She shrugged. "I'm not enough."
They paused for a moment and enjoyed each other's body warmth. Gloriana's lavender scent continued to tickle Ves' nose, causing him to bask in her presence.
In the meantime, the three cats each attempted to interact with each other, to mixed results. All of them existed in different forms and phases!
"Meow!"
Lucky finally had the bright idea of turning himself intangible. Once he did so, he actually managed to touch the Golden Cat's spiritual body!
"Meow meow meow!"
He immediately grew excited and pounced on the Golden Cat, much to her distress! Lucky soon gave the juvenile spiritual entity her very first bath!
Nyaaaa! Nyaaaa! Nyaaaaa!
"Miaooow."
Clixie practically begged Lucky to teach her how to turn intangible, but it was not to be. The circumstances where the mechanical cat gained this ability couldn't be replicated!
"You wanted to use the Golden Cat you made to design a mech exclusive to the Larkinsons, right?" Gloriana spoke up again. "What have you come with so far?"
"I've developed some ideas." Ves carefully replied as he organized his recent deliberations. "The mech I wanted to design has to serve several different purposes. First, it has to remain relevant for at least a couple of years. I don't want to spend all of this time designing a mech that will grow redundant just a year later."
"Understandable."
"Second, I want it to play a useful role in my attempt to elevate the Avatars, Battle Criers, Sentinel and other Larkinsons into second-class mech pilots. I think I can make the transition easier if I design a mech that straddles the line between the two classes. A two-and-a-half-class mech, as it were. It will basically have some of the capabilities of a second-class mech without the accompanying complexity."
"How will you do that?"
"I have some ideas."
Breyer alloy played an essential role in that. Ves wasn't ready to reveal this, though.
"What else do you have?"
"The third priority is to design something that can suit most of my mech pilots. I've recently ordered Benny to perform a survey, and he listed out all of the piloting specialties my warriors possess. They run the gamut, but most of them specialize in either light mechs, swordsman mechs, knight mechs or rifleman mechs."
"There are huge differences in their underlying designs. You'd have to design at least three mechs to cover most of the bases."
"I can't afford to waste too much time on this project." Ves stated. "I only want to spend two or three months at most on this project before I move on. That's not enough to design an entire suite of mechs for my mech pilots, so I decided to take a different approach."
Gloriana was smart enough to guess his solution. "You're designing a modular mech platform? That's.. bold."
She didn't sound too enthused by the idea, and for good reason. A modular mech platform was basically a mech designed to accommodate different roles from the ground up. It did so by incorporating a certain degree of modularity in their designs.
This enabled customers to swap the loadouts of the mech in the field. For example, to convert a knight mech into a rifleman mech, the arms as well as the weapon had to be changed.
Though this sounded incredibly useful, in practice a modular mech platform consisted of a huge amount of compromises!
What it gained in versatility, it lost in many performance aspects! The core structure of the mech had to accommodate way too many roles, which prevented it from excelling in any single area!
This stood in stark contrast to specialized mechs, who weren't nearly as good in adopting different loadouts and fighting methods.
For Ves to state that he would take three months at most to design a fully-featured modular mech platform sounded crazy!
A modular mech platform design was an incredibly burdensome investment that didn't always pay off.
An ordinary mech designer took at least a year to design such a formidable project! What gave Ves the confidence he could complete it in three months?