[attr="class","beck"]resignation comes eventually.

"i see."

almost crestfallen, he allows silence to surround them. he doesn't know what to say, so he says the only thing that's on his mind.

"i'll miss you, choi."

[attr="class","noodles"]Chu-e Choi

Another pregnant silence between them.

"... thank you, Theo."

Chu-e means it, it's just with his own resignation. His own kind of acceptance.

"I'm glad you came to Hoenn."

[attr="class","beck"]he nods, but decides it's not enough. choi deserves more.

"you're stuck with me, choi."

[attr="class","noodles"]Chu-e Choi

His chair squeaks, soft, when he moves to stand. The Skitty hops down, jingles, and he turns to one of the cabinets along the wall. A tail twitches, eyes firmly locked on Theo.

"Do you know what MAGMA is?"

Theo, now, is only a grunt here. Yet, Chu-e knows he isn't some rat or squealer. What he says will stay between them.

Theo can be privy to the new project.

[attr="class","beck"]"i don't."

theo hasn't heard of it. he hasn't heard of a lot of things. but if it's something of choi's, then it's something that interests him.

[attr="class","noodles"]Chu-e Choi

"We think we can stick Avatar powers in non-Avatars." The simplest way to describe it.

A nondescript SD card is pulled from an unlabeled folder. Sitting back down, his laptop is opened and it's popped inside. Files on the project are opened, turned around for Theo to see and look through.

If he tries to find anything else, all he'll parse if that Chu-e has a lot of cat videos and recipes saved in his bookmarks.

[attr="class","beck"]he leaves the folder, leans forward, and sifts through the various files on the laptop instead.

"i assume it's not as easy as it sounds."

[attr="class","noodles"]Chu-e Choi

"Nothing ever is."

A lot of the information is very technical. It's stuff beyond Chu-e's understanding. It was only thanks to Miles Sharp dumbing things down for him, often times, that he really understood very much of what happened in the labs.

"We have a few volunteers lined up for when testing starts."

[attr="class","beck"]he stops on one file in particular, spends a moment to thoroughly read it, then glances up at choi.

"do you think it'll work?"

[attr="class","noodles"]Chu-e Choi

"They almost had it working before. Ran out of samples. We have all the samples we could want, now."

Which was a terrible way of thinking about Cillian Quinn and Lulu Flint. Samples. Experiments.

Chu-e knew personally what that was like.

[attr="class","beck"]samples. experiments. it's not disgust that rises, it's something else entirely. he still isn't sure what.

"what happens to them?"

[attr="class","noodles"]Chu-e Choi

"The samples or the experiments?"

Briefly he thinks of his captivity. Strapped to tables, cut open again and again, still beating heart and pulsing organs measured with clinical precision.

He wonders if they'll measure Killian Decker's organs, too.

"If they're lucky, they'll die."

Chu-e wonders if the file Theo was hung up on was the video of his insides.

[attr="class","beck"]it was.

"and if they're not?"

[attr="class","noodles"]Chu-e Choi