There is a very simple reason Ferra has been out of touch. She was sitting at day four of being under siege. So was everyone else in the Gears Foundation. She'd woken up to panic as their cooperative project with Athena Macrotech on Perseus turned into a security and financial audit literally overnight. Buried in the list demanded was a full inventory of all Gears projects on and off site, down to location and security.

We shall leave it at the relationship cooled after that.

The audit team (thankfully without any Champions, who are presumably off doing something more important to the bottom line) has cordoned off the Gears Foundation building and the first arbitrators were gearing up for a breach when an intern had noticed and hit the panic button. The ensuring field going up had cut the audit team's TAG in half by fortunate placement, and the rest were stuck on the wrong side of a controlled temporal distortion. The audit team had spent most of the last day bringing up and trying a tunnel boring laser on the field, to no effect, and were leaving it on while they worked out the next step.

On the other side, in Professor Gear's office, Ferra and the Professor have a good view of the laser trained on their window, blocked by the field. And it's here that they've decided to figure out, what next?