"I'm pretty sure that if it came down to it you would not end up with a civilian grade prosthetic, though, even if we had to make compromises."

She smirks for a moment. Yes, she did mean that kind of strap.

"Oh, I'm sure between our intuitions and your clever brain and thorough training we'd manage to do better than civilian-grade. I'm just not looking forward to having to reinvent Auratech, even if it's a good idea to manage it eventually."

"I wonder how much it has in common with --"

"Did you get the events of our field trip to I-Island?"

She hums a bit. "We didn't follow that in detail, but the media existed." She grabs a slice of frozen persine and pops it into her mouth. "Oh! Freezing these really adds something, almost like a dessert!

"But anyway, the girls were in a bit of a depressive streak around when the movie came out, and only really got bits of the events there through fanfic. I think we remember something about some extra-special Quirktech?"

Depressive episodes are not pleasant!

"Yes, there were Quirk amplifiers - destroyed, and any blueprints with them, because our world did not need that - Trigger was already causing enough problems - but I mention those events because the general principles of Quirk-active technology might actually be a workable bridge to Aura technology.  It's not something I've studied in detail beyond knowing how to make parts for support devices that are usually limiters for poorly controlled, or uncontrollable, psychic quirks, but if I'm right we may at least not be starting from scratch for the materials science portion."

No, they're really not. She'd like it if her girls had fewer of those.

"Huh! That could maybe get us somewhere! It's definitely worth a shot."

"I'll put 'samples of all the Quirk-active materials I can make' on my to-do list.  Or, well, really I may as well just start making them, but since we're not going to be able to use them until after the first mission at the earliest, I'm going to reserve actually doing it for something to do at the end of the day rather than the beginning.  Even if I expect today to be mostly hand-to-hand."

"Sounds great! Although not very urgent, we don't have Aura to test them against yet." 

Hm. Would that work? Nah.

"Just remembered that a lot of the Spider-man games had him web boxing gloves onto his fists for better punches, but I'm pretty sure that just diffuses the force and also is a pain to get back off after, so it's just a silly game mechanic."

"...I wouldn't try it either, no."

"Figure the thought's just 'cause I miss Ember Celica. Can't really remake them until we reinvent mechashift, and that's more your and Ruby's deal than mine. I'm more a mechanic than a research kinda engineer."

"...What is Ember Celica?"

"My weapon from Remnant. Shotgun gauntlets that collapse down to stylish bangles. I'm really proud of the design."

"I can't get them to fold up, obviously, but I might, actually, be able to make parts for something like their expanded form, to allow you to start practicing again - even before we can work out mechashift.  I don't imagine your body actually knows what to do with them, presently, even though perhaps you would."

"I can dig a fair bit of how it worked out of my exomemories, but part of the problem is that the showrunners got the trigger mechanism wrong. I know, what a surprise, right?"

"Not really.  ...Oh, right, that was sarcasm.  How is it supposed to work?"

She laughs warmly and nods. "Yep, sarcasm."

"So they say it's supposed to be triggered by punching, but what if you wanna punch someone without shooting them? No, that's not sufficient. But when you look at the design, there obviously wasn't any kind of external trigger wrapping around into my hand. That long and especially curvy of an extension would be too delicate for combat mechashift, and you don't see it in the animation either. No, there was an internal mechanism."

She starts to gesture, outlining the shape of the mechanism. "So we had this really useful bit of mechanism called an Aura-reactive switch. I used one in each gauntlet of Ember Celica, making a spring-latch that blocked the kinetic trigger of the punch-to-fire mechanism, with the Aura-switch toggling the latch out of the way so I can fire."

"Hmm.  I actually do have a couple ideas.  They're not going to be as smooth or necessarily as durable as the mechanism you had, until we can actually recreate the Aura switch, but I could, at least, work something out that could arm or disarm punching to fire."

"Oh? Go on, gorgeous."

"It's a set of possible tradeoffs, really, where and how we set an arming mechanism.  I actually think it ought to be possible to rig something relatively unobtrusive that doesn't resort to electronic controls, such as were my first thought, though all of my more plausible ideas do bring the controls a bit further forwards.  ...The somewhat less plausible idea of 'see if we can make a latch setup your webslinging anatomy can predictably interact with,' aside."

"Actually - I wonder if it would be possible to make something that you could use your superadhesion to disable the safety of, similarly to your Aura latch.  That's not something I've had cause to do, before, but it's not something I think I couldn't manage."

"Oh! That actually might work! If we make a switch in the section that goes over the back of my hand, and shape it so it sits flush with the surface, but has a different texture so I can tell where it is, then I could toggle it by sticking to just the switch and flexing my wrist side to side."