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Gyro hated children. They were nuisances at best and reminders at worst. Yet, somehow, in some tiny infinitesimally small corner of his heart he hadn’t quite managed to kill or science away he managed to tolerate them. That was the only explanation as for why he let the girl with a hair bow in her hair, whose name had immediately slipped his mind, sit on his tables and stare around in wonder.
“Dr.Gearloose, who’s she?”
“That, pink child, is my attempt at a robot maid. Her name is Robotica, and if all goes according to plan, she won’t ever develop enough of a consciousness to turn evil in the first place.”
“What if she does anyway?”
“We- and by we I mean I, will cross that bridge when I come to it.” Gyro said, he waved his wrench in a circle in her vague direction. He couldn’t be bothered to turn for such a mundane and pointless task. “Don’t you have other things you’d like to do? Dolls to play with or some such?”
She was quiet for a long second. “No, I can play with my dolls anytime outside of training. Going to the bin is rare and since I can’t get into the archives… I, well. Your work is fascinating Dr.Gearloose.” Her voice pitched up at that last sentence. No doubt an attempt to chase her temporary melancholy away.
Personally, Gyro wondered why she even bothered, the world hated chipperness, would crush you until you felt like less than a bug underfoot for it. Whatever. Not his kid, not his problem. If her naivety got her hurt, she wouldn’t be able to sue him about it.
Gyro scoffed. “Of course it is, this is the cutting edge of technological innovation. What would you want in the archives anyway? It’s a bunch of old papers slowly gathering mold and dust and whatever else.” He didn’t hate the archives, far from it. All libraries were filled to the brim with information, something more useful than gold in his profession (mostly, gold tech was still his most stable energy circuit despite the cost) but if he was the future, that place was the past. Nothing good came from him lingering there too long.
“Have you ever been inside Dr.Gearloose?”
Despite knowing the girl had a high possibility of asking that exact question he still found himself frozen mid wrench. “Not for some time now, no.” Not since Della- He finished the motion. “But places like that don’t change even if it’s been a few years.”
“You’re probably right.” The girl kicked her legs. “I heard there’s lots of information about the McDuck family there you can’t get anywhere else.”
“That’s true.” Gyro admitted, begrudgingly. “Don’t want to destroy it, don’t want it out in the wider world, dump it in the bin with the rest.” The money bin was built and maintained with that philosophy. The treasure, the artifacts, the inventions, the employees and any information on lost relics (and people).
“Aww.” The girl whined, slumped near in two. “I’d hoped you’d tell me I was being crazy. Now I want to get inside even more.”
Gyro really shouldn’t do this. He really shouldn’t. He stood up and turned to face the girl properly. “If you still feel that strongly in five years, I’ll find a way for you to get inside.” Gyro promised.
Her expression was one of extreme disbelief. “Really? You’d do that?”
“Unfortunately.” Gyro muttered to himself. Another thing he hadn’t managed to kill, his habit of trying to fix other people’s problems for them.
“Thank you Dr.Gearloose!” Her smile was familiar in all the wrong ways. Despite the fact her face was completely different in almost every possible way, skin tone, beak shape, eye colour, that smile was the exact same one 2-BO liked to give to him all those years ago.
“Yeah, whatever.” Gyro went back to focusing on Robotica. He wasn’t at a particularly delicate part of the construction, simply tightening the bolts on her limbs, but it was easier than the child studying him. The girl might be a little like 2-BO, but that robot never stared at him like that. Unblinking, like he was the experiment instead of the hunk of metal in front of him. No, the last person who did that was a whole other ghost.
“You know, if you keep alluding to things, it really won’t be my fault if I can’t hold back mystery seeking senses anymore.” Della passed him the spare solder.
“It absolutely will be. Don’t go digging where you’re not wanted, Duck.” He cooled the iron on the sponge and watched steam rise for a couple seconds.
“Touchy! Would it kill you to lighten up a little bit?”
“No, but it most certainly will kill you.” He watched a glob grow on the end of the iron.
“See, this is the sort of nonsense I’m talking about! Give me something, anything, I’m dying over here!” He could vividly imagine the dramatic gesture she was pulling just out of sight. Maybe an arm thrown over her eyes, or both hands over her heart, anything to convey how absolutely weak and pathetic she was at the moment.
“Somehow I think you’ll manage just fine.” He finished his job, the two wires now one.
Della blew a raspberry at him. “Fine, whatever, keep your secrets.” She sent him a smirk that made the feathers on the back of his neck stand up. “I’ll get them out of you eventually.”
At that moment, he didn’t doubt that she would. She was like a rat, snatching and stealing and burrowing to her heart’s content. Anything she could ever want was at her fingertips, but that had never been enough for her had it? Della always needed more. More mystery, more history, more danger, more tales. The fact was, nothing could stop her, until it did.
“Do you have anything from the archives here?” The girl’s voice dispelled the lingering traces of his reminiscences.
“No.” A lie. There was a folder tucked away in an old, buried filing cabinet with rocketship plans. A high shelf of mysterious artifacts they’d given him to identify and research. More than a couple photographs tucked in various manuals as temporary turned permanent bookmarks. Of course, something the archives would never have but the girl would still hunger for were the sarcastic comments on a good fraction of his old designs and instruction manuals.
“Oh, yeah. I guess if a regular library is strict about returns the archives are probably even more so, huh.”
“I guess. Don’t you have someone else to bother?”
“Not really. Mr.McDuck isn’t going to leave for another hour or so and he doesn’t like it when I attend his meetings.”
“I wonder why.” Gyro muttered sarcastically. The girl looked almost the same as Della did at her age. They were different people, certainly. The girl was softer than Della was, less sharp edges and fire underfoot. A result of growing up alone in a mansion without an infamous temper. Still, Gyro might’ve lost a not-quite friend that day, but Mr.McDuck lost a niece. It made sense it was too painful to even look at her, much less understand her.
Hey, look, that physiology course he took in university was finally showing its use. About time, it was over a decade late. The girl nodded emphatically, obvious to his thoughts.
“I think it’s because he’s afraid I’ll disrupt everything, but I won’t. I know how to be so quiet he doesn’t even notice I’m there most of the time.”
“That is surprisingly sad.” Gyro raised an eyebrow, “Is this a tactic to get me to pity you?”
She waved her hand in an arc. “What? No, that was bragging. Although now that you point it out, it is a little sad.”
“Look, I’m not a therapist and I don’t care. I work here because inventing is my life and people are not.” She had a despondent look on her face. He sighed. “That being said, you’re not unbearable company. My lab is open for you to-” He wheezed as she caught him in a hug tighter than he thought her small muscles were capable of. “Let me finish.”
“Right, sorry.” She let him go and he gasped for air.
“As long as you don’t do that again you can stop by the lab whenever in with the stipulation that I get to kick you out for any reason.”
“That’s fair. Some of your projects can be a little…”
“Misunderstood?”
“Destructive.” The girl concluded.
“Know what. That works.”