"Oh," Steven says, removing the hand and putting his glasses back on. "Right. Right, of course. But you do know about Dirk's giant Lapras robot he's been building, right? The one that Jack's helping him with? I don't know all the details yet, but Tyler and I sometimes pop in to feed and otherwise bother him and-- well. They're building it so they can steal a shitton of Lapras. From someone who sure as fuck sounded like Armin from the description and then when Dirk and I were bouncing ideas for possibly weaponizing the head a couple weeks ago, I mentioned Armin as someone we'd have to get past and he didn't contradict me."

He pinches the bridge of his nose. "And I gave Dirk good advice then too. Because I had no fucking clue I'd actually start to care this much about Armin. But-- fuck, Carly. He's just-- god, he reminds me of Charley, that's what he does. Brilliant, curious, that love of games and speculative fiction, caring... and god, so good. He honestly cares about people in the abstract--that's fucking hard, Carly. People say they do, but a lot of the time they really don't and they just want to believe they do. But he really does."