She grins. "Stop complaining, then."

He sighs and goes to the kitchen to start making himself some tea and making Lucky a mocha latte.

Magenta walks into the kitchen and, seeing Gonie there, winces in sympathy. "Your girlfriend still giving you a hard time?"

He shrugs but his scowl is still there.

"Yeah. I'm sure she'll crack it any day now, though!"

He waves a dismissive hand. Obviously she's going to crack it, she's Lucky, but does she need to keep waking him up at fuck-you AM and then stay up until some ungodly hour at night? Where does she even find the energy?

"Haven't you been going hunting recently?" he wonders, sipping from the ice coffee he just grabbed from the fridge. "Surely your Stats are high enough that you can tank it."

Yeah, obviously he can tank it, but still.

"Yeah, yeah, I get you. Well, good luck, to you and her."

He waves a dismissive hand again. She doesn't need luck, just time. ...and maybe a sedative. He'll look into procuring one discreetly and maybe slipping it into her hot chocolate tonight.

"I have to say, though, it's very funny to see you this grumpy. I didn't realise all it took to faze you was messing with your sleep schedule."

Gonie flips him the bird and starts to leave.

He cackles as Gonie walks out.

Elena isn't training anymore when he walks past the living area, and instead he finds her in the workshop, leaning against a wall, a faintly bemused expression on her face while Lucky talks her ear off.

"...core needs to have the adrenaline sensor modified to use the same network as electrical grids one and three because you can actually perform joint inference on it and the neuronal responses to stress—I mean it in the sense of excitation of the lymbic system in general, not like stress stress—to compensate for the overactive triggers implicitly encoded in grid two—I could theoretically rework that, and actually I probably will eventually, it's kind of a mess of latent variables that I've been patching up with sensors on top of sensors on top of sensors, I just want to have a usable MVP before I redesign the whole thing from scratch—oh thank you Gonie how long have you been standing there come here I need you to hold this still for me—anyway where was I—right, I want to actually only have a single grid—by the way how's training going, did you ever get Triple Kick down, I don't think I've asked recently..."

"Last night, yeah," she says, offering Gonie a very sympathetic look.

Gonie shrugs and accepts the sympathy, but only slightly. He's used to her, by now.

"Oh cool congrats! Have you told Erik yet, I think he wanted to spar once you got it—aha, here you are you little piece of—"

"I'm gonna go let Erik know," she says, taking the opportunity to flee the scene.

Her own fault, honestly. She didn't actually need to come here keep Lucky company while he was getting her breakfast.

"Gonie, grab the diagram on the desk over there—no not that one the one next to the—yes, that's the one, and also the—thank you—actually can you grab that thingy—"

He's long since learned how to find exactly what thingy she means when she asks for a thingy, and he does as instructed, as always.

"Cool awesome now hold this here, it needs to be at this particular angle—go put an apron on or something, if the melted solder drips onto your skin it's gonna burn and if I have to call Magenta over to heal you he's gonna make fun of you—"

Lucky develops something she dubs a Belt of Cloaking, which mimics some of the effects of a rogue's Cloaking without needing to actually be enchanted with the Skill, which would make it prohibitively expensive. It's still pretty expensive to make, but less, as it requires a reasonable number of magic crystals and expensive materials—it actually needs elunium, which she'd never touched before—but no enchantment work.

Well, what she's doing could arguably be called enchantment, but she'd argue that it's not: the effects she's causing are not being applied to the user; rather, they are being applied to an area around the belt itself. Plus, the magic is doing the hard work of redirecting light rather than having an actual embedded spell or Skill. This has the advantage that most spells to reveal hidden foes won't catch it, but conversely it does nothing for sounds or trails and anything that gets into the radius of the Belt, such as dust, also gets turned invisible, which can be used to detect someone.

But still, for situations where all you want is for people to not have reason to look somewhere—rather than preventing people who do have reason to look somewhere from finding you there—that's more than good enough. It allows for a ton of freedom of movement that the Rebellion members didn't previously have, for security reasons related to keeping the compound a secret.

"You know what this means, right?"