✾ Aura, a Lady.

She moved to leave. Bryn held up a hand.

"So here's the rest of my pitch: Armours, on top of being an unbelievable triumph of integration engineering, are chock full of esoteric materials, and powered by literally the most esoteric materials we know about: most esoterics are the swarm breaking the usual rules of matter, but Cores are something the swarm builds to break its own rules. We don't understand 'em yet, but someday we will, and personally, I think we're not getting there without a bunch of different perspectives."

Sophie opened her mouth, closed it again. Bryn was making some points. Or maybe laying out some bait. But it was, admittedly, appetizing.

She said, "So one of my moms built this thing's radars. Say, hypothetically, I was to say yes. What would I be doing?"

"By broader spiral standards, this beastie's already obsolete. So you'd be working on the next generation. Two bays down. Skytouch University's newest and best, slowly coming together, pure custom and glorious, and I would love to have newer Bell avionics expertise in it, maybe even newer Bell swarm songs to go with it. You know how it goes. 'Every generation…'"

"'…we rise higher.'" The oldest Ascender proverb there was. It was a transparent appeal to sentiment, but Bryn wasn't actually wrong.

Climbline. The tradition of the Ascent Nation is clear: climb ever higher, but leave lines behind. Knowledge sharing is considered just shy of sacred by the Ascent inhabitants of the middle Silean, and one's true and lasting legacy even beyond family. That's why Ascenters carry two last names: their second for their family of origin, but the one before it is passed from master to apprentice, from supervising professor to student, a climbline helping one person after the other to reach higher up, uninterrupted.