Garfiel asked again, “Are you sure? You didn’t forget any part of the servicing, did you?”
“Uh, first I unplugged it, then I removed the base and blades and took the scraps out of the drive.” As she went through the servicing steps and her actions from the previous night, Winry unconsciously put her hand up to her chest as though to soothe her heart as it started to pound. “Then I blew out the dust with the air compressor and wiped down the base and blades …”
That was when she abruptly stopped. Winry’s face rapidly paled.
“Oh, but the cylinder!” she cried.
She would normally rake out the metal powder that had worked its way into the machine, then oil the cylinder. That was an important step in ensuring the blades would be quick and accurate. She realized that past Winry had skipped that step.
When she quickly stuck her face into the machine that Weis and Henrik surrounded, she found that the normally straight blades were horribly misshapen. She could see parts scattered around. The sight caused her mind to go completely empty.
“I had a suspicion that was it,” sighed Garfiel. He could verify from how Winry’s face had changed color and she’d gone speechless that she had indeed made a mistake during the maintenance.
Winry’s lip quivered as she recalled her mental state the night before.
When she had been working on the machine’s maintenance, her thoughts had been revolving around Milia’s leg, the progress she had been making with several schematics, and Darish, all while she had also been fighting off exhaustion.
After several days of hard work and sleep deprivation, she had lost her ability to concentrate. On top of that, she hadn’t even been able to objectively see that herself. Her neglect to remember Pollack’s appointment aside, in her current condition, Winry had been inevitably headed toward making a giant mistake.
“This is no good,” said Weis. He had opened the exterior stay and brought his face up to a gap to check the inside of the machine, but now put the tool he was holding on the ground as though he had given up. “There’s a crack in the cylinder. It probably won’t be able to function accurately like that.”
“Looks like a bunch of small parts popped off all over the place too,” added Henrik. He had stuck a screwdriver in where the base was warped in order to pull out the damaged pieces, but now he also gave up, collapsing into a nearby chair. “We need to change out the broken parts or we won’t be able to get it to work.” He raised his palms, gesturing defeat. Next to him were blueprints and some automail as well as an unprocessed sheet of metal.
“But what about that automail …” Winry trailed off. Her face froze as Henrik shrugged.
“We’ve gotta finish that by tomorrow morning,” Henrik said. “That sheet metal there is Weis’s. We didn’t think we’d be able finish without this tool, so we came by to see if we could use it.”
As he spoke, Henrik reached out to the automail he had set down. The automail’s exterior was crushed as though it had been put under a great deal of pressure. One of its parts clunked dully as it fell to the floor in front of Winry’s eyes.
“When we tried using the machine, we couldn’t control it, which resulted in what you see here. We’re lucky that we got out of this with just a broken casing.”
That terrible noise from earlier had been the sound of the automail being crushed by the damaged machine.
Only the exterior had been ruined, but with the machine now broken, the automail mechanics couldn’t finish their work. Similarly, Weis likely wouldn’t be able to proceed with processing the sheet metal at all. When Winry realized she had broken the cutting-edge machine they had all chipped in to buy, her knees started quaking.
“I’m sorry! I’m really sorry!” she cried. It wasn’t anything that could be fixed with an apology, but she couldn’t not lower her head. “I’ll look for parts immediately!”
If she could replace the broken parts, she could possibly fix the machine. Winry gathered the scattered pieces on the ground with both her hands, then quickly scribbled the model number of the bent blade and cylinder on some memo paper that was on the workbench.
However, when Winry tried to rush out of the studio, Garfiel stopped her.
“It’ll be impossible to get all of those parts today—there’s just too many of them. And the shops are going to be closing soon anyway.”
“But … !”
Still half facing the road, and with a stricken look on her face, Winry watched Weis gently shake his head.
“The manufacturer makes this cylinder in a distinct shape. It’s not interchangeable with any other manufacturer’s parts and there isn’t much supply. Sometimes things like this happen.” After wiping the oil off his hands with the towel around his neck, Weis nestled his metal sheet under his arm. “I’ll head back to my shop to see if I can process this with another tool.”
“I need to at least see if I can go back and get the exterior back to looking how it was,” Henrik said, wrapping the broken automail in cloth. Despite their attempts to rally, the two experienced engineers had come over after determining that they would need the new machine for their work. That basically meant there was no other way to finish their jobs.
Because of her mistake, the two of them might lose their customers’ trust. In Rush Valley, where it was always the survival of the fittest, Winry knew full well exactly how important even a single customer could be.
Since Garfiel had put his faith in Winry’s maintenance skills, his colleagues might even think he was a poor judge of skill for entrusting the machine’s care to her. Even after he had taken her in as his apprentice, she had made a mistake and betrayed the trust he had put in her. She couldn’t stand by and do nothing.
“I might be able to gather the parts if I go to the shops around town! Please let me look for them!” Winry shouted, then ran outside.