"FREEDOM ICKY MOSS."

- Kira Yamato

The glaring and whirring ceiling of the Mechon factory looked like the inside of an army hospital through Sharla's barely open eyelids. She was lying slightly elevated on her back as mechanical chaos screamed all around her. Her vision was strained and blurred. Her hearing was dull and muffled. Every part of her body was paralyzed by overwhelming numbness. Her forehead tickled but she was too weak to move her arm and scratch it.

A set of giant sharpened prongs hovered above her field of vision and dripped with red liquid. At first it didn't register to her why they were red. She was barely able to reason where she was, what was happening, or what condition she was currently in. Her eyes glanced down and she saw the massive visage of Metal Face grinning over her. Her eyes glanced up until they almost rolled back into her head and she saw Face Nemesis watching over her from upside-down. She glanced right and saw Xord huddled with his giant maw snapping up and down. She glanced left and saw the darkened outline of a towering Mechon she couldn't recognize standing motionless with its torso panels folded open.

Face Nemesis was kneeling with her hands turned up and forming a bowl big enough to hold a single Homs. Sharla was lying in her grasp with the Mechon's articulated palms conforming to her body. The feeling of her shoulders, spine, and back hips resting against a metal bed was something she'd soon become very accustomed to.

The construction of a new Mechon core was well underway, and Metal Face had taken charge as the lead surgeon. Face Nemesis assisted as a nurse. Bit by bit, Metal Face would slip his claws through another vital component, hastily pry it out of its owner, and toss it over to the ever-hungry Xord, who acted as a sentient disposal bin for unwanted biomatter. The parts of Sharla that worked efficiently enough on their own and were allowed to stay—of which there were very few—were nudged aside and spared the wrath of the massive scalpels. Everything else was frantically excised like lumps of jelly or strings of spaghetti so there would be room to put in the upgrades.

Face Nemesis deployed her little-known secondary equipment to make sure the defeated Homs fighter never had a chance to overcome her grogginess and immobility. It took a certain degree of expertise to keep Sharla still without letting her slip into the biological equivalent of Sleep Mode. A plastic breathing mask was sealed over her mouth and provided her with air that kept her awareness hazy and her eyelids heavy. Her sweat-soaked forehead was crowned with a royal tiara of electrical wires mounted on suction cups that dulled her nerve signals.

A small amount of caution may have been used to keep Sharla in a state where all she could do was lie back in a stupor, but the three Mechon used no such caution when it came to giving her the business. Her vest was crumpled up around her shoulders and armpits, the front of her bodice was ripped with all of the buckles in tatters, and her shorts were frayed and pushed down far enough that they practically rode the base of her pelvis. Cutting, slashing, digging, and stabbing tools flew through the front of her body faster than blades in a blender making a strawberry smoothie. Speed and destructiveness were the only things her surgeons were concerned about, and they were still trying to raise the numbers for both. By this point she was probably covered with more fragments of her own innards than her actual clothes.

Sharla had a distant perception that something horrendous and wrong was happening to her, but trying to focus her senses just left her even more lost. The numbing neural pulses and anesthetic gas Face Nemesis utilized were designed to keep her just sedated enough so she'd be agreeable to some massive invasive surgery and then rapidly wear off once she was in her new Mechon body. The signals Face Nemesis sent through her brain gradually became more intense, getting her primed to have her memory scrubbed at the same time Metal Face was obliterating her organs.

By Homs standards, she was an exceptionally healthy and physically able young lady who exercised regularly as part of her combat practice and rarely deviated from a steady balanced diet. Translating all of that into Mechon, Sharla was mostly a bunch of junk haphazardly shoved into a frame that was nice to look at. Lungs that collapsed after a few brute force hits were too fragile. A digestive system that tangled in knots with a few G forces was poorly designed. Spinal nerves that could only transmit weak signals and snapped like twigs with too much pressure couldn't be considered reliable hardware. Just about the only things worth saving were her well-rounded exterior and the brain up in her pretty head that made everything work.

The good news was Sharla was the lucky winner of the world's first on-site emergency Mechonectomy operation. The bad news was that wasn't actually good news if you were anyone other than the Mechon. Usually when a Homs specimen was captured (alive or dead), there was the complicated and time-consuming process of analyzing physical traits, mental capacity, and combat abilities before it was ever decided if the materials should be converted into a Mechon core. The process generally took a week at the very least.

But in Sharla's case? Naw. Only a few minutes ago she'd been fighting along with the rest of Shulk's team in what became a failed raid on the Mechonis stronghold. The party went in knowing this place produced both the common rank and file Mechon drones and the larger, more advanced, and highly mysterious Faced Mechon.

Sharla was already in the fortress where all the necessary tools were immediately on-hand, she was surrounded by vicious Mechon enemies looking for any opportunity to apply their engineering knowledge, and she was one cute little bioprocessor who happened to match the basic requirements of a recently finished but inactive Mechon chassis standing on the launch platform right beside her. The victors of the battle had decided she was going under right now so she could get a revolutionary express installation. If she had held the same appreciation for mathematical probability as most of the Mechon race, she would have already realized so many unfavorable coincidences piling up meant she wasn't going to get off easy.

Sharla's specialty leaned more toward trigger discipline and bullet physics, but that was fine. Part of this operation was meant to help her think more like a Mechon.

The rest of her team was still laid out on the ground nearby so they could be dealt with later, but she had been rushed to front of the organ donor line before she even realized she was on it. Her body was a salvage job and an all-you-can-eat buffet rolled into one, and whatever she had for breakfast that morning was quickly becoming Xord's lunch.

There were no sheets, surgical curtains, or even life monitoring equipment in this dreary garage that was never meant to be an operating room for biological life forms. Sharla's impromptu procedure was a rugged and gritty effort that got straight to the meat of the matter. The only privacy she was provided was the way Metal Face, Face Nemesis, and Xord crowded so close together made it was difficult to see exactly what they were doing. From any angle ten feet away, all it looked like was a group of giant machines passing around construction equipment and teaming up on something tiny and helpless.

It was nearly impossible to exaggerate just how quickly she went from battle participant to surgery patient. Her rifle was actually still within her reach on the edge of Face Nemesis's thumb, but the extreme disorientation filling her senses stopped her from picking it up and shooting Metal Face straight between his eyes while her kidneys were in his claws. No concern had been paid to disarming her, disinfecting her, or even properly disrobing her for the procedure. Sheer overwhelming brutality was all the Mechon needed in order to succeed.

When Sharla wasn't seeing blurry red things being lifted away from her, she saw blurry bronze and gunmetal things being lowered toward her. Her shoulders would fidget or her hips would twitch every once in a while, but with her foggy sense of awareness there was no way of telling if she was the one doing it or if she was just getting rattled around in all the chaos. Any time she closed her weighty eyelids and weakly lifted them again, she could never tell if five seconds or five hours had passed.

The tickling above her eyes grew even more intense, overtaking all the numbness and dizziness that paralyzed her body. She felt what could only be described as an invisible spider hugging its legs around her brain and sinking its claws through the gray matter. Fuzzy hairs prickled all over the inside of her skull as her vision distorted until it turned pure white. She blinked once, and then everything was gone.

That specific instant was when Sharla ceased to think for herself.

The frenzied cycle of organ disposal and prosthetic implantation finally came to an end when Metal Face stepped back from his handiwork. The new version of Sharla resting in Face Nemesis's palms was clad in a reinforced bodysuit like ones worn by all Mechon cores. Firmly clinging to her original organic figure, it protected and integrated with her valuable internals, becoming the only attire she'd ever wear and never be able to remove. In addition to regulating her new Mechon augmentations, the wrapper-suit was the only thing preserving the few mangled bits and pieces that remained of her biological self. She'd almost immediately start turning into a high-tech mold colony without it.

Her breathing mask was gone and replaced with metal armor on the sides of her face and underneath her chin. Her head rested at a slant so her dark hair covered her eyes and only half of her emotionless face was visible. The crown of suction cups that had savagely conducted the final assault that eradicated her mind and filled in her new one detached from her brow with a simple pop, pop, pop. The wires drew back into hidden compartments in the chassis of Face Nemesis once they were off. Sharla used to follow the principle of one shot, one kill. Now she was a firsthand advocate to the Mechon philosophy of one brain, one thousand sledgehammers.

Between what Face Nemesis had done with her head and what Metal Face and Xord had done with the majority of her other vital organs, it was hard to look at Sharla and not think "Mushy mush." But the complete dismantling of everything that defined her as a person hadn't even finished yet.

Face Nemesis stood up and walked toward the empty chassis of the new Mechon waiting in the silo. She carefully cradled Sharla's lethargic form like a tiny doll in her hands, turning Sharla over so her head drooped toward Face Nemesis and her back pointed toward the unnamed Mechon behind her. Face Nemesis gently set her down in the reclined control bed in the Mechon's center.

The Mechon's boot-up sequence was triggered by transistors in Sharla's refitted body communicating with the cockpit's receivers. The minute she was in place and her extensive list of modifications checked out, the lid of the metal coffin sealed over her and locked her away in its life support and cooling systems. A second, third, and fourth layer of bright white armor folded around the core assembly to form the front of the Mechon's torso. The intention was to keep the core materials comfortably housed and keep the appalling nature of all Faced Mechon a closely guarded secret.

The new Mechon awakened and took her first steps off her launch pad. She had a vague feminine aesthetic, but her profile was more narrow and less teapot-shaped compared to Face Nemesis. Her design made it harder for enemies to track her and easier for her to move around and change vantage points on the fly.

Her new body had a glimmering white finish. The same pristine white was painted on all of her trim and even through her inner frame. But the practice of turning a dusk-skinned mortal into a circuit board for an albino-armored robot wasn't just a fashion statement for the Mechonis aristocracy. Her single-tone paint scheme made her simpler to maintain and perfect for arctic recon.

Her peers on Mechonis knew her by her serial number. Residents of Bionis would learn to know her as Pearl Face.

She exchanged silent looks with the other three Faced Mechon. Metal Face slowly leered at her while she remained indifferent. Face Nemesis and she gave one another a nod and kept it at that. Xord crouched like a dog and made like he wanted to take a bite out of one of her curved aft sections, but she gave him a gesture that unashamedly said "You've had plenty." She then turned her attention elsewhere.

The floor of the base rumbled with metallic thud after metallic thud in the rhythm of colossal footsteps. The rumbling faded and was replaced with a distinct electrical whir climbing in pitch. Shulk and the rest of the Bionis team were drawn to the sounds as they were coming out of their daze.

Melia was the first to notice Sharla wasn't lying near her and the first to gasp in terror when she crawled up from the floor. Pearl Face was towering over the team like a vengeful ghost and aiming down at them with a high-precision proton cannon that most certainly did not have the Silver Bullet Suppressor's problem of not being calibrated correctly for her arm.

Before any of the targets had a chance to react, she fired a shot that made the entire room shine blinding white.

Author's note: No one wants a thankless job.

Author's other note: Hmm. Could be Vanea wearing Sharla's hide so she can have her own Faced Mechon form and follow Meyneth around more often. Could be some other Badnik wanting to get in on the fun. Could be a generic AI. Maybe we'll never know.

Author's other other note: I wonder where this goes if she ever runs into Jade Face.