[sub][h3][center]Nicholas[/center][/h3][/sub][hr]
Did he need to do something about Archie? Definitely maybe [i]not right now[/i]. The young man was leveling out. He wore a heart monitor right? Or something like that, he’d reasoned out. Did he almost transform into a kaiju every single time he went on a walk? Archie seemed a little too mopey-go-lucky to be numb enough to suppress all of his emotions effectively.

[I]’Lobotomy?’[/I] offered a voice inside his head that wasn’t his fathers, at least not entirely. At the thought, he felt his cheeks burn with the most intense shame that he had ever felt.

“Nicholas, right? I’m Keaton, and you’re not a spy, but are you sure you want to stick around? We’re about to discuss doing something infinitely more stupid than throwing an explosive at a giant lizard so if you’re staying, know that you’re going to be involved.”

[I]You’re definitely not a spy?[/I] Actually, in an ironic sort of way, he really explicitly was a spy.

“Well,” he started, “you seem a little too calculated for that to actually be true. To be perfectly frank, I have no idea what’s going on.” He turned to Archie, “Speaking of which, sorry about that.” Resuming, he thought “I already seem to be involved, so… what the hell?” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

At that, he heard Eli groan, already exhausted, "Let's just get this meeting over with and go for some pizza."

“Sounds.. delightful,” Nic commented before offering, “My treat.”

Then Eli said “sit with me,” and tapped the seat beside her. He was more than happy to oblige. In fact, he was so overcome with jubilation that he beamed like a lighthouse before realizing that she had actually been addressing Lynn. Stomping out the embers of hope like a used cigarette, he winced and picked a seat diagonally positioned, so that he could still get a decent view. Unfortunately, that did place him directly across from [s]Hephaestus[/s] Lynn, who seemed to be toying with the idea of murdering him even more intensely than he had been considering [i]pacifying[/i] Archie.

As he heard Keaton’s discourse on the possibility of children being onboard, he couldn’t help but cringe. He’d seen too many children kept in cages. Mostly because he’d helped put them there. This seemed like as good of a time as he was ever going to get to redeem himself.

As Archie demonstrated an explicit understanding of his lack of fine control, Nic felt the beginnings of a newfound legitimate respect developing. Not just that Archie wasn’t an asshole. It was more than that. He was a humble, gentle soul. The kind of person worth protecting, even as much as other people needed to be protected from him. In a sense, that kinda was the function of The Promise. [I]A place where people like Archie weren’t a danger to ‘normal’ or ‘important’ people.[/I] He’d have to think on that.

When he heard Natalie’s backstory, he shuddered. Seemed fairly familiar. While he had never been scientifically experimented on, per say, he was basically a case study in non-conventional warfare. Should he share that? Probably. But was he going to right now? No.

When Amelia gave her impassioned take on it, wrapping up with “I'm in it through the long haul with you guys. So I guess my only other question then is, how far do we wanna push this?

“Other than Natalie and Archie, I have no idea what you guys can do, so I’m not sure what to suggest entirely but.. I for one can release spores that infect people and let me see through their eyes, also transmitting their vision to anyone else infected within range. If you guys wanted to do some additional surveillance or trailing people who go in and out of The Spire, I could probably help with that a lot.”

“That said, there really isn’t a lot I wouldn’t do to rescue whoever is in there. I know a place we could hide out back on Earth, if it helps, but I don’t really have any ideas on getting everyone there from here.”