Page 42 of Dragon Chaos Around

“You know about early aviation engineering?”

“I was present for early aviation. I found the wire-bracing solutions more elegant than the later shift to monocoque fuselage construction.” A beat. “The Wright brothers’ approach was crude but creative. Your cape mechanism is considerably more refined.”

Alani stared at him. A man who had watched the invention of flight stood in her Brooklyn workshop and had compared her cosplay engineering to the Wright brothers, and the comparison was in her favor, and she needed to sit down except she was already standing at her workbench and sitting down would require admitting that his casual technical mastery was doing things to her cardiovascular system that the soldering iron’s proximity could not explain.

“Crystal,” she said, not breaking eye contact with Chaos. “Are you documenting this?”

“Every second.” Crystal’s phone was already up. “Continue. I’m building an evidence file for when you deny this happened.”

The tour continued. Crystal’s station next—her bodice construction drawing a series of questions about textile engineering and how period-accurate corsetry techniques translated to modern cosplay. Crystal, who had not expected a pop quiz from a dragon, handled it with the composure of a woman who had survived Nores family dinners for a decade. She showed him the crystal detailing she was hand-sewing and he examined the adhesion method and asked about thermal tolerance under stage lighting.

“He’s grading us,” Crystal muttered to Alani as Chaos moved to Giselle’s station.

“He’s not grading us.”

“He examined my stitch density, Alani. The man has opinions about my stitch density.”

Giselle’s paint work stopped him. He crouched—a motion so controlled and fluid that it barely displaced air—and studied the gauntlet filigree from three inches away. Giselle, who was not easily intimidated, went very still as Chaos hovered over her brushwork.

“The line weight varies intentionally,” he said. “Thicker at the knuckle joints, finer at the wrist. You are painting the illusion of three-dimensionality onto a flat surface.”

“Trompe l’œil technique adapted for EVA foam,” Giselle said. Her voice had the rigid calm of someone maintaining composure through sheer professionalism. “The eye reads depth where there is none. Saves weight, preserves mobility.”

“The gold gradient on the index finger. That’s hand-mixed?”

“Three pigments. Custom ratio. I’ve been refining the formula for eight months.”

He straightened. Looked at all three stations—the armor, the textile work, the painted detail. The full scope of what they were building. When he spoke, his voice had dropped the meeting-room register and settled into the lower, less guarded range he saved for moments that mattered.

“This is craftsmanship,” he said. “This isn’t hobbyist work. This is engineering, materials science, and visual storytelling at a professional level. You’re building wearable art.”

The workshop held its breath. Crystal’s pin dropped from between her teeth and landed on the cutting table with a tiny clink.

“That,” Giselle said quietly, “is going in the spreadsheet.”

TWENTY

ALANI

The cape happened because Alani couldn’t help herself.

She had been saving the prototype for the competition—a full-length villain cape in midnight fabric with a matte-silver lining, the internal wire armature allowing it to sweep, billow, and hold a dramatic fan-spread on command. The finished version would go on her competition armor. The prototype was functional but unlined, its wire skeleton visible, its hem unfinished. It hung on the costume rack behind her station, waiting for final adjustments.

She looked at the cape. She looked at Chaos, who was examining Crystal’s fabric-draping technique with an attention to detail that bordered on forensic. She looked at the cape again. The cape was approximately the right length. Chaos was approximately the right height. The math was irresistible.

“Stand up straight,” she said.

He turned. “I am always standing straight.”

“Straighter.” She grabbed the prototype off the rack and crossed the workshop in three strides. Before he could object—before the carefully modulated voice could assemble a defense—she swept the cape around his shoulders and fastened the magnetic clasp at his throat.

The workshop went silent.

The cape fell from his shoulders to his calves in a column of midnight fabric. The matte-silver lining caught the afternoon light when it shifted. The wire armature, responding to his posture—the unconscious, ingrained posture of a predator who had been standing like a king since before the Magna Carta—held the cape in a gentle, sweeping arc that framed his body as if the fabric had been designed for him.

Which it had not. It had been designed for an anime villain. The fact that an anime villain’s silhouette and a dragon king’s silhouette were functionally identical was a coincidence that Alani would be processing for the rest of her natural life.

“Oh,” Crystal said. Her phone was already raised.