"Big bro! Wake up! Big bro! Wake up, awooo!"
Early the next morning, Kraft was woken by the excited dog. As soon as he opened his eyes, he saw Quinn's goofy face resting beside his pillow, tongue lolling as he panted.
"Big bro! Time to go to the lab, awooo!"
"..."
Still bleary-eyed, Kraft pulled the covers over his head and burrowed back into bed.
Yesterday, he had stopped Martin and Peter from fighting, then stayed to chat with Martin. By the time he returned, it was already the early hours of the morning. He had barely slept and was still exhausted.
"Let me sleep another hour..." Before Quinn could start howling again, he added, "Keep disturbing my sleep and you won't get your armor."
"Awooo-ooh..."
Quinn promptly swallowed the rest of his howl, turned, and ran.
"Threatening to confiscate my armor? Fine, I'll slack off..."
An hour later, Kraft, still drowsy, struggled out of bed and shuffled into the bathroom to wash up. Quinn stuck close to his feet the whole time, constantly urging him on.
"Hurry up, big bro! It's almost noon, awooo!"
Driven to distraction by Quinn, Kraft hurried through the breakfast Alice had prepared, then headed to his lab with the impatient Quinn and Bea, who wanted to join the fun.
"So, which type of armor do you like?"
Once they reached the lab, Kraft presented two design approaches for Quinn to choose from, as usual.
"The big one! I like big ones!"
Quinn chose the heavily armed design without hesitation.
"Sure."
Kraft nodded and began designing Quinn's armor.
Unlike Bea's light armor, many components of heavy armor couldn't be assembled using nanomachines. To fit it inside a collar, he would have to rely on spatial compression technology for practically everything. But that introduced another problem: