixed. I wanted Novem's limits to be the physical limits of the strange, magical components that made up its body. Not the limits of my own creations' ability to store energy.
As such, I was currently installing a multi-faceted system. Multiple batteries, backups that'd come online in the event of an overload.
Projections looked promising. In theory, distributing the load would allow for an exponentially higher limit before overload, and utilizing Capsule Corp compression technology, I could store a half-dozen backups that'd automatically connect in the event of an overload.
Before I knew it, three days of uninterrupted work on Novem had passed. The new power system's instillation was complete, and ready for load testing.
But… I'd been in my lab for three days. Without interruption. When I looked at the date, I almost fell over from shock. The girls had never allowed me that before. Not in years.
I couldn't test Novem's new power source. Not like this.