The manual was old, with a worn down spine and plenty of dog-eared pages. Half the systems it described were long outdated, and the suggested repairs were often designed for anything except whatever machine she was working on at the moment. Jess kept it at her workstation anyways.
The other mechanics liked to rib her about it sometimes, laugh at whatever sentimental notions had her keeping a useless mechanic’s textbook on her workbench instead of something more current. Occasionally a new apprentice would start working on the shop, and they’d all ask Jess to regale the new kid with the story of the book, the reason she even had it with her in the first place. “Alright,” she’d say, laughing, “I’ll tell you just how I got this waste of space…”
It had been her mom’s, first, and when Jess was setting out through the Borderlands for a new place to live, it’d been one of the items her mom had convinced her to take. She had cash and water and food, clothes and tools and photos, but Jess’s mom had studied the RAVEN when she was starting her mechanic job, and so she was still convinced Jess would need it for hers.
The story Jess tells the shop consists mostly of the many different ways she nearly lost the book on the way, spun for laughs to an audience of coworkers. She leaves out the bits where she rereads it each night. Leaves out the parts of the story where she sobs every time she thinks it’s gone for good. Leaves out the parts of the story where she realizes that every time she found it again, every time she lost it and picked it back up, some parts of it changed.
Half the systems the manual describes are long outdated. Most of the suggested repairs are completely useless in the moment. But when she flips to a page in the RAVEN that’s actually helpful?
Jess keeps the outdated manual, keeps the “sentimental waste of space”, and doesn’t ever let anyone know exactly how she manages to repair every HSPSC that ends up in the shop, even though nobody else can.