It was a repurposed mechanic bay, evidenced by the still-very-present oil stains littering the jacked up concrete floor. No amount of Meowth litter would negate years and years of abuse. It was shaped like a barn, big slanted roof and a low hump on the top, with Zubat-infested rafters and spiderwebs in the corner. Three window ACs-- all of which Cyg had fixed up herself, thank you very much-- cranked in different corners of the room, but it did little to abate the humidity. A large, lifting garage-style door guarded the entire front side of the building, currently shut.

There were two lifts, and the right side was chock full of tools and tool benches; the left had the door Rory was currently walking through, and another door leading off to an office (complete with computer and coffee machine) and small, toilet-and-sink bathroom.

Cyg was in her beat up navy electrician’s coveralls tied round the waist and a black tanktop, hair in a ponytail and eyebags only slightly pronounced. She was still setting everything up, taking inventory of what spare bits the Rocket big-balls had provided; she heard Rory’s voice echoing round the bay, and she leaned back from behind a stack of lumber and waved.

“Hi!” she yelled, about three stories off the ground, her voice’s echo answering Rory’s. “Oh, hold up.” She unclipped herself from the safety belt on the lift and jumped into space-- onto the waiting hand of Aradia, her shiny Runerigus, who lowered her safely to the ground. She thanked the Ghost-type and hustled to the front of the bay, workboots heavy on the concrete.

“Hey,” she said, wiping sweat off her brow, “I’m Cygne. You must be Rory. Sorry about the heat. I have a big industrial AC unit I’m fixing up but it’s-- it’s a project.” It had been damaged in a building fire and completely gutted by scrappers, is what she meant, so it was a total rebuild from the ground up, but hey. “C’mon in. There’s coffee in the office and it’s also like 15 degrees cooler in there.”

“Oh, it’s a biiig HVAC system,” Cyg explained, pushing into the office and holding the door open for Rory to follow. A bell tingles as the door opens and shuts. “It was on an office or something that caught fire and most everything melted or was so horrifically smoke-damaged it was unusable.”

She shrugs, slipping around a small, cheap black desk that held the computer and sitting opposite Rory. “Then, scrappers moved in and stripped it of anything of value. So it’s really just a dusty old box that I have to rebuild from scratch and hook up.” Not to mention retrofitting this giant garage for an actual HVAC system would be an undertaking, but Cyg liked a project.

Speaking of projects...

She fishes two cans of pop out of the minifridge behind her, sliding one across the desk to Rory. It leaves a smear of moisture in its wake.

“Anyway, I was looking over the PDFs you sent me. They’re really interesting. What kind of scale were you thinking of, size wise?”

Rory was apparently more of a do-er than a talker, which was fine. Cyg was cool with that. She had enough nonsense in her brain and absolutely no capability to internalize her monologue to fill in the spaces between. More than enough. That was, of course, if Rory didn’t get sick of her before then.

But that was a lot of future thinking. They had to actually build something, first.

“That’s a biiiiig project,” Cyg said, though her smile was all unchained excitement, like a child coming downstairs on Christmas morning and seeing the bounty left under the tree. “We can do it, of course. Some of the-- logistics will be difficult. Sourcing materials, mostly. And some of it isn’t necessarily… nicely shaped.”

She pointed to the tendrils of the tail in the Kyogre diagram. “It’ll be hard to outfit that to actually perform and not just be dead weight.” Nothing a lot of beveling and math couldn’t fix. Plus, this would give her an excuse to source material for her other pet project, currently sitting as a collection of rough sketches stuck in her drawer.

“What are you thinking as far as firepower?” she asked, spinning the pop can in place with excitement. “Missles, cannons… lazers?” the last was offered with a raised brow and a canted-up, toothy grin.