Kaleb rocked his forehead back and forth on the cool metal of his worktable. Somewhere nearby, Daivor was cackling like a madman as the sounds of shuffling feet echoed in the room. Boxes were moved, chairs were pushed aside, and bins full of electronics were slid around.

"And make sure that you dust the underside of that shelf," Clara ordered.

"But no one's going to see underneath a shelf." Roy whined.

Clara's response was to squawk angrily and Kaleb could feel her large brown eyes on his back again. "Is this how you handle your assistants, Professor? Allowing them to question orders?"

Kaleb rolled his eyes. "This isn't the military, Professor Strigian. I do not require absolute obedience."

"And that's why this… Lab is such a mess."

"It's a Workshop." Kaleb grumbled as Terrance and Marie waddled over to him, a workbench held between them.

He raised an eyebrow in question, and Marie sighed. "We need you to shift your bench down, Professor. My work station should be closer to the forge cause I use the most metal. Clara just explained this."

Kaleb groaned as he stood and grabbed the end of his workbench. As he walked it down along the metal wall, he saw Daivor watching everything from a high spot on a nearby shelf. The little bastard seemed pleased as punch about the whirlwind that had invaded their domain. Sure, Kaleb had invited her over, and this was all mostly his fault. But Kaleb wasn't thinking about that. He was thinking about how she had immediately derided him for the poor layout of his workshop. Of course, that was after bowing and scraping to the one and only Builder Gnome in the place. Afterward, though, the owlish woman became a firestorm of orders and advice.

Their shelves of storage needed to be in a separate but attached room. The server room door should have a lock on it. The workstations were atrocious and each of them misused the space allotted to them. She even had something to say about the several cots in the room. She wasn't against the practice of sleeping where they worked. But she declared they needed to be further out of the way. With every bit of reorganizing came an angry squawk about how they weren't keeping the space clean. Which is why Roy was on the floor carrying an increasingly dirty rag.

Kaleb set his table down in what used to be Roy's spot. Roy's own station had been moved into Marie's, and hers now sat beside Terrance's. He silently agreed that the pair should've been closer together to begin with. But he wasn't giving the angry bird-lady the satisfaction. Clara cooed as Marie and Terrance got their area cleared before turning back to Kaleb.

"Now, we need to see about finding a better spot for all this free-floating metal."

"That's for Terrance and the forge." Kaleb pointed out.

"Then it should be on that side of the room! Why is it piled over here near the shelves and the server room?"

"Because when we dump our shipments, we do it on this side. That's why there's a lot of junk on the other side of this wall." Kaleb tapped a knuckle against the southern wall of his workshop. "We bring in what we need as we need it, and then hand it off to Terrance and his new pal."

Clara rolled her eyes. "Yes, the animals. Really professor, is this a zoo?!"

Milly stuck her nose out of Kaleb's robotic arm and whistled angrily. But one look from the severe bird woman and the blue marmot fled back to its home. Sebastian made his displeasure known by turning his shelled back on the teacher. Scott, as ever, ignored everything in his forge. All the animals in the workshop, save Scott, seemed to be naturally cold to Clara. The severe woman returned that coldness and even seemed to actively despise their presence in the Workshop. Even when Kaleb and Marie had explained their uses. But Marie hammering metal with the strength of an industrial press didn't do a thing for the other Professor. Eventually Kaleb put it off as another quirk of the alien woman. Like her disdain for anyone with multiple areas of study.

"They're helpful. No matter what you say." Kaleb crossed his arms and dared the tall woman to challenge him.

She waved a feathered arm at him and gave a strangled sound of annoyance. "Whatever. We still need to get this area cleaned up. And it's right next to Master Daivor's house as well! That's not right."

"He uses some of that metal, though." Roy pointed out.

Daivor sputtered as he took a drag on his pipe before looking at the young boy as if he was a traitor. Clara took Roy's words in and nodded understandingly.

"Well, if the Master Builder needs ready access to supplies… But we at least need to clear some space."

A line of Homunculi hurried over and started pulling bits of metal and trash away from Daivor's Gnome Home. Clara nodded as a small space was cleared and then she looked about the room again. Kaleb grit his teeth and tried to get the woman back on track.

"Didn't you want to look at the K-Tech arm?"

"Yes, I'll get to it soon. But we really need to do something about this lab,"

"Workshop."

"Whatever. You need more space and better equipment. Your unorthodox apprentices seem to have grown lazy in this environment, too."

"Hey, Marie and Terrance were working non-stop before we showed up. Not to mention that Roy was… doing something, too." Kaleb finished lamely.

"Thanks, doc."

"Yes, your chief assistant." Clara shouted, rushing over to Roy's workbench and pulling up his terminal.

Reams of data and design templates poured across the blue screens, and Clara snorted. "Who seems to be working on an untested bit of power armor? Y'know, they sell standard variant armors at your local Hero Emporium, right?"

"It's not power armor, lady!" Roy jumped up from the floor and dashed over. He angrily got between Clara and the screens before enlarging a screen and pointing at something.

"It's an exosuit with light armor. See, it's designed to increase my strength and speed without overloading me with armor."

Clara stuck her beak closer to the screen and squinted. "Hmm, yes. But your power output and consumption are all off. There's no way you could generate such power from such…"

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Kaleb dashed over and closed out the terminal, shooting Roy a look. The boy nodded sagely and locked out his screen before scurrying away. Clara watched the byplay with interest before snorting.

"Classified tech left open on a standard terminal? Professor, the state of this lab…"

"Workshop!" Kaleb shouted. "It's a workshop. We are not all a bunch of lab monkeys debating theory and running predictive models! This is a shop! One where we breakdown and rebuild bits of tech with our own two hands. This is a place for the practical application of undefined practices. Where we find out what happens when you run too much current through an untested alien metal!"

"You lose your eyebrows." Roy quipped.

"And a finger." Daivor added.

"The POINT," Kaleb interrupted the peanut gallery. "is that this is where science becomes reality. That's a messy practice, Ms. Clara. But we make do."

Clara glared at him as the feathers around her neck and arms puffed up angrily. Behind her, Terrance and Marie looked over at them with apprehensive expressions. Roy and Daivor were watching with little smirks on their faces as Sebastian shuffled slowly through the room. The only sound was the muffled footsteps of the NPCs just outside the workshop's four walls. Kaleb met Clara's glare with one of his own until the woman's feathers puffed up so much she was in danger of bursting out of her clothes.

"It seems we have two very different ideas about how to run our…places of employment, Professor."

"Indeed, we do. However, I would still like you to give your professional opinion on the item you came here to look at." Kaleb waved an arm over to his own workbench where the deconstructed K-Tech arm sat.

Clara had barely glanced at the thing when she first stepped into the room. Even now, she seemed hesitant to look at it. The room fell silent again as Kaleb waited for the bird woman to make a move. Clara's eyes scanned the room, taking in everything before finally getting to Kaleb's station. Behind her, Terrance leaned over to Marie and whispered loudly.

"Its like when your dad wants your mom's opinion on something he created."

"Yeah." Marie giggled.

Kaleb shot the two an angry look, showing that everyone could hear them. The room was fairly quiet, and Terrance had done little to cover the whisper. Clara's eyes squinted in amusement before they finally settled on the frame and coils of synth-muscle on Kaleb's bench. For a moment she looked ready to scream at him, but instead she hurried over and grabbed at the frame. He and Daivor had already separated the thing from its joints. So it came apart in the woman's hands and that's when she shot him the stink eye.

"What have you done?"

"I was examining it! How else was I supposed to get a look at the internals?"

"With a 3D diagnostic scanner!"

"We don't have one of those! Besides, that would take a giant database of known parts from the most popular companies."

Kaleb paused as he said that and then looked up at Daivor. The gnome was in the middle of slapping himself in the face. But once he was done, he shot Kaleb a nod and jumped down to Roy's shoulder. The pair of them hurried off as Kaleb resisted slapping himself, too. Getting an incomplete database of the most popular parts used by companies wouldn't have been too hard. They could've added it to the server dump and had a ready-made directory of parts.

Clara didn't miss the Gnome and the teenager hurrying away. But she kept her eyes on the part of the frame in her hand. She weighed expertly before stating.

"This isn't a terrestrial metal."

"No. K-Tech doesn't seem fond of them. Instead, they prefer the more alien alloys. We haven't cracked what exactly they are using, but it appears to be standard practice."

"So much so that they use it in their prototypes." Clara nodded.

Kaleb nodded. "But it's still your design, right? I mean, it's in pieces, but this was still something TekNik wanted to produce."

"Yes." Clara said, setting the frame down and looking from the shoulder attachment. "But, as I said, it's been juiced up and seems to be retrofitted with their crazy power supply."

"Wait, that's IP theft! You can sue them!" Terrance said, drawing looks of pity from Marie and Clara.

"No, she can't. They're fucking K-Tech. Even if you had proof of someone wearing a K-Tech employee shirt breaking into your lab and taking your stuff. They'd still probably get off with a light warning."

"I hate to agree. But it's true." Clara nodded. "Corporate espionage is pretty hard to prove, too. I mean, we have the design documents for this arm dating back months. But what's stopping K-Tech from claiming their designs are just as old? It's not that unlikely that two companies would make something similar, is it?"

"This similar?" Kaleb asked.

Clara just shrugged as an answer before she picked up the power housing and studied it. She measured out the core slots with her thin fingers and nodded glumly. Next, she ran her fingers along the corded bunches of synth-muscle before getting to the CNS threads and wires. Her eyes seemed to sparkle with interest as she studied the threads. But she put her mask of stoicism back on when she noticed Kaleb watching her.

"Ahem! It's all rather impressive and exactly how K-Tech would do things. Overpowered, Over-designed, and overpriced. You're lucky to have such a fine example to work from."

Kaleb ignored the obvious pride in her voice as he moved to grab a bin from the shelving unit. However, the shelves had been moved to the western wall, and he quickly had to change course. Picking up the bin with the other cybernetic limbs, Kaleb dropped near Clara's feet and cracked open the plastic lid. Clara gave an audible gasp before she crouched down and started looking through the bin.

Kaleb chuckled. "Hehehe, liking the horde, huh? All from the same dumpsite as the other one. What do you think?"

"I think my company has a serious leak." Clara said as she shifted the arms in the bin and scowled.

Kaleb nodded in understanding. "More of your designs."

"Nothing recent. But yes, some of these were planned concepts waiting for funding."

"And the others."

"Probably from other competitors. Or actual K-Tech designs. I'll need to call the head office about this. Argh! That means all the labs will be audited and work will slow to a crawl."

"Yeah, that would suck… or…"

"Or… what?" Clara asked, looking up at him from the floor.

"Or you ask your company to hire my Super Group to investigate. Stealthily."

"Professor, didn't the last time you tried to be stealthy go horribly?" Asked Marie. "I mean, you got the SG confined to their Contract Area. How are you all supposed to help TekNik investigate when you can't leave?"

Kaleb grinned. "I mean, I'm sure a big, well-respected company like TekNik can pull some strings, right?"

Clara tittered. "You are grossly overestimating my pull with the company. I'd be lucky to get a sit down with my boss's boss."

"Even with such a huge leak in the corporate bucket, so to speak?"

"It's not that uncommon, Professor. But I'll see what I can do. No promises."

Kaleb groaned, but nodded in understanding. "That's fair. Still, though, do you wanna look through some of my ideas?"

"In a moment, first we need to properly tag these arms and separate them." Clara dug through the large plastic container, pulling cybernetic limbs out.

"Clara! We just went over this…"

"Professor! If I am to help you design a new arm. I am going to need to understand what you are working with. Most of these beauties are unfinished, but I believe between the two of us, we can create something."

"And that requires us to sort them all?"

"Everything is useful and we can make use of anything that isn't. Now crouch down here and collect the ones with obvious K-Tech designs."

A small chortle made Kaleb glance up and he saw Marie and Terrance watching them and hiding giggles. Their smiles froze as Clara issued more orders, though.

"Marie, carry on cleaning and see about giving us more room. Terrance, get us some coffee. And will someone please get this damn rock turtle away from me?! I am not a zookeeper!"

Kaleb had enough time to stick his tongue out at the teens before a feathery hand reached up and pulled him down. He was made to sit next to Clara and go through the large box of arms. Sighing to himself, Kaleb tried to think of the end goal. Once they were finally through, maybe he'd finally have a new arm.

Milly chittered away in her current home. Her voice echoing within his mind. Her happy feelings sustained him as he started pulling arms from the bin and going to work.

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