Patricia saw them looking and walked over before they had to ask.
"The first shipment of materials and components is being coordinated now." She checked her tablet. "The armor plating and associated mounting hardware will arrive day after tomorrow. That's the fastest item on the list."
"Then we wait two days," Ryan said. "No point assembling the frame without the armor ready to go on."
Patricia moved on to the next item: staffing. Ryan's personnel requirements had raised eyebrows at Aegis, and she wanted to confirm them in person.
"You're requesting researchers in three areas. New energy systems, mechanical propulsion, and computer science with a focus on neural interfaces. And you've specified that you don't need senior academics. Graduate students and early-career PhDs are acceptable."
"Correct."
"Every other project I've worked on has fought tooth and nail to recruit the most senior people in their fields. You're asking for junior staff. Can I ask why?"
Ryan understood the implication. She thought he was afraid of being overshadowed. A fourteen-year-old worried that a professor with thirty years of experience might challenge his authority.
"This project doesn't need academic heavyweights," he said. "There are no unsolved theoretical problems for them to crack. Every technology on Scrapper already exists in my head, fully developed. What I need are competent people who can learn the systems, follow instructions, and execute. I need hands, not brains."
Patricia considered this for a moment. She glanced at the five remaining technicians, then back at Ryan.
"So what you're building isn't a research team. It's a support crew."
"I'm building the first generation of mech engineers. They'll start as support. Where they end up depends on how fast they learn."
"Understood. I'll have the first batch here day after tomorrow, along with the armor shipment."
Ryan spent the next two days with his parents.
They walked the campus, ate in the dining hall, explored the surrounding neighborhood. Lisa bought a scarf from a shop near Harvard Square that she didn't need but couldn't resist. Tom found a diner that served a passable chicken fried steak and declared it his new favorite restaurant in Massachusetts, which was a low bar since it was the only restaurant he'd tried in Massachusetts.
On the second morning, Ryan walked them to the train station. Lisa held his face in both hands, told him to eat vegetables, and cried. Tom shook his hand, then pulled him into a hug that lasted three seconds longer than Tom would ever admit to.
They boarded. The train pulled away. Ryan stood on the platform until it disappeared.
Then he turned around and went to work.
The workshop. Day one.
Scrapper's components lay across the floor in the positions Ryan had assigned during the unboxing. The five technicians had spent the past two days studying the assembly documentation Ryan had prepared for them. They had a basic understanding of how the pieces fit together. Theory, at least. Practice was about to begin.
Ryan's phone buzzed.
"Components are at the gate. Opening up." Patricia's voice.
Ryan signaled the crew to open the main doors. Outside, Patricia stood at the head of a small procession: fifteen young men and women, most in their mid-to-late twenties, followed by three cargo trucks.
"Your new team," Patricia said. "And your first parts shipment."
Ryan looked at the group. Fifteen researchers, exactly as requested. The oldest couldn't have been past thirty. A mix of PhD candidates and recent graduates, drawn from energy systems, mechanical engineering, and computer science programs across several universities. Their faces showed a range of emotions from professional composure to barely contained excitement.
Ryan shook each hand and called each person by name. Patricia had sent him the roster the day before, and he'd memorized it in a single reading.
"Ryan, hi, I'm a huge fan." The last in line, a young man with glasses, was vibrating with enthusiasm. He looked barely older than a master's student.
"Kyle Novak. Welcome aboard."
The cargo trucks began unloading while Ryan addressed the group inside the workshop.
"What you see on the floor is Scrapper in its current form. A test prototype. The version from the videos. What we're going to build is the next iteration."
He pulled up a diagram on the workshop's main display screen.
"Scrapper's final configuration runs on a plasma reactor as its primary power source, with an ion battery array for backup. It can switch between bipedal and spherical modes. That's the target. We're not there yet, but every upgrade from this point forward moves us closer."
"Your role is straightforward. There are no open research questions for you to solve. Every technology Scrapper uses already exists up here." He tapped his temple. "Your job is to learn those systems, understand them deeply enough to work on them, and execute when I need you to. Think of it as an apprenticeship, not a thesis project."
A few of the energy researchers exchanged glances. One raised her hand.
"You mentioned a plasma reactor and an ion battery. Could you elaborate on those? We're in energy systems and we haven't encountered those terms in any existing literature."
Ryan paused. "The short answer is that these are proprietary technologies that you'll be introduced to as the project progresses. For now, all you need to know is that they'll replace the diesel generator and the power cable. Once they're installed, Scrapper becomes fully mobile. No tether. True operational independence."
The researcher nodded, but her expression said she had forty more questions she was holding back.
In the corner, Kyle Novak turned to the colleague beside him. "He'll figure it out. He built the whole thing from scratch already."
The colleague gave him a look. "You're a fanboy."
"Proudly."
Assembly began that afternoon.
The first phase was armor. The new steel plates, dark matte black, had arrived precision-cut to Ryan's specifications. Each piece corresponded to a section of Scrapper's skeleton, designed to bolt onto mounting points that Ryan had built into the original frame years ago in Crestfield. He'd always planned for armor. He just hadn't been able to afford it.
The gantry crane earned its keep immediately. Torso plates that would have taken hours to position by hand were lifted, rotated, and set in place in minutes. The five technicians handled the bolting and welding while Ryan supervised, calling out adjustments, checking alignment against the specs stored in his head.
By late afternoon, the torso was complete.
Scrapper's midsection, previously a naked skeleton of exposed cables and structural beams, was now encased in black armor plating. Clean lines. No exposed wiring. The cables that had snaked across the frame like visible veins were hidden beneath panels that locked together with mechanical precision.
It looked like a mech. Not a frame, not a prototype, not a science project. A mech.
The resemblance to the movie version was striking. Not identical: the original Scrapper from Pacific Rim: Uprising was a patchwork of scavenged parts, mismatched colors, cobbled-together plates from half a dozen different Jaegers. Ryan's version was uniform. All black. Purpose-built. It looked less like a junkyard survivor and more like something that had rolled off a production line.
The torso lay on the workshop floor, and even horizontal, even incomplete, the sheer mass of it filled the space with a weight that went beyond physics. The researchers stood around it in a loose semicircle, phones forgotten in their pockets, just looking.
"This is way more intense in person than on video," Kyle said quietly.
Ward, who had wandered over from the office building to watch, stood near the cockpit hatch with his arms crossed. "You're sure it can still move with all this extra weight?"
"One way to find out." Ryan connected a power cable to the torso's main coupling and hit the switch.
No indicator lights visible now. The armor covered everything. But Ryan had installed a single external status light on the chest plate, just below the cockpit. A small green LED, almost modest compared to the constellation of lights that used to blaze across the naked frame.
It lit up. Steady green.
Power confirmed. All torso systems nominal.
Ryan climbed the ladder, found the concealed release on the chest plate, and triggered the cockpit hatch.
The outer doors split open. A rectangular seam cracked across the armor, the upper and lower panels separating and retracting smoothly. Beneath them, the circular inner hatch appeared. Four curved outer segments and one central disc, nested together like the aperture of a camera lens. They spiraled open in sequence, each panel sliding aside to reveal the cockpit underneath.
Below, fifteen researchers and five technicians broke into applause.
"That is the coolest thing I have ever seen in my life," Kyle announced to no one in particular.
Ryan climbed inside, ran the self-diagnostic, and climbed back out.
"Torso checks out. Keep going. Arms and legs tomorrow."
For every 500 Powerstones extra chapter.