Chapter 32.4: Missing Component

At least another hour passed; the two magitechnical experts were still flipping through pages and having periodic, heated debates over the meanings and implications of what they read. Each of them would hold a small stack of papers in hand and vehemently point at something, arguing for its merit. Then the cross examiner would criticize the thought and exchange the sheet for another one somewhere else on the table, pointing and going on about that one. Methodically, though, every page went back to precisely the stack it had come from. There was clearly a system to this, despite its appearance.

Minkus sat patiently at Penny’s side, watching and listening, almost pensively. Penny, on the other hand, lay back across the empty table and faded in and out of consciousness. With nothing to do, she’d realized just how tired she was. But each time she nodded off, just touching the rest her body craved, the noisy pair at the table managed to wake her up again. Whether by the slap of pages against the table, a sudden disagreement about a diagram, or some noisy fidget one of them had picked up, it happened again and again.

For the umpteenth time, her eyes closed, and Penny drifted off, when a high-pitched growl brought her sharply back to reality. The little turds just weren’t going to let her sleep, and she was done trying. With a sigh, Penny rose up on an elbow to take in the scene.

There, just beside the other worktable, Wepp stood scribbling something on a blackboard one of them had wheeled over sometime earlier. Jinkke was halfway across the lab. Standing at a bookshelf loaded to bursting, she thumbed through one tome after another. Shuffling through pages, she’d grunt again, and put each one back as it clearly failed to give her something she wanted.

She slid the last tome back onto the shelf she’d pulled it from and, grumbling to herself, made her way back toward the table with Wepp.

Penny poked Minkus and nodded in Jinkke's direction. “What’s happening?”

Before Minkus could reply, though, his sister did. “Nothing of any particular value,” she said, deflated.

Penny exchanged a glance with Minkus again. He looked equally unsure of what was happening.

“Are the schematics not making sense, Jinkke?” Minkus asked, scratching his ear. “They seemed sensible to me— well, more or less.”

Jinkke reached the workstation, dropped a sheet, and picked up another that she promptly added to a small map of connected pages. “It’s not so much their sense that is causing us such discomfit, Big Brother,” she replied. “Zinn was certainly an eccentric bordering on lunacy, but his general schemas make logical sense. It’s the archaic technology and obtuse methods throughout these designs that are giving me a migraine.”

“Political decisions aside,” Wepp added with a shrug, “Zinn was quite creative in applying the technologies of his time—or at least I assume so, as I am only truly familiar with about 68 percent of the foundational materials I see here. It’s all very interesting.”

Minkus smiled wanly, but it seemed to grow as he watched Wepp reshuffle a small handful of pages. He’d been fairly subdued since he’d returned with his sister, which Penny could understand. Now he was thinking about this Zinn character again, though, and that seemed to perk him up. “I only grasp a fraction of it of course,” he said, still grinning a little. “But— it’s Zinn, Jinkke. Zinn. Asura haven’t seen this in— well, a very long time. And we found it.”

Barely attempting to hide her distaste, Jinkke shook her head, once again scanning another page from the table, even as she spoke. “In a historic sense, yes, I suppose it’s intriguing. I never imagined the myths we were told as progeny had any true validity, but here I am, holding the designs of an exiled, egomaniacal figure of legend. Maybe it’s only fitting that I’m minorly confounded.” She rubbed at her chin as her words trailed off, and she continued to read.

Minkus slid himself off the edge of the granite table and stepped up beside his sister. His movements were slow, almost awkward, but it didn’t seem to stop him from speaking the words that bubbled up and out of him. “Don’t you remember how Appa told the story of the great, misunderstood golemancer who saved Kryta? He said that was the core of courageous ingenuity: to use your gifts for others.” Minkus waved a hand through the air, as though brushing his own words across the sky.

Jinkke just sighed, unable to stop herself from rolling her eyes. “Myths and parental conjurations,” the female asura said with forced gentleness, “to spur you in your strengths, Big Brother. Surely you remember the historically accurate tutelage we later received. Zinn was disgraced and exiled by the Arcane Council for regicide against the humans he later aided. The fool vanished after that point, further supporting the wisdom of the council’s decision. Appa only heroized him for your childhood entertainment and moral education—which, I must admit, did have positive effects.”

Jinkke paused a second: a snappy, internal dialog passing across her face. “Anyway,” she said, “there could well be some knowledge in these designs that we could leverage, provided we had the slightest notion what seer essence was.”

“Seer— what now?” Penny asked. “Sounds like a perfume those bougie crooks down in the market sell to tourists.”

Jinkke scowled. “Let me backtrack to a reasonable starting point.”

She moved her attention back to a pile of sheets she’d set aside. Picking it up and shuffling down a few pages she drew out a sheet and spun it for Minkus and Penny to see. It was covered in little diagrams of various stonework parts. Penny remembered the page. In fact she remembered noting that the data current associated with the listed components made at least a little sense to her. It was similar to what she’d picked up from another section of the Zinn tome, back when she and Minkus had first worked with it, earlier in the year.

“These are valid schematics for a golem with some crude manner of onboard field emitter,” Jinkke continued.

So that’s what that was, Penny thought, scanning the pictures again.

Jinkke scratched her forehead in consternation. “It’s not my field of expertise, but I can at least recognize the competence of the designs. Whatever we have here, Big Brother, it’s not a hoax; this is the genuine work of the mad exile, and, as much as I hate to admit it, it’s theoretically a viable construct. Given a golem reduced to only its most essential constituent parts, we’ve concluded that we could, theoretically, reconstruct a modern analog of Zinn’s design here.”

By now, Wepp had set down his stick of chalk and joined the others. “Of course,” he added, looking back at his blackboard calculations, “one of many complexities of analogizing this design with modern technology will be a much higher energy demand, or so it appears. The average golem of contemporary design already requires a sizable energy output in magical systems, electrical systems, and magnetic-field projections. Even in this ancient design, it seems that the first two of those systems needed to be at roughly doubled, or perhaps more, to make the emitter viable at the desired field diameter—the conversions aren’t perfect to modern measurements. Either way, in today’s golems, that is a substantial amount of energy.”

Penny scowled, taking it all in. She did know something of the difficulty involved in converting those damned, ancient measurements. Still, that didn’t account for Jinkke’s clear frustration; the little genius shouldn’t have any real problem with that sort of thing.

“OK,” said Penny cautiously. “So why do you two look like someone just pissed in your ale?”

Exchanging a glance with Jinkke, who still clearly disliked him, Wepp responded. “Other hurdles aside, our true fly in the elixir, as it were, is this note.” He pointed. “Neither of us has the slightest familiarity with this substance: seer essence.”

Curiously, Penny scooted to the edge of the worktable and leaned forward, elbows to her knees, and squinted at the sheet on the table across from her, not that it mattered anyway. Wepp was pointing at glyphs she couldn’t read.

Jinkke put a hand to her forehead as she leaned forward. “Yes, it appears that the design centers around some element Zinn called seer essence. The rest of this, as we said, could conceivably be replaced with modern analogs, but this— I don’t even know what it is. Golemancy is not my greatest strength, nor is magical essences. But I can find no record of such a substance in any of the most essential volumes on the subject, which is highly irregular.” She sneered a little. “And frustrating.”

Wepp opened his mouth to respond but stopped, suddenly raising a finger instead. He looked down, shuffling the sheets he had in hand, and held one out for Jinkke. “Actually, there is this bit of obtuse trivia,” he said curiously.

Jinkke glanced at it as Wepp went on with his thought. “I’d all but set this aside as the artistic expression of a madman, but upon further consideration of our current predicament, I wonder if I was mistaken.”

Jinkke eyed the sheet a moment and then looked up at him, troubled. “Smoke and sparks,” she gasped. “You don’t mean to imply—”

Wepp’s nod cut her off.

Penny looked back and forth between the two, waiting for one of them to say more. Instead, they just gawked at each other. Gods.

“Can you catch us up too?” Penny asked coldly.

Glowering, Jinkke glanced around the page to meet Penny’s eyes. But she also obliged, taking the sheet of paper from Wepp’s hand and rotating it to show Penny and Minkus.

“I remember that,” Minkus whispered with a near imperceptible shiver. “What— what is it?”

The page was copied in Minkus’ admittedly cleaner hand, and among the disjointed blocks of notes and tidbits of sketches scattered around the page, one drawing stood out. It was larger than the rest and drawn in much greater detail, depicting what appeared to be some sort of shadowy humanoid laid out on a block, with jagged lines of lightning rising from all over its body to a single point hovering above its chest. Whether those were lines of energy going into or out of the figure, Penny had no idea, but it made her skin crawl either way.

“I didn’t give it much initial consideration,” Wepp said, still directing his musings to Jinkke. “But the heading is unavoidably curious given our current subject matter.”

“Yes,” Jinkke agreed. She rotated the sheet back into her own view again, and inspected it further, grimacing. “And the annotations below it— I can hardly believe I overlooked this detail!”

Wepp crossed his arms, being careful to hold the rest of his pages so as not to crease them. “Indeed. It reduces our list of likely sources to a much more finite count.”

“Possibly three,” Jinkke mused, completing Wepp’s assertion. “But only one of those is truly probable.”

Wepp nodded sharply. “Agreed.”

Penny sucked in a breath. Asura could be frustrating on an individual basis, but in groups of two of three, they were downright infuriating. “Look,” she groaned, “I’m sure this little psychic connection here is fun, but everyone’s been saying we’re on a short clock, and I’m no damned asura. I can’t read your language, and I don’t do— whatever this is. So could you please cut the crap and just tell us what’s going on?”

Jinkke lowered the sheet and scratched at the back of her head. It seemed a second ago that whatever they’d discerned was fairly obvious, but now she was reticent to say what that was.

Not looking up, she spun the sheet around to show Minkus and Penny the creepy energy picture again. She spoke slowly, only then raising her eyes to meet theirs as she pointed with her free hand. “The heading calls this sketch essence extraction. And the annotation beside it speaks briefly of the uniqueness of finding a Seer—capitalized. We’d missed that noteworthy detail on the other page. The essence we’re after was most likely not a naturally occurring or synthesized material—well, not in the standard and scientifically humane definition of naturally occurring, anyway. It did occur naturally, presumably in the body of a Seer, a bipedal creature that appears to have been sentient to some degree or another. Zinn... extracted its essence. And in all likelihood, he did it himself.”

Minkus stammered, “Jinkke, are— are you saying Zinn— he killed this thing?”

Jinkke shrugged, laying the sheet back down on the table. “With certainty, Big Brother, I can’t say. But I’d venture to guess that it isn’t a particularly pleasant experience to have one’s essence extracted.”

Wepp sighed. “Whatever may or may not befall the specimen in such a process isn’t entirely relevant to our discussion, I am afraid. The greater issue here is the note alongside that rendering of the extraction process, which presents Seers as being so unfathomably rare that Zinn’s discovery of one was all but a fluke to begin with.” He gestured floppily at Jinkke. “The reason she has not been able to discover any reference to this substance is now readily apparent: no one in the modern era has found or formulated it, most probably because no one has encountered the species necessary for its creation. Which, I am afraid, leaves us in a bound cog. The critical element in our all-but-certainly critical defense strategy is unattainable.”

For several moments, everyone was silent. Penny searched Wepp and Jinkke’s faces for a trace of inspiration; it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that one of them would suddenly concoct an alternate path forward.

Neither of them did, though. Wepp stared off at the ceiling, his fingers moving to massage his chin as he began meandering around the room, deep in thought. Jinkke gave a quick look at Minkus, gauging him, then looked away once more, unsatisfied. She bent down and shuffled pages across the table some more, set on finding a solution to her brother’s problem.

Penny rubbed hands up her face and through her hair. She’d never thought much of this whole magical-protection plan, probably because she’d not really believed there was an insanity-magic monster out there to begin with. Although, the knot twisting in her stomach implied that perhaps she’d believed it a little more than she’d thought. Dying in a huddled mass of insanity coiled up on the ground at the feet of a purple rock monster wasn’t exactly a thrilling thought.

She looked at Minkus. His face was unusually tight. Almost stony. Penny was starting to second guess this whole, ludicrous situation again, but Minkus’ face was as set as she’d ever seen it. He was the one to break the silence.

“Jinkke?” he asked, drawing all eyes to him. His voice was thoughtful, timid, bold, and excited, seemingly all at once. “What about the Synergetics vault?”

Wepp eyed him curiously, shifting his attention to Jinkke and back again to Minkus. “What about it, specifically? What impact would the college’s vault have upon our current complication?”

Minkus’ sister sighed, lowering her face into her hands, but only for a second. She lifted her head just as quickly and adopted the gentle expression and tone she’d tried espousing earlier. “Big Brother, are you speaking of the rumored—”

His nodding cut her short.

“Rumored what?” Penny asked, looking at them.

Jinkke shook her head, not hiding her exasperation anymore. Instead of arguing with anyone, though, she acquiesced. “He’s talking about the urban legend that the College of Synergetics has kept a secret store of discovered Zinn materials for the last two centuries, hidden somewhere deep in the vault.

“But it’s false. It’s clearly recorded history that everything Zinn ever did—” She paused, looking down at the small piles of paper all over her table. “Alright, everything Zinn ever did that was kept in asura hands was destroyed after his exile. Why the myth has persisted that Synergetics has been illegally sitting on samples of his work is beyond me.”

“I have never heard this tale,” Wepp said plainly, “It does sound incredibly improbable. Impossible? No. But bordering on it.”

For a minute, the two thinkers got into a spiraling debate on all the reasons Minkus’ story was unlikely. When she looked over at her friend on the table beside her, though, he seemed to hold a different perspective, and not just on the factuality of his alleged Zinn storehouse. He looked agitated, worried. It was something Penny had seen on his face before, not long ago.

Minkus politely excused himself and stepped between the other two asura, his back to Wepp and his face to his sister. He took her hands.

“Jinkke,” Minkus pleaded firmly, “I told you. My friends are in trouble, and we only have so much time.”

His sister looked down at his larger, paler hands wrapped gently around hers, and she sighed. “Minkus, you barely know these people...” Even as she said it, she winced, although her eyes remained on her brother’s hands. It was as though she could feel the sudden look of abject dismay on his face, and she changed her approach. “What I mean is that the odds of there being any amount of truth to that story are so slim as to make it a fool’s errand to even approach it.” She looked up at him.

For a moment Penny felt the slightest bit bad for Jinkke. She was getting one of those looks from Minkus, the kind that would break anyone, given enough time.

The larger asura’s thick lower lip quivered, not with anger or indignation, but a simple and unapologetic sadness, and Jinkke couldn’t take her eyes off it. Penny couldn’t either. Hell, even Wepp seemed moved by it.

“They’re my friends,” Minkus said again. “And it’s more than Ventyr and Yissa. Wepp says all the Vigil there could be at risk. Jinkke, If there is anything you can do— please help me. If we don’t find this essence, if we don’t create a defense— well, I am still going to aid them.”

She pulled her hands from his and turned away to run them frustratedly through her hair.

“Alchemy, Big Brother,” she said, letting her arms fall to her sides. “Alright. I told you I would assist how you needed, and there may be someone I can make this request of. But—” She spun back around to face him, looking him dead in those big, sad eyes. “But I can make no promises: not that he’ll assist us and certainly not that there is actually anything in the vault for us to find even if he does. This is quite literally our final potentiality for constructing this, and if we’re unable to do it, Big Brother— I beg you not to proceed with your plan if this yields no results.”

The two stood still, each stiffly vertical as they faced each other, and Minkus stammered. Heaviness and happiness conflicted across his wide face. “Thank you, Jinkke,” he said. “But— I can’t do that. This is the right thing to do, and I will do it. Whether we have the golem or not. I have to do this.”

Shaking her head, Jinkke turned and started picking through the papers once more. “Of course it is, and of course you are. You’ve become obstinate in your years away.” Shuffling through papers to collect specific sheets, she still didn’t look back at him. Instead she snapped a quick glance at Penny, across the worktable. “I suppose you had some causality upon that?”

Penny threw up her hands “Don’t look at me, Small. He started being this way all on his own.” He really had, and Penny understood exactly how much of a pain in the ass it was. Of course, she also recognized that there was something to his stubbornness: something about it that seemed solid and right. She could do without it, or at least she had for a long time.

Rolling her eyes, Penny shook the introspection away. She couldn’t wait for all of this to be over.

Coming back to the scene before her, Penny refocused on the little, blonde woman, who was now striding toward the door with several sheets of the transcription pinched tightly between her arm and body. “I’ll be back as soon as possible,” she said. “Hopefully with something to curb your curiosity.”

She rounded the doorway and was gone.