Chapter 34.1: Construction Begins

There was a flurry of questions for a good while after Penny pitched her smartpack onto the worktable: what the device was, where she’d gotten the intelligence core, how she and Minkus had crafted it, and finally—resoundingly—why she’d made it. With widely varying degrees of politeness, every one of them asked in one way or another why she’d “wasted perfectly good parts” on a “regressive application” and a “butchery of asuran technology.”

Had it been any other day, Penny might have had the wherewithal to hold her tongue at their “purely scientific assessments.” It wasn’t any other day, though, and Penny didn’t have that wherewithal. Before thinking, she snapped back her regular rebuttal.

“Golems,” she barked at the three of them, “are creepy!”

Obviously the argument didn’t land well, a realization that struck her quickly. Penny didn’t give a centaur’s cropped tail, though. Wepp laughed, Professor Vaff nodded patronizingly, and Jinkke put a hand to her face. Still, Penny didn’t care. She threw her arms across her chest and glared at them as they all returned to work.

Jinkke was the first to start back at it, spreading an array of relevant equipment around the skeleton of the smartpack, which sat lonely atop the workstation—Penny just couldn’t look at it. Wepp and Vaff re-sorted all their documents into some new arrangement and pinned them up nearby. The three had never before worked together, but already they seemed to operate in unity, fulfilling alternating roles in a strange sort of choreography that moved them around the stonework table to approach one task after the next.

For a while Minkus was entranced by it, standing just outside their miniature cyclone of motion and watching intently. Penny, on the other hand, silently slipped away, about as far as she could go. Standing beside the sliding, steel front door, she leaned against the wall, arms still tightly crossed and only occasionally bringing herself to cast a sidelong glance at the trio aggressively dissecting her creation. If the five of them hoped to be ready for whatever might come next, this was the only logical way, and they had to be ready. For the asura kid, for Vent and the bookworm—gods, even for Minkus. Penny had to make things square with the lot of them, and this ludicrous, little expedition was the only way she could think to do it. It had to be done. It didn’t make it any easier to watch Jinkke rip apart the pack and throw one part after the next into a steel bin beside the workstation, but it had to be done.

That part wasn’t surprising: the belts, pulleys, drives, and Kormir-only-knew what else being tossed directly into the trash. Tearing something down and casting aside unneeded parts were necessary steps in repurposing any machine—not that it made the sting any duller.

Clenching her jaw and muttering curses under her breath, Penny forced her attention back off the table again, scanning the room for anything interesting. She stormed past the asura, pushing her attention to the other workstations and the many shelves of tools, tomes, and other miscellany around the room.

She passed from one worktable to the next, finally reaching the farthest one from the door that led out into the hallway. Atop it, a small, stone cube caught her attention.

Sitting there amid several others that were similar but not identical, the stonework device seemed to be the only one of the cubes that was activated. It glowed from crisp, bevelled lines between its six faces and hovering just a few inches above its inactive brothers. In some ways, it looked like one of the many waypoints Penny had seen throughout Tyria, but it wasn’t quite the same. It was smaller, yes, but more importantly, it didn’t spin on a single axis, as Penny had observed waypoints to do when travelers came or went. This little thing seemed to spin on all axes at once, balanced in the air at only its very center. That was curious and worth exploring. Penny reached to touch it.

“I would recommend against that,” Jinkke called across the room behind her.

Penny straightened, looking back over her shoulder.

With the smartpack’s dispenser assembly in one hand, Jinkke eyed her warily. “It may not be far along in development,” she said, “but Onn is annoyingly particular about others even making physical contact with his ongoing enterprises.”

Penny grimaced. For a moment, she considered grabbing the thing and chucking it into that steel trash bin, just to see what Jinkke would do. Instead, though, she pulled back her outstretched hand and flashed Minkus’ sister a dirty look before straightening and moving on to the shelves along the wall.

After listening to Wepp prattle on about the virtues and shortcomings of the tomes around the room, any interest Penny might have had in them had died. With her options becoming increasingly limited, though, she ran a finger along the spines of several shelved books nonetheless, squinting to read them.

Half were titled with those strange glyphs the asura used, which meant nothing to her at all. The other half appeared to be written in New Krytan. Those looked relatively new, and instead of dealing with things clearly technological, they bore titles about different magical theories and were attributed to a smattering of one-syllabled authors. Despite herself, Penny turned to glance at Jinkke and the professor. Curiosity nipped at her. What was it these people actually did here?

The question passed quickly enough, though, and Penny was once again moving from tome to tome along one of the shelves: past a stack of diagrams and recorded calculations, and on across a variety of colored crystals and electrical components. Then, at the end, she found something she actually recognized. It was her killswitch.

Well, it wasn’t actually her killswitch. That device was somewhere amid the pile of tools she'd pulled out of her pack before its demolition had begun. This killswitch was the one she’d built for Minkus, the one for which he’d helped her build the smartpack, and the one he’d gifted to his sister. It wasn’t an especially complex device; she'd never intended it to be. In fact it was the killswitch’s simplicity that she most appreciated about the tool, and at the moment, it was the thing captivating her imagination. In the trouble likely ahead of them, it could be handy to have a device capable of blowing out any electrical systems Penny had ever seen. And maybe more importantly—she glanced over her shoulder—having something to work on right then would be good. It was all but certain that neither killswitch had been charged in some time, perhaps even since they’d left Divinity’s Reach. She grabbed the small, cylindrical device and moved back toward the collection of tools she'd left at the side of the room. 

She made a few steps without paying any mind to the trio demolishing her work, but before she could pass them entirely, her eyes drifted to the wastebin alongside the table. She stopped cold.

Atop the mound of belts, rods, runners, and random hardware sat two steel boxes about five inches across and slatted at the sides for ventilation tubing: these were the smartpack’s two generators.

Penny groaned, gawking down into the bin. This was more than she could take. “Gods. What in Torment do you think you’re doing?” The asura paused, all turning as she lifted the pair of components from the pile, juggling the killswitch between them. “How far do you expect to get on this thing without power?”

 “From those?” Wepp asked, quickly returning to work at the blackboard they'd wheeled over. He waved her off. “Those are quite irrelevant.”

“Irrelevant?” she snapped, indignant. “I paid good money for these components. More importantly, they’re the damn power source. You know, the parts that make the machine go?”

“We have no need of them,” Jinkke said, half joining the conversation as she continued removing parts. She never looked up from her work, but she did raise a small, blue stone, wrapped in copper wiring and mounted to the end of a tiny, steel disk for Penny to see. “I’ve removed the crystal and am adapting it’s coupling for use on a generic thaumaturgic generator: unquestionably superior to whatever those were.”

Penny glowered at her a moment, but the only one to notice was Minkus.

“If you’re genuinely concerned about your monetary investment, though,” Jinkke said without looking away from the modified headcasing, “you’re welcome to all the detritus from all the waste bins you desire. But please stop distracting us.”

Hugging the killswitch and two generators just to keep them from falling, Penny stood upright, towering once more over everyone in the room. She opened her mouth to snap back at the little, blonde runt.

“Actually,” the bent professor interrupted, “if you don’t mind continuing to distract me, Penny, I would appreciate gaining a fuller understanding of this intriguing fuel of yours.”

He raised a black disk, about an inch thick: round and and only gently worn, it remained glossy where it hadn’t yet been burned. It was one of the super-condensed carbon pucks Penny used in her high-output projects. They were useful, yes, but useful to a human and useful to an asura were, as she’d discovered, two clearly different things.

Penny sneered. Vaff hadn’t struck her as being the type to mock, but it must have just been a matter of time. He was asura, after all.

“Very funny” she scoffed. “I did what I could with what I had, alright? I’m sorry it’s not up to your high asuran standards.”

The professor frowned, taking a step closer. “Apologies. That was not a jibe. I have genuinely never seen a fuel element like it.” He slid his spectacles up his narrow nose, glancing once more at the puck and then at Penny. “It appears to be carbon-based, making it perhaps rudimentary in the eyes of some. Except, I daresay, for what I assume to be its uncommonly dense composition.

“I discovered it in one of those generators of yours, but it seems to have scarcely been consumed at all, which may or may not be in support of my hypothesis of its density. Precisely what duration of time has passed since you first inserted this specific element into your device?”

Gods, was his interested real? Penny looked at Minkus for help, but he only stared at her with a dopey grin.

Having stopped his scribbling at the blackboard, Wepp now watched Penny too, far more interested than he had been moments before.

She collected her words. “I don’t know,” she answered Vaff. “I haven’t changed that puck since we left Divinity’s Reach, so— a third of a season?”

“Indeed?” Vaff mused, sounding impressed. Neither he nor Penny noticed Wepp until the bald asura stepped past her and joined the professor, the two of them now inspecting the smooth, black disk between Vaff’s fingers.

“What’s the big deal?” Penny asked, almost tempted to eye the thing more closely herself. She took a step back, clutching the generators and killswitches to her chest. “Gods, It’s just a charr SC puck. They’re not common in the Reach, for obvious reasons, so they take some... unique connections to get your hands on. But don’t tell me a bunch of technology freaks like you don’t know about this. It’s just the charr, for Grenth’s sake.”

‘I do not,” the professor said simply.

Wepp agreed. “I have diligently observed your capital, its people, and its technology for multiple years now, and never has an element like this crossed my line of sight.” He continued to inspect the puck. “You say you’ve been burning it for one third of a season. Has that been a constant expenditure of energy or only periodic activation?” He let the question hang, and Penny began to answer, but he interrupted with another. “And what percentage would you say has burned off in that timespan? What was its original size? How is the source material compressed? And does the compression make it more or less volatile—”

“Gods, I don’t know all that,” Penny cut in, snatching the puck from Vaff’s hand, as though that would somehow quiet Wepp. “I don’t know how it’s compressed, and I don’t know how volatile the stuff is before being compressed, so how the hell would I know how comparatively volatile it is now? All I know is it’s a damn good fuel, better than anything humans make, and…” She trailed off, looking closely at the amount of wear on the puck of carbon. She sneered. “Gods, I’ve probably gone through a tenth of it already. Damn pack really burns the stuff up. Must be the constant drain of keeping the intelligence core listening for commands.”

Exchanging a thoughtful glance with Wepp, Professor Vaff ruminated on the information for a moment. “Only a tenth.”

Before she’d even seen him move, Wepp leapt forward, snatched away both the carbon puck and one of the generators in her arm. She shifted, rebalancing the other items in her grip, and Wepp dropped the two items to the table.

“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re—”

Wepp paid her no more mind, already mumbling to himself. He puzzled out power outputs over various durations for a variety of applicational demands, some of which Penny understood, at least when she was able to keep up with his rapid and convoluted thoughts. Vaff, however, seemed to follow it all without a hitch, nodding as quickly as Wepp could speak and periodically interrupting him with a silent but corrective gesture.

Penny watched it for a minute, both interested and perplexed by a process that felt foreign and familiar at the same time. From the corner of her eye, she noticed Jinkke also peering curiously at what Wepp was working at so furiously.

Finally the muttering gave way to something more audible. “Excelsior!” Wepp cried, throwing up his stubby arms. He spun to Penny, waving the puck at her once more. “How many more of these curious marvels do you possess?”

She reeled at his snap movement. “I don’t know,” she said, trying to think. “Three? Three or four. Why?”

“What is it?” Jinkke asked, finally pausing her own work and stepping into the discussion. “What have you discovered?”

The wrinkles in his brow nearly stretching back over his bald head, Wepp grinned more broadly than Penny had ever seen. There was a funny slyness in the expression. “The human has given us a viable power source for the field generator.”