"It's like being a magical girl!" said Titanomachia brightly. "When you don't have the dress and tiara on, you're someone different. None of it counts."

The Sprocket Dakini drones were waiting at the Smash Room, baseball bats in hands and baseball caps on heads. Tall, lanky, sleek machines with empty black faceplates and brightly coloured handpainted stripes and flowers, Dakini Tacbots are the Single Intelligence's least beloved and most appreciated children. Most street corners have a sealed deployment pod holding a Dakini but they're not there just for emergencies - if you need help moving a piece of heavy furniture, someone to pitch a cricket ball for you on a rainy morning, or carry your grocery bags somewhere the local Dakini will deploy to help out.

But they're not slaves. Sprocket's actually pretty clear and firm about that. They're [i]friends[/i]. Sprocket is your friend. They'll help out because Sprocket is nice and likes helping out, but they'll cheerfully decline requests they regard as unreasonable or selfish and they expect to be treated with respect. They'll do things [i]together with[/i] you, not [i]invisibly for[/i] you. Sometimes they'll want to engage in conversation, or suggest a different activity that they want to do instead, or ask for a favour in return just to establish that this thing goes both ways. Their overall vibe and accent is 'extremely chill surfer dudes', which is a slick dodge that gets Sprocket out of some common failure states:
- It means they can avoid dealing with anything they don't feel like; politics, abuse, confessions, by defaulting into various 'woahs' and 'boguses'
- It means that they're very tiresome to spend a lot of time around, which pushes people away from becoming fixated on them as replacements for human connection.
- It lets them come across as physically very powerful while also seeming harmless, lazy and kind of doofy, which makes people lower their expectations.

Some people still find them sinister. That's a natural part of being a person. The way they snap into organized mass formations during firefighting or other emergency operations can be genuinely unsettling. But it takes work to maintain suspicion of the Dakinis; the Single Intelligence learned a lot from the fall of the Slopbots and has determined not to repeat any of their mistakes.

"Heyyyy Ti-tan-OH-machiiiiiiiiyy!" said the first Dakini, painted in neon green tiger stripes, offering a hand for a high five. She hit it. "We got the brief. Sounds like fun!"
"Cross!" said the second Dakini. This one was a paint disaster, having served as a canvas for children. "What's happening dude?"