Once Sunset called Krystal 'Mama', the blue vixen knew two things. One, she was in caring for the little filly for the long haul. Whatever the situation with her and the rest of team Star Fox may or may not have been, she'd lost too much already - her own family included - to abandon a little one who looked to her that way. Two, she knew it was time to start working to expand Sunset's mind towards teaching her to control her expansive magical gift. Not only had her power only continued to grow, it was rapidly exceeding the capacity of Slippy's tech to contain...mostly due to a lack of storage capacity. The materials needed to make proper magic containment vessels simply weren't readily available in the Lylat system, and Slippy could only do so much with used soda cans, no matter how much attuning them to Sunset's wavelength did to improve their structural integrity. If nothing else, he was running out of room for the cans.
Towards building up Sunset's cognition, Krystal started carrying Sunset with her around the ship. As long as she made sure to hold Sunset close to an ACSU panel to make sure she didn't have a build up coming, she could carry her through the halls for nearly an hour before danger of a build up began. Since the ship was of a size that - short of an electrical outage in the elevator - one could walk every part of the ship in a loop in less than half that time, that was more than enough to take her wherever Krystal decided to go that day. Sunset always enjoyed the excursions, taking in every inch of the ship and naming things as best she could in her baby talk as she pointed insistently at objects.
Today, Krystal decided to walk towards the halls where Slippy was at work. He was making modification of some sort - he almost always was these days - and Krystal wanted Sunset to get the idea that things around her would change sometimes and that wasn't a bad thing. On the way there, she encountered the Great Fox's robotic operator, ROB 64. He was a golden robot whose blocky joints housed his narrow limbs, as he was built to interface with the Great Fox's systems, and movement and other such functions were secondary to his design. He rarely left the bridge, save to go down to the repair bay to get Slippy to fix up some part of him, or to visually check a confusing report from the computers. When Krystal bumped into him, he was on his way back from the repair bay. "Greetings, Krystal," he greeted, his robotic voice unable to truly convey emotion, though she chose to interpret that he was happy to see her. Leaning down, he put himself at eye level with Sunset. "Greetings, Sunset."
"Bwo-bot!" Sunset called out excitedly, reaching out with both arms to the machine. ROB lifted one hand to let Sunset grip his finger. As always, it was impossible to tell the robot's emotional state - or if he even had one - but he never passed up an opportunity or refused an invitation to play with the little filly, so it could be assumed that he enjoyed being her 'Bro-bot'. That had initially been thought to be Sunset's attempt at pronouncing 'robot', but her refusal to drop the initial 'b' made it plain she knew what she was saying.
"She really seems to like you," Krystal murmured softly.
"Affirmative," ROB agreed. "I am plainly her favorite toy."
"Pretty sure she doesn't see you as a toy-" Krystal lost her voice as she saw Sunset's horn glow, using her aura to completely disassemble ROB's hand before reassembling it - still attached to him - as a bubble gun.
"You were saying?" ROB asked flatly as bubbles sprayed into the air from what had been his finger. Sunset happily lunged upward, popping the bubbles that got close enough with her horn.
Krystal struggled not to laugh. "I'm terribly sorry about that, ROB," she began sincerely.
"I did not say I minded being her favorite toy," ROB corrected as he ran out of bubbles. Sunset's horn glowed, restoring his hand to normal. He then patted her mane lightly before turning towards the bridge.
"Bye bye Bwo-bot!" Sunset called out happily, waving to him as he went. As ROB rotated his upper body to wave back without stopping, Krystal continued on her way.
It didn't take long after that for Krystal to reach Slippy. He was hard at work applying ACSU panels to the walls of the corridor, laying them carefully so the conduits interlinked with each other. "Hey Krystal!" he called without turning to look at her, one of his eyes having already caught sight of her approach out of his peripheral vision.
"Hello Slippy," Krystal greeted softly as she knelt down so Sunset could see Slippy easier. "What are you working on?"
"Unca Silly!" Sunset called out happily, reaching out until Slippy extended a webbed hand for her to play with. She was always fascinated with the way the webbing between his fingers stretched and collapsed as he flexed the digits. Letting her watch and play didn't even slow down his work, as he had simply pulled off one boot and used his similarly webbed foot to grip the tool while balancing expertly on one leg, his wide peripheral vision allowing him to both immediately correct if his balance shifted even a nano-meter and watch Sunset play and his own work at the same time.
Not for the first time, Krystal wondered just how Slippy was able to process so much mental input at once, and wondered if the attempt was somehow responsible for his clumsiness while moving at high speeds, especially when he seemed to have absolute control while standing in one place.
"I noticed you started taking Sunset around the ship to show her around," Slippy explained in his high, piping voice. "Now, I can guess where that goes. Once she knows her way around, it won't be long until she's wandering around on her own, whether to find whoever she wants or because she thinks it's fun to play hide and seek." He winced slightly as that statement caused Sunset to giggle almost wickedly. "Now, that could cause a problem if we can't get her back to her room before she starts another magical buildup. My first thought was to try and take the ACSU tech and put it into a suit she could wear, but I hit several problems with that.
"First," Slippy began as he pulled up another wall panel, placing an ACSU panel in its place and welding it there, "the suit couldn't hold nearly enough energy in itself, and we'd have the same problem with draining the suit as we do with her buildups. Second, I haven't figured out how to make this stuff into a fabric yet. I was lucky to make the panels work so well on the initial design, and have just been refining it since, testing what works best. The third problem was most significant, though." He gestured to Sunset. "She's still growing. Given her size relative to the rest of us, she'll likely grow fast. And one thing I can tell about putting this tech into fabric is that it's going to be expensive, both in terms of development and the material itself. I'd rather wait until she's big enough I won't have to make a new one every week, and responsible enough I can give her a gun so she can discharge the collected energy in a controlled manner.
"Then it hit me," Slippy continued as he hopped sideways to work on the floor panel. "If she's going to be wandering the Great Fox, why not turn the problem into a solution? I've been struggling to find a way to store all the excess magical energy she gives off...but what if I turned the Great Fox itself into the battery? By lining the entire ship with the panels and conduits, it'll make the ship itself ACSU compatible, storing the magic in the material of the ship itself and the concept of it as a unit. From what you translated in those spell books Sunset brought with her, a structure that has 'personality' will often draw excess magical energy to itself in massive quantities to become more, which sounds remarkably like some sort of haunted house. What if we shaped the Great Fox to do that, based in its 'personality' as a protector of the Lylat System? With ROB at the helm, it's already got a will in a way. That's why I installed an ACSU circuit in ROB just a bit ago, so he can interface with the ship."
Krystal shook her head, marveling at the way Slippy thought everything out so carefully and made such amazing leaps. "Of course, it'll probably be years before there's enough magic absorbed to create a noticeable effect on the Great Fox, even at Sunset's output. The scale the books talked about was for small houses, and maybe a manor. A ship this size..."
"Then if it works, it'll be a long time before we have to worry about storage issues for the magical energy, won't it?" Slippy pointed out with a wide grin, before turning to grab some of his lunch out of his box with his long tongue and turning back to his work as he chewed.