By the time Stark made his way into the booth across the road, Winry had already stripped the metallic mess-up down to the bare bones. It would have been fantastic if not for how bad it was. The port and connections were disastrous, but the wiring for power was there and the actual outside looked more realistic than anything she'd made. If you took that outside design and fitted it to a working arm, the results would be revolutionary. And then there was the other stuff!
The arm was designed to allow the energy to extend past the fingertips as electricity, probably as a defensive weapon. Paninya's canon leg was the only thing that came close, but where that worked mainly with explosives, this seemed to be based entirely off electricity. You'd have to be crazy strong to even generate the needed power, let alone operate something like that. Would Ed be able to?
She turned around, eager to go back and ask her neighbor more questions as well as smack him again for his lack of fundamental training. He was standing right behind her, eyeballing her dissection of his arm.
Two seconds later he had a bruise the size of Manhattan on his forehead. "Idiot! You don't try high tech stuff like this until you know the basics. You taught you?"
He got up from where the impact had thrown him and started rubbing the afflicted area. "No one. I've been teaching myself."
"Well that obviously hasn't been working. What were you trying to do, anyway?"
Stark whistled and the only suit Pepper had forced him to bring along for protection landed beside him. "I was trying to turn this guy's armor arm into a prosthetic." He detached the appendage to let the girl get a better look.
She leaned forward and studied the wiring for a moment before asking, "What powers something like this?"
Stark spent the next minute explaining the arc reactor that was now in the center of the suit's chest, not his own. And to his surprise, she understood almost all of it. What was this girl, some type of mechanical genius? But once he explained how converting the arm from one power source to a different one, and formatting a better structure wasn't working so great, she stood up. "Well, if you'll teach me how to wire in that shock system, I'll help solve your power issue. Equivalent Exchange, right?"
Stark had no idea what that meant, but he agreed to it all the same.
Reviews are my lifeblood. My stories shrivel up without them. Next chapter we start lessons for Stark!