Two days after Halloween, Doctor Finkelstein called Carver up to the lab for her semiannual maintenance and repair routine. Spending as much time with the trio as she did, her cage and limbs tended to get dented, bent, scratched, rusted over, and generally beaten into some sort of less than perfectly functional shape if left unchecked for two long. She could oil her joints herself, of course, but the fine tuning was something she left to her creator. At least it was usually one of the few times he was mostly congenial with her.

Carver climbed up on the operating table and got comfy while Finkelstein retrieved a special potion from a dusty cabinet. She snickered quietly. After a few too many times where she had amused herself with his distraction, and the "unfortunate" discovery that metal bands and cuffs couldn't reliably restrict her vines, it had become standard procedure for him to temporarily paralyze her while he worked on her. She had grown used to it. But this time, there was an extra level of hilarity: she got to calculate how much of his continued use of the potion was out of [i]fear[/i].

Once she was properly paralyzed, the Doctor detangled the vines and splayed them out across the table, letting a few dangle off the side. He quickly detached her limbs. 

"Hmmmm..." he said, turning one of her legs about under his spotlight. "You know, my dear... This is a rather old mechanism. I've been maintaining and replacing your limbs regularly over the years, but I haven't actually [i]improved[/i] upon the design in a rather long time."

Carver perked up. "You mean I'm getting an upgrade this time?"

Finkelstein nodded, gathering up the rest of her limbs to put them in the pile of inventions waiting to be disassembled, melted down, and repurposed. "My new design will have increased strength and stability, and will be much more damage resistant."

"Sounds good," his creation replied. 

He smiled. "[i]Good[/i]. Then let us begin, shall we?"

Over the course of the next hour or so, he retrieved and assembled a number of large steel panels pre-shaped for this purpose, attaching them with rivets and gyroscopic ball bearing joints. Once the legs, lower torso, upper back, and arms had been put together, he removed Carver's pumpkin head and carried her cage over to the partially completed body.

With great care, he divided up her vines into four large groups and fed them down into the hollow space inside the new limbs. Once that was done, he attached her cage to a stand inside the chest cavity and connected the front chest pieces to close the whole thing off. Finally, he mounted a new metal head on her neck pipe and riveted it to the chest to ensure it couldn't be taken off or destroyed.

"The paralysis potion should be wearing off any minute now," he informed her. "There are handles inside each of the limbs that you can pull on to make them bend and move. The head is directly connected to your cage, so you should be able to control it naturally."

Carver blinked slowly, getting used to the mechanical eyes, then tilted the head downward to examine her new body while she waited for her vines to finish waking up. 

The first thing she noticed was that the new body had been painted orange. The second was that, instead of spreading the tips of her vines to create stumps to stand on or any number of tentacly finger-like digits, she now had actual feet and hands.

The third thing she noticed was the polite curve shaped into each side of her chest: her creator had made a subtle but definitive attempt to hint at femininity. The pumpkin creature slowly raised a corner of her new zigzag mouth. Time to switch pronouns!

Carver wiggled his vines a little bit inside the body, then searched for the handles Finkelstein had mentioned. Upon finding them and maneuvering a vine into place for each, he awkwardly bent the arm to bring his new left hand up where he could examine it better. The Doctor had been meticulous in the design and construction of this hollow body; with one vine on each handle, he had exactly enough vines left to fill and control each of the fingers. He moved and flexed them in turn, testing the joints out, then reached farther upward to feel the top of his head. A solid, twisted piece of metal had been welded to the top to form the resemblance of a pony tail.

Finkelstein watched with smug pride as his creation got used to her new body. Now he would have a constant reminder to take into account her womanly variables, and manage her properly.

"Well?" he asked. "What do you think?"

Carver tried to shrug, but failed. He tried to turn or tilt his head to see what the problem was, but the neck was too stiff to see its own base. He closed his eyes and reached out with his other sense instead... Ah, there was the problem. The location of the shoulder joints was farther out than expected. He opened his eyes and shrugged successfully.

"It's weird, but I get what you mean by more damage resistant. It'll take some time to get used to."

Finkelstein nodded. "Of course, of course, my dear. Now, why don't you get some practice walking, and go show your hooligan friends?"

Carver was delighted to discover that his mechanical eyes were fully capable of rolling. It was a bit jerky and slow going at first -- and he nearly tripped going down the spiral ramp -- but by the time he got to the treehouse he mostly had relative control over his movements.