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Ryan and his parents ate fruit and chatted warmly, savoring the warmth of family in the hotel room.
Ryan also mentioned to his father the cooperation agreement he had reached with the old president, and asked him to have people work out the details of the cooperation with MIT.
At dinnertime, Chloe arrived at the hotel as well, and the four of them shared a rich dinner together.
Chloe, who was interning with a film crew these days, had grown more passionate about movies than ever.
After the meal, she followed Ryan back to his room and carried on their discussion of the Crimson Typhoon mech movie, polishing the many fine details of the film world's settings, talking as she went and recording her ideas and Ryan's in her notebook.
In truth, it was basically her alone doing the talking in that room. The foundational settings of the Pacific Rim movie world, Ryan had already finished telling her in full back at the base.
All that remained untold was detailed war history, which monster had been brought down at which time and the like. There was no need to cover that material. He'd never studied it in his earlier days, and simply had no memories of it to give.
So he only lay on the bed, flipping through coverage of the newest mech films at home and abroad, and did a little checking and gap-filling on the settings Chloe had invented for herself along the way.
"Hey, Wonder Boy. The mechs that appear in the movie, how are they supposed to be designed?" Chloe leaned against the bed, both hands resting on her laptop keyboard, staring blankly at the screen.
"If it's that you're asking, then you've hit on my strong suit."
Ryan's gaze came away from the television. "Bring paper over. I'll draw you a design."
Chloe heard him and hurried to pull her usual sketchbook out of the bag beside the bed and pass it over.
Ryan flipped to the newest page and set to work on it with a sketch pencil, writing and drawing, while Chloe pushed her laptop aside, lay over on her side on the bed, propped her head on one hand, and watched.
Ryan first laid a proper height scale down the paper, and then the pencil went hooking and stroking across the page.
Very soon, a cleanly lined structural drawing of a humanoid mech stood on the paper before Chloe's eyes.
Beyond its fully humanlike form, the most striking thing about this mech was the round nuclear turbine engine exposed in the middle of its chest.
"Seventy-nine meters. One thousand nine hundred and eighty tons."
Chloe looked at the mech on the paper. "Gipsy Danger?"
"What a strange name..."
Ryan wrote annotations for the various weapons and equipment across the structural drawing, and then signed his own name in the lower right corner.
"The movie can't only have domestic mechs. There have to be foreign mechs too. This one is a mech in foreign service."
"Fair enough." Chloe accepted the explanation, took the sketchbook into her hands, and pulled a face at it. "Your drawing is terrible, though. It looks exactly like an engineering blueprint."
Ryan shrugged and said nothing.
For the amount of time it had taken, drawing it to this standard was already quite respectable.
"I'll redraw a color version on the computer. You watch from the side and tell me what color goes where."
Chloe tore Ryan's drawing free and set it beside her for reference, then quickly opened the Argus Image on her laptop.
The two of them had traded places exactly. Now it was Ryan lying on his side on the bed, watching her paint.
"This part is steel grey..."
"This opening at the chest needs more detail of the turbine turning..."
"There are lights on the head and on the shoulder armor..."
The whole night through, the two of them drew in that room, and only when the sun climbed over the edge of the sky was the color version of Gipsy Danger finally finished.
Looking at the mech render taking its final shape under Argus's assistance, Chloe was thoroughly satisfied.
Ryan gave an enormous yawn and glanced at the mech on the screen.
There stood Gipsy Danger, grey armor over every inch of it, its build like a wall of muscle, the cockpit in its head glowing alight in the dark, the nuclear engine in its chest roaring as it spun, the glow of it washing the whole body top to bottom.
"Haah. Sleep first. I still have to go collect an award tomorrow."
Ryan yawned, flopped down flat on the bed, and went straight into dreamland.
His award was the next day. The free day in between had been set aside for him to rest properly and settle his condition. Who could have known it would be spent on an all-nighter.
"Sleep, sleep..."
Chloe couldn't hold out either. She closed her laptop and followed him into dreamland.
Not until the afternoon were the two of them finally roused.
When they heard that the pair had spent an entire night's labor in that room producing one single drawing of a mech, Ryan's father and mother didn't know whether to laugh or sigh.
All the more so with Chloe proudly holding up a printout of the Gipsy Danger color painting for the two of them to admire.
Ryan's mother shook her head. "You two aren't little children anymore. Did you forget he has to walk on stage tomorrow and accept an award? A matter this big, and neither of you keeps it in mind!"
"Heh heh..." Chloe rubbed the back of her head and produced an embarrassed smile.
"It's fine. I'll just turn in a little early tonight," Ryan said.
He'd kept excellent sleeping habits all along. One occasional all-nighter was no great matter.
"Either way, the two of you mind your rest!"
...
The next day was the day of the award.
Early in the morning, Ryan was called up out of bed, and then rode the dedicated car to the hall.
He had not stayed up again this time. He looked bright to the bone, confidence and sunlight brimming from his face, and with the reinforcement of his good looks on top of it, one glance was enough to make people warm to him without quite meaning to.
And in that entire venue, he was the youngest person present.
Even among the students invited to attend and observe, not one was younger than he was.
Through the whole course of the ceremony, he was the focus of the entire hall, every gaze in the room resting on him.
In the moment he bowed to receive his certificate, thunderous applause broke over the venue.
Everyone watched this youth.
Once, people had believed he was the nation's future. Who could have guessed he would prove himself this quickly. He was not only the future. He was shaping the present, and he represented the future all the more.
And the Crimson Typhoon project he led, out of the two-hundred-odd projects honored, carried off the trophy of the Special Prize in a single stroke.
It gave everyone present a new understanding of exactly where the Crimson Typhoon project stood.
The ceremony ran smoothly from start to finish, and when it ended Ryan went nowhere else. He took his certificate straight back to the hotel, and shared the joy of it with his parents and the others.
And it was at this moment that the news storm outside was only beginning to rise.
That evening, the national broadcaster's news program gave nearly ten minutes of its length to introducing the day's award ceremony.
Though most of that time went to the ceremony's other content, the coverage concerning Ryan still claimed close to a full minute of it.
The moment the news went out, it raised a thousand waves at a stroke, surging out toward the world like a tsunami.
In any corner of the world where a network signal and a television still existed, Ryan was, on this day, the absolute center of it all.
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