Redundant. Pointless. Irrelevant.
What is the purpose of the material?
It was soft and smooth to the touch and it crumpled easily. Grey lines scattered across its surface like folds and it was slightly brown in colour, too light to be oil from what the girl knew. It was awfully small as well.
The size of two hands.
The girl used her open hands as measurements for objects. After all, what other measurement could be easier than what is on your person at all times?
But regardless, this object entirely had no use. It was not usable by the robots - foreign materials were always thrown away. Giving it to another human was entirely out of the question - interaction with anything taller than her almost always ended in some kind of critical failure. There was a possibility that the material slid water off like metal, but its size made it useless as cover or collection.
Though she learned recently that fires continue to burn if things that can light on fire are thrown into it. Its size and what it felt like to touch made it perfect for that.
Time wasted.
All of that didn't matter now.
She looked up towards some obelisk in the distance, an obsidian black clock tower. She knew that whenever it showed two lines, two dots, and then two circles that the robots called it 'Eleven AM', and that the supply line delivery would be coming in.
With one hand holding the bag, she jogged forwards towards the usual spot. She twisted, turned and jumped her way around like some fabled dancer, with each step and footprint the exact same as the many days of her life before.
It had been a few weeks since the last time she was late. That day, She tripped and scratched her leg on some shattered glass. Since then, she developed a defence mechanism which involves enacting something akin to doing a forward roll whenever she falls.
"HALT. STATE YOUR CALL-SIGN"
One foot stomped down and slightly turned to the side to grind herself to a halt. She looked up at the thing in front of her. A face of a metal, paper-thin oblong, with a skeletal, grey body.
"Lyte," she answered.
"SHOW PROOF OF DE–"
She shoved the bag of metal out so it could see.
"ENTER."
She slid past and emptied the bag onto the floor behind the robot, making sure to keep the two-hand-sized object at the bottom for later. The robots never had a problem with anything she did, as long as it didn't directly go against a command or sitting still - they simply didn't know any better.
A shadow flew by overhead and she looked up.
It was a massive, steel box, with a tiny slit horizontally across the entirety of its surface. It looked as if two L-shaped metal blocks were stacked on top of the other and randomly soldered together around the side with variously shaped metal sheets - the sheets and the box alike in crusted brown corrosion. Four circular hoses of blue flame held each corner, and these blew sand and dirt around with a vicious usurping of the wind as it descended to the floor.
Despite how hard Lyte racked her brain to understand how the floating fire worked, she had no idea. That is to say as if anybody knew how it worked.
Another three of these flying machines came in each ahead of the other. She let out a small cough from the dust and walked towards the supply ship fleet.
From each of the ships, was a tray-like ejection that contained the various materials that it was packed with. Lyte checked each one for cans, and though they contained mostly metal scraps, she ended up with a bag-full of them.
When she and the robots were finished rummaging through the trays, the corners of the ships burst aflame to hover off the ground, and flew far, far away beyond the large outskirt wall - the opposite direction from whence they came.
For a split second, Lyte looked at the floor, squinted her eyes in concentration, and looked up again at the disappearing ships in the sky to fully open them. No more rush meant it was okay to think about things.
The barrels have fire. The pits the robots use have fire. Those little machines I have make fire. But I never see them flying, so it must be something else.
She turned her head back down to the side.
But, that fire is different from the ones I have seen…
And, as she turned back towards the call-sign robot from earlier, the best conclusion she came up with was that of colour: blue fires are for flying, and yellow fires are for burning.
Of course, Lyte didn't know the words for blue or yellow, and nor did she have any knowledge for aeronautical engineering.