Chapter 35.1: On the Asura Wagon

Three hours. That was how long it took Penny to realize that she hated wagons—at the very least she hated this one. The four of them were somewhere in southeast Maguuma, and she and Wepp had just finished turning the bed of a moving wagon into the laughable approximation of a workshop.

Kneeling there to keep her balance, Penny glared disgustedly at the finished product. Whatever they’d been trying to create, it was still just a handful of crates bolted together and surrounded with open boxes of parts and hardware that rattled and clanked with every jolt of the wagon. It hardly looked different than the assorted cargo and cases of equipment they’d started with, yet somehow they’d wasted the better part of an hour on it.

Sitting on his padded bench just beyond the crates, the wagon-driver tugged the reins to avoid something in the road. A box of rolled schematics and notes skittered away from the crates and toppled, followed closely by a set of wrenches that leapt off the crates and slid toward the back of the wagon bed.

Penny buried her face in her hands.

“How’s it progressing back there?” the asura driver called over his shoulder. “Did my other cargo offer any benefit?”

When Penny couldn’t bring herself to respond, Wepp did.  “Indeed. It seems to have reached as solid a state as we could hope to attain.” He held himself steady with a hand on the crates, which at least said something about their construction. “And with that complete, it is quite past time that we return to the prime objective.” 

The driver nodded and continued his work of guiding the massive, four-legged golem that drew the wagon. That thing was one of several reasons Penny had decided she hated this method of travel. She wished these people could do anything without involving a golem.

Wepp cleared his throat. “Again,” he pronounced, with a sidelong glance at Jinkke, “I say we should return to work, assuming we have established a next step.”

Sitting against the sidewall of the wagon bed, Jinkke looked up from the tome she’d been buried in. “Oh, you’ve finished? Excelsior.” Holding the tome out toward Wepp, she stumbled to her feet. “Please look this over. I believe I’ve found the missing element in our parity equation.” 

“Oh, thank the Alchemy.” Cautiously, Wepp moved toward her, never taking his hand off the round rail at the top of the sidewall. He took it, letting his eyes fall to where Jinkke was still pointing.

Penny watched, waiting for what came next, when the front wheels slammed into another set of potholes in the road. Clutching the book tightly to his chest, Wepp popped a foot in the air; the crate-table bounced and cracked, and parts crashed to the floorboards. Even Penny, who’d been kneeling the whole time, teetered into the opposite sidewall as the wagon wobbled on down the road.

“What in Grenth’s green ass— ?” she yelped, leaning over the side to look back behind the cart. “Did we just kill something?”

“My ears,” the driver replied, holding his floppy hat to his head. “That was a large one, wasn’t it?”

Penny gawked, noting similar expressions on Jinkke and Wepp. This road was one of the worst she’d ever seen. “How the hell are we going to get any more work done if this thing keeps tossing us around for the next four days?”

This plan had seemed crazy from the start, but as they rattled down the shoddy road, it was starting to look nearer to impossible.

Just as Penny caught Jinkke’s eye, about to ask the question again in earnest, the driver gave her answer. “Don’t worry yourselves one iota. I do apologize for the rough condition of the road up this way, but there is no circumventing it. Ever since that gravitational disaster at the bridge at Loch Jezt, this is the only northbound route out of Soren Draa.” Yanking his knit cap down around his ears once more, he flung a finger out at the cliffside to their left. “And thanks to those self-involved Inquest ruffians carting materials in and out of their secret facility with no concern for the way they masticate the road, the rest of us just endure it. We’re outside the jurisdiction of Soren Draa, and the Alchemy knows the Arcane Council won’t lift a finger.” He shook his head and muttered something under his breath.

Wepp bristled.

With a sniff, the driver returned to his previously congenial tone. “In any event, the road should improve substantially in about 2.6 miles. This, I can assure you, will be the worst of it for the duration of our travel.” 

“Great,” Penny replied curtly. She understood that things could be much worse, but that didn’t change her annoyance at the moment. It didn’t change the burgeoning queasiness in her stomach, either. She caught Jinkke and Wepp’s attention and pointed to the rear of the wagon bed. “I’m just going to go over there and toss my breakfast if it’s OK with you two.”

Both sneered, seemingly for different reasons, and Penny turned away from the crates to scuttle toward the rear of the bed. That was where Minkus had long since settled himself. He’d hardly moved since setting out.

One of the wheels hit another bump, reducing Penny’s weight as she spun to hang her legs off the open tailgate. Grumbling, she watched the pocked road spin out from below her and roll off into the growing distance between them and the settlement of Soren Draa.

Settlement seemed like an insufficient term. They’d wound far enough through the verdantly craggy landscape of southern Metrica that all she could still see of it were the angular tips of its buildings and the strange electrical rods that sat atop them. Energy arced between them so wildly she could still make it out from where she sat, a few miles away. Maybe it was no Rata Sum, which still loomed visibly in the open sky many miles farther on, but Soren Draa was easily a city, and frankly, it would have been an interesting one, had they not pushed through it with hardly a sideways glance. But they’d been about one thing, and one thing only: hiring the wagon driver.

Trying once more to settle into the sway of the wagon, Penny stifled a yawn. Only now that she’d sat down did the tiredness catch up with her. Their day, after all, had begun very early. Gods, the previous day had never ended.

She, Jinkke, Wepp, and Vaff had worked through the night and still weren’t anywhere near completing the Seer-essence projector. Several complications had arisen, most of which she could understand at a general level, even if she didn’t have the background to know what to do with them.

Of course, the first problem they’d encountered had been the one she’d accidentally solved: finding a way to produce adequate power for a sustained energy field. It still made no sense to her, but that high-yield steam generator and the charr-made puck had impressed Professor Vaff right up until the moment they’d left him at the wagon yard in Soren Draa. With a few adaptations made to one of Penny’s generators, Wepp was convinced he’d developed an energy-generation and distribution system robust enough to stimulate and shape a magical expulsion without sacrificing the compactness necessary for the whole thing to be carried by hand. He’d said something to that effect anyway—the lot of them always spoke in so much technical hot air.

Of course, solving the power problem had only led to subsequent hurdles, including the matter of projecting a repulsive energy field that could safely pass through organic matter without “disrupting its molecular cohesion.” Fortunately, Vaff had been quick to recall a schematic that one of his old krewemates had drawn up for resolving something similar in another type of energy emitter. As he’d described it, the design projected the magic in a pre-matrixed dome that began at a fixed, relative point and encircled the user, instead of expanding outward through him. Once closed, the dome would stabilize enough to be permeable by any living organism not bearing the resonant magic of the mursaat, without the molecular-cohesion problems. Probably.

Altogether, they’d solved the power problem and had been well into a second iteration of their answer to the emission problem when the third and largest hurdle had presented itself: their supply of Seer essence was far more limited than any of them had anticipated.

According to Vaff’s estimates, drawn from another of his many, dusty tomes, they had the magical essence to produce the field for 38 minutes, give or take 13. It seemed that where the electrical output was needed to stimulate the magic and project the field, the magic itself would be spent in sustaining the field. If they did wind up forced into a conflict with the freak asura who’d killed the librarian, those minutes of usage would be critical and hopefully sufficient. Of course, to ensure their device would work in such a situation at all, it would have to be adequately tested, just like any new invention. And therein was the rub. Virtually any proper testing would burn through their entire store of Seer essence long—long—before they had even a functional prototype.

It was that realization that had turned the rest of their night’s efforts away from building the field projector and onto finding another liquid essence with enough similarities to be a suitable proxy for testing. By the time they had, the night had passed, and dawn had cut the sky.

What did they now have to show for a sleepless night? A new tank of magic juice (something the asura had called lyssal-magic isolate) one working generator, a bare smartpack frame, and a fully disassembled intelligence core. When the professor had made his estimate for completion, no one denied it: with the time for reassembly, core diagnostics and adaptation, projector connection and testing, and final compositing, they were looking, at least, at a fortnight of work for a stable prototype—less, of course, for an unstable one. Penny couldn’t see how even that timetable was possible. But then, a day prior, she wouldn’t have believed any of this nonsense was possible, so who knew?

Ironically, the professor’s harsh estimate had offered one benefit, at least in Minkus’ eyes.    He’d insisted that they didn’t have time to wait for this project’s completion before departing to warn the Vigil of what they knew, and now everyone agreed with him. Even his sister, who’d most vehemently pressed for delaying travel, knew he wasn’t wrong. If it was going to take them as long as they now concluded, they really didn’t have the time to delay their departure until they’d completed the project. Even at a walking pace, Ventyr and Yissa would arrive several days before a prototype was even finished, which meant many days more before the four could even express the danger they were in, let alone deliver a means of combatting it.

With Vaff’s help, they’d gone out on a limb to acquire the resources necessary for this one-in-million project, and suddenly the group found themselves with an impossible decision: they could either finish building the necessary defense or get to Brisban fast enough for such a defense to matter.

That was when Professor Vaff had made his odd recommendation. He knew a shipping merchant with particularly large wagons. He proposed that they might be able to do both.

Packing all the equipment and materials they could onto a pushcart and leaving the lab behind, they party had made their way across Rata Sum just as students began to fill the halls once more. On the upper level of the city, the went through yet another asura gate and down to the jungle below, popping out into the smaller, but no less curious, asuran settlement of Soren Draa. It was there that Vaff had introduced them to some new asura with yet another monosyllabic name Penny didn’t have the energy to learn. He operated a small group of cargo wagons that Vaff had apparently used for years to ship research equipment to and from students on research assignments throughout Metrica. It seemed many professors, students, krewes, and labs did likewise; his was one of the largest shipping outfits in Metrica, boasting over a dozen golem-drawn wagons of various sizes.

At first, the cranky, little asura had refused Vaff’s request to move not only equipment but also three asura and a human. Like most people, however, an offer of additional coin was all it took to smooth over his concerns. Of course, it then took even more money to convince him to let them rent and build a sort of moving lab on the back of one of his larger vehicles.

What it seemed no reasonable amount of coin would earn them was transit any farther than someplace called Mrot Voru. The little imp insisted that his people did not travel any farther into Brisban than that. “They call them wildlands for a reason!” he’d squawked at them repeatedly.

That—all of it—was how they’d landed themselves on this accursed, rattling, stomach-tossing excuse for a workshop. It was how Penny found herself bouncing down a road into the jungle. And it was why she was stuck staring back at the uppermost tips of some asura city she never would have even known existed.

Penny grumbled to herself again, half because of where she was, and half because recalling it all had brought that asura-girl’s face to the forefront of her mind again.

Several feet beside her, Minkus sat quietly, his jaw tight and his fists balled atop crossed legs. Since the wagon had pulled away from the loading ramp, he’d barely spoken.

Penny had kept an eye on him as she and Wepp were hacking together their new worktable, and only a few times had she seen activity from him. In each instance, he’d done the same thing she assumed he’d kept doing after she’d returned to the lab the day before: he tossed  pebbles in the air and let them hit him in the face. Of course she knew what he was trying to do, but based on what she saw, he still wasn’t getting it.

More than once, his sister had tried stopping him. Each time he’d rebutted in that gentle way of his and continued right on. Though her repeated glances said the debate wasn’t finished, she’d let him alone, pressing even further into her reading instead.

Now that Penny sat next to him, she could finally see Minkus’ face. She didn’t know a thing about magic meditation, but his expression seemed about as far from serenity as she could imagine.

Opening her mouth to say something, Penny was stopped short. The road heaved the wagon again, tossing it side to side like a boat on the waves.

“Gods,” she yelled, catching herself. “How the hell are we expecting to finish this thing before we reach this Mrot-u-Vo-rutu place? The old man said it would be a fortnight before we even got this thing working. How is this supposed to work?” She shot a look back over her shoulder at the asura starting back to work.

Turning from the crate-table, Jinkke groaned loudly, still clutching the cargo for stability. “Smoke and sparks, we’ve gone over this. The fortnight estimate was specifically for a fully-realized prototype, which in this particular instance means it can pass the scrutiny of a combat-viability assessment. That is not our object. Our purposes only require that it works well enough to provide a basis from which Vigil technicians can continue building.”

From the corner of her eye, Penny only saw the tip of Wepp’s outstretched hand. “I’ve been considering that point. Do you honestly presume the Vigil have assigned golemancers, energy experts, or anyone else with useful skills to such a backwater outpost? The likelihood of that—”

“Is a joke,” Penny finished, setting her gaze more intentionally on Jinkke. “He’s right. Getting that contraption working is on us, and it’s still going to take a hell of a lot longer than we need it to, whether or not the Vigil have magic-engineers to pick up the slack.”

Penny paused, waiting a second to see what the wagon did next before releasing the sidewall.

“I’m not one for your asuran, magic-powered, crack-in-the-universe methods of travel,” she went on, “but it sure would have been helpful if your professor had gotten us some of those waypoint disks to get us there instead of this thing.” She gestured broadly at the rattling, wooden structure underneath them all.

Wepp sighed. “On that subject, I concur. This is a curious challenge we’ve undertaken, but transmat travel would indeed have been preferable.”

Jinkke, who’d been holding her tome again, put it down, running her hands through disheveled hair. “For the last time, even if Dean Phlunt wasn’t stingy enough to withhold transmat disks from his own mother, we would have spent days simply seeking out disks that held coordinate data anywhere remotely near our destination. As it is, we are wasting enough critical time to test my patience for the next decade. I do not want to squander more of it.”

Penny crossed her arms, glaring out again at the road behind them again. “Gods. Someone needs a nap.”

Pounding steps approached her from behind, audible even over the groaning wheels, but Wepp spoke up, causing Jinkke to halt. “Now, now, krewemates. We should return our foci to the objective at hand. We have only a few days of working like this before we no longer have this rolling workstation at all. I suggest we utilize it for all it is worth.”

“Yeah, that’s another thing.” Penny spun, holding her arms tight across her chest despite the rocking. She pointed her chin at all their materials and gear. “How are we supposed to walk all this through a jungle after this guy drops us off?”

“Technically,” Wepp said, “the terrain ahead of us isn’t jungle.”

Penny sighed, her anger deflating. “That wasn’t the point, and you know it.”

Jinkke looked at her thoughtfully, though, and in a suddenly calm voice, she admitted it was a problem. It was just one they hadn’t the time or power to address yet, and Penny couldn’t argue with that. There really was nothing they could do but wait and cross bridges as they came.

And like that, the flare of conflict abated. The two asura behind Penny shuffled cautiously back to the crates, and she heard the scratch and clank of steel parts slipping out of boxes as she set her gaze once more on the winding road behind them. Penny released a long sigh, letting the fight drift out of her.

“You sound tired.”

Penny looked up.

Forcing a thin smile, Minkus cut a glance at her from the corner of his eye. Even at that angle, she could see his eyes were red.

“You look tired,” she replied.

He snickered a little. “No— and yes, I guess.” He shrugged at the thought. “None of you slept last night. I did. So I— well, I’m trying to do my part.”

“Right,” she said sardonically, stifling another yawn. “Looks like it’s working real well.”

His gaze fell to his lap. “No. It— it isn’t. I still cannot control it.”

“Does that really work?” she asked. Curiosity rose alongside her skepticism. “That whole meditating thing, I mean. Does it normally work, getting all quiet and thoughtful or whatever you’re doing? I mean, you don’t look very peaceful.”

He blinked, looking away again before responding. “No,” he sighed. “I supposed I’m not.”

For a moment, the two sat in silence. Penny wished the banging axles and groaning wagon would be silent as well, but like most things, they didn’t care what she wanted.

“Eh,” she finally said. “Don’t listen to me, Biggie. Just do your thing.”

With another weak smile, he obliged, closing his eyes and returning to his meditation. Oddly, he opened his clenched hand and laid a palmful of rocks down between them, opening both his hands wide on his lap as though waiting for a gift from the sky.

Penny reached back for the stiff pack she’d bought on their way out of Rata Sum—it barely fit her, but for now it would have to work. She slipped her coat out of its straps, rolled the fur-lined leather up between her and the sidewall, and leaned back against it, drawing her feet up into the wagon. Maybe Minkus was right, and she was tired after all. Either way, though, she could sure as hell make herself more comfortable for a few minutes—despite the roads best efforts to thwart that. She’d go back to work with the geniuses before long.

Slipping her hand into the pack again, she felt around for something to calm her and found it. Despite the road, the world around Penny faded from view, and all she felt was the rough texture of age-worn orange canvas.