"When are we going to give up the facade with the fake names? It's not like anyone is hunting us anymore, and they're not fooling anyone." Nico laughed when she returned to Max's office after seeing their guests off to talk with the observers.
"Any time you want, really. It's not much of a secret anyhow, more of an inside joke at this point." Max agreed.
"We should likely do some preventive damage control as well. I will get the Innu on it right away so the guys we pranked can't come at us and try to get revenge back in the Alliance. They might have been basically exiled for their business practices, but if they can convince people that we're worse, it would be a mess for our sales." Nico suggested.
"Good thinking. Get ahead of the problem, and then we can get back to finishing this reformation project. The daily report from Headmistress Medusa says that the kids are eager to see it when it's finished, so I'm assuming that a day-long field trip might be the next thing on the request list once the work is done." Max agreed.
"I think that's safe to assume. Everyone on board wants a chance to set foot on the planet when we finish, so we are going to have to do a particularly good job of it and not waste too much time while we finish, or they'll start getting bored.
Part of the charm of our vacations is that we keep moving around and seeing new things, so spending too much time in one spot is actually a detriment to our popularity. Plus, there's nothing to shoot at here."
Max shook his head at the diminutive cyborg, whose curly black hair was waving in time with her speech.
That didn't seem right. She wasn't moving her head to make it sway like that.
"Nico, what did you do to your hair?" He asked.
"You know that anime with the hapless harem protagonist and the alien assassin? I copied her fully controllable hair with this version. I don't have the grip strength down, but I'm getting better at the control. Soon I will be able to grab stuff with it or use it as a whip."
"You weaponized your hair? Don't you think that's going a bit too far?"
Nico laughed as if Max had asked the dumbest question in existence.
"Of course not. Long hair has always been weaponized. Even if it was mostly to hold weapons or with a heavy ball at the end to flail enemies with, it is a waste not to do something with it, and I found this cool way to make synthetic hair strands morphable. Give me a bit more time, and I will be able to add them to the augmentic armor as extendable ropes for various purposes.
Technically, that's what I was working on, to begin with, then I realized that it would make cool hair, so I tweaked my own."
A utility rope would be a good addition to the suits, so items could be suspended or recovered with ease. The fact that Nico had made it a weaponized part of her own body was just inevitable, really.
"Just don't let the fun side projects interfere with the cloaking technology. We are going to need that one soon enough, sitting here between the Narsians and the Klem.
You know what, I've got a great idea. Get it completely finished, and we can pick a fight so you can test it out. We can call it population control of a hostile species, and the guests will love it."
"Who taught you how to sweet talk a woman? Because it's working. I think we've still got a month or two before we've got it properly functional though. I want it working well enough that we can use it like the Hunters do when they're playing war games with intelligent species and cloak our Mecha, not just our ships in orbit.
Having a unit or three of stealth Mecha, likely Corvette Class for the extra speed and versatility, would be a game changer in a fight."
Max waved goodbye as Nico turned to return to her work, dragging the excited Innu along with her. Something that they had seen or thought of in the last few minutes had the technician's mind going in circles, thinking about how to modify a power relay. He was certain that it was important to finish that part of their work, so he sent them on their way as soon as possible and waited for the inevitable scolding that he was going to get from the observers.
He didn't have to wait long. After only an hour, he had a very official letter waiting in his inbox, informing him that it was neither amusing nor acceptable to attempt to use Alliance law to manipulate others into committing serious military tariff violations. The tone of the letter suggested that they knew exactly what had happened in the room, so he assumed that either the Illithid had informed them or their own staff had obtained the sensor logs from Terminus.
His money was on the likelihood that someone from his staff had sent it, though, since it would make their lives easier not to have to answer questions about how such a strange interaction had taken place, to begin with. [I can read minds, and she can manipulate data with a thought] was a perfectly reasonable answer to the Alliance, but it was still easier not to have to do it at all.
Later that evening, he got a follow-up letter from the Commander of the Observation ship, informing them that they would be having more guests in the near future. The Council would be sending a team to talk with them directly about a proposal they had to prevent future incidents where human innovations that bypassed copyright laws might cause interstellar uproars.
That should be a lot of fun. He had no intentions of slowing down their work or keeping it hidden from the Alliance as a whole. However, if they thought there was some way to prevent conflicts like this, where price-gouging businesses might end up with a score to settle after their senior staff was lynched or run out of the Alliance territory entirely, it would be a small relief.
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