Same disclaimer, read the others if you want to know what it says.
All in the Timing
"Okay, this is...weird..." Jessie's face contorted slightly, as she slipped on the second 'boot', the inner skeleton to it. It was cold and confining, and yet...fit her like a glove. In a good way. "I'm glad I let you have those old shoes of mine to build these around...man they're heavy. They fit, but they're heavy."
"I know, I picked them up and figured you'd feel like you'd gotten in trouble with the mob or something. You know, where they give you cement sneakers and let you play in the river a while?" Dan smirked up at her, fastening the second of the two metal feet he'd made her. He hurried it up, bolting them on really with old rollerblade-style closures he'd salvaged somewhere along the line. "Okay...done, gonna go plug you in. Now remember, hold on -"
"Hold on because I don't have the stabilizers yet, I know, I can't take off flying quite yet but we need to at least see if I got the ratio right for such small fans we just built in here...Don't worry so much. Got my helmet, you've already got the camera on the tripod and aimed this way, let's do this."
"Okay, okay...hold on. Got the switch?"
"Dur..."
"Okay fine, go. Just don't hit your head too hard on the ceiling."
"Thanks, darling," she said, rolling her eyes just as he turned the camera on. "Test thirteen, flight boots only. Commencing in five..." she counted the rest down, held onto the same ropes that'd once held on the grated platform in previous tests.
--
Jessica hurried in through the door of her classroom just in front of the teacher himself, taking the last seat there was in the front, her usual seat in fact. He was running a tad late, so he started everything up right away.
"Okay, I hope you all had good winter breaks, welcome to part two. You've all had plenty of time to brainstorm, drink so much you forget what project you wanted to do, and brainstorm again, so, don't say I didn't warn you. Everybody pass up your year-end project proposals to the front of your row, each row pass it all the way to the ... my right, your left, to the left," he motioned to the left side of the room, according to the students' perspective.
Her hands, still reddened from soldering the wiring into the shell of the beast they were creating, delved into her backpack, pulling out two sets of proposals, as people from the back started passing things forward. One proposal was the real deal - the full thing: Ambitious, bordering on a psychotically large amount of work, but a full suit with several gadgets they figured wouldn't be too hard to come up with, however unlike Tony Stark's suit it would be. Or the modest one: just the flight controls. More than likely if she turned this one in, they'd be done in a couple of weeks, rather than taking the entirety of the second semester to make the whole thing. This would be the easy road. Did she want to take the easy road? Did she ever take the easy way, with anything?
Jessica sighed, and, with a slight smirk at the thought of what they'd already gotten done…turned in the full-suit proposal, stuffing it on the bottom of the stack as all papers were handed over to her. The teacher took them without a second thought, as she put the milder project proposal back into her pack, and took out her notebook and pen for the lecture.
--
."BABE!" Danny tried shouting it over the loud, pounding music. For the eighth time. Black Sabbath blared over a pair of gigantic home-made speakers Jessie had turned in for last year's project. But still, no answer from her, just more welding at her table, working like nobody's business on the suit.
"Dr. Samuels? She'll be with you in just a sec," Dan called into the phone, setting it down outside. He himself went inside, in the mean time - and shut off all power to the garage at the circuit breaker box, which was much easier to get to than the stereo at that point. "Hey babe, I said your teacher's on the phone."
She'd already shut off the torch and given him an inquisitive look when everything had gone dead, powerless. "you couldn't have just come over here and tapped me on the shoulder?"
"As sexy as you are handling power tools and such," he said, giving her a peck on the cheek when she got over there, "you're dangerous with that blowtorch."
"Only if your head's made of metal. Oh wait, you WOULD be in danger, in that case," she teased, sticking out her tongue at him teasingly as she pulled off the welding helmet, and picked up the phone when he showed her it was outside, in the fresh air. "Yes, professor?"
"Jessica, hello. I was just going over your project proposal," her tech teacher began explaining, and it could be heard that he was leafing through the pages of said paper she'd turned in the day before. "I'm sure you knew I was going to have a few questions and concerns about such a tenacious goal for a simple end-of-the-year project."
"Oh of course. I wouldn't expect any less, ask away."
"I didn't think you'd mind. The first concern I have with something like this is the safety issue. It has to be safe and cleared to operate within school grounds."
"Say no more. The prototype I'm turning in has absolutely no weapons attached, and I've already taken a number of other measures. For instance, there will be a safety chip in it, so it is completely disabled without me inside the suit."
"Without you in it, or without someone in it?"
"Without me. I'm the only one who knows the code to punch in, there's a little keypad hidden on it, and I'm also the only person who's been working on the insides of this thing, so I'm the only one who knows where the security chip gets plugged into. And it's stored securely."
"Okay, I hope that works out for you when you build it, you know security systems are hard to manage sometimes, with all the extra wiring and programming."
"Oh, I already know it works, that's not an issue."
"Well, just because you've tested a security code on a pre-existing panel doesn't mean it - "
"I mean I've already got it built into the suit and it works like a charm," she'd obviously anticipated this. And, sure enough, he was reacting the way she expected him to.
"Into the - you mean you've already --"
"Yeah. I have. I mean, it's not a hundred-percent yet by any means, but the security system is up and running, successfully."
There was a long pause at the other end of the line.
"Well then, there go most of the other questions I had," Dr. Samuels finally squeaked out, obviously amazed….and nervous with anticipation.
