Xaviers!

Natalie sits in the workshop in an unnecessarily sagging posture. She's staring numbly at a blank screen that should contain code that she can't bring herself to write. Seconds tick by into minutes and still she doesn't do anything. Just staring and wasting that valuable time she was going on about earlier.

"Was there a problem with the police?" Ashlie's voice chimes from a nearby speaker.

"No, other than them being irritated at having to deal with the situation. Will was headed back to the dorms last I saw him. Shari opted to walk back and I din't want to push it with her," she says. It wasn't really lying if you weren't explaining the whole situation. "The police fined them both two hundred pounds and suggested the university try to have some discipline."

"What's wrong then? Mental fatigue? Is something wrong with the hardware?"

"No, that's fine. Shari... it's... we're no longer romantically involved and it's... adversarial. We had a disagreement about my current situation."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Are you okay?"

"No. But not being okay's not going to change the situation," she says with a sigh. "We've got to make this work. I just... I just wish she understood."

"People struggle to understand each other. I can only imagine it's worth on an intergalactic scale." she says, sympathetically.

"Well, water under the bridge, right?" She rubs at one of her eyes and tries to smile.

"Not all things are meant to last and some lessons are painful."

"Just not the way I wanted to learn the 'meant to be alone' lesson, I guess." Her power grabs the computer and begins accessing the facial canvas, making adjustments to it as she tries to set the pattern for the current structure to more closer match her actual face.

"Hey now, I'll admit I'm not exactly an authority on romantic relationships, but you'll figure it out one day. You're a clever young woman."

"Clever with technical things, not people. This is the second black eye on something like this since I started university. Not risking it again." The face began to take more shape. After a bit, she actually started reworking some of the existing underlying structure of the face to make things work better. It would require a bit of extra work, but she seemed to be good at identifying expendable/replaceable structures.

"I don't believe that's a particularly bad track record for someone your age, but I understand that it hurts."

"I marked the thresholds for structural stability for you, so you know how much material you can safely shave off without compromising resilience against anvils too much." she seamlessly switches topics.

"Why would I be..." She raises an eyebrow and shakes her head, "My main concern is structural integrity around the eyes. Don't like the thought of being blind and if they're smashed, blind is what happens."

"The skull is made from tungsten titanium carbide. Even if you reduce the thickness by up to 20% it'll still withstand significantly more than biological equivalents."

“Removing some material in places and adding some to better reflect my face shape. Tricky adding the structure without making it too rigid. And I’m not a doctor or artist so I feel like I’m missing something.”

"You'll probably have to compromise a bit between expressiveness and resemblance. If we can't resolve this issue in the medium term then I'll look into producing a new head model from scratch."

“If I can avoid the uncanny valley, then that’s a primary objective. One of the difficulties of a preexisting face.”

"Err on the side of expressiveness then. Avoid changing the underlieing structure too much, so the facial movement actuators and artificial muscles aren't too far off in their calibrations. Anything added to adjust the skin shouldn't have too much of an impact while still changing the general appearance."

"Sure thing," she says, focusing on the work for a while, adjusting and tweaking until she finally has something she seems to be mostly happy with. "Okay, I think this is a good first pass."

"Alright, let's get to implementing then. I'll make the underlieing adjustments while the other pieces print and then you can put the finishing touches on it." she says and two of the robot arms swings down again, one wielding a small plasma torch and the other a small spinning metal file.

Natalie puts the body back in the frame, turning off most of the movement sections so that Ashlie can do the work she needs without risking any movement.

Having to rely less on awkward, staggered commands Ashlie works quick, removing the synthetic skin and artificial tendons before going to work on adjusting the skull's structure, mainly focusing on slightly reducing the cheekbones and chin as per Natalie's designs, occasionally pausing to let the metal cool down as to not transmit too much heat down into the more delicate components encased in the skull.

"That should just about do it. Give it a moment to cool and settle."

It's a bit unsettling to have robotic arms waving a plasma torch around your face, even if they're super precise and you can't feel the cuts. At some point in the process, Natalie just shuts her eyes down rather than watch. She powers them back up, looking around. "So is this 'metal surgery'? I can't imagine plastic surgery would apply," she tries to joke.

"Aesthetic engineering." Ashlie jokes in response.

"If only everyone thought about the aesthetics of their engineering," she says, getting a sensor arm to come over and monitor the temperature of the cuts and welds. "I'm going to contact my mum to get the money for Shari's fine, but can I just have her transfer it to the school? I'd like to mask that that's where it came from."

"Of course. You still care about her."

"Well, maybe one of these days we can be friends again, maybe not, but I still like being able to help," she says, letting the arms begin remolding the artificial tendons to better fit the new face structure. "How I feel about her is... complicated and I'm not sure I... words don't really work well for it. They just sort of stumble all over each other without arriving at any good meaning."

"She's important to you, romantically or not. And you worry you lost a good friend. It hurts, regardless of words and labels."

"And I don't think she understands that it hurts. She assumes I'm emotionless in here or something." She resists the urge to shake her head as the task of putting her face back together continues. "It's like you said, just different hardware. I'm still me."

"Shapeshifters sometimes have... peculiar philosophies about these kinds of things."

"I guess," she replies, somehow managing to shrug with just her voice. "How's it look from your vantage point?"

"Extrapolations are looking good. The final pieces should be done soon and we can put the skin back on. While it's off, do you care to adjust the hair color?"

"Let's do something new." She hands off some information on a particular shade of blue. "And can we get the hair about jaw length? It's okay, if not, but it'd make me feel more like me if it was."

"I'll synthesize some in that particular shade then and swap it out."

"Thanks. Might as well own this... well, for certain definitions of 'own'. Anything you need programming help with while I wait? The memory code seems to be functioning well."

"See if you can write something that can take advantage of modular memory storage, just in case we need to extent what you currently have access to."

"It needs to be tolerant of not being able to access the memory, I would guess. Say if a part needed to be swapped. With some self-correction built into the layout," she says, going back to her existing code, making a copy and beginning to modify it while she talks.

"You'll want to make it tamper-proof in some form. And be careful about how you handle overlaps. You'd probably want the active memory to take priority over a stored backup, but if you're shunting away superfluous details you want to access later you might need to figure out how to reintegrate things without overwriting anything."