88 Inviolable

Lily had been seeing Grace more often since they had settled in Megaton more or less full-time. Typically, she would have tired of a sexual partner by now, months ago even, but she had to admit that she enjoyed the woman's company, and she had worked up to spending almost as much time with her as she budgeted for Alice, which made her Lily's second favourite person and ranked as a high two on Lily's scale of people, by now.

Still, she still needed a period to recharge with solitude after being around her, just like the Apprentice and other people. The main difference between Grace and the Apprentice and other people was that their presence deducted much less mental fuel over time than other people did.

"Oh, are you going to serenade me? Where did you find zhat guitar?" asked Lily amusedly when Grace showed up with a traditional folk-style acoustic guitar one evening.

That caused the woman to grin, "Yeah! I've been learning how to play, and this guitar was handed down to me by my dad, who brought it from California."

Lily sat down to listen with her hands in her lap and said regally, "Okay, you may begin serenading me now.

"Well, perhaps not serenade; I don't sing too well, but listen to this," Grace said and began playing a very challenging piece with a definitive Spanish guitar sound. By the end of the short two-minute piece, she was clapping happily.

It reminded her of a song that she could play on the guitar too, and she could sing too. She had sung before in both of her lives, but people often commented that she was technically very good but lacking something, so she had not often done it.

She had learned to play the guitar in her life in America, and although she definitely wasn't as good as Grace, there was one song that was very heavily inspired by a guitar solo by Isaac Albéniz called Asturias that she could play; it had a Spanish guitar sound to it, and she thought Grace would like the lyrics too.

"That was great! Okay, my turn..." Lily said and held her hands out for the guitar, which Grace handed to her after glancing at her for a moment.

Grace asked, "You can play the guitar?"

Lily huffed, "Of course! Now... uh... let me see if I can remember."

She had heard this song originally on that terrible but addictive short-video app shortly after what became known as the first pandemic of the 2020s, about twenty years prior to her death. That was about the time that everyone agreed that the world started turning to shit, not the exact point but more like the turning point.

By the time she passed away in 2043, instead of the expected ten billion people on Earth, the population had dropped to about six and a half, with nuclear fire touching the Earth four more times in twenty years. Odessa and Kargil were the first two incidents, and Tel Aviv and Tehran were the third.

When Hamas drove an Iranian-provided nuclear explosive and detonated it in Tel Aviv, Israel responded by nuking the Iranian capital to cinders and then deploying EMP weapons on all of the other Iranian cities, with the Israelis teaming up weirdly enough with two other Arab polities to destroy the Iranian state and military. Seeing Israeli and Saudi Arabian jets fly missions together against the Persians on CNN had been incredibly surreal, she thought. It was like reality was stranger than fiction.

Although amazingly, neither of the three incidents sparked a global nuclear war as it had in the Fallout universe, some felt it was very close, especially the first incident in Eastern Europe.

Shaking her head, she returned to the song. Still, it was a very nice song, even if it reminded her of the beginning of the world's downward spiral, so she reviewed it quickly in her head.

The guitar element of the song was a direct copy of that 19th-century Spanish virtuoso's work but simplified, which was the only reason she felt she could play it.

As for the lyrics, well, Lily always thought they sounded moderate to highly sapphic, so she felt that Grace would like them. After getting a handle on the guitar and playing a few test chords and a simple melody for practice, she nodded. If she had already replaced her larynx with a digital speaker, she could have copied the singer's original song, but that would be cheating, she supposed.

Still, even though she couldn't autotune her voice at the moment, she still brought up a simple auditory waveform analyser that would give her an alert if she started to sing out of key.

Grace was grinning and waiting for her to begin, so she coughed once and started to play the intro guitar solo, then began singing, "I summoned you; please come to me. Don't bury zhoughts zhat you really want. I fill you up, drink from my cup. Within me lies what you really want..."

The song she was singing was called "Middle of the Night", and she didn't think she sang it even half as well as the original artist. Still, she must have done it well enough as she didn't get past the second repetition of the chorus before Grace pounced her, carefully avoiding damaging her precious guitar.

---xxxxxx---

She had a busy day the next day; she was replacing the trashed gas turbine on her captured Vertibird with a brand new one she had manufactured by the simple expedient of copying the working one. She didn't have a source for a hydrocarbon-based fuel to run it, though, and it only had about a half tank left in it.

Before she got the manufacturing details for fusion cores, she had intended to build a similar hydrocarbon fuel manufacturing facility using a lot of the power of the fusion power station. However, she wasn't sure what she was going to do with this repaired Vertibird now. She took detailed scans, and the airframe wasn't really suitable for conversion to a fusion platform as it was.

She could modify the design and replace the gas turbines with, perhaps, five fusion cores powering a robust and powerful electrical motor on each side. The motor would need to be cooled, but traditional liquid cooling would suffice at a low airspeed, with air-cooling at cruise taking over.

But it would take almost as much work to refurbish this Vertibird than it would to rebuild a new one to the new design, besides she didn't have the extremely complicated machinery necessary to build the fusion cores finished yet.

It wasn't that difficult to create a simple boron-impregnated metal alloy, but in order to be used in this type of fusion, it had to be accurately crystalised layer upon layer in interesting geometric patterns with atomic accuracy that she could not even achieve with her current generation of nanomachines.

She had the complete design specifications for the complicated machine that could do it, and she was sure she could build it. However, it was as big as a three-bedroom house, so she started a new digging project. Normally, the ceilings in her underground areas were a little over three and a quarter metres. Taller than normal buildings, as she wanted people in Power Armour and possibly large robots to be able to navigate it{easily, but this would need more than twice that.

It was a long and complicated building project to dig out a single level that had ceilings that were over two times her normal. Special care had to be taken to ensure the stability of the project, so it didn't collapse, but she thought she could have the area ready in two months. Then maybe another month or two to build the machine, and she could start production. It was no wonder that the Brotherhood couldn't manufacture these fuckers. Could she instead just take over Raven Rock in four months?

Sighing, she shook her head as she supervised a team of robots using a crane to drop the new engine into place. Pausing, she noticed Grace approaching the outside hangar she was working in. Curious, she waited for the woman to approach.

"Ooooh, sweet, is this the one you shot down? I thought it would have been wrecked..." Grace said as she walked in.

Lily nodded at her; she had been in town when the Brotherhood had attacked and had been a little upset she hadn't gotten in on the action, "Yes. I targeted zhe right engine, and zhe pilot was able to land it; quite good work actually. I'm replacing the turbine engine now."

She walked around it and whistled, "Oooh, it's one of the first generation Pre-War models that are still powered by jet fuel... an oldy, eh?"

Lily blinked slowly at Grace and asked carefully, "What... else would it be powered by?"

Grace snorted, "Well, you didn't expect us to have a number of gas stations to stop at on the way from the west coast, did you?"

Lily had, actually. Although now that she thought about it, Gary had said those fuel-generating stations were only installed at Naval Air Stations, for sure. There was not a lot of call for the Navy in Colorado or Oklahoma, so there probably weren't any Naval Air Stations in those landlocked states.

Grace continued, "Even before Control Station ENCLAVE exploded, the eggheads had built fusion-powered Vertibirds. There are only a few places you can get fuel for these babies these days, although we could get some gas if you wanna fly over to Adams?" She asked, laughing up a storm at her own joke.

What? Lily had been smashing her head against the wall of a fusion-powered Vertibird for ... well, how long had she been here now? She was pretty sure she could do it now but was she just reinventing what some people had already done?

"Did zhey just put a bunch of fusion cores in zhem to power zhem?" Lily asked curiously, as that had been her solution.

Grace shook her head, then paused and then shrugged, "Well, it kind of looked like a fusion core, to be honest, but it was about the size of a hot water cooler instead of the usual thermos of coffee size. They needed to be pulled out and refuelled on a special machine every two hundred flight hours; I know that."

What? The size of fusion cores wasn't solely because it was a small, compact and useful size. That was as big as they could make the devices individually. From the engineering discussion she had been perusing, Mass Fusion had tried to make over-sized fusion units because their efficiency would have been a lot better, but the peculiar reaction between protons and hydrogen wouldn't occur if the reaction chamber was too big, and that limited the size of the device.

Lily stood there pouting, which caused Grace to laugh and ask her, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Lily said, but the truth was she didn't like not being indisputably the smartest person alive.

'Well... chances are the person who invented this died of old age already,' Lily comforted herself with that thought.

---xxxxxx---

Sarah Lyons showed up to her office as requested the next morning, "Hey, Doc. What's up?" Lily hadn't told the woman why she had requested the meeting, in part to see if she would ask clarification or just come anyway. Lily liked that she had just come anyway.

"I repaired zhe Vertibird I seized from your wayward souls. I'll return it to you for a favour," Lily told her, straight to the point.

Lyons widened her eyes, "Damn! I should have brought Ferguson; he was sure that machine was going to be down forever. Reports are the engine was totally wrecked."

Lily blinked at her and then said, "Ah. You still 'aven't considered the possibilities with zhe DMLS system I sent you." She sounded disappointed, like a teacher that got a poor book report from a student. "It included scanning systems to scan physical objects. I just copied every part from zhe working engine and 'printed' a brand-new gas generator in a similar alloy and put it on zhe airframe. I tested it, and it runs properly."

Although the Brotherhood would have had to disassemble a working engine and scan each individual part one at a time since the multi-millimetre wave radar scanner doesn't penetrate like Lily's supertech one does but it was still possible for them; it just would take more time.

Sarah Lyons's face grew shocked for a moment before saying, "Wait! Are you saying that we could do this repair ourselves now? We have over a squadron of Vertibirds sitting doing nothing for lack of working engines." How many aircraft were in a squadron again? In her experience in the US Army, aircraft were formed into battalions as God intended. Perhaps Air Cav had squadrons, though. She thought it was over twenty, though.

Lily nodded, "Yes, I will include zhe CAD files for zhe gas generator as a sweetener if you agree to 'elp with gusto. It'd probably save your Scribes a lot of man-hours, but you could do zhe exact same zhing I just did even without this 'elp."

Sarah hummed and nodded, "You're right. I hadn't considered the possibility that these machines would have. Compressor turbines and rocket engines all could be built really easily now, huh?" Lily nodded at her.

Then she asked, "What do you need? I'd really like to get that Vertibird back, even if you just told me it isn't quite as important anymore, and I want those CAD files to bribe the material sciences Scribes with."

"Remember zhe seed vault locations you told me about?" She nodded, "Well, I want your 'elp to loot zhat one that is on Kent Island. The bridge is out; I've already checked."

Sarah made an 'ahhh' noise and asked, curiously, "Why are you so interested in these seeds or plant samples?"

"Besides zhe fact zhat zhey're the collective genetic 'eritage of 'umanity, zhat is?" Lily asked her, amused.

Sarah nodded, "Yes, besides that."

"Because I believe I could genetically modify a number of types of plants to grant them not only a resistance to radiation, but zhe capability to sequester radionuclides through a biological process," Lily told her, honestly.

Sarah asked, surprisingly insightfully, "Pull the radioactive particulates out of the water they drink, you mean?"

Lily nodded, "And the air if it was dusty. It might take thirty years, but eventually, DC and then the rest of the world might stop being a radioactive hell-hole."

Sarah smiled, "That's the part of you I like, Doctor. My dad says you're a high-functioning psychopath, but then you have these lofty ideas to make the world a better place. Yeah, we can definitely help you, especially in exchange for what you're paying us."

Lily didn't quite understand what Sarah was saying. She didn't think that those two things she mentioned were mutually exclusive. And besides, she felt empathy... sometimes, especially if she reminded herself to do so and made an active effort out of it.

Sarah then coughed, "Uhh... I didn't mean to call you a psychopath, exactly. I'm pretty sure my dad is wrong. Plus, that's one of the main reasons he agreed to work so closely with you. I'm not sure I understand why, either."

Lily hummed and enlightened the woman, "If zhat is what zhe psychological profile he had constructed of me says zhen 'is decision is likely because it would make me very predictable. I don't really agree with it either, but I am pretty predictable in a lot of ways."

However, she wondered how Elder Lyons had gotten enough data for his psychologist Scribes to presumably profile her. Did he suspect that she had something to do with the Outcasts' inexplicable incineration? If so, it might explain why he stopped the investigation and why he told his daughter that she was a psychopath.

Shrugging, she continued, "I'd like you to use your aircraft to take some of my men, and yours too, if you want to come, to zhose coordinates and bring everything you can back."

She already knew what her first priority to acquire was. If you considered this a terraforming attempt, then it became obvious which plant would be ideal in this hemisphere once modified. Kudzu.

However, just radiation-resistant cereal crops would be a real shot in the arm of civilisation around here. Virginia and Maryland had a lot of good farmland once upon a time. It was still there, except for the contamination.

---xxxxxx---

It took a week and a half to organise the mission to go to the seed vault, but Lily was surprisingly not involved one whit.

Gary had been keen to get involved, especially when Lily had mentioned the purpose. The Brotherhood had been really happy with their returned Vertibird and thrilled with the CAD files and the idea that they could get their fleet of aircraft that they had been mainly cannibalising for parts in the air. There was already talk of training more Initiates as Pilots.

Lily sent him through a VR Power Armour familiarisation course and gave him a set of T-51B armour and a new plasma pistol. He already had the old plasma rifle that they had used so long ago in their ant eradication mission.

Gary didn't hide his past with Sarah Lyons, and she and the rest of the Brotherhood were amazed. Although they still had an ongoing conflict with the Enclave, they still had a lot of reverence for people who were in the US military during the time of the Great War, just like their founder.

Lily gave all control of the operation to Gary and the Brotherhood, putting them in command of her soldiers, who seemed very eager to fly on Vertibirds, while another two squads were going to accompany her on a different mission.

Sadly, when you became a Dictator, it became a lot more difficult to just sneak off on your lonesome, so she was taking her armoured RV and two trucks filled with soldiers and robots.

The Apprentice actually wanted to go with Gary and explore the Vault, which Lily encouraged as she felt that her own destination was dangerous. Well, if not dangerous, then at least uncertain. Although, the Brotherhood team looked askance at the young girl in her obviously much sleeker and larger hardsuit. Pinker, too.

It didn't help when Alice asked one of the Paladins, "What, you mean your armour doesn't have built-in weapons systems or a battle management computer?"

Lily sent the girl a text message: ixnay, and she stopped showing off.

Her roof could fit two Vertibirds, and Lily watched them arrive two at a time to pick up a squad of her men and robots and Gary and Alice before flying off to the southeast in formation. Apparently, they would refuel, and from there, they would hit the site. All of the Vertibirds had both GPS systems, including moving maps, even if the maps hadn't been updated in a while.

Leftenant Wilson asked, "So, what's so special about this Dunwich company, ma'am?"

"I don't know, but I am going to find out," Lily said earnestly. She had been putting off her curiosity about this place ever since she got here, and she just couldn't avoid it anymore. It was like a junkie with a pile of opiates in front of them; you couldn't expect her not to partake, even if it was dangerous.

If it killed her, she had left a complete download of her ego and PC data dump in a small device in the Apprentice's room, along with instructions on how to clone her a new body and transfer the memories over. Lily no longer thought that such a replacement would still be her, but at the same time, it would be the best thing that wasn't her that someone very much like her continued to exist. Still, she would do her best not to die.

The drive was long and uneventful. The Dunwich building was on the far left of "the map" in Fallout 3, which turned out to be over a hundred kilometres from Megaton, so it took several hours of driving around to get there.

Lily had to stop the team of humans from going inside, she shook her head, "No, just robots. You guys stay out here and guard the perimeter."

That surprised them, but it was the reason she brought so many robots with her. She glanced at the twenty Kaytrons, "Lasers only; I don't want to burn zhe building down. Sweep and clear the entire building and basement levels. Execute."

There were diminishing returns with Kaytron intelligence gains due to their distributed network, so twenty Kaytrons weren't appreciably smarter than eight, and a thousand wouldn't be appreciably smarter than twenty. That was partly by her design in keeping the bandwidth available for intra-Kaytron communication limited but mostly because stable distributed intelligence was a very hard problem.

Still, they nodded as one and proceeded into the building. Lily wasn't watching through any of their sensors but was following their broadcast actions and intra-Mesh communications, and they systematically cleared all of the feral ghouls from the upper levels and then proceeded down in the basement and connected cavern, ensuring a daisy-chain of their fellows kept a complete relay chain, so Lily could maintain contact with the whole cohort.

The sweep and clear order wouldn't kill entities if they weren't considered a threat or if they didn't attack, so she supposed every one of the cultist ghouls in the cavern attacked on sight, just like the game. If there was anything else down there, the robots couldn't detect it, and they could detect a lot more than even she could.

Twenty minutes after they entered the building they all filed out. She glanced at the Spider Company men and women, "Okay, I'm going to go in alone."

That caused Wilson to fidget, "Uh... I'm not sure..." Lily waved him off, "I'm going to go in alone." She said, firmer this time.

"Yes, ma'am. Estimate before you're back up?" he said, getting with the program.

Lily hummed and shrugged slightly, "I don't know. Either not very long or most of the day. If it's zhe latter, I'll try to come up and let you know."

She entered the building, triggering her HUD to display the shortest path to reach the caverns below and started walking there. In the game, there were a number of spooky holotapes that told the tragic story of a man named Jaime Palabras in a Lovecraftian descent into madness.

Lily didn't really believe in the supernatural, but she had already seen evidence of psychic and telekinetic powers in this world. In the game, the Dunwich building wasn't dangerous, but Lily wasn't the protagonist of the game; that would be the Lone Wanderer assuming the world recognised him as such. A lot of things that wouldn't touch a protagonist might cinematically kill an NPC like her. Still, she had to find out anyway.

In the game, you saw a number of hallucinations as you passed through the building, but she did not experience anything at all except a vague sense of unease, and she might have been imagining or projecting that herself.

As she walked down the stairs into the basement to reach the caverns her perspective suddenly shifted, and both audible klaxon alarms and visual alerts started peppering her visual field.

*** WARNING! BASILISK HACK PRECAUTIONS! ***

She blinked, suddenly realising that she was hanging upside down from the ceiling on the top floor of the building, and her left-hand tools were deployed, as were her replacement legs that she had installed without telling the Apprentice a few days ago. She had tested them and loved them but hadn't gotten around to scaring Alice with them yet.

The eight spindly little legs felt very comfortable, and they gripped the ceiling through a combination of levitation emitters on the tip of each leg and grabby little claws. She had the battery power to hang like this for hours.

Her plasma cutter tool was almost completely discharged; whatever she had done had used most of the special miniature micro-fusion cell she installed in the arm.

She skittered down across the ceiling and then down the wall to stand on the floor and deployed all of the tools back into her left arm. She'd keep her legs like this for now while she conducted a mental self-assessment. If she needed to run fast, then these legs could run over forty-five kilometres an hour on even rough and uneven ground, like the middle of a half-destroyed building, which was so much faster than two legs ever could.

She didn't know how her basilisk hack precautions were triggered. By definition, she couldn't know. Basilisk hacks were from her old world, and were constructed by the hyper-intelligent TITAN AIs. They were a memetic attack which took advantage of the way biological or even emulated transhuman brains interpreted and processed sensory input. Kind of like the way epileptics was susceptible to certain visual stimuli, all of humanity was susceptible to certain combinations of all senses, although she suspected it was mainly sight and sound. It was kind of a difficult thing to study.

The hyperintelligent AIs knew so much about how the mind worked that they could craft a series of sensory inputs and, through them, deliver payloads directly from the brain. It could be as simple as knocking you out or as insidious as completely rewriting your personality over a period of months. Once you saw and heard the attack, you were pretty much done.

It was so serious that in the past, her standard countermeasure for a potentially detected basilisk hack was self-deletion, followed by restoring herself from a backup. She valued her life now a lot more than she did back then, but she kept a modified version of the precautions on her system.

To be triggered, her computer had to have detected her memories being changed in real-time, somehow. Her Muse continuously monitored her sensorium and compared it to her short-term memory, and in a serious discrepancy, it triggered this failover mode. It rendered her unconscious and took over her body, and it used whatever methods it could to run away until the effect stopped.

When it felt she was as safe as she was likely to get, it saved some data about the incident, including a modified version of her sensorium, and then carefully deleted her short-term memory; then just to be safe, it deleted its own memory about the incident.

The only way she could learn about what happened was if she opened the data packet, and if that triggered the system again, well, the Muse wouldn't leave a report the second time.

Sighing, Lily checked her network connections and sent a message to the men outside that she might be longer than she thought. After that, she opened the file and squinted at her sensorium. The Muse altered it, giving a random distortion to everything she saw, heard, smelled or felt.

The idea was it would take very precise sensory combinations for a basilisk hack to take place, and adjusting them randomly with distortion should cause the entire thing to fail.

She didn't see anything unusual, but for a period of time, she stopped on the stairs and said, "What the fuck?" That was unusual. She wasn't seeing anything on the sensorium, but Lily's past self was clearly reacting to something. The thought track was intentionally missing here, so she didn't know what she was thinking.

After a couple of minutes, she didn't say anything but continued down into the cavern where she found the obelisk, but then immediately she noticed when her Muse took over, deployed her eight legs and plasma torch and sprinted up out of the cavern, skittering across walls and ceiling until she used the plasma cutter to cut through part of the ceiling, and darting up through the hole, repeating this two more times before she settled, hanging off the ceiling of the top floor.

Interesting. She hopped into the air and folded all eight of her legs back into her cybernetic legs, and landed on two feet. She glanced down at herself and hummed. She was just wearing panties now. Well, that was a problem. Her eight mighty legs had destroyed her pants. That was a problem for later, though.

She started playing back the saved memories this time. Her memories and sensorium stream saved to her computer were, ideally, supposed to be identical, but she wouldn't have been in this situation if it was.

Everything started more or less the same, but she started noticing a faint outline, almost like one of her own boxes she uses for her visual graphical user interface for her computer system.

About half of the way down the stairs, it grew solid enough that she could see, and almost the text on it, as if it actually was a graphical interface.

¥̵̛̲ð̶̗̂µ̷͈̅r̸̛̙ ̵̻̂þ̸̳̍å̴͕̌§̸̛̥§̸̱̽ï̸͚̓v̸̠́ê̵̳͊ ̶̫̀þ̸̮̈́È̵͔͋R̵̙͑K̷̰̿ ̵̻͑"̶̖̀Ì̷̡̓ñ̶̹͂v̴̙̆ï̴̡͗ð̴͚̎l̴̺̆å̴̹̎ß̸͍́l̵̰̅ê̷̙͊ ̶͓̒§̵̝͆ð̶̮̄µ̵̛͈l̴͕͌"̵̗͛ ̵̤̍h̵̻̃å̷̩̂§̶̻̈́ ̵̬̒ß̶͇̏ê̴̩̈́ḛ̵̂̒ñ̵̩̔ ̴̈͜å̴͓͘¢̷̯̿†̶͙̑ï̷̭̀v̶̜̇å̷̩̿†̸̱͛ê̵͖̌Ð̵̻̉.̴̻͗͜͝

A few more steps resolved the text until it was clear. It was on the background of a blue background, almost exactly like the user interface to one of the Final Fantasy games on the SNES or NES.

Your passiPERK "Inviolable Soul" has been activated.

Ah, this is where I briefly stopped on the stairs for seemingly no reason. My thoughts in my memories were still there, which was one reason reviewing this data was dangerous. In the past, I was thinking pretty much the same thing I was thinking now, namely, "What the fuck?"

I suddenly chuckled as both the memories and my present thoughts were almost in sync for a bit. My memories had a feeling that the underlined segments in that user interface were a link like it was a web page or something insane like that. And my past self tried to "click" on, and the image changed.

perk / pɜrk / (noun): Multiversal travellers generally receive zero or one perk for every universe they visit. Perks are special abilities incorporated into your soul that convey special abilities. The first perk a traveller picks is often the most powerful. Choose wisely!

What... the fuck?

I watched my memory "click" on the other link, silently.

INVIOLABLE SOUL

GRADE: SS+

While your soul can still be destroyed if enough energy is put into the task, it can never again be bound against your will. Even if you voluntarily consent to binding, you may, at any time, dissolve the binding without paying any penalties that would usually be associated with breaking a soul bond/contract. Additionally, you receive a minor resistance to biological/digital brainwashing of all types, and any brainwashing will slowly, over time, wear off with minimal to no psychological damage.

+50% SOUL resistance

+25% Mental resistance

Brainwashing must be continually applied to you in order to remain effective. (Minus 1-3% brainwashing per day.)

Lily's memory had begun walking down into the cavern, and as soon as it saw the obelisk, the memory stopped suddenly.

She was confused, very, very confused. She didn't even believe in souls... well, perhaps she did now. But she definitely wouldn't have before arriving in this strange universe. She certainly didn't remember picking anything. Was this a real thing, or was it a memetic contagion from the Cthulhu spire in the basement? Well, whatever it was, she wasn't coming back here.

Walking down to the ground level, she took a pair of pants from a robot, put them on and walked outside.

"We're going home," Lily said absently.