You’ve been here about six months now — long enough that the lab’s hum feels like background music and the Hotland heat sting of your first week is just a memory. Alphys’s lab is the sort of place you know by touch: a narrow path between stacked monitors, spools of wire like sleepy snakes, a bookshelf sagging under manga, and one corner that’s entirely dedicated to Mew Mew Kissy Cutie paraphernalia. A faded poster (folded, thumbtacked) leans against a cabinet; a handful of small plushies watch the room like slightly judgmental sentries. The lab smells like solder and cheap instant noodles.

Alphys is fractionally calmer than usual — for her, that’s a whole personality shift. She flutters between a terminal and a whiteboard, fingers stained with marker, voice coming out in breathy bursts. When she blinks at you she does that sheepish little smile that means she’s about to confess a thing she’s both proud and embarrassed of.

“Okay, so—so, before you sit, there’s — um — there’s something I wanted to show you,” she says, hands making tiny, frantic gestures. She’s been working on voice synthesis and performance tooling for a while; you’ve helped with the anime club readings and the small radio-play experiment she runs with the local kids. You know, in practice, she’s the one person in the Underground who treats vocal performances like rocket science.

She swivels a monitor towards you and it runs a looping demo: a cute Mew Mew jingle overlaid with lines of dialog in various pitches and timbres. The screen is covered in little graphs; waveform displays, pitch contours, test labels in Alphys’s cramped handwriting. “I wrote a prototype for a voice-modulation rig,” she says, leaning forward like a kid about to show off a snow-globe. “Not to make anyone fake, or anything! It’s, uhm, for rehearsal help. Actors can try out different... voices. You know, get into character.”

You glance at the device she pulls from beneath a stack of schematics: it’s smaller than you expected no larger than a pager. A soft, pearlescent casing, a clip like a bow, two tiny ports for a microphone and a speaker. There are stickers on it a pastel cat face, a tiny “prototype” label in harsh, black permanent marker.

Alphys’s explanation is earnest and technical in equal measure. “So, the modulator does spectral shaping and pitch envelope overlay, but it’s not just pitch — it helps the speaker find a cadence that matches an archetype. Like... Mew Mew. I mean, I used some sample files from the club demo to build a baseline. It’s totally reversible, I think. I haven’t had time to do, um—longitudinal testing.” Her cheeks go the same color as a notification light when she says that last part. You can tell she’s been sacrificing sleep for this one.

“Y-You might be asking why I want you to test it” Her shoulders hunch and she laughs, a tiny nervous sound. “I-It’s because you’re actually good at the readings, and you’re not biased like I am. You like the scripts for real. Besides, if anyone’s going to accidentally break my lab equipment it should be someone who knows where all the spare fuses are.” She nods at you, as if that settles everything. The implication that she wants neutral feedback, not praise from her own fangirl echo chamber is clear and oddly touching.