And just like she had hoped, Sanchi approached her the next day.
"Hey," She said, getting Ana's attention. Ana looked up from where she was sitting. "Hi!" She exclaimed. It was currently their lunch break, and Ana was in the middle of eating a cheeseburger that was the size of her head. Sanchi glanced at the comically large burger then back to Ana's small frame. "Hungry?" Sanchi asked. Ana flushed, "A bit.." Sanchi snorted. "Well this shouldn't take too long," At Ana's confused face, Sanchi added. "We've got something for you in the robotics lab, Rob's doing the final details but it's pretty much done, and he wanted you to see it anyways." She said.
Ana's memory jolted at the mention of the robotics lab and immediately jumped up.
"Oh yeah!" She exclaimed, very graciously wiping the food off her face in a way that made Tiffany bury her head in her hands. Sanchi just looked amused. Ana turned back to Tiffany. "I'll be right back, but if I'm not back before the breaks over, save my food for me will you?"
"Sure thing.." Tiffany wobbly replied, head still in her hands while she stole one of Ana's fries.
Ana took a final sip of her iced tea and dashed after Sanchi, who had already started walking back to the robotics lab, a pit of excitement bubbling up in her chest. "Rob went kind of overboard with the electronics part of it." Sanchi told Ana, who was practically vibrating with anticipation.
"What do you mean?" Ana asked.
Sanchi let out a long breath. "I mean, you're friends with him, surely you know how… passionate he gets about something he's working on." Ana got flashbacks to a time where she and Rob were partnered up during a bake sale that served as a fundraiser for the neurology students research program they didn't have enough money to support back in their first year.
Rob pressured about three families worth of people with guilt tripping and endless heckling alone that Ana thought he should consider switching his major to advertising.
She shuddered at the memory, even if it was how they became friends, which Rob also insisted. "Yeah…." Ana trailed off. "Now I'm a bit scared." Sanchi chuckled. Ana remembered Rob telling her how he and Sanchi got together, he created a list of all of his best and worst qualities and put them on a pros and cons chart to convince Sanchi to go out with him. Rob had told Ana Sanchi agreed because of all the people she'd dated in the past, none of them openly admitted their flaws to her face without some sort of condescending manner so she agreed.
At long last Ana and Sanchi had finally reached the robotics room which Ana practically busted through the doorway to get into.
Rob was in the same spot as last time, Ana wondered if he ever went home, and didn't even flinch at the velocity of the door slamming open. Instead, he casually looked up at the two of them like he had heard that noise one million times before.
"Ana! Good, you're here! Sanchi and I were able to put that stuff together for you!" He exclaimed.
He held up what looked like a dark purple visor and two small square frames, which were the same shade of purple. Ana walked over to him, her previous nerves forgotten, and put on the visor when he handed it over to her. Ana slipped on the visor, the smell of new plastic invading her nostrils. The visor was heavy as she slipped them fully on, and she noticed the lenses in the middle were a lighter shade of purple and very sheer. Ana ran her fingers along the lens and jolted back in surprise when they began to glow, making Ana begin to understand why they were so heavy.
"You wanted them to cancel out purple right? So, I got a bunch of purple stuff over here," Rob told her, darting back to a table behind him with a bunch of various items Ana couldn't place.
Ana walked over to the table Rob was stationed at, looking down at the objects on the table.
"Have you seen the glow feature? You just have to touch the lens." Rob asked. Ana nodded. "I was wondering about that." "Yeah, that was just an afterthought I did a few hours ago, the main component here is the button on your right side-" Rob held up his hands as if mimicking putting on the glasses- "Yeah your right side-" Ana felt around for the button and felt a small circular object with various thin grooves and crevices. "So when you turn the dial, this activates an ability of the lenses that automatically detects and cancels out purple by emitting a yellow light over the object. The more you turn it, the more yellow you'll see and the more it cancels out purple, but it would also make your overall vision yellow."
Ana turned the dial, true to Rob's word her vision got increasingly more yellow, the objects on the table turning different hues and increasingly more saturated as she turned it.
"So alongside that there's a small push dial on the other side that activates a night vision mode, Sanchi added that-" Ana experimentally flicked on the second dial- "And then next we've got these things over here." Rob barreled on. Ana turned off both of the dials and slipped off the glasses, holding them at her waist as she followed Rob back to the first table he had been standing at when she walked in.
"So these here-" Rob held up two thin rectangular boxes with material that looked similar to scrunchies on the inside. "These are the hair pieces!" Ana exclaimed as she took them from Rob. Rob nodded. "There's a button on the underside here that turns on an LED light, there's three modes, on standard, a blinking mode, and the other is in one of those snake patterns." Rob explained.
Ana set down the glasses and held both of the plastic rectangles in her hand, pressing the buttons and watching the purple lights illuminate her fingers.
Rob leaned on the table with crossing one leg over the other, a satisfied look on his face. "I'll accept my payment in the form of a large spaghetti bowl from pasta house." He said, making Sanchi blanch. Ana smiled at them. "Sure, thanks again guys!" Ana called. "No problem Ana, try not to break them immediately though."
Ana flushed. "C'mon guys, when have I ever done that?!"
Rob and Sanchi both opened their mouths to speak, but Ana immediately rushed out a final thanks before darting out of the room, not wanting to remember any embarrassing things she had done in the past.
--
When Ana got home that night, she immediately pulled the accessories from Rob and Sanchi out of her bag and put them on her coffee table, admiring them for a moment before dashing out of the room and running into her closet, shifting through dozens of boxes and her cabinets, pulling anything out that resembled the look she wanted to go for.
Ana bundled up all the clothes in her arms and dashed back into her living room, tossing the clothes on her table and dashing back to her closet to pull out a large circular hat box from the very back of her closet and pushed it into the living room.
Ana turned on her TV for background noise and got her notebook, flipping to the page that held her costumes design and got to work.
Her TV had been left on the news channel, which was reporting a story of a single mother who had found fortune in something that sounded suspiciously like an MLM. Ana cut and sewed her outfit at the segment went on, occasionally standing up for measurements against herself, then at some point dashing to her closet again to get a pair of shoes.
She took a break after about half an hour, noticing that there was now a new segment on screen, this time reporting more attacks from Electrina, the reporter taking quite a long time to note and explain a brief interaction that had happened between Electrina and Megumi Twister- which had been captured by bystanders. Trina was setting fire to a building she was standing on when Twister landed behind her, the two getting into some kind of an argument. Twister looked out into the crowd of people with a contemplative look on her face before continuing her argument with Trina.
Their faces were blocked off and the sound of the building burning, people screaming, and authorities arriving was so loud, so no one could make out what the two were saying.
The argument ended with Trina shoving Twister and Twister staring back at her with a look of loathing that was so strong it was visible through the mask that covered half of her face.
Ana stared at the video curiously before getting back to work on her outfit. She would have to ask Megumi about this next time they saw each other. 'But maybe not in our usual setting..' Ana thought stitching a new zipper onto the top portion of her outfit.
Eventually Twister left the scene, leaving Trina to fend off the authorities, and leaving the general public confused about what the exchange meant and what exactly had made the usually emotionless Twister so angry. Some speculated that Twister was the one who was going to destroy the building and she was just mad Electrina had taken over, but that seemed like an odd thing to be angry about. Others speculated that Trina had done something in their personal lives that had angered Twister, which the news caster agreed seemed the most accurate..
As much as Ana wanted to speculate, she really didn't know what could've pissed her off to that degree. She had been pragmatic when Ana called her a monster the first time they met and bored when Tiffany was yelling at her, Ana supposed she was angry when she recounted the story of how she had become Zalic's right hand, but even since then the notion that Ana was going to put pressure on Zalic had lightened her mood surrounding that topic.
Ana decided to leave the topic alone for now, as there was no point in doing so seeing as how she was one of the select people in the city who could find out.
She held up the finished material, wiping sweat off her brow, at last, the look was complete.