Ciela hung on for dear life, laughing the entire way. It worked for a while, until one of Vanessa's jumps caught her more off guard than she was expecting. With a tiny yelp she toppled backward, snapping her wings open and finishing out the backflip. Unfortunately, she overcompensated, and landed square on her butt, and hard. It was barely even five seconds before she was back on her feet, smiling through the pain. "I'm okay!"

"... I thought you knew." Ciela's expression was blank. She supposed she had sort of been blindly following Vanessa's lead, probably because she was older. And she'd been having too much fun just then to worry about where they would train. "The training grounds?"

Ciela instinctively prepared to fly before finally processing that Vanessa had said no wings. So she closed them up and started running as fast as she could. She was putting everything into it, but she wasn't really gaining any distance on Vanessa; she almost had a thought that it was because her legs were too short, then pushed it out of her head and put every ounce of energy she had into running. She started slowly gaining, but it probably wasn't fast enough.

It’s surprising how much people would be willing to pay to avoid doing busy work themselves, more so during these sorts of times, with tests going on every other minute, piles and piles of revisions and studying piling up. Kovac never really bothered himself with that sort of work, either he learnt a thing or he didn’t, headbutting a few books for hours on end never helped him much. Instead, he turned his time to more productive, more profitable ventures. His aptitude for maintenance and repair was well known by now, and while he often did it for free, he had to find a way to curb demand a little during these times. That and a little spare coin never hurt anyone… Well there was that incident with the railgun modified to fire literal spare coins as ammo, but that was an outlier at best.



He’d taken his workload for the day, and assortment of firearms and melee weapons, and his tools of the trade, sharpening stones, oils, pastes, brushes, files, strops, even a small induction forge, and tucked himself away in a nice little corner of the training grounds. Well as tucked away as a man of his stature could be. After setting up a stool and desk to rest against, he had set to work. He had started with the most drastically needed work, chipped blades, bent firing pins and bulged barrels, working down in severity as the day passed around him. When two younger students burst in through the door, he simply ignored them, in fact so deep was his concentration, the pale grey light of his aura was flickering around him, the ozone smell filling the air. Instead he kept his attention on gliding a shashka, a relic from the Great War itself, down a leather strop smeared with diamond polish. A rare treatment, one that he wouldn’t usually spend the time on, but the old lady was a living monument to such pivotal points in history, as far as he was, concerned she earned it.



After a moment of silence he plucked a sheet of paper from the desk before lazily pressing the cutting edge of the blade against its edge, the curved blade passing through it as if it wasn't even there. With a dramatic flair he finished the cut the two pieces of paper drifting away from his desk, before returning the old girl back to her freshly restored wine-red sheath. His work finally done for the day, he looked up from the table, lifting the jeweler's glasses he was sporting from his nose as he did so. His brow furrowed as he regarded the two, pushing a handful of unbound hair out of his eyes as he did. “I don’t suppose you’re here for the smithing?” He said, gesturing to an empty spot on the floor next to him, opposite an ever growing pile of finished pieces, “Just set them down there, I’ll get to them after a spell.” He explained in his gruff tones, pulling a thermos and paperback book from beneath his desk, as he slid the glasses back down his nose, flipping the magnifying pieces out of his way as he did. “After my break of course.”