"Remind me again why I'm being dragged away from my T-15 project?" Valentine wasn't pleased by his current predicament, seated in Serenity's tattoo parlour under the watchful eye of his sisters, Serenity herself, and his father.
"Family tradition, of course." Rachael was scrolling through something on her phone with her lower eyes while her upper pairs were focused on her little brother. "We've been discussing this with mom for a week, finally got her to agree."
"I don't understand..." Valentine was wary, since Serenity wasn't just inviting them to have a coffee. They were here for something else.
"Your entire family has at least two tattoos each, done by me of course. And you, my dear, are a blank canvas. I'm not wasting a chance like this." Serenity smiled at him. "So, you're not going anywhere until you decide on what and where your first two tattoos are going."
"You're rather tenacious about this, aren't you?" Valentine asked, which made his father chuckle.
"It's family tradition, of course we'd be tenacious about it."
"Ray got lucky with hers, being born a clone of me. Dad started it, I'm infamous for mine, Jake's got my red spider on his chest, Mom's got three, Mishka's got one on each arm, Kaneki's got two on his shoulder, Alice has like, what, four now?" Yuuki turned to Serenity, who shook her head.
"Five now. She got an owl, right here." Serenity indicated the side of her ribs. "Val, sweetie, tell you what... I have an idea for a small one, you pick where it goes, then you can come back next week with your own design, and I'll do it then, alright? You are not walking out of my studio without a tattoo."
"How small is it?" Valentine asked, and Serenity held up her thumb and index finger about three and a half inches apart. "Sure, fine... Put it on the side of my neck. I don't really care where it goes."
In record time, Serenity finished her design on the side of Valentine's neck, a beautiful lotus flower reaching from just below his jawline down the length of his jugular to stop at the dip of his throat, right below his Adam's Apple.
"Remember your promise~!" Serenity teased as she finished pulling her gloves off.
"Think you got time to do one on us?" Yuuki asked, indicating Rachael with her phone in hand, who was likewise staring at her phone. "We've been looking at ideas this whole time."
"Hmmm... That's up to your father." Serenity glanced over at Tobias, who nodded.
"We'll see you at home, girls." Tobias nodded as he and Valentine left the studio to drive back in his pickup truck, leaving the sister's bikes parked side by side in the same parking space.
"Alright then... Who's first?" Serenity's eyes glinted with glee, rather curious to see what the twins had in mind for their newest tattoo's.
"And here I thought Alice and Sere were the ones with the green thumbs..." Rize couldn't help but tease her children as they all gathered at the dinner table that evening. "Alice of course being figuratively... and Serenity in the literal case."
"What's wrong with flowers?" Yuuki challenged with a forkful of flesh halfway to her mouth. "Actually, no... What did you expect us to get?"
"More spiderwebs, actually." Rize smiled at the counter. Sure, seeing their very distinctive style was always eye-catching, but the addition of the Lilies of the Valley adorning her daughters' opposing shoulders - Yuuki's was on her left, Rachael's was on her right - was still a slight surprise nonetheless. And of course, her son's lotus on his neck was actually... rather fitting for him.
"Sere said it was a great idea." Rachael swallowed her mouthful of flesh before speaking. "She said it reminded her of you and Kaneki from back when you were all still in Raccoon City."
"I knew this... rather eccentric Ghoul, Shu Tsukiyama, back when I was still in Japan. He was really into floriography." Rize paused her eating to recall the unusual but gentlemanly Ghoul, who was at the time known as 'The Gourmet' by the Japanese CCG, but couldn't recall the exact language he'd used for the particular flower that her daughters had on their arms. "I just can't remember what the floriographic wording is for the Lily of the Valley..."
"Sweetness, humility, returning happiness and trust." Valentine reported from his phone's screen. "Lotus is a symbol of tenacity, everlasting life and purity."
"In my eyes, flowers are just nice to look at. Sure, they can symbolize certain things, but they don't have an audible language... It's a visual one; subtle and eloquently bold." Tobias smirked slightly. "Regardless, I won't be getting a flower tattoo myself, I already draw the line with the wildflowers in the field on my wrist." He pointedly glanced at the armoured knight on the back of his right hand, one of the two visible parts of his signature medieval-fantasy tattoo that dominated his whole arm and part of his chest, shoulder blade and traces up the side of his neck, only a faint smoke trail - literally - being visible above his usual suit collar, stopping below his ear, just like his son's lotus flower did.
"I'm satisfied with my hip and my shoulders, thanks." Rize smiled as she resumed eating. "If you want to let her do it, I don't care how colourful you get... Just pay for the laser removal yourself if you want to get rid of them."
"C'mon, give her five minutes and she's already got a place to put it. Twenty, and she's looking for a way to pin you down... Give her an opportunity, and you're fucked." Tobias smiled, laughing darkly.
"Mr. Darkwood, are you sure this is the concept you've designed? It's..."
"You have my design; your orders are to fabricate the components for me." Valentine didn't even bat an eye at the attempted denial of his design for the first of his upgrades for the T-15's; A pair of mobility assistance thrusters placed on the lower back. They were meant to boost jump heights, slow falls to prevent injury, and even dash around while on the ground. He decided to simply call them a Boost Pack instead of something complex. "Get started." He ordered in the same bored tone.
"Y-yes sir..." The tech team quickly got to work using Valentine's dissected 3D model of the various components for the Boost Pack.
"You know where to find me." Valentine spun on his heel and returned to his commandeered workshop, already strewn with stacks of rolled blueprints and several partially assembled components for a T-15. Taking a seat on his wheeled stool, he pushed himself across the floorspace, slowing to a halt beside his latest toy. He'd taken a leaf out of his father's book and picked up an FN P90 to tinker with. His idea wasn't complex, it just had one small issue that was giving him grief.
One of the official FN parts for the P90 was a large, bulky looking suppressor that integrated into the front of the weapon. It wasn't the issue. In fact, he'd gutted the entire attachment, swapping out the internal parts and frame to turn the outer shell into an extended foregrip, including an extension to the barrel, which just barely poked out of the end of the blocky extension.
But, he did something else, which was the issue.
The lower half of the new foregrip was hollow, with a spring loaded compartment that opened up from the bottom - activated by a small and simple sliding lock switch - swinging a hidden suppressor up to the barrel's small presence at the front. The problem was that it didn't screw onto the threaded barrel by itself, it had to be done manually.
Putting his feet up onto the bench where his customized PDW was resting, Valentine sighed and closed his eyes for a moment to think of a way to screw the suppressor into place as it deployed. If he used a delayed tension corkscrew mechanism, he'd need to build the whole thing by hand and... wait.
He suddenly had an idea, based on that delayed tension corkscrew idea, but why hadn't he thought of such an obvious method!
Clicking the sliding lock open, the suppressor flipped out from the bottom of the foregrip and snapped into place, but he'd already slid his stool across the workshop to grab a few necessary scrap parts, chief of which was a few small magnets.
In minutes, he had made steady progress with his little prototype mechanism, but the sound of the workshop's door opening behind him reached his ear.
"Mr. Darkwood, the team you've assigned to the Boost Pack fabrication would like you to come verify some materials used in the render, they're unsure about..."
"Ten minutes." Valentine didn't look up, hunched over his small mechanism with his goggles over his eyes.
"But sir, the Boost Pack..."
"Ten minutes." Valentine repeated his statement sharply, cutting the intern off.
"It's urgent, sir..."
"Fifteen minutes." Valentine turned his Magnokinetic glare over his shoulder towards the intern, his voice darkly tinged with a threatening note. "Shall we keep going?"
A/N: Double upload because I've recently moved to a new house, and aside from a few technical issues, my access to internet has severely diminished. I shall still be writing, but my upload schedule is - for lack of a better term - fucked up. I'll try to keep at it as much as I can.