Amara huffs out an irritated snort as she furrows her brows in concentration as she fiddles with her detached right arm.

The bloody thing is on the fritz again. It's a touchy little device, her right arm, and mostly custom by now. She's gutted and rebuilt it twice, but it was never meant to last as long as it has. Planned obsolescence in a medical device is sick, is what it is, and the very concept makes her more determined to baby her arm along at least another solid decade more before she replaces it.

It's a goal that feels much more high-minded and noble when she's doing less annoying maintenance. Right now, there's a part of Amara that wishes she could swan off to a corporate lab and pop her arm into a nice, sterile workstation to tinker with it using tools designed to work with the 'patent protected' fastenings and motorics of the cybernetic limb.

Still, needs must. If all Amara has is this grungy room at the back of this old house, then that's where she'll fix the bloody thing as many times as she has to.

"Fucking hell," she mutters, prying back another panel with a metal shim. She spits the screwdriver carefully into her left hand and gingerly gets to work on opening up the second internal panel under that, hunching over where she's perched on a stool with the best light in the computer-lined work room. The table she's at is covered in tools surrounding her right arm sitting in a modified set of clamps, the right sleeve of her t-shirt empty except for the socket mount hooked to her shoulder.

When she pries the second panel loose, she concentrates, the neural bands on her temple transmitting an impulse to her detached right arm to twitch the simplified graspers at the end of it. She studies the tug of the thin metal strands inside her right arm, then sighs heavily, rubbing the bridge of her nose with the cool metal heel of her left hand.

"You can quit bloody lurking, you know," Amara says, conversationally, without lifting her head to glance at the figure in the doorway, "If the rest of that lot told you I stabbed someone for interrupting me once, they left out that it was an accident, and I only stabbed him a bit."

She gestures vaguely in the direction of the doorway with her small, fine-tipped screwdriver: "With this, actually. Barely broke the skin. And you're a tough duck, aren't you? Must be, seeing as you ended up with us. I'm sure you'd be right in no time if you got a bit stabbed. So come in and make yourself useful while you're staring, would you? Pop the tool cupboard by the main server and get me a voltage tester."

Amara doesn't like to let most strangers get too close to her arms while she's working on them. It wasn't entirely an accidental stabbing the last time. But the newest odd duck who's joined their little flock of activists strikes her as a good sort. Or, at the very least, the sort who's receptive to a touch of light stab threatening as a deterrent to poking at delicate mechanisms that ought not be poked at by amateurs.

It also gives her an excuse to get to know their newest associate a bit better, which Amara can't say she minds as she glances over her shoulder. Might be just the thing to brighten up the dreary afternoon, as it happens, she thinks, with a faintly wry twist at the corner of her mouth.

"And you might as well tell me what you came in here to tell me while you're playing my lovely assistant," Amara says, propping her left elbow on the table to cradle her chin in her metal palm, "So long as it's not about the bloody house chore rota again. I'll get to the vacuuming when my arm's fixed. Can't be getting on with it like this, can I?"

With a thought, she wiggles the graspers at the end of her right arm where they're dangling out of the far end of the vice clamps on the table, her eyes sparkling with mischief.