Kaz's change in attitude didn't elude Shira. She was sober this morning, after all. While the previous evening hadn't really meant much to Shira, she might have been off in her assumption that Kaz would see it the same as well. It irritated Shira a bit, but she got over it. As long as they could work together, then it didn't really matter. Or had nothing really changed, and she was just overthinking it? Relating to people was always a bit of a chore to her, and she often found herself wanting to be at a point where she could interact with others on just a physical and intellectual level, social mores and emotional needs - her's or other's -  be damned.<br/><br/>She was curious about the change Kaz was making - it was obviously non-standard, but pilots were allowed to make small modifications to their mechs in order to better suit their style. Before she could ask more about it, however, Kaz gave her a far more interesting puzzle. Shira picked up the piece of metal. It measured about 15 cm across and 13 cm wide, and her artificial fingers were able to detect an almost imperceptible slight curve to the metal - possibly less than 1 degree, but she'd need to run it through actual equipment to be sure. The edges were slightly jagged, so it'd been a piece of a larger whole before being torn off. If it had been part of a uniformly curved object..she ran the calculations in her head, the diameter would have been almost 18 m, making it a fairly large object. Of course, that was just an assumption. Whatever this came from didn't need to have a cylindrical fuselage design, especially since she was sure it wasn't from anything on the ship.<br/><br/>"The metal isn't something I've seen used in the hull of the ship, or any of our space-going equipment." Shira would know, she'd had to have at least passing knowledge of every piece of equipment for her previous job. In fact, she didn't even recognize the material. "Unless some organization on the ship - Lyceum, the government forces, or an independent research agency - is using this without informing the rest of the community, it's foreign debris. Interesting." She took a closer look at it, her left eye zooming in, and her artificial fingers increasing their sensitivity to get a better feel for it. There were no seams or other machining traces left that she could detect, so it may not have been engineered, either. A naturally occurring metal, perhaps? Had it broken off of an asteroid in the recent swarm?<br/><br/>"You've found a mystery, Pilot Markin." Her vision and hands returned to normal. "I'll need to spend more time analyzing it, but right now, I couldn't begin to tell you where this is from, though my assumption at the moment is that it might be from one of the asteroids in the swarm from yesterday. I'll let you know if something comes up, but for now I'll also need to report it in to the appropriate departments." The appropriate departments being security, engineering, astronomy, central auth, and probably a few others. Lyceum would probably want to know about it before anyone else, but Shira wasn't really willing to deal with corporate politics. This felt bigger than a corporation's need. She bid Kaz adieu and went into her office, still poring over the strange piece of metal.<br/><br/>Shira brought up the scans from yesterday as well. Today, she had three priorities. The first, to analyze the oddities she had noticed during the test yesterday in the Dart drive output. Second, to se if she could start getting concrete data to feed into a simulation. And the third, the strange piece of metal. She shot off an email to higher up in Lyceum and contacts in other departments on-ship regarding the third, and began to get to work on the first two.