Ryo sighed, wondering if the repairs he made to the battle machines would ever last for more than five minutes before an alarm echoed through the Golden City to signify another robot attack. Hours after he had finished repairing Hitomi's machine, she had walked in to his lab with an apologetic look on her face. Hitomi, as one of the best techs behind Ryo, knew how much effort went into fixing and improving each machine: a considerably longer time than it took for a robot to take a lucky shot and wreck the whole thing.

"Please, you really need to check this out, you're the best tech here!" she begged, clasping her hands in front of her face as if she were praying to the purple haired teen.

"Flattery will get you nowhere, you know." Ryo gave a small smile, thinking it must be impossible to handle if she was having such a problem. On any other day, he would have said yes without a second thought, after all, this was his job. But today he was spending a few hours teaching Takeshi how to weld parts of the Blade Titan back together again without it looking worse than the original damage. A few long, tedious hours. Ryo had spent the first twenty minutes in a discussion with the hot-headed pilot who had insisted it would be a waste of time, and as long as the team as Ryo, the three boys only needed to know basic repairs instead of the major welding jobs. At this point in the day, he was worn out beyond belief, and he still had to be alert enough to stand guard later that night. Ryo grabbed an assortment of tools from a near-by workbench, thinking that at least Hitomi's battle machine couldn't argue back.

"Don't touch anything while I'm gone, okay? I'll be back as soon as I can."

Takeshi frowned, placing what he was working on back onto the workbench in front of him and took a step into the centre of the room.

"I dunno what you think I could do while you're gone" he muttered more to himself than to Ryo.

Hitomi led Ryo out of the lab, talking more in detail about what the possible problems could be. The voices of the two mechanics hadn't even fully faded from the underground corridor before Takeshi had grown tired of standing still. He thought nothing could go wrong if he explored the room a bit, as long as he didn't touch the equipment for working with wires and the heavy metal plating of the battle machines. This only really left Ryo's desk.

It was awkwardly shoved into a corner in the underground room because of its rough stone walls, while shelves, tables and general clutter filled up the rest of the hollowed out space. This was Ryo's personal lab where he did more experiments suited to him rather than the military funded lab he normally worked in above ground, and as a result was significantly smaller which made it seem even untidier. It was a miracle that Sensei didn't step foot in the room, as he usually scolded such things.

On the desk alone, endless projects were overflowing onto the floor and burying a computer, some neatly planned on blueprints and some quickly scribbled on lined paper, some initial ideas that had been put on hold and some almost completed. Scale models of half-finished battle machines acted as paperweights, and almost every pen and pencil had been chewed where the tech had been so deep in thought he wasn't paying enough attention to anything else. Takeshi quickly dropped a pen after noticing this, grimacing and wiping his hand on his sleeve. However, as he looked closer at the notes, it was no problem having them all in the open like this. Apart from being in a fairly unknown room, most people wouldn't have been able to understand what Ryo had written in his quickly scrawled mix of Japanese kanji and English terminology.

The only thing that Takeshi found that weren't plans were three empty coffee mugs and a heap of packets of sugar that had been dumped into them, which was basically Ryo's diet when Hikaru wasn't keeping a close eye on what he ate, or more appropriately, what he wasn't eating.

With nothing else to do, Takeshi picked up one of the unopened packets, absentmindedly playing with it as he sat at the desk chair and looked around the lab. He leaned his elbow on the desk and rested his face against his hand, wondering how long Ryo was going to take.

Five more minutes passed, and after memorising every item on one of the tables and then trying to put them in alphabetical order, the green haired teen decided that he needed a less painfully dull pastime. The table was covered in more scientific than mechanical objects, with different shaped bottles of bright powers and liquids, not to mention the names of these chemicals sounded amazing even though he had no idea what a majority of them did. Takeshi had admitted on many occasion than he was more of a blunt object than a genius type person, but that by no means meant he was stupid, unless you asked Hitomi that is. However, his scientific knowledge was fairly basic compared to that of the techs, most likely due to the fact that he spent a few years working in the mines on Sentai Mountain before the first robot rebellion instead of schooling.

Frowning in concentration, he wondered over to the table, still fiddling with the packet of sugar in his hand. He debated in his head if investigating these bottles would break Ryo's rule, which he had imagined to mean 'don't do any work' rather than 'stand in the middle of the room and do nothing at all'. As long as he wasn't physically mixing anything together, nothing could go wrong. The first thing he picked up was a jar labelled Potassium Chlorate, and poured some into a near-by petri dish, seeing a fine, white powder fall from it. Takeshi tore open the packet of sugar he still had, shaking a small amount onto his hand and comparing it with the potassium. "I guess this is why everything needs labelling" he muttered to himself, knowing how Ryo liked to rely on his memory more than anything else when it came to what was what. He brushed the sugar off his hand into the dish, looking around at the other bottles on the table; Copper Chloride, Iron Oxide, Sulphuric Acid, Zinc. "Wait a minute, acid?" Takeshi picked up the sulphuric acid, noting the bright yellow warning label under the name stating that it was extremely corrosive.

A sudden curiosity overcame the teen, partly because of his love of messing around with stuff, and partly because he was bored and couldn't sit still for very long. Both of these traits had led the rest of his team to believe that he had the mentality of an ill-behaved five year old. Takeshi turned towards the door of the lab. It would be unlikely that Ryo would come back anytime soon if Hitomi hadn't exaggerated about the needed repairs, and he would be satisfied if he just did this one, tiny thing.

Not taking notice of the warning on the bottle of acid, he slowly began pouring the clear liquid up the neck of the bottle, and a few drops fell out to land in the petri dish with the potassium and forgotten sugar. Instantly the compounds started to react with one another, and a bright orange flame sparked half a foot in the air, letting off wisps of black smoke.

"Shit!"

Takeshi jumped back in a panic, still holding onto the bottle of acid and glancing around desperately for something to put out the fire. Just as his eyes flew across the doorway, something seemed off. Taking a second look, he noticed the figure of a person in the orange jumpsuit of a tech who had deep purple hair, and was currently starting at Takeshi in a state of shock as if someone had just told him Uplink had been turned to scrap metal. As Takeshi locked eyes with Ryo across the room the two boys heard the sparks of the fire die out seconds later, ending the reaction with a thicker cloud of smoke, which was for the best as neither one had made a move to put it out after Takeshi was standing wide eyed like a deer in the headlights.

Takeshi slowly put the bottle of sulphuric acid back on the table and took a large step away, not breaking eye contact with Ryo for fear of being violently punished. Ryo had a reputation throughout the Golden City for being as explosive as his experiments if anyone put anything out of order, or did a job that was less than perfection, but most people who had briefly met him never believed such a quiet young man could ever be like that. Everything is fine until someone gets between Ryo and his work.

Ryo snapped his jaw shut, looking eerily calmly at Takeshi before taking a few steps towards him. Without raising his voice, he simply said "One rule. I wasn't even gone for ten minutes, and I gave you one rule."

"Yeah, I-" Takeshi started to defend himself, but was cut short as he felt a breeze ruffle his hair as an object flew past his head. He turned around to see a screwdriver impaled to its handle in the rock wall behind him, and glanced back at Ryo just in time to see the tech grab another tool from the closest work bench and launch it at his face. Takeshi narrowly missed the projectile as it was thrown, and the third, and the fourth.

By the time the teen had run out of the lab at full speed with a horrified expression on his face, he could still hear Ryo shouting after him "It was a simple order! You could have blown my lab up you idiot!"

Takeshi never returned to finish the lesson Ryo had been giving him, and in fact avoided Ryo as much as he could for the next few days. It wasn't until the inevitable team training session that anyone realised anything was wrong, as the normally strongest member of the team could do nothing to defend himself as the shorter tech fought against him with more strength than he had ever shown before.

[A/N – Even if hardly anyone knows who I'm writing about the story still makes sense, right? Exo-Force needs a proper fandom ;-; So this started as 3 lines of dialogue to go with a picture I drew… I don't know how it turned into this, but thank God for my vague memories of AS Chemistry and how stuff works. As always, if you have criticisms feel free to tell me, I'm here to improve!]