Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

Chapter 132 – Workshop in the Sky

Emily and Podrick return to a warm welcome aboard Calypso. The moment they step through the ship’s main hatch, they’re met with the barrels of several guns. Podrick steps back in surprise, but Emily simply walks forward unconcerned.

“Hey,” she says with a small wave before reaching up to drop her hood and pull the scarf from her face.

The guns lower as Anton, Angela, and Ash let out sighs of relief.

“You should have taken that off before coming in,” Anton grumbles.

“Sorry,” Emily responds unapologetically as Podrick drops his hood and finally enters the ship fully.

“Did you get everything?” Anton asks the boy.

“Of course! I even saved you some silver,” Podrick answers proudly, tossing him the storage pouch.

“Thanks,” Anton says, shutting the hatch behind them before turning his attention back to Emily. “So, how’s it looking out there?”

“Strange,” she answers with a shrug. “There’s a large bounty on my head, but no public knowledge as to where I am. Also, there’s nothing being spread publicly about this ship carrying me, but I get the feeling we’ll be targeted if we try to enter a city.”

“Will there be people pursuing us then?”

“I don’t know. I managed to make contact with someone in the capital, but all they said was that the royal family had been questioning my friends to work out why I’ve turned traitor. They didn’t mention large forces moving out of the capital, so I’m guessing they’re waiting for us to try leaving the country before they attack us.”

“Okay,” Anton says resolutely. “We’re changing our route a little then.”

Emily raises a curious brow as he turns to Angela and continues.

“Change our heading to north-north-east, we’re going to stop off in Folkard.”

“Route B?” Angela asks, receiving a nod in reply.

Seemingly satisfied with the answer, Angela turns around and heads towards the bridge.

“Route B?” Emily asks with intrigue, noticing Podrick’s excited grin at the mention of his home city.

“While you’ve been gone, we’ve been discussing our best path out of the country,” Anton says, nodding towards Ash and the empty corridor Angela left down. “Route B was for the scenario where stopping in a city would be dangerous. We still need to stop somewhere we can refuel properly: we only managed to refill half of our stocks at Eimdon because we had to leave so soon. Also, we want to get rid of the products in our storage to lower the ship’s weight for the sea crossing and gather some funds for getting set up on the other side. So, Route B takes us up to Folkard because we can stop off at the Rockworth shipyard. They’re outside the city and friendly, so we should be safe there for a bit hopefully.”

“It will also give us some time and space to refit the ship’s outer plating like you wanted,” Ash adds.

Nodding, Emily pushes away from the wall she was leaning against.

“That makes sense. Speaking of, I should get started preparing the ship's upgrades,” she says, walking towards the storage at the back of the ship and waving over her shoulder. “Give me a shout if you need me.”

As she’s disappearing around the corner, Emily hears a hurried set of footsteps coming after her.

“Taken to following me within the ship now too?” she asks Podrick without looking back.

“You said I could watch you make the ship’s modifications!” he argues with a defensive tone.

“Ha,” Emily scoffs with a small smile pulling at the corner of her lips. “That I did. Well, if you’re going to watch, you might as well help. Go to the room I awakened you in and move everything out, please. I’m going to go grab my workshop to set up in there.”

Podrick nods and runs on ahead as Emily changes course to head towards her room. She grabs the spatial storage bag she left behind and quickly makes her way to join Podrick. By the time she arrives, he’s almost finished clearing the space for her, with only three barrels left by the door.

“Perfect,” Emily mutters, glancing around the open space.

It’s slightly smaller than her old room in The Dome, but without the bed taking up a wall. Emily flips open her spatial backpack and reaches in with her mana, picking out the machines from her workshop and pulling them out in the form of a dense purple mist that fills the room before solidifying into wood and metal.

Glancing at the machines, a small frown creases her brow.

The plating is going to be too big for most of these to be helpful. I may need to strengthen some of my handheld tools.

Her eyes drift around and land on the Steam Source, her magical steam generator.

The easiest way will be to upgrade that.

She pulls up the blueprint as a floating virtual page in her notebook and starts pulling the design apart.

“If I add a collection array here… make this a closed system… change that to a normal fire crystal,” she mutters to herself rapidly, quickly forming the generator into a piece more suitable to her current technological and magical prowess.

¯¯¯¯¯

[Steam Source {Gen.1}]

[Type:] Magic Steam Generator

[Tier:] 1

[Rank:] E

[Description:] A magical steam generator.

[Effect:] When activated, generates vast quantities of steam

_____

Emily finishes her second iteration of the steam generator as Podrick finishes his task and shuts the door behind himself. Without sparing him a glance, she starts pulling the machine apart and gathering the pieces to modify or remake. She pulls some pipes and raw metal ingots out of her storage, using a few spells to form them into workable parts.

Podrick watches in silence, enchanted by Emily’s delicate use of her power as she works. After finishing the basic bodywork of the machine, she brings out an assortment of crystals: two lesser air, a normal fire, and a normal water. She lays them with the lesser fire and water crystals that were in use in the generator before, picking up her engraving tool and setting to work carving runes into the metalwork around several sockets connected by channels of white iron.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

Her focus on her work never wavers, and she doesn’t even look up as Podrick leaves and returns with their meals for the evening. She finishes the runework and sets down her carving tool as Podrick is halfway through his food.

“Are you done?” he asks as he notices her sitting back and admiring her work.

“I should be,” she responds with a satisfied nod. “I just need to put the crystals in and turn it on.”

Emily follows through with her words, placing the crystals into place inside the generator, sending a burst of mana into a few of them, and closing up the access panels. She steps back and gestures for Podrick to come over.

“When I say, press that button,” she instructs him, pointing to a large bronze button in the centre of a control panel on the front of the generator.

Podrick nods and stands at the ready as Emily moves to the side of the machine and hooks up a handheld steam cutter. Stepping back from the generator, she makes eye contact with Podrick.

“Ready!”

On her cue, Podrick pushes the button and immediately the pressure gauge on the steam cutter jumps up. Emily watches it climb with a smile, squeezing the trigger on the cutter and letting a powerful stream of vapourised water and particulate fly out, clattering against the floor a few metres away.

To test, Emily pulls out a thin sheet of metal and places the cutter against it. She pulls the trigger and traces a line, cutting slowly, leaving an empty channel in the tool’s wake.

“It looks good. Now twist the button counterclockwise for me,” Emily says, watching the pressure gauge again with her spare hand sitting on The Clock’s pouch.

Podrick twists the button and it pops out. Immediately, the pressure in the system drops.

“Perfect.” Emily nods, relaxing her free hand.

“Did you not think it would turn off?” Podrick asks with a confused glance as Emily walks over to start connecting the generator to the other machines lining the walls.

“Kind of,” Emily says with a shrug. “I knew it would turn off, I wasn’t worried about that. But I was worried it might blow up when it did.”

“What?!” Podrick shouts, jumping away from the generator. “It might have exploded? Is that why you got me to press the button?”

“This generator is less a machine and more a magical artefact,” Emily explains. “There was a low chance, but if it did have a problem, only I’d be able to contain and deal with it. So yes, I kept my distance when turning it on. Don’t worry, you would have been fine.”

After a few seconds of glaring at her in silence, Podrick sighs and drops his head in defeat.

“Fine,” he grumbles, taking the pipe and wrench that Emily hands him and copying her in connecting the machines to the steam system. “What’s the difference between a machine and an artefact then? It looks like it’s pumping out steam like a normal generator.”

“There isn’t really a proper separation as far as I know. So far, I haven’t seen or heard of anyone else trying to mix the two like I do. If I had to give a difference though, machines are multiple moving parts working together to achieve a purpose, while an artefact is a single magical construct that achieves its purpose alone. Take that with a grain of salt though. I just meant that the button there is messing with the magic array inside the machine, so any backlash would be magical in nature,” Emily says, moving over to the generator, flipping open the main chamber and gesturing for Podrick to come look at it. “I wanted the system to be activatable by a non-mage because my last design required a manual mana injection to turn it on, so I had to come up with a way of making a button to activate an array. I don’t know any runes that respond to non-magical contact yet, so I opted to change the circle holding the array instead.”

She points to a moving panel within the generator, where a line of white iron is split in the middle with a part of it shunted aside by the panel.

“The entire array for generating steam is completed other than this line here. When you press the button, that panel moves down and completes it. Then the array is activated by the mana being pushed into it by the gathering array down here,” Emily says, pointing to the green crystals outside the generator on the bottom.

“Okay,” Podrick says with a confused tilt of his head. “What are runes and mana?”

“Runes are these letters.” She points out a tiny rune carved into the metal. “They’re basically the building blocks of magic. Think of them like components in a machine while mana is the fuel source.”

Emily shuts the generator and pats Podrick on the back as she returns to work, setting up the piping system. After an hour, they finish up and settle down for Emily to drink her cold soup. Angela knocks on the door and enters as Emily’s halfway done. She asks Emily to take over control of the ship for the night and gives her a warning about an armed mine in their path, telling her how to avoid it.

“There you go, I’ve taken over the controls now so Tony knows he can sleep,” Emily says after Angela’s done with her explanation, using some bread to scrape her bowl clean. “Is that all?”

“Yeah, that’s everything. Thanks,” Angela says, turning to leave before pausing and looking back at Emily with a conflicted look on her face. “Hey, Emily?”

“Yeah?” she responds, glancing up from her bowl.

“I’m sorry about before. I blew up on you when I shouldn’t have.”

“Don’t worry about it. Anton and I didn’t explain anything to you, so you couldn’t have understood. Besides,” Emily says with a small grin. “I respect you for confronting me, despite how rightfully scared of me you were.”

“Ha,” Angela scoffs, reaching down and ruffling Emily’s hair. “Me? Scared of you? In your dreams, kid.”

“Oh? But you should be.”

Angela’s hand freezes and a small shiver runs down her spine as she stares at Emily’s unsettling, emotionless mask, but a moment later she gives one last swipe of her hand before turning around with a small chuckle.

“Don’t forget the course changes!” she says, waving over her shoulder as she steps out of the door. “I left notes on my seat in the bridge if you need a reminder.”

Emily sets down her empty bowl and stands up as the sound of Angela’s footsteps fade down the hallway, running a hand through her hair with a buzz of machina and returning it to its normal state. Podrick notices her moving and scrambles up from the floor in front of the Steam Source, tucking a small notebook into his pocket.

“What are you making first?” he asks as he walks over.

“Metal,” Emily responds, ignoring the look of confusion she gets in return and taking out several large chunks of raw material from her backpack.

She spreads out everything from steel and copper to black iron and mythril, covering the floor in front of them. The moment she finishes, Emily raises both hands and casts a spell she created during her months of frozen time in The Glade, forgemaster.

A torrent of runes pours from her arms, wrapping the metals in a large magic circle of orange and silver. Several threads of mana stretch from Emily’s fingers, floating at the ready as the spell casting finishes.

Podrick watches in silent awe as Emily starts weaving her fingers deftly, flicking around the thin tendrils of mana to manipulate the scattered metals. She selects a few and picks them up with a couple of strong silver threads before slicing off a piece from each with a burning orange thread. She gathers together multiple chunks of different metals before wrapping them in a cocoon of threads, a blend of the two colours, and leaving it floating above the workshop as she moves on to a different combination.

Emily repeats the process over and over again, trying multiple ratio blends as she combines dozens of different variations. She soon fills the room with glowing cocoons and completely clears the floor of her prepared metals. Next, she removes the first alloy she made from its cocoon, finding a single orb of perfectly mixed, molten metal waiting for her.

She takes the orb and flattens it down into a thin plate, a centimetre thick, matching of the plating on the outside of Calypso’s hull. The moment the glowing metal is in shape, Emily wraps it tightly with silver threads and lays it down on the floor.

The room slowly heats up as she works, making plate after plate of armour, and sorting them into organised stacks. By the time Emily has finished, Podrick is dripping with sweat, watching her with a horrified look as she calmly dispels forgemaster, instantly breaking all the threads around the plates and revealing her finished work.

“Why do you need so many of these?” Podrick asks, lifting one of the sheets of metal from its stack.

“So,” Emily says, pulling out the Spitter and screwing its silencer onto the end before taking the plate from his hand, “I can test them.”

She clenches her fingers on the plate in a vice-like grip and points her gun at it before pulling the trigger. A bullet silently leaves the chamber and slams into the plate with a loud pop, ripping a hole clean through it and flying into a barrier of spinning wind that Emily conjures at the last second.

Podrick barely has time to process her actions, staring at her in disbelief with his hands halfway to covering his ears.

“Crazy,” he mutters as Emily carefully inspects the bullet hole as if nothing happened.