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The clanging of the wrench against the engine room floor was simply more background noise to Kress’s ears, the cobalt caster preoccupied with jotting down all the details he could into his tome. Already, he had filled three pages of his tome with sketches of the room, and if he wasn’t so obviously a Cresian celebrity, he might definitely be getting stink-eyed as some sort of corporate spy, so detailed his notes on the glorious engine and pipes and magical circuitry and runic programming was. Indeed, his focus had already grown to the extent that the youth was beginning to forget where he was, and at the tap of his shoulder blade, Kress’s immediate reaction was to say, dismissively but not unkindly, [color=8493ca]“I’ll have breakfast later, Velora. Just set i-”[/color]

Thankfully, he wasn’t so incompetent to not catch himself before the sentence ended, turning around to face the tapper with an apologetic, roguish grin. [color=8493ca]“Ah, sorry ‘bout that. Force o habit, friend,”[/color] Kress said, [color=8493ca]“You wanted the time, yeah?”[/color]

With a smooth motion, he slipped his hand into his vest’s inner pocket to extract a marvel of precision engineering. Connected to a silver chain, the pocketwatch held in Kress’s hand was of gold inlaid with ivory and lapis lazuli carvings. They depicted generations of Alstein greats, a litany of beasts and runes carefully inscribed, and as he popped it open, the chime of runic energies powering up was a delight for deafened ears. Spatial magic shot upwards, an intangible line of energy that stretched up at the speed of light to calculate the position of the sun and the stars, the path of the planet itself as it orbited the great star that blessed the world with light and life, before the information returned and adjusted the clockwork of the pocketwatch to be accurate to the millisecond. Light magic surged out next, a holographic display presenting the time and date in numerals rather than with needles, while further illusions spawned from the display to note the weather outside: crisp and sunny. Everything about it was conceptually excessive and ostentatious, but somehow, in the hand of a boy of noble bearing who thought little to nothing of such toys, it simply seemed…elegant. Painfully, crushingly elegant.

Kress glanced at it for half a second, before snapping it shut once more, sliding it into the folds of his richly-decorated robes. [color=8493ca]“Basically almost 9,”[/color] was his hella generalized response, before slight concern emerged. [color=8493ca]“Don’t suppose you’re late for your shift, miss?”[/color]