Round 162

The building's demands were climbing faster now, more specific, more urgent—the kind of escalation that made Silra's teeth grind despite the professional calm she was trying to project. Forty minutes to finish repairs and they were already at thirty of it, the pressure mounting in ways that made her skin crawl. Jeane's not going to last much longer like this. Her wings twitched visibly now, a clear sign the succubus nature was fighting for dominance—something Silra had seen before but never quite like this.

Halie was right—I can't work with that kind of distraction. The elf technomancer tried to focus on her instruments again, but Jeane's visible struggle kept pulling her attention away from the readouts she needed to interpret. But sending her out onto a cursed balcony in a building we don't understand? That feels like trading one problem for another, Silra thought, the words forming unspoken in her mind as she watched Hera try to reason with the increasingly unstable succubus.

The engineer across the room looked up from her work, meeting Silra's eyes with a look that said clearly: Don't fuck this up. Silra nodded almost imperceptibly, understanding the unspoken message. She turned back to her instruments, trying to ignore the growing tension in the air and focus on the task at hand—the structural integrity of the building was still their primary concern, after all. But with Jeane's wings spreading wider by the second and the pressure from the building intensifying, it was getting harder to maintain that professional detachment.

This wasn't going to end well if something didn't change soon—either they found a way to manage Jeane's situation without derailing everything, or they all ended up in a very uncomfortable and potentially dangerous situation. And with the clock ticking down toward their estimated completion time, Silra knew they didn't have much room for error left.