Gizmo

"THAT'S -- whoops. That's probably a good idea, yeah!" Ryder agreed easily with a grin. He tilted his head to one side in a way that sent his strawberry blond hair bouncing as if to emphasize his good cheer. "And I'm both! I'm Ryder, awesome to meet you!" The teenager deposited the trays of drinks on the counter by the sink, doing a quick scan of his own for any potential hazards nearby. "The three melon blast already got snapped up but you've got your pick when you want to take a break. I've got one here that I swear tastes exactly like key lime pie with a ginger and cinnamon kick. Delicious and great for sore throats so that's a win all around, right?" Yellow hopped off his shoulder and buzzed around the perimeter of the room before landing on a disused workspace, close enough to see what Eira was working on but out of arm's reach.

Any time Ryder had gained with his reckless bicycle ride was more than eaten up as he distributed another pair of smoothies and stopped to enthusiastically chat with employees inside the building, followed by immediately getting turned about in the hallways. When racing percussion and growling female vocals began blaring from around a corner he spun on his heel and jogged off in that direction without question. "Hey, I'm a 'teenagers'!" he shouted to Yellow upon reading the sign outside the lab, the little robot on his shoulder making a futile attempt to cover its audio receptors with its front set of legs. Stepping inside he turned in a small circle while heading for the centre of the room, marvelling at the equipment while the tower of smoothies in his hands vibrated along with the music. "Oh man, where do you even get one of those?! Wait, that's just the casing from the JW-9; the lens has gotta be a custom! That's wild!" Continuing to shout even as his voice was lost amidst the music. Spotting the blonde girl in the lab coat with her back to him Ryder called, "Hi! I think this was where I was supposed to go?" When there was no reaction he took a few steps closer. "Hello? Hi?! THIS IS MORE SHOUTING THAN I WAS EXPECTING!"

"Luckily smoothies are a lot like science consulting," Ryder told the woman in the round glasses with a smile bright enough to activate UV tinting. "It's all about anticipating a need." He reached back into the storage compartment and retrieved a trio of drink trays balanced in a precarious tower, each holding four take-out cups emblazoned with the Smoothie Shack logo. He removed the top tray from the stack to access one of the cups from the middle tray, wedging the former into the crook of one arm while he wiggled the latter free. Yellow took flight and zipped around under the increasingly horizontal tray and pushed up against the bottom to keep it from tipping over, buzzing urgently. "You went for the strawberry kiwi last time - total classic, obviously - but I noticed you were kind of checking out the one Mrs. Hunter-White had - that is a lady who is serious about fruit, mad respect - so this is sort of a combo of the two? Super open to feedback, just let me know what you think!" Improbably he managed to hand off the beverage without spilling any of the others. "Have an awesome rest of your day!"

If Eira had executed perfectly upon her monochromatic aesthetic, the riot of colour that came tearing down the side street toward the HAX parking lot on two wheels spoke to a very different fashion sensibility or lack thereof. Checkered pants and paint-splashed high-tops jutted out at an unusual angle to accommodate the bicycle's unusual gearing and pedals while a hoodie in neon greens and pinks flapped wildly above the storage compartment suspended over the back wheel with a series of auto-stabilized gimbals. The bicycle was achieving surprising speed considering its unorthodox modifications, a fact that seemed to be causing its rider quite a bit of stress. "C'mon c'mon c'mon!" Ryder coxed the brake lever as the building loomed closer and closer, swerving around a parked car. Just as the front wheel reached the end of pavement the bike abruptly stopped, sending him tumbling over the handlebars and onto the grass several feet away. The teenager sprung back up to his feet as though made of rubber and pumped his fists in the air triumphantly. "Yeah! On time!" Sprinting back over to his ride he flipped open the storage compartment and deposited his helmet and gloves inside while retrieving a bike lock and an angrily buzzing wasp shaped robot. "What? No, it's fine! It was totally fine the whole time, Yellow! You worry too much, you'll get wrinkles!" The Robug flew tight circles around Ryder's head in rebuttal before landing on his shoulder.

Ryder laughed again, released Tori's handshake and quickly set about tidying up the counter with nimble fingers and practiced movements; it certainly wasn't the first mess he'd made with fruit. "This is Riverside! People come in with little dogs in purses that are way louder than Tango. The dogs are pretty loud, too." The jazz hands might have detracted from the punchline a bit. "And nah, it was fine, I didn't even have to go to the emergency room or anything! I think they saw it as more of, y'know, an ongoing concern." He finished piling the berries into a little pyramid, having evidently given up on trying to corral the robotic mantis and retrieved a spray bottle and dishrag. "Wait, so you made some big tomatoes or whatever and your mom sent you to a different continent to live in an empty campus? That sounds... deeply lousy." For the first time since the conversation began Ryder actually frowned. "Are you okay?"

Magenta hopped up and down in apparent approval before scuttling about the counter to retrieve another berry. "Yeah, no, I'm actually registered to start there in September? Like, transferring, right?" Ryder gestured animated with his hands, pointing at nothing in particular as if to somehow illustrate his meaning. The teenager shifted from foot to foot with pent-up energy, apparently working though the same game of what-am-I-allowed-to-say. "So I was already building things but then I found a thing and figured out how the thing worked and used that to build a new thing but when I used that thing the person who built the first thing was worried I might break things if I didn't learn some things and it was sort of a whole thing." His eyes lost focus briefly while he repeated all of that back to himself silently, confirming that it all followed. Nodding to himself he extended a hand to Tori. "Anyway! I'm Ryder."

"Huh?" Ryder turned around with a bowlful of berries and a bemused expression, giving a start when he spotted the Robug on the counter. "Gah! Mag!" Reflexively he tried to catch the robotic mantis under the cup he was holding, succeeding only in raining raspberries, açai berries, slices of strawberry and a variety of others across the surface while his quarry simply skittered away to one side and clacked its long forelegs together at him. "You know you're not supposed to be out where people can see you, come on!" Ryder groaned, surveying the mess of fruit glumly. "I know Tango is super cute, that's not the point!" The little triangular head cocked in the other direction as Magenta seemed to consider briefly before picking up a raspberry between its forelegs and turning about to present it to the fox kit. Ryder let out a exasperated sigh, then blinked rapidly and straightened up. "Wait, did you say something about Claremont? Like, the school?"

"Haha! You're welcome, I guess? Nothing to apologize for!" Ryder's laugh was easy and loud enough to cut through the background chatter in the room. "Don't know why anybody's paint their nails if they didn't want them to be pretty but I guess everybody's going for their own thing. I totally hear you about being hard on them; part of the reason I got okay at it is all the practice 'cause I always chip it, like, immediately, right?" He presented his hands for inspection and indeed more of the nails than not had seen wear and tear. "I do a lot of mechanical stuff, tinkering and fabbing so-- oh! His name's Tango, like Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?" Ryder clapped his hands in delight. "Phonetic alphabet jokes! That's so rad!" If customer's producing fox kits from their hair was an unusual occurrence worth remaking upon it evidently hadn't occurred to him yet. "We've got berries for days, absolutely. This is like berry central. Coming right up, little buddy!" As soon as Ryder's back was turned to grab one of the shallow paper cups the Shack used for gelato and frozen yogurt something strange scuttled up from behind the counter and onto its top. About palm sized, it appeared to be a mantis rendered in chunky metal and plastics, all pristine white and bold magenta. The little robot cocked its triangular head before moving to get a better look at Tango, scurrying about the counter in a broad arc as it seemed to deliberate between wariness and curiosity.

Bells hanging above the door jingled as Tori and her little companion entered. The interior decor had enough palm fronds and paneling to nearly qualify as a forest, albeit an entirely plastic facsimile. Diner style booth benches wrapped in mint green and white vinyl stood beside rattan chairs woven from some synthetic material beside tables decorated with overlapping images of various fruits. The riot of colour extended to the variety of patrons chatting over smoothies, sundaes and cold pressed juices and to the teenager behind the counter. "Hey, welcome to the Smoothie Shack!" Ryder greeted with a smile brighter than the summer sun outside. His tousled strawberry bond hair formed a sort of halo around his face and contested with the canary yellow of the loose top he wore under his fruit-splattered blue-and-white striped apron. With his hands on the counter in front of him Tori could see that his nails had been painted in a variety of iridescent greens, glittering blacks and swirled purples without any obvious pattern. "First time here? I definitely would have remembered those wicked tattoos!"

Ryder placed his hands on his hips and leaned back as the door closed behind Dragonfly. "How cool was that, right? I didn't really think about it until now but she could have been a lot less okay with me having her drone, right? I wonder if-- oh, you're making a face." His sister was indeed making a face as he turned around to look at her. "Ryder. What did you build?" He looked toward the ceiling to avoid her penetrating glare. "Um." "Is this the bicycle all over again?" "The bicycle wasn't even that bad!" "You broke your arm in three places, Ryder." "I mean, yeah, but only the one arm." "Only the-- Ryder!"

"Awesome! That's honestly a total relief." The wattage of Ryder's beaming smile did nothing to assuage Dragonfly's concerns about his sustained energy output. Jenny had loaded the three tall plastic cups into a carry-out tray but waved Dragonfly away when she moved to pay for them. "Don't worry about it. I'm kind of a fan, too." She indicated a heart-shaped enamel pin on her cardigan coloured in stripes of blue, white and pink and shrugged. "I've got so many ideas now! Like, I bet if I used residual spatial distortions to bend light I could create a kind of camouflage effect and deal with the excess heat from rapid instar swapping!" Ryder seemed to be largely in his own world, gesturing animatedly with both hands as he drew imaginary schematics in the air. "First I'd have to--" "First you have a shift to finish so I can work on my paper," his sister insisted with a glare. The younger sibling clapped his hands together and bobbed his head with a chagrinned laugh. "Yes! Right! But after that!"

Jack of all Blades [Maxed] Strange Like Me - 1 post Chitin Bug Hunt - 24 posts Rollover from Jack and Ref Point to Chitin, please!

APPROVED

"Oh, wild!" Ryder exclaimed, immediately fishing from his pocket what had probably once been a commercially available phone before its innards had been transferred into a frosted transparent case along with other modifications. Jenny simultaneously pulled out a comparatively nondescript device, looking more apprehensive about the implications of Dragonfly's ability to remotely access and modify data. "Don't worry, I won't bug you a bunch or anything! Oh, ha, 'bug'! Right, because-- well, anyway. Can you let me know if you manage to fix him?" The teenager indicated the drone in the cardboard box. "I still feel kinda bad I couldn't manage it myself."

Jenny gave her brother a look with narrowed eyes. "Please tell me you didn't try to make a few of those wings." "I can honestly say I did not do that!" Ryder confirmed cheerfully, his good mood apparently all but bulletproof. She placed her hands on her temples and squeezed her eyes shut, visibly concentrating on her breathing. "Fine. I'll take what I can get." "Me too!" Ryder gave Dragonfly a pair of thumbs up. "I guess you probably didn't write stuff down into a book or anything but even just more advice like the paper test thing would be awesome! I want to learn as much as I can so I can use it to help people. That's my dream and I never give up on a dream!"

Ryder pumped his fist triumphantly. "I can work with close! I'm not very good at quiet but I'm great at learning!" "Both of those things are true," Jenny admitted, placing the last of Dragonfly's to-go cups on the counter, "but can we go back to the part about the city block for a minute? What did you do?" "Nothing! It's fine," her brother assured her, adjusting his conspicuous belt buckle and straightening his shirt. "The peaches were still usable afterward!" "What part of that sounded reassuring in your head?" She turned to the armoured heroine and crossed her arms. "Are you offering him an internship or what here? He's still in high school and definitely not signing anything until our dad gets back."

"Oh yeah, totally," Ryder agreed readily before blinking twice and standing up a little straighter. "Oh! Yeah. Totally." The teenager shifted from foot to foot awkwardly, strawberry blond hair bobbing as he looked down at his feet. "So... hypothetically, if someone already knew how some of that technology worked, it would be the most dangerous for them to not learn more about it. Yeah?" He tilted his chin up to give Dragonfly a grin that was partly embarrassed and partly hopeful, rocking back and forth on his heels with his hands in the pockets of his pants.

"We wouldn't have the oranges out if they weren't good," Jenny was quick to point out but she gave the fruit in question a judgmental look nonetheless and added, "The strawberries are better, though." She set about preparing the order with the practiced ease of someone who knew where everything was without needing to look. In fact, she glanced over at Dragonfly while layering the parfait. "You're his favourite, you know. He thinks the world of just about everyone but he tried to explain something about how your wings work to me once and just about vibrated himself through a wall." There was a note of caution in her tone, looking for signs that her brother's expectations might not be met. Ryder burst back into the room holding a cardboard box printed with peaches and shipping instructions. "Back!" He'd lined the inside of the box with towels as though he'd been making a bed for a stray wounded animal and nestled the damaged drone within.

The young woman behind the faux-palm tree counter looked up from her book at the filtered voice and froze, letting Dragonfly finish before demanding in a strangled voice, "Ryderrr..." "Gotta get the thing! Right back!" He gave his sister a big thumbs up while racing around the length of the bar to reach the door into the back. Seemingly to pick up on some of their guest's discomfort he paused to turn the thumbs up to Dragonfly as well before ducking out of view. Jenny was wide-eyed and silent for a long beat before clearing her throat hesitantly. "Well, uh. Welcome to the Smoothie Shack? Can I get you something?" She gestured with both hands to the array of sliced fruits, brightly coloured bottles and other ingredients. Evidently broad body language ran in the family.

"Paper! That's so smart, man! If you got the vertices just right you could put in a flat piece and have it come out folded into origami, I bet!" His head shot up, staring into space and his hands went wide as an idea struck him. "I could totally do something printer-themed. Need to think about this." Just as quickly his attention swung back around to the conversation at hand. "Right! Follow me!" After what ended up being a short trip once the cricket Robug had accepted an apology Chitin led Dragonfly into Riverside. Ducking around a corner and out of immediate sight of any passersby the teenager toggled the chambers on his belt and returned his armour to its subspace pocket in a flash of light and colour. Ryder laced his fingers above his head and stretched mightily. "Talk about a successful test run, ha!" Hefting his backpack again he waved to the older heroine where she hovered nearby overhead and jogged over to a storefront with a sign, flanked in palm tree designs and adorned with tropical fruit imagery, that proclaimed it to be the Smoothie Shack. "I'm back! Sorry about-- yah!" The apology was cut short as his sister caught one of Ryder's ears and gave it a forceful yank. "You're unbelievable, you know that?" Jenny huffed before letting him go and retuning to a textbook she had open on the counter. "You're just lucky it was a slow night. Did you finish whatever was so important?" "Yes! All good. It was really important, you're the best!" Ryder gave a sunny smile that Jenny knew better than to bother trying to stay mad at, settling for rolling her eyes and trying to suppress a fond grin.

"Instant zip-ties! That explains the different protocols for living matter, too. I tried storing some fruit to see if it would stay fresh and, uh, the good news is that I was going to make smoothies with it anyway. Splurtch!" He mimed a messy explosion with both hands while making the accompanying sound effect. Abruptly reminded of something he stuck himself in the forehead with the butt of his hand. Part of the helmet chirped in protest and as Dragonfly watched it detached from the armour, rearranging into a little robotic cricket while the cyan coloured pieces of armour on Chitin's suit returned to their subspace pocket with little flares of light. "Smoothies! My sister is going to kick my butt if I don't get back to my shift." In his simplified white and black suit the young man turned back to Dragonfly. "Uh, do you like smoothies? Or ice cream or parfaits or-- actually we have a bunch of stuff but the things is your drone is in my workshop which is at my family's juice bar and we could go get it but I don't know if that's weird?" He wasn't worried about Dragonfly knowing who he was; everyone knew she was a real, big time hero even if she hadn't just stepped in to help. Plus it occurred to him that she'd probably been able to track his armour once he activated the system. "Maybe that's a personal boundary thing? Sorry. People say I try too hard sometimes which, like, why would you not try hard, right? But, yeah. I need to get back, is what I was saying."

Having jumped up to the warehouse rooftop in one prodigious leap the youth had become distracted looking down over the edge until he was addressed directly. “Right! I'm Chitin! Y'know, because..." He rapped his knuckles against the side of his helmet. “And it's one of those fun words that I think most people read before they hear out loud so you mispronounce it, right, because it totally looks like it should be 'chit-in' and I think that's neat!" He seemed to catch himself rambling and overcorrected his posture, standing ramrod straight at attention and trying to look more serious. “I can go get the drone for you! Or you can come get him? I found him but I couldn't fix him enough to turn him back on so I tried to learn more about how the systems work and wow. Obviously I don't need to tell you but there is a lot going on there, oh man! I am super glad trying to use the suit didn't tear off any of my limbs." He stuck his arms straight outward as though taking stock, the backpack slung over one shoulder sliding down to hang from one elbow.

Chitin actually clapped his hands, the metal caps on his fingertips clinking together. “That'd be great! I have a bunch of questions about how you get objects to revert to standard space without having to reorient along a reference axis as a separate step! Let me just get my guys." He whistled so though he were calling a trained pet, a strange sound through his helmet. In response the remaining three Robugs appeared. Magenta and Black scuttling over from the warehouse door, the former clacking its forelegs together at the defeated thugs and the latter dragging an empty backpack along behind it. Yellow buzzed in through an open window but gave Dragonfly's drone a wide berth like a cat eyeing up a much larger dog. “Sorry things didn't turn out so hot for you and your friends," he told Mike sincerely once the Robugs were back in their bag. “Make better choices, okay?"

“You definitely shouldn't run guns at all but okay," Chitin sighed, shaking his head at Mike. The armoured teen shifted awkwardly from foot to foot as he tried to come up with the best way to answer Dragonfly's terse demand, suddenly very aware of what he was or wasn't doing with his hands. “Hi! Hello. Um, this is maybe a weird time to mention it but I'm actually a really big fan?" He waved then thought better of it and placed his hand on his hip before rethinking again and putting both hands behind his back. “Oh, this is Mike. I don't think he really wanted to hurt anyone, he's just bad at... empathy? Or like personal responsibility? I'm glad you showed up when you did, I didn't really want to have to hit anybody else." He cocked his head quizzically, looking from the mangled beam cannon to the surrendered arms dealers. “Did you guys make those or...?"

Ryder’s jaw tightened beneath his helmet. He was trying but with Chuck shooting wildly someone was going to end up with more than a few bumps and bruises if this didn’t end soon. ”Putting guns into the city just to get popular isn’t much of a dream,” he remarked, stepping out into view atop a crossbeam. Mike let loose with a precise burst of fire, sparks bursting like fireworks where the bullets hit metal supports or cyan armour. Chitin ignored the new warnings popping up all over his HUD. ”You need to wake up.” He pressed each of the chambers on his belt in sequence once again, dropping into a crouch as power rerouted to the suit’s right leg, panels lighting up around the edges not unlike the beam weapons the gun runners were using. "CYMKick!” the tinny voice announced and Chitin launched himself forward and down, angling through the hail the lead until his boot collided squarely into Chuck’s chest. The other man went flying backward, crashing into a crate hard enough to splinter wood and send the box balanced on top of it toppling over, while Chitin stood resolute at the point of echoing impact. He snapped off a quick jab in Mike’s direction just to keep the remaining gunman off balance, trying to control where the weapon could be pointed. “You can still stop this!”