"Urghh," grunted Tori, burning out a huge chunk of metal with a cutting torch and tossing it aside for later reattachment, exposing the dust conveyance system inside, "why...won't...you...fix??" The fire from the various blowtorches had begun to extract sweat from her skin, and she'd stripped her vest jacket off and hung it on the door, exposing her bulging shoulders and all the scars that festooned them. She'd been working for a good few hours, and her limited Lien had begun to rapidly tick down. She could feel all the blowtorches burning a massive metaphorical hole in her pocket.
It wasn't the metal gauntlet surface that was hard to fix; that was an easy enough repair. Just heat, hammer, repeat, done. Belying the simple outward appearance, though, Sigyn was a finely-tuned, intricate system of emitters, tubes and receptacles, all designed to funnel extra-fine Dust powder into her trademark shields. It took extremely specialized tools that this shop didn't seem to have access to to fix it quickly and easily, and she was a long way from Atlas. Instead, she was making do with a pair of needle-nosed pliers and a tiny jeweler's hammer, attempting with dubious success to knock the tubes and pins back into place.
And that only covered the alignment issues. Several small, delicate and integral parts had been damaged, and she'd sorted them into a small pile to be worked on later. Some, she doubted she could fix at all. If she couldn't, she would have to find them in a specialist shop, which was definitely not to be found out here in Mission. Traveling all the way back to Atlas without Sigyn to keep her safe didn't sound especially appealing to Tori, and so the day wore on, finding her still shut up in the small workroom.
With a tense grin, she slotted a final piece in and clicked the newly-installed button. To her great relief, the injector seemed to work fine, carrying the confectioner's sugar that she'd substituted for Dust in her tests into the system. One part of the system down, only a few left to go. The injector was the most complicated part anyway.
She put down the pliers and took a long draught from a water bottle beside her when she heard a voice behind her, coming from the now-open door:
"Tori?"
"Hey, Nimmie," she replied absently, wiping a sheen of sweat from her brow and bending over the table once more.
Then she looked up, blinked, and looked behind her. Her mouth dropped open slightly. That, plus her wide golden eyes and the damp hair falling out from behind her ears, made her look almost half as surprised as she was. She stood shakily, stumbling slightly from an amalgamation of stiffness, pain and astonishment, and looked at Nimmie for about five seconds.
Then her eyes began to water, and she flung herself forward in a flying hug at the smaller girl. "Nimmie!"
"Oh my God," she ramble/sobbed near incoherently, pressing her face into Nimmie's shoulder, "I've missed you so much!"
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