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Cam waved away the smoke, coughing, and pushed his goggles up onto his forehead. There was a smudge of soot across one cheek that ended in a sharp line where the goggles had protected him. RJ set a conspicuously large, twisting glass bong on the floor next to his chair. He half sat up, reaching for the glass of kombucha that was close at hand and took a sip, watching as Cam brushed at his face and hair, only succeeding in spreading the smudge further across his nose.
"Don't forget to make them look cool. I've always thought the Power Rangers would look cool with sunglasses as morphers," RJ said amiably, stretching his legs out and arching his back a little. Cam made a face at the quiet noise of RJ's back cracking, and pulled his goggles off entirely, setting his screwdriver down on the card table set up in the middle of RJ's loft.
"You know I'm doing this out of the goodness of my heart, right?" Cam said. He pushed aside the half-built morpher and picked up a pencil to scribble something on RJ's carefully detailed blueprints. "You're not even paying me. Remind me why I like you again?"
"Hey!" RJ protested, pressing his hands to his chest, as though mortally wounded, "I shared my cookies with you. That one time."
Cam clenched his fist around the pencil and gave RJ a half-hearted glare. "Yes. And I will never, ever forgive you."
Cam and RJ had met a few months ago, after a friend of a friend of a nephew of a friend had told Cam's father that a member of the Order of the Claw was in need of ranger-related assistance. RJ had put out his feelers when Mao had told him that, if the worst happened and Dai Shi escaped, he'd be sending his best students to him and hoped that RJ could augment their powers in his... unique way. RJ had taken his chair and Cam and his father on a friendship- and trust-building camping trip into the woods. There had been cookies, which helped with the bonding part, but maybe not so much with the trust-building.
Somehow, RJ managed to shift his chair closer to Cam without actually getting up out of it. "It did you some good to loosen up for a few days. It's not as though there was any damage." He paused, considering that statement. "Any permanent damage. To any necessary public property." After another moment of thought, he nodded-- that about covered all the correct contingencies.
"There were bonfires, you know," Cam said. He clicked his tongue and drew on the blueprint more viciously than necessary.
RJ leaned up, trying to get a look at the notes Cam was making. "Your dad needed to get in some extra zen-master practice anyway," he said, absent-minded. "I don't know why you're getting so mad about it."
Cam scoffed, but moved the notes closer to the edge of the table, so RJ could read them more easily. "You only say that because you didn't have to deal with the fall out." Cam didn't infuse his words with much heat. He picked up his screwdriver, and turned the morpher over to examine the damage.
"When you say it like that, it sounds like he needs a little more practice," RJ said. He took a sip of his kombucha, thinking the idea over.
Cam grimaced at the thought and said, "I'm not going to win this fight, am I?"
"Nope. Want a brownie? They're in the oven."
Picking up the goggles, Cam settled them back on his head and gave RJ a resigned look. "Not unless you want morphers that transform your students into goldfish."
"Prospective students! They're still Master Mao's students now and I pray to the Pai Zhua masters that they stay there. I am not master material." RJ made an expansive warding gesture. There was a look in his eye that Cam understood. For all that RJ could roll with the punches, that didn't mean he was entirely confident in his ability to teach others the same thing.
Cam shrugged and said, in an attempt to be supportive, "You're not giving yourself enough credit. You'll make a decent master if you can refrain from doing things that will end with them getting turned into house pets." He arched an eyebrow and gave RJ a crooked smile.
Making a slight motion to shake off the serious mood that was trying to creep up on them, RJ smiled pleasantly. "It's not my fault you're a lightweight. Cyber-Cam can match me toke for toke."
"He's a hard light hologram! He doesn't even have neurotransmitters!" Cam looked down at the morpher, his cheeks warm.
"That's why I gave him the cheap stuff," RJ said. "Wait, hard light means that he wasn't actually smoking it. Now I know why your dad got such a bad contact high."
With a jolt that narrowly avoided jamming the screwdriver head into a delicate connector, Cam looked up again at RJ. "Wait, are you telling me that's why dad ate five pounds of sunflower seeds in one sitting?"
"Sunflower seeds?" RJ contrived to look confused.
"There are some hold-overs from the guinea pig thing. That's not the point." Cam waved his free hand in RJ's direction, turning his attention back to his work.
"The point is there is no point," said RJ loftily.
"Very zen," Cam responded as he turned the morpher this way and that, examining the wiring for flaws. "Practicing for your new students?"
RJ nodded and drew himself up a little straighter, perhaps imagining that his hypothetical students were watching. "Prospective students who will hopefully never arrive. But I want to have the correct attitude if they do arrive. Sort of a cross between ninja sage and enlightened slacker."
"You have the slacker part right. I'll bet you're just going to use them as part-time help anyway," Cam said. He didn't look up from the circuitry he had begun to fiddle with, lifting the morpher to get a clearer view.
"It will be an important part of their training! And what do you mean 'part-time'?" RJ's outrage was mostly feigned, as he scooted even closer, coming close to hitting one leg of the card table with the side of his beloved chair..
"I'm not even going to ask how much you plan to pay them," sighed Cam. Settling the morpher back down onto the table carefully, he slid it nearer to RJ, and reached for the small soldering iron.
"It will be character building." RJ shrugged and settled back into the cushions, making himself comfortable.
Cam huffed a laugh. "They won't even get dental, huh?"
"But they will get all the monkey madness pizza they want!" RJ widened his eyes and grinned, an expression that was supposed to emphasize what a great deal the dental-for-pizza trade-off would be. He reached toward Cam with one bare foot, flaring out his toes as he tried to pick up one of the morphers Cam had been working on without getting up.
"You're a little monkey mad," Cam said and swatted RJ's leg away from the half-finished morpher, making a face. "Don't touch that! It's very delicate. If you play with it, you'll disrupt the energy source, which could send a pulse through the morphing grid."
"Which means?"
"You could blow up half of California."
"Right, not touching." RJ curled his legs under himself and laced his hands together across his stomach. "Why is it so fragile? Morphers are designed to take a beating."
"One," Cam held up one finger, "it's only half finished, and exposed connectors that are linked into the Morphing Grid are not stable. And two," he held up a second finger, "it was your idea to make them sunglasses. To do you know how thin I have to make the cabling to cross the bridge of the nose? You're lucky I can get the energy web broad enough to hook into a cellular matrix without blowing up the person wearing them from the inside out."
RJ considered that. "Gnarly," he said after a moment.
A resounding explosion sent sudden shockwaves through the floor, and both men tensed in anticipation of an attack. Cam set his screwdriver down, glancing to make sure that nothing in the new morpher had broken or exploded itself. Slowly the smell of burning baked goods suffused the loft space.
Cam looked at the dark smoke starting to billow up the stairs. "Are those the brownies?"
Tilting his head thoughtfully, RJ frowned at the clouds of exhaust. "Next time, less banana, I think."