"I feel like she may be too young for this, you know."

"Am not!" ...or is she? "I think," she hedges.

"Here!" he says, emerging from the hallway that leads to the workshop with a stack of paper in his hand. He strides over to Lucky and gives her the papers.

She looks at them then up at him like a deer in front of a mage's Fire Wall.

"Well? Explain it!"

"Don't be so rude to the child."

"...could you explain it to me?" he says, somewhat mollified by the reminder that the girl is ten.

"Um. Okay. So. Uh." She needs to get her thoughts in order, so she looks down at the papers and leafs through them until she finds the relevant one and skimming over it is enough to engage the right thought process. "Okay! I already had one crystal but it was a charged asymmetric argonium and that's good for general propulsion and lift but, look here, the way I'd gotten it set up at first made it very hard for it to lock into an amplification pattern—I didn't notice then so I didn't understand why another crystal of the same kind wasn't playing well with it, but then Gonie got me three raw zirconiums and this is what they looked like—not exactly but pretty close, and the crystalline structure here, if you project the internal structure of the second crystal this way then you can kind of slot the three zirconiums here, here, and here, and it's not stable but that's what I noticed and that's what helped me figure out that I was probably missing something..."

His eyes glaze over during the explanation, and when she starts showing him actual equations he physically flinches and interrupts her with a, "Yes, yes, that's all good, but how does it work?"

Lucky blinks, emerging from her fugue and trying to process his words. "That's... what I was explaining?"

She giggles.

His face is turning red, now. "I mean, how does it... do... what it's doing... and how did you... make it do it?" he asks, helplessly.

Gonie smirks, behind Lucky.

She stares at him blankly for a moment then leafs through the papers until she finds the one where she drew the finalised diagram of the crystal array and hands it to him.

He accepts it and looks at it with furrowed eyebrows and an unfocused look in his eyes then hands it back over. "I suppose that all checks out," he mumbles. "Who taught you this?"

"...my master helped me but, um, I learned most of it myself?"

"Your master?"

"Um. Mastersmith Jon?"

"You're apprenticing under old man Jon?"

"Um. Yes?"

"Hmm. He's good people, Jon. A good man."

"I'm very grateful to him." Whiiiiich is reminding her that she was meant to work today and now she's being offered to join the Rebellion and she still doesn't know what they're Rebelling against. "Um. Can you explain to me... what... you guys do?"

"Hold on, I'm still not convinced! She may not be a spy, but she's still an outsider, and a child at that."

"Rupert, dear," says Dien, putting her tea down, crossing her legs, and placing both hands on top of her knee with fingers interlaced. "What were we just talking about?"

"...what?"