Chapter 35.3: All Nighter
With a huff, Penny settled into their strange workspace as Jinkke caught her up with the progress they’d made throughout the day.
What the two asura had accomplished was fairly substantial, though it had little to do with the machinery itself. As Jinkke had been finalizing theoretical conversion charts between lyssal inputs, Seer inputs, and energy-field outputs, Wepp had managed to craft a bib adapter that would allow for on-the-fly essence-switching once they’d completed their trials with the lyssal isolate—Penny had to admit that was a good idea. With the two, the team could begin calibrating the purpose matrices of the intelligence core, or at least they could once they’d also composited the input processor, core, and projector into a single unit and linked the power supplies to it all.
Penny pushed sweaty hands through her hair with a groan, reminded just how much of this project was still ahead of them. She didn’t know how they’d do it, but there was no doubt in her mind that they would be toting loose equipment through the jungle on foot long before they actually had a working prototype.
Still, she was damn well going to do what she could. There was no way that Kikka person was going to walk away from all she’d done without some kind of retribution. For that matter, Penny wasn’t going to either; she had debts to pay.
While Penny prepared the generator, Jinkke began reassembling the intelligence core. They’d stripped down the core to its individual components and determined the proper configuration for its new application. Now it was time to put it all back together and power it on. After all, they wouldn’t be able to modify the matrices if the damned thing wasn’t even in one piece.
As she heated up the solder iron and parsed through the copper cables for any exposures or frays, Penny considered how fortunate it was that the professor had recognized the value of the generators when he did. If the devices had been tossed out as planned, not only would Penny have been pissed, but they’d have found themselves even further away from completing this contraption than they were now. Power generation was no easy matter, asura or not. Maybe they could have found some kind of replacement in a place like Rata Sum, but outside it? Penny doubted they’d have come across anything with specifications near enough to their needs to be viable.
It wasn’t long before the other two returned with food, though in Penny’s estimation, it was still too long. Sleeping through much of the day also meant she hadn’t eaten, and now she was starving.
Even as she stuffed it in her mouth, Penny couldn’t have said exactly what the food was—some kind of local fruit and game, she thought they’d said. Whatever it was, the stuff was good enough for her. There was far too much work to do for her to worry about what she ate. It was simply enough that she ate.
Reconnecting the core to its power was a simple retread of steps she’d followed back in Divinity’s Reach. Her hands worked nearly of their own accord, freeing her mind to wander on to what came next: for her, for the asura, for all of them.
Yes, Penny could move on to calculating and inputting the calibrations if she needed to; she’d done it before with Minkus and that Zinn tome—gods, that seemed like ages ago. But the time she’d lose just in translating those damned glyphs meant the work would be best left to Jinkke or Wepp. No, once Penny had finished rewiring that generator to the rebuilt intelligence core and testing the output and power balance, her most logical next task would be assessing the condition of the second generator and preparing its connections to the additional systems. The power yield would have to be divided between the essence processor and the emitter, which meant getting Wepp’s specifications—again, not because Penny wasn’t capable, but because the runt was just faster at it. Her hands continued their work, removing and rescrewing parts as she checked overall functionality almost mindlessly. She’d performed spot checks like this a thousand times, which left her mind free to continue pondering that other generator and what it would need—in fact, would that generator need a separate power crystal to fuel the other components the way this one did the core? It was being connected to additional asuran components after all. They’d brought a few spares, but Penny’s last project had only contained a single asuran component, so she had no precedent for this. She filed the question away for later, her hands still working at the pieces in front of her.
At some point—Penny couldn’t say when—Jinkke and Wepp finished their own meals and rejoined her. They weren’t big people, but gods if the two of them didn’t make that clump of crates feel even smaller than it was. Exchanging words only when necessary, Penny and Wepp shuffled about at their respective duties, while Jinkke stood stock still, carefully inserting magitechnical conduit boards into the core in just the right order.
The sun continued its course past the horizon, and Wepp lit the pair of portable illumination cells they’d brought along. They were set on putting in as many hours as they could before they found themselves off the wagon and on foot.
Determination alone only carried them so far, though.
After a previous sleepless night, the asura simply couldn’t work straight through another. Jinkke was the first to succumb. Having finished her reconstruction and begun into diagrams of the purpose-matrix changes, she started to falter. From the corner of her eye, Penny watched the asura nodding slowly into her sheets, until at last she fell forward, knocking her head into the work surface, scattering her notes, and scaring Wepp half out of his wits. Jinkke popped back up, shaking it off and swearing up and down that she was awake and fine to continue.
It was only in collecting the scattered papers that Wepp noticed an error. Then another. And finally a third. It was, in his words, “sufficient evidence of her inability to continue,” and she left to get some rest.
Wepp lasted a couple hours longer, but when Penny noticed him curled up in the corner of the wagon, she knew he’d passed his limit too. There was something just the littlest bit uncomfortable about how peaceful the plump, little asura looked in his sleep: like a speckled, balding baby. Penny pushed away the thought and shook Wepp awake, sending him into the lab as well. The driver had secured beds for them all, so there was no point in Wepp laying around out here. Besides, it was a tight space, and Penny didn’t want to spend the rest of the night tripping over him. They were fine sleeping, but she had work to do.
Eventually the sun returned to the world, the crisp blues of daybreak driving the night sky westward across the wilderness. Of course, Penny only noticed it when Minkus and Jinkke came down the Brill Alliance stairs, drawing her attention away from the work long enough to see there was even a sky at all. It all might have burned away in the night, and she never would have noticed.
Still rubbing sleep from her eyes, Jinkke fumbled her way to the rear of the wagon and rejoined Penny with a sizable yawn. Minkus waved a greeting but held his path toward a broad tree at the western edge of the Brill complex, his bag already slung over his shoulder in preparation for their departure. To Penny’s surprise, he made no remark about her working all night. He barely even smiled. He looked to her like he’d gotten rest, but he clearly hadn’t lost any of his focus on that magic-shield quest of his, and he was right back at it again. Sitting down in the tall grass, he crossed his legs and assumed that meditative position once again. Of all people, Penny couldn’t fault him for being single-minded.
Like so many projects before it, this essence projector had wormed its way into Penny’s head, and now it demanded that all her faculties race to keep up with the ever-widening flurry of thought that spiraled around it. It had demanded that all night. She could have laid down on one of those borrowed beds at some point, but any sleep she got would have been pretend. Hell, she would have been pretending just to need the sleep. Her mind would still have been tugging at the frayed edges of this project, especially the challenge of the time-constraint—that part of this mess was actually starting to make the whole thing a little more exhilarating. So, instead of faking it, she’d just spent the night getting the core rebuilt and fully powered: it put those spiraling thoughts to use and kept her twitchy hands busy.
She’d sleep. Eventually.
Jinkke interrupted her work, asking how things had progressed in the course of the night. The tone of condescending worry had lessened some since the previous day, but it was still there.
Jinkke rejoined the effort, assuming the lead again as she applied Wepp’s power estimates to her own essence-conversion charts—after correcting her mistakes, of course. They’d need Wepp before even attempting to calibrate the processor or its newly connected power supply, but with the proposed numbers, they could at least begin preparations toward that. Jinkke kept at it, with Penny looking over her head to try to follow the permutations. Most of them made sense, but more than once Penny had to groan at the process, fidgeting with one tool or another as she gave her two cents. It was complex working a project with other people. More productive, maybe—just maybe—but a hell of a lot more complex.
Finally the wagon driver and Wepp turned up again as well, one strolling out of the lab with energy to spare, and the other like he’d been dragged kicking and screaming out of the deepest part of his sleep, because he probably had. The sun was now fully above the horizon, and the driver had decided it was time to be on their way once more. Back to the wagon almost as soon as the other two, Minkus agreed heartily that it was time to go. He launched himself back into his previous day’s seat at the edge of the wagon bed and quickly greeted the three gathered around the crates. And just like that, he returned to his meditation.
Hopping up on one of the wheels, the driver checked his cargo, even the crates that had been turned into a work surface, and then climbed onto the bench at the front of the vehicle. He called a verbal command at the golem and tugged the reins, and the wagon rambled away up the road.
