Chapter 38.2: Working Prototype

Before returning to her watch outside the ravine, Jindel had done as Captain Gelwin had instructed, taking the group beyond the rear palisade of the encampment and into the research site of an asuran krewe she called Ulta Metamagicals. The chief researcher on site was the very female they’d briefly seen in Gelwin’s tent: that square-faced Tekki. She had the humor of a granite slab, but with some cajoling, the rude, little female eventually granted them access to an abandoned corner of their facility.

The term “facility,” though, was a stretch, when it was really just a series of half-collapsed ruins carved into a ring of cliffsides that these Metamagicals people had taken over. True, they’d stuffed every possible corner of it with equipment, and there were asura technicians hunched over stonework tables everywhere, constructing something or running calculations for the asura gates scattered about. But the place didn’t look half as useful as anything Penny had seen in Rata Sum, or even Soren Draa.

The nook they were given for their work had been abandoned for some time, even since Metamagicals had moved in. Jinkke swept a layer of dust off the work table while Penny powered on a remaining generator half coated in dirt and webs. It sparked a few illumination cells to life that she then had to refocus toward their new station.

Within an hour, though, no one cared whether the space was a Rata Sum lab or an illuminated hole in a wall. Either was better than a patch of dirt or a rolling wagon, and ultimately all that mattered was getting the field projector as close to done as possible while the scouting team searched for Ventyr and Yissa. The four of them had been assured that they would be notified as soon as the scouts returned, and whatever came next, they knew their machine would be critical.

As they laid out the parts and began back into their different tasks, Wepp reiterated the concern he’d voiced in Captain Gelwin’s tent: that Ventyr must have already fallen into trouble with Kikka and her krewe. Jinkke withheld her opinions, but Penny argued with him openly. Lighting her welding torch and dialing its heat to precise specifications, she shot back rebuttals to Wepp’s reasoning without looking up. Wepp was simply wrong. He had to be. At any moment the captain and his scouts would bring her barky friend striding around the toppled stone wall, where he would sanctimoniously chew her out for her choices over the last fortnight—she wasn’t looking forward to that part, and she wouldn’t let the sylvari get away with it without a fight, but it was exactly what he would do. Afterward, Ventyr, Gelwin, and the rest of their zealot brethren would be on the march toward Kikka’s facility to get every bit of the justice their dutiful hearts desired. And at that point, the most critical piece of their weapons kit would be this projector. Wepp debated her conclusions a few times, but eventually both went silent, taken once more with their respective tasks.

When the sounds of their voices had been replaced by the woosh of the torch and Wepp’s ratchet clicks, Penny caught Jinkke watching her pensively. For maybe the first time, the worry in her lilac eyes seemed to be for Penny, not against her. Scowling, Penny looked away, knowing full well what was going through the little woman’s mind.

There was no knowing for certain whether Ventyr was safe—of course Penny knew that. There was as much honest chance that Wepp was right, and they’d be using this projector to go in after him, rather than going in alongside him. In that case, he was just one more reason Penny had to sidle up with the Vigil and knock in Kikka’s door. The little bitch deserved it. Penny deserved it, Ippi deserved it, and Vent deserved it. Hell, even Wepp deserved it—and gods knew he couldn’t join the attack himself. Still, she almost prayed to one of the gods that Ventyr would be found.

With a snort, Penny let the thoughts cement in her mind. Her stomach twisted, but this time it gave her focus as she continued the delicate work of soldering electro-magical systems with a welding torch. It wasn’t the best tool, but she could make it work. The way she felt right then, she could make anything work.

The three of them continued to work, and hours passed.

Some time later, her extinguished torch still in hand, Penny knuckled her back, stretching out the tension that had built up from all the bending it took to work alongside the asura. Even the acute focus she’d found didn’t stop the dull throb of a tired lumbar. She stepped back, lifted tinted goggles to her brow, and looked down at the parts she’d been so focused on connecting since before the sun had gone down. She couldn’t help but shake her head. Everything seemed to be in order, and moving faster than she could have anticipated, but gods if it wasn’t the goofiest looking contraption Penny had ever put together.

The night before, they’d gotten the conical essence-processor and the half-spherical projection unit wired up to a common generator. Hobbled together on the back of a moving wagon, the casing of each component looked like discolored steel patchwork, making the pair of very differently shaped parts look even stranger when side-by-side. Though the two couldn’t be put to a united purpose without also being connected to the intelligence core—what Penny had now been working on—they had at least been able to validate Wepp’s theory that one generator was capable of providing energy for both parts. That was good, since the core itself would require a dedicated power source.

Now Penny had put everything together and made all the necessary connections between the disparate hardware. She’d wired the second power generator into the intelligence core, linked the core into the processor and the field emitter, and piped the processor’s dissemination line into the energy-input manifold.

Wepp too was now standing back and looking it over with an understandable mix of awe and disgust. Altogether, the strange amalgam looked like something the kids in the Reach could have built with a soldering iron and scrap metal—it honestly wasn’t too far from what these geniuses had done. Assuming Jinkke’s reformatting of the core’s logic and objective matrices had gone according to plan, though, it was ready. Ugly, but ready.

Looking across a tabletop littered with now-connected parts that they’d moved too quickly to keep in any order, Penny tried to read Jinkke’s face in the glow of her data tablet. She could have almost traced the glyphs as they scrolled across Jinkke’s cheeks.

“Hardware’s ready,” she said, dropping the soldering iron to the table and pulling a silver coin from her pocket. She flipped the coin across her knuckles nervously. “If your end’s ready, I say it’s time to test this thing.”

Professor Vaff had estimated that a working prototype would take them a fortnight, and here Penny was proposing they plug in a tube of magic juice and test the thing the very moment she’d completed slapping all the parts together, only a few days later. It was foolhardy, even for her, but they had to keep this thing moving. They all knew it, and the warily agreeable expressions she got in return from Wepp and Jinkke reinforced that.

“I’d say ready is a relative assessment,” Wepp mumbled, “determined by a variable correlation of need and available resources.” He slipped toward Jinkke, spying the readouts on her tablet from over her shoulder. “But there may be no closer to ready we can get at this point.” His attention shifted from the tablet to its bearer, who still said nothing.

Sometime in the course of their travel, Penny and Wepp had both begun deferring to Jinkke. Since her first day in Rata Sum, Penny had learned more about asuran engineering and magitechnical theory than she would have ever thought possible, but all that really did was reinforce the fact that Jinkke knew more than she did, vastly more. About the principles, about the applications, and about this particular project, the sometimes stuck-up asura had forgotten more knowledge than Penny had learned—something Penny would absolutely never admit.

Jinkke sighed and glanced at Minkus, who’d been silently meditating in a corner since they’d settled into their work. Worry dressed her face.

Penny glanced back as well, but worry wasn’t what she felt at the sight of her friend hunched in the shadowed corner with eyes closed and silent meditations flowing off his lips. The nervousness hadn’t left her, but there was something else too.

Gods, did she miss Minkus?

He’d been right there the whole time, and somehow she missed him: his chatter, his insistence on helping—all of it. What was wrong with her?

Penny shook the thought away at the same time Jinkke came out of her own thoughts. Wepp stared at the both curiously.

“Wepp is correct,” Jinkke said, shifting their attention back to the project. “Depending on what that scout team returns with, we may have impossibly little time in which to finish this, and there is little, if any risk in activating the system with the lyssal isolate connected. We won’t be wasting our real essence, and even in a worst-case scenario, the field produced should do little more than generate a glamour of some kind. Harmless to both us and the machinery—probably.”

“There are much worse worst-case scenarios than that.” Wepp scowled and crossed his arms. He’d taken to doing that for emphasis.

“Not probable ones.” Jinkke groaned, nearly glaring, though she refused to turn and face him. “I don’t care whose law states that a chance for spontaneous combustion is always present.” Setting her data tablet aside, she approached the collection of interconnected parts. Leaning forward, she inspected Penny’s connections.

“Are there any further, reasonable arguments?” she asked, tugging a little at one of the circuit connections.

Wepp harrumphed but shook his head. Penny did the same, glowering a little at Jinkke’s apparent mistrust of her soldering and weld points.

“Oh, don’t look so insulted,” Jinkke chided, catching Penny’s gaze. “It’s just good practice to reassess each other’s work. I would ask you to do likewise if you could read glyphs.” The hint of a smile touched her lips, which should have set Penny off further, except that smile had the cast of one of her brother’s grins: playful, not condescendingly asuran.

Stepping back again, Jinkke took up her tablet once more and keyed in a few changes before extending the thing toward Wepp, who silently looked it over.  He mumbled something about remaining, unavoidable risk, but glanced up and nodded approval.

Jinkke smiled subtly again, gesturing Penny toward the activation switch on one of the two generators. “I think it’s probably fitting if you perform the principle activation.”

Jinkke made room for her beside the two generators, and Penny stepped in. She halted the dance of the coin across her knuckles and stuffed it back into her hip pocket, instead extending her now empty hand toward the generators. “All ready?”

“Wait!” an excited voice called from across the room. Minkus popped up off the floor. He rubbed his eyes, coming out of whatever state his meditation had gotten him into, and groggily strode toward them, regaining his bounce as he went. “Is this the first activation? I— I didn’t miss it, did I?”

Penny tried and failed to suppress the grin that inched across her lips. “Oh, look who’s come out of his trance to join us.”

The comment slowed him a step, and a flash of rose touched his cheeks, but the embarrassment seemed to pass before he’d even reached the table. He edged up and scanned the collection of interconnected parts with wide, round eyes. “I didn’t miss it, did I?”

“No, Big Brother,” Jinkke said. “You’ve arrived in precisely the nick of time...” She trailed off, running mental calculations before gesturing at Minkus and Wepp. “But the two of you may want to distance yourselves at least a few steps, for safety.” Wepp nodded an emphatic agreement, and each of them took several steps away from the device, though Penny had a hard time believing a few yards would protect them from— whatever came next.

She couldn’t think about that, though.

“Are we ready now?” Penny asked, flexing fingers that still hovered beside the switches protruding from the two generators. Almost in sync, the others nodded, and she counted backwards from three.

She flicked both switches into their upward positions, and the generators whirred to life. Two small threads of smoke rose into the musty air, and the float in the extract reservoir immediately started to drop, marking the flow of lyssal isolate into the processing unit. Breathing in the room seemed to stop, and Penny took a tentative step back. The three asura, however, leaned closer, and a faint purple light began to glimmer in the input line between the processor and emitter.

Penny continued her unintentional movement away from the projector, pulling her goggles back down as the magenta glow pulsed brighter and brighter along that stretch of accordioned, rubber tubing. A little more slowly than expected, the energy drawn out of the isolate by the processor was passing through the input manifold and collecting in the emitter’s capacitor.

Jinkke flashed glances back and forth between the device and her tablet. She straightened, and a smile spread across her face.

“Well?” Wepp asked.

“Everything is operating precisely to expectation.” Her grin deepened, and she brushed hair out of her face to see the tablet’s details more clearly. “Perhaps even better than our expectations. The objective matrix in particular has taken well to its reformatting. It’s interfacing with the processor as though all it’s ever done is magic-extraction.”

The emitter screeched loudly, and the glow in the input line diminished, matched suddenly by a similar light filling the focal iris at the top of the small half-dome, which began to turn. It screeched to life at an even higher pitch.

Penny watched through her dark lenses, knowing that new glow to be the starting point of the energy field itself. She glanced at the others, who were all visible to her in the increasingly bright, purple glow of the device coming to life. The rest of them shielded their eyes, but Penny couldn’t watch them for long.

The light suddenly blinked out then burst even brighter, an arched ribbon of light cutting through the air alongside the device and down to the stone table beneath it. That sizzling line split, spreading out in opposite directions and leaving a shimmering dome in its wake as each side encircled the piecemeal contraption at its center.

Both sides of the field sped toward their opposite meeting point, and Penny’s eyes went wide behind her lenses: the dome of iridescent energy was racing toward the cable connecting the core to Jinkke’s tablet. How had they not considered that the field would have to pass across that? What would happen when it did? For Grenth’s sake, when forming, the field could theoretically have deadly effects on living things, but they hadn’t even stopped to consider what it would do to technical instruments they’d be using.

Her heart racing, Penny ducked and covered her eyes, but the crackling faded, dissipating into a steady, high hum, and Penny peeked through her fingers. She looked first at Minkus, whose dopey grin had spread nearly the width of his face, and then at the other asura. Everyone was alright, and at their center, holding all their attention, was the emitter, fully encased in a translucent, magenta dome that warped and bent the image of the device inside it, like looking at it through a hundred purple gems. Beside it Jinkke beamed, scanning the readouts on her tablet, which was apparently still connected to the emitter. Penny almost sighed in relief. Almost.

Gods, she’d known she was in over her head, but now? Well, now it felt real: the device, their plan—all of it. It was real.

“Well, that’s unexpected,” Jinkke mused, snapping Penny’s attention back to the world around her.

“What?” she demanded. “What’s unexpected?” Penny stepped up alongside the asura, cautiously gazing down at the tablet, but that wasn’t what Jinkke was gawking at. She followed her blond friend’s attention.

Wepp made his way around to them as well, and holding his position on the opposite side of the work table, Minkus reached for the largest wrench his hand could find and fell into a readied posture. All of them stared at the thing inside the dome: the thing that was no longer a collection of scrabbled boxes and wires and tanks and tubes. No, the emitter had vanished, and in its place stood a small, stone creature.