THE MOMENT
Jenny's eyes stared frigid into Aurelio's soul as they stood there in his garage. He'd laid out his reasons and the emergency at hand, hoping it was enough to earn some leniency from her wrath. The truth was he'd messed up, and it was worse than anyone knew. He'd only discovered the extent of the trouble recently, and Jenny was the only person he could ask for help. But, he fully expected at the least a stern lecture, if not the full riot act.
"I need help, there I said it." He added as she remained silent with cold brown eyes. "Are you happy now?" She had every right to be furious.
"You want me to help you fix YOUR mistake? The mistake you lied to me about and tried to keep from me?? And where've you been!? I found out about your royal screw up and told you how little I appreciated it, then you just vanished! I heard from the twins you did the same thing when I wasn't even here. Now, you come looking for me when you need help cleaning up your own damn mess??" She shook her head. "I don't think so. I'm tired of cleaning up after you. Take care of it yourself," she said. With a final look of disgust in his direction, she disintegrated into white dust and vanished.
Aurelio wasn't surprised at her reaction; but, he didn't enjoy how he was feeling in that moment. He let the emotions wash over him as he considered her words. He deserved everything she said and more; he did know that. But, the universe was too big to think about minor things like that all the time. And, he was only going through it because it was a genuine problem. Both, an emergency, and an issue he wanted to solve for the sake of solving it. Of course, he knew better than to mention that motivation to Jenny.
He remained still for almost five minutes making peace and building his courage.
"I guess that's the worst it can get, right?" Finally, he sighed and sent Jenny a Whisper.
[Real emergency. -Aury] he said. The one saving grace he'd had was he'd never abused the emergency call. A black portal opened instantly in his garage and Jenny emerged looking annoyed, but not quite as mad as the NPC version he was practicing on.
"What?" she asked.
"It's about the twins...," He started the revelation he'd rehearsed. "...they're unstable apart...," he said as he pulled out a black glass card. "This is the version I thought I'd duplicated...," he said as he offered it to her. " I tried collecting a sample just to see if I could’ve done it, and the nanos turned corrupted after some time. I think we need to find a way to combine them again."
She examined the card silently, and he braced himself for her real anger. She reversed the the card to carefully inspect it from the other side, then she put it between both her hands and tried to pull it apart, but it didn’t function the way it was supposed to. As much as he liked to consider them equally talented, she had an intuition about technology that he didn’t. He need a collection of tools to examine it as in-depth as she was doing by sight.
"I need help, there I said it," he got nervous as she appraised the node silently, and moved on to the next step at the same moment she replied.
"Okay," She nodded. "Do you have any idea how long we have?"
"Are you happy now?"
"What?" she asked. "Wait, I was talking, what'd you say?"
"I.. uh. I was asking for help," he said. She nodded.
"Yeah... what would I be happy about?"
"I mean.. that I'm asking you for help cleaning up my mess..," he said. She narrowed her eyes and subtly shook her head with disapproval.
"Your MESS?? They're girls! OUR girls. I don't care about how we got here, they need help," she said as she reached forward and flicked his forehead.
"Of course," Jenny said, "I'll help."