"Early? What? As if you're not welcome here whenever you please," Zeph snorts from one of the platforms which he'd built into his squadron headquarters. Being the only engineer from Cipher Corp on his squad, he had functionally been allowed to take over the entire space for the purpose of producing weaponry and other devices for the others to take out into the field. Even when he wasn't around, the building was abuzz with activity from knight-like automatons assembling parts, processing resources, and making repairs.

Sprocket's head snaps up at the arrival of the duo and promptly leaps from her witch's shoulder, arms and legs outstretched to extend crafted wings which were charmed to keep her aloft. As she spirals downwards, making a meandering, looping trajectory towards Emmie's shoulder, Zeph takes the stairs down to meet them, two at a time. The monkey gets there first, clinging to Janice's daughter and affectionately rubbing her cheek over the girl's shoulder. When she had been alive, Zeph had considered the published charms expert a friend and mentor, and she had been the initial link which connected him to the Az'es family. Sprocket had always taken a particular liking to Emmie -- the most fun of the lot in her expert opinion.

"Welcome back!" he greets after catching up, grinning with some flickering undercurrent of uncharacteristic nervousness, "I uh -- kinda realized that the original reason I invited you over might be kind of... insensitive? So if you're not comfortable with the direction I'm taking this just stop me and Sprocket can show off some new grappling hooks that just came off the production line instead."

There was no point in keeping it a mystery, so he barrels on ahead: "Do you remember Argon?"

Argon was the 18th creation in a particular series of automatons designed for defense. Zeph had made them to act as guards during scientific expeditions where it would otherwise be a logistic nightmare to bring enough food and other resources for a proper defense team. And yes, Zeph insisted on giving each of the individual automatons names, even if they were going to be produced in bulk.

More importantly, Argon had been the single automaton sent along on Kap's research expedition to help test the real-life functionality of the design. There had been a whole squad of other guards there, so no one had expected it to see any serious use. It was just a test, after all... right up until it wasn't.

In the end, Kap and Emmie had been saved, but at the expense of Argon getting torn apart by a daemon.

Kap Az'es