This is a giftfic as thanks for ValentineSin13 drawing a cover illustration for Innocent Sin. They gave me another prompt, but then they asked if there would be more kittydroids.

Zero thinks of himself as 'it' and 'this unit.' X uses 'he' and has a concept of 'things that exist.' Out of the things that exist, the question is which is the 'I' and his defining trait so far is that he pokes interesting things. He's noticed that Zero does that too, so he has Zero in the same category as himself, while Zero has yet to create a 'person' category, and instead has the categories of 'the thing doing the observing,' the things that do things when he does things (toys) and things that don't do things when he does things (the wall). He prefers reactive to non-reactive, and his actions causing X to go to sleep sometimes have made him aware that what he does can turn reactive into non-reactive, at least temporarily. This is a boring thing to have happen.

I'm not using 'he' because X has any understanding of pronouns or gender, but because he has a pseudo-'people' category and has himself in there, while Zero doesn't. I'm conveying this by having Zero use 'it' while X… isn't actually using a pronoun for people, but would be if they were actually thinking in words. While 'they' is in fact correct usage for third person singular of unknown/irrelevant/non-male-or-female gender, thinking of using it gave me ideas, using it could imply things about X's self-perception that are just as incorrect as the implications of using he and he doesn't make verb conjugations look like they're wrong.

They both had some programming going in, and that's causing their observations of the world to cause them to build very different frameworks for sorting and understanding it.

This new thing was a pokety toy with colors and bumps and different bits of color on the bumps.

It made sound when this unit touched the bumps! Different sounds!

There were… lots! Lots of bumps! It slapped its hand on the bumps and different noise and ooooh.

The toy that moved in all kinds of ways and made sounds was looking at this unit and the new toy that made sounds. Oooh! Maybe the other toy would come over to roll around! It often did that when this unit found a new fun toy.

Instead it kept poking at the toy it had, but that was fine. This toy was very interesting to poke and bat at and turn upside down and press down and oh, maybe it could touch bumps that weren't next to each other?

The other thing-that-poked-things had stopped moving lots of times, and it still wasn't letting the toy with lots of noises go.

He had gone over to poke the thing-that-poked-things because it was fun to move and be moved and turned all around and feel bits move and sometimes the thing-that-poked-things forgot about toys after that and moved on to other toys and then he could play with the interesting toy. It didn't work the first time so he went to play with another toy until he stopped moving, and then he'd tried again and the other thing-that-poked-things had stopped moving, but he wasn't able to poke at the toy before he stopped moving himself.

When he was moving again, he only got to poke at the toy twice before the other thing-that-poked-things came to roll around, and it grabbed the toy! When he had to stop moving, the other thing-that-poked-things still had the toy, and when he tried going to over to poke, it wouldn't let him push the toy away from them so he could try to roll over to it first when they stopped poking each other later.

The toy must be veryvery interesting to poke, maybe even as interesting to poke as the other thing-that-poked-things if the other thing-that-poked-things wasn't done poking it yet!

He poked other things, because not having anything to poke or move was bad, but he wanted to poke the thing that made all kinds of sounds! What if the other thing-that-poked-things pushed it away from him when he was asleep and it vanished before he even had a chance to poke it?!

The toy that made all kinds of noises was the best toy! As long as it had this toy, the other toy that made all kinds of noises and moved around kept stopping playing with other toys and came over to let this unit poke and roll around with it instead!

If the other toy had the toy, then if this unit went over, it would poke and roll around with this unit instead of how it often just waited for this unit to go away if it wanted to poke other toys.

This toy made the other toy roll around with it! And it made noises! It was the second-best toy!

Part of the reason for the simulations was to teach X that even though he had much more powerful plasma weaponry than could be safely built into a robot master without the accumulated strain causing his buster to give out on him when he really needed it (Blues ruined busters all the time), it wasn't a very good idea to use violence to solve all his problems and disagreements.

X was missing the simulations because they needed to put him with Zero, but it looked like Zero was doing a very good job teaching X that resorting to violence could make things worse instead of better.

Rock's little brother looked about ready to cry from frustration.

Roll had built a much, much sturdier version of the kind of human baby toy that made different sounds when the babies pressed different buttons, to help them form associations between whatever was on the buttons and the various sounds. It wouldn't have been worth the effort to put something in there until now, but they were pretty sure that Zero had finally gotten the idea that if he applied too much force to things they stopped making sounds and being interesting.

X was more likely to break things apart on purpose to look at the inside bits, but only after he'd explored all of the outside. It was partially their fault for putting treats in some of the puzzle toys, but when engineers tested to destruction all the time… Well, hopefully giving them enough experiences would help them realized that what you did was different in different situations. Like, if someone was a person, you didn't open them up so you could look at the bits that fell out.

Normally, when Zero was playing with a toy and X wanted to play with the toy, he just waited until Zero was done. Trying to push it away from Zero didn't work because Zero's eyes were attracted to movement and X tugging at a thing meant X might wrestle with him for it.

This toy was making all kinds of sounds, though, and it kept drawing X's attention, and it had been a few days already and Zero was still poking at it. Sometimes X wrestling with him for a bit for something made Zero forget about the original thing afterwards, but even when X had taken advantage of Zero being distracted by an especially bouncy ball to roll off with the sound maker, Zero came over and wanted to wrestle for it back as soon as X started pressing buttons.

Not that Rock wanted X to grow up thinking it was okay to take other people's things while their backs were turned, or take advantages of other people's weaknesses relative to him – although both their attention spans were still very erratic.

X wouldn't mind wrestling that much, but normally if he wanted to play with something instead he could just stop until Zero realized X wasn't going to wrestle with him anymore and went away. Then Zero figured out that X would come over and wrestle him if Zero kept the toy, or when Zero went over to take the toy, and that meant X couldn't poke at the toy without Zero interrupting him.

Rock had Roll's blueprints so he could have just built a second one, but this was good for them. He hoped.

The toy that rolled around with him spent a lot of time not making sounds or moving. It was good that it was easier to get it to move and roll around while it was functional with the help of the toy that made sounds, but that made it stop moving and then this unit had to hope there were other toys to be interesting.

The other thing-that-poked-things was not moving, and that meant he could poke the toy! Trying to get the toy was very hard to figure out and made him use up all the stuff he could do before he needed to stop moving again very fast. But that meant he started moving again first!

It was bad when the other thing-that-poked-things wasn't moving, wasn't it? But this meant he could get the toy and poke the toy.

The fun toy stopped being fun before this unit had any time to play with it! There was something like that before, when the fun toy just lay there most of the time but then when it did move it was the most fun!

There was also before when this unit applied too much force to the fun toy and made it stop moving. What was making the fun toy stop moving?

"Now Zero's getting frustrated that X is falling asleep early and it's making him fall asleep." Rock looked sad.

…Why was the other thing-that-poked-things no longer poking him? He could finally poke the interesting thing and now the most interesting thing wasn't playing with him anymore!

"So both of them ended up ignoring the toy to try to figure out why the other one changed their behavior. Do you think they learned anything?" Reviewing the footage, Roll truly wondered.

"I hope so?" was all Rock could say. He'd been really scared there for awhile, when X was moving away from Zero to play with the toy instead of falling asleep on top of Zero to make sure Zero wasn't taken away in the night. Were they not friends anymore? It was a relief to see them sleeping in a pile again now. X initiating play sessions had only reassured Zero after X calmed down enough that they stopped putting him to sleep. "At least they'll remember this the next time something comes up?" Their systems were learning bit by bit, so maybe they'd be a little better able to work things out next time. "I think at this rate, without the simulations…"

"This is going to take a lot more than thirty years," Roll agreed.

So many POV shifts... This 'verse came out of an RP series, and that lends itself to switching between character viewpoints. This format not so much. Perhaps if I do another of these they'll be developed enough I can show what's going on with more than one character at a time without switching to Rock to have him tell us what's going on.