Apriltober 18, Loyal
a/n: Alexa and the new Outfitter Lacey (see ch. 8) really aren't getting along. Lacey is going to speak to her manager.
All the good things belong to Monolith Soft, so not Lacey. I'm sure the diskbomb is canon.
Alexa was carefully picking organic material out of a diskbomb launcher with oversized tweezers. The Easter egg hunt had been a real success, and the repurposed weaponry had made quick work of hiding dozens and dozens of eggs, dyed the same colors as the visiting hoard of littlepon. She was paying for it today, though, meticulously coaxing fragments of pastel pink and yellow eggshell out of every crevice. She didn't mind; yesterday had been fun, and if she had to spend an entire day, nose firmly wedged into skell weaponry, she was not one to complain.
"That was a rotten trick you played on me." The table shuddered and the tweezers scraped across a gear tooth. Alexa didn't startle at the angry voice, being too worried about any damage to the weapon. Satisfied that everything was fine, she looked up at the speaker.
"Hi, Lacey."
"You jerk!"
"What?"
"You told me to come in for a fitting of that mermaid gear with the Harriers."
"Yeah. You asked me to."
"I asked you to let me know if Douglas was there. Instead, you know who was there?"
Alexa did indeed know. She suspected this would be a long conversation. She set the tweezers down reluctantly. "Lowes. He's the Harrier we got to take the fitting."
"Right. Definitely not who I was hoping to get my hands on."
"First of all, ew. Second of all, Lowes is a real catch when it comes to armor trials. He tends to take the hardest missions, so we really get a chance to push things to the limit."
"JERK! Now I'm stuck with him."
"Huh? I thought the fittings went well. The data came back real positive."
"I'm assigned to the test missions."
"Nice. Beach trips across the continents."
"Stop trying to be cute. You set me up and I'm not going to stand for it. I'm going to complain to your manager about this harassment. I might even take it to the Commander." Lacey pushed a strand of her ashen blond hair away from her cheek angrily.
Alexa shrugged. She looked at the diskbomb launcher with momentary regret, but decided to try and find out why Lacey was so miffed. It wouldn't be fair for Tika to be landed with the problem if Alexa could fix it first. She felt momentarily very loyal to the skell engineer, and not just because she had signed off on the Easter shenanigans. She smiled politely and made her best guess. "I get that you expected one Harr..."
Lacey cut her off. "It's not about me expecting yummy Barrett and getting very-not-yummy Lowes. It isn't even that he talks all the time and never listens. I can deal with that: I've been working with you, haven't I? It's that he has a four rating. FOUR. And now I'm on a series of missions with him because you didn't like that I'm normal about guys and skells and whatever."
Alexa really wasn't following. She turned the wattage of her smile up a notch. "So he isn't cute or something? You'll live, won't you?"
"FOUR!" Lacey was shouting now. "That means out of every 10 missions, his team comes home safe four times. I'm going on a minimum of five missions with him. I'm guaranteed to die."
"Look, math doesn't work that way," Alexa began.
"SHUT UP! I'm going to go let Tiki know..."
"Tika."
"SHUT UP! Just for that, I'm going to make sure that you're the one going out on those death missions." Lacey turned on her heel and stalked out of the hangar.
And that is how Bozé Lowes learned a whole lot about skells in the following days.
a/n: I think Alexa and Bozé could be buddies.
Next up: Ballet.