Prologue.
From the beginning the “big project” had been a disaster.
The leader of the project, Io, had been given only recruit engineers with which to work on it. And as he knew well, while even the experienced ones tended to blow things up, recruits were even worse.
He managed to train them a bit, but they still had little skill. They had barely started when one made the mistake of setting up a Red Rover instead of a Slush Puppy to guard the area. In the middle of the night a few Oilers snuck in. Programmed to attack anything that was not gremlin or construct, the rover fired immediately.
Within minutes, all the gremlins were awake and trying to save themselves from being roasted in their beds.
But two of them did die. One of them was the poor gremlin who had started it all. The other was his brother, who had tried to save him.
Work on the project had to be halted while the many injured recovered. But while they were resting, the Oiler disease took hold of them.
For some reason, gremlins have a very strong allergy to Oilers. This often develops into an illness that is usually deadly.
At least half of the engineers died. Io was among them.
A young gremlin named Ulon who was, in fact, Io’s cousin, took charge of the project. She separated the engineers into those operating on Mecha Knights, those operating on Retrodes, etc.
She proved a worthy leader. When it was discovered that the Mecha Knight blueprints had been burnt in the fire, and the place was too far from the Colony to fetch replacements, she told them it did not matter about making them the same as the rest, and put down a likely rebellion.
Because of this, the mechas were built differently from the normal ones.
In the end, the only success was the project itself.
(I've been too lazy to put this up. Remiliaoftheearth apologizes. Sorry!
Not that anyone cared.)
Is this going to be one of those stories where a bunch of scientists who don't know what they're doing try to fork around and slap complex AI on bog standard robots resulting in said robots going haywire and destroying the place?
Or is it something new?
:3