THE NEW WORLD ↠ TERRA NOVA [O.H]

10| A RAT IN THE WORKS

"Oh, we're going to be great friends, Emilia!"

Emmy yelled back, "I hope not!"

With the shake of her head, she scoffed, walking back into the office. Jaived looked up from his computer and over to her. "Who was that?"

"Boylan," she replied, placing the objects on one of the tables.

Over the past couple of days, Emmy had managed to organise the room a little more, mainly when Jaived was out of the office. "What did he want?"

She shrugged. "I'm not sure, he didn't say. He just had a box in his hand." Emmy sat down at her desk, picking up one of the scrap pieces.

"A box?"

"Yep."

Jaived was about to answer when the stomping of feet sounded from the stairs. "Jaived!" Boylan yelled. Emmy looked over to Jaived before the doorway. Boylan stood there with an angered expression on his face. "Listen here, Jaived, I have had enough of this. I shouldn't have to keep coming here for this." He lifted the box and shook it in the air, it rattled slightly.

"Tom, I—"

"No, I'm not done with you Jaived." Boylan shook his head. Emmy rolled her eyes and stood up, taking the box from him. "Excuse me, Emilia, but the men are talking."

"No. A little boy is yelling because his toy is broken." She shook her head, moving over to one of the tables, opening the box up.

A few of the wires had become loose, at the end of each one there was a clip. Emmy began to connect the colours of the wires back up with the colours of the spaces used to keep the clips in place. Boylan must have thrown the box or at least rattled it too harshly which caused the wires to pop out of place, which didn't seem like a highly unlikely theory considering how he rattled the box earlier and his temper seemed to be that of a short fuse near water. Emmy finished clipping in the remainder of the wires before Boylan started to yell at her,

"I am not a little boy, and it's Jaived's fault. If he didn't do such a crappy job—"

"Done."

"What?"

"I said: done."

"What did you do?"

Emmy lifted the box up. "Let me guess, you placed it on your desk roughly?"

"So?"

"You broke it," she told him. "You just had to open it up and click the pieces back into place." She handed it back to him, glancing over at Jaived who smiled shyly at her before looking back down to the cylinder. "Now, I don't know how illiterate you are, but the sign says employees only. You don't work in this building so I'm going to have to ask you nicely to leave, or else I will have to remove you with force."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm going." He huffed, mumbling to himself as he walked back up the stairs.

Emmy rolled her eyes and moved to sit back down at her desk. "You didn't have to do that," Jaived told her quietly.

"Do what? My job?"

"Stick up for me."

She looked up at him, he was still looking down at the cylinder, occasionally glancing at the computer screen. "I put him in his place. You can stick up for yourself without my help."

Jaived nodded his head. "Still. Thank you."

Emmy continued to look over one of the pieces she had brought down. She turned on her computer before getting one of the programs up. Emmy started to construct parts for the Jeep on the computer, looking to see what components fitted well together and what would have needed to be filed down or switched out. There were blueprints for the Jeep already programmed in, Jaived wanted to make the battery last longer by using more solar paneled pieces, but he was still trying to work out how to stop it from overheating and getting destroyed and coming apart. On a scrap piece of paper, Emmy wrote down a few measurement changes and what pieces she would need to repair first.

A loud frustrated groan left Jaived's lips and he placed his head in his hands. Emmy looked over to him. "You okay?"

"I can't figure out how to open this."

"Are all the other cylinders like that one?"

"Yes, I've been through all of them to see if there was any difference between them, but all I have is a pile of unusable cylinders."

"There's no seam at all?"

"None. There's no way of physically opening this thing."

"Scan it." She shrugged.

"What?"

"Scan it," she repeated. "When Tanya and Malcolm wanted to know what type of dinosaur egg they were dealing with they scanned it. Who knows, maybe something will show up in a scan."

"We don't have a scanner."

"Do we have materials to make one?"

"I guess so?"

"Well then, we're just going to have to build a scanner, aren't we?"