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Harper hit the ground in a totally graceless move that even Tyr would never in a million years have expected, lashing out with both hands to slap the grav strips he'd palmed against the sides of Tyr's boots. The antigrav functionality activated on contact, and Tyr shouted in surprise as he was abruptly inverted and yanked up to the ceiling.

Harper rolled onto his back and looked up at him and found himself unable to hold back laughter at the sheer shock on Tyr's face. That had worked way, way too well.

At least until Tyr pulled himself up and slapped the strips off, tucking himself neatly so he flipped in midair and landed in a crouch on the ground again a few feet from Harper.

"Shit!" Harper rolled to his feet, scrambling backwards as he abruptly remembered the second part of that plan. "Uh, so, I was supposed to run, just then—"

"It would have been wise," Tyr rumbled, straightening.

"Any chance you'll hold right there and let me get that head start?" He continued to back away as he asked the question since it was Tyr and the answer was obvious, and as he expected a hand closed around his collar and yanked him backwards a second after he turned to make a dash for the door. "Oh, come on!"

"You are a menace, professor," Tyr said, and Harper was a little relieved to hear a hint of laughter in his voice. Not that he'd been afraid of Tyr hauling off and smacking him or anything, not for a trick like that—hell, knowing Tyr he'd have figured out how to incorporate a couple of the strips into his own arsenal by tomorrow—but Tyr had been stuck way too far into his own head this past week. Anything besides stone-faced was an improvement.

"I am a genius," Harper informed him, twisting against his grip. Which Tyr probably didn't even notice, but it was the principle of the thing.

"Mm." Tyr released Harper with a shove in the opposite direction, away from the door, and then knelt to examine one of the grav strips that had fallen to the floor.

Harper took a couple prudent steps backwards just in case Tyr had any plans to try it himself because if it had shut off when Tyr dislodged it rather than just burning itself out...well, there was a reason Harper had made sure to get them on the sides of Tyr's boots rather than tossing them at his shoulders. Standard antigrav disks had circuitry to distribute the field over the entire device it was attached to so whatever it was rose steadily into the air, but strips the size of what he'd designed were really closer to mag bolts. Not that there was anything actually magnetic about them, they reversed the gravity of the object they were attached to, thanks, but engineering reality meant they didn't exactly do it neatly or with much in the way of safety features. Harper didn't want to hit the ceiling headfirst if Tyr tried one on him without understanding how it worked.

Tyr wasn't one for rash decisions, though, and he left the strip where it was and straightened again. "Do I want to ask how long you've been planning this?"

"Eh, not as long as you probably think. I had the idea a couple weeks ago, but I hadn't had time to work on them until you were helping the Squeegees load their cargo yesterday."

"Squirgin," Tyr corrected.

"Sure. Them." Technically he could have worked on the grav strips before, but with Tyr practically glued to him at the hip this past week he couldn't have done it without Tyr seeing them, and that would have made this whole thing a lot trickier.

At first he'd figured that Tyr's constant presence at his side while he was working had been to make sure that Harper wasn't hunting the kid down behind his back—not that Tyr could have stopped him if he'd really wanted to, but that wasn't the kind of thing that Harper liked to advertise—but by the end... Well, Harper still wasn't sure, but at this rate Tyr was going to end up an actual engineer.

This job with the Squeegees had given him a break, though. They were a human offshoot rather than more Nietzscheans so he hadn't worried about keeping himself totally out of sight, but there had been no interest in introductions on either side either so he'd taken the opportunity to get started on this latest special project. Started and mostly finished...there were still some tweaks he'd make before he added them to his own arsenal, and even if Tyr generally went for more conventional weapons he might have a suggestion or two as well, but that could come later.

Tyr stepped sideways, away from the grav strip, and beckoned Harper towards him.

"My, my, look at the time," Harper said, backing even further away. "Aren't you hungry? I'm hungry. And aren't the Squeegees who came along with the cargo going to want breakfast?"

"Both members of the Squirgin trading party have indicated that they would prefer to keep company among themselves during the journey, and since they're in the two passenger quarters equipped with small kitchens, I don't expect to have a great deal of interaction with them until the end of the journey." He gestured again. "Come, professor. It's hardly my fault that you forgot to run. Besides which, I seem to recall telling you on at least three occasions that I'm not interested in being a test subject for any of your experiments which means that you deserve to be severely beaten."

"Hey, I totally and completely swear that you are still last on my list for anything like that," Harper returned. And then moved back against the wall and grabbed up a conveniently-throwable item from the nearest bench. "It's not my fault that you and I are the only ones here which by default makes you first on my list too."

"Okay, what about now?"

Tyr shifted and then nodded slightly. "Better. Ease it off another half turn."

"Now?"

"Good." His immediate inclination had been to decline when Harper had started muttering about his body armor. Or possibly resumed muttering about his body armor; Harper frequently didn't make a great deal of distinction between the projects that he wanted to do, had done, and currently had in progress. Regardless, though, Tyr had already altered it in a number of ways since making his initial purchase to make it suit him, and as clever as Harper was he didn't always think about weaponry and defense in the same terms that Tyr did. Or any rational person for that matter; witness his latest brush with antigravity insanity. Still, safer to let Harper experiment when Tyr was there to squash overly ridiculous ideas than find out that Harper had made those kind of changes behind his back.

And the little professor had identified two panels that fit slightly looser than Tyr had recognized previously. Annoying.

"And...all right, try now," Harper said, doing something behind Tyr's shoulder.

He rolled his shoulder and then nodded. "It will suffice. The other, now."

"Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh. No respect." He moved to fiddling on Tyr's right side and then patted his shoulder. "Good to go."

Tyr scoffed and then waved Harper around, moving him to one side and out of range, before snapping the blades on his other arm to full extension.

"Creepy," Harper muttered and most definitely did not make any attempts to fiddle with Tyr's gauntlets. Which was just as well as Tyr checked the now-shifted intersection with his combat armor and adjusting the cuffs to cover the gap before signaling Harper to the other side and repeating his action.

"You finished everything that you intended to do to my firing lane yesterday, correct?" He'd kept his mind off his son and the circumstances that he still found entirely unacceptable by assisting the little professor with most of his recent projects, and either out of common sense or because he got tired of being threatened when he forced Tyr to fold himself into ridiculous shapes to fit into inconvenient areas of the ship—unlikely—he'd taken the opportunity to finish several things that would have been more time-consuming for him on his own. Moving consoles and rerouting wiring, punching a few more holes in Tyr's ship, hanging heavy wall panels over the generators in the firing lane, and so on.

"Yep. Well, until you blow a hole in the side of your ship and space yourself and I promote myself to captain and replace it with a personal bar, anyway. Purple and green is a lovely color scheme, don't you think?"

"Your sense of fashion is as clearly as abominable as your choice of music, and I will promote you to headless pest adorning my command center if you are not careful."

"Says a guy who used to wear a chain mail shirt on a regular basis."

Try raised his hand and Harper removed himself from reach again. Not that he looked particularly intimidated, although the bright orange and green overshirt he was currently wearing should have convinced him of the truth of Tyr's statement with no need for further commentary. "Let me grab a couple decent scanners and get them set up first, okay? I want a good look at what those bullets can do too."

Tyr nodded and went to his wall of weaponry, selecting the heaviest of his guns and loading up a full set of rounds from the cannister that Harper had given him. Obnoxious comments from the little professor aside, having helped him hang those wall panels meant that he was far more confident than he had been in his firing lane's ability to withstand bullet impacts than he had been with what he'd originally set up. Especially since unlike Harper he'd seen the reports of why the Vedrans hadn't pursued further use of the bullets in their time. Of course, that only mattered if he missed, which was hardly something worth considering, but still. It was one thing to be confident and quite another foolish.

Something he should remember to remind Harper of. Possibly after he bounced him off the ceiling, which was going to happen as soon as he received his own set of those new grav strips.

Harper was back in only a few minutes, solid evidence that he was as interested as Tyr as seeing the new bullets in action, and he fiddled until he was happy with how the sensors were set up and then stepped out of the firing lane. "Are you thinking you're going to need these new bullets on Squeegee—"

Tyr gave him a pointed look, and he sighed.

"Annoy one guy looking for vegetables, I swear. Fine, do you think you're going to need them on Squirgin station, or what?"

"No, but it is good to be prepared." They'd reach the station that was the destination for the Squirgin trading party tomorrow with a few days available to spend on station replenishing supplies and such before they needed to load up again, but what they were loading up with next was supplies for a Nietzschean station and after what had happened the last time he'd been on a Nietzschean station...

Not that he'd actually shoot anyone for simply looking down on him, of course.

Unless it was a slaver, perhaps.

"Okay, you're smiling and it's kind of creepy so I'm going to go work on my racer while you're otherwise occupied and not going to keep whacking your head on the ceiling and threatening me about it. I'll grab the records where you're done, but let me know what you think about the bullets at dinner, okay?"

"Yes," Tyr agreed. "The new type of fish I picked up on the Squirgin's planet is thawing. Be prompt or I will eat your portion."

"Yeah, yeah."

"I will haul you to the galley by your ankle, then."

"See, that I absolutely believe you'll do." He waved a device similar to the one that Tyr held. "Alarm set, I'll see you at dinner."

Experience said that Tyr would absolutely have to hunt him down and haul him to the galley, but right now he had weapons to test and he hefted his gun and stepped into the firing range. His worry over his son had not abated, nor had his dissatisfaction with the situation, but weapons training had always proven an excellent distraction.