Fidget carefully lowered another nut onto the table. The castle was getting big, now. Almost half a meter high. She'd rebuilt it from the foundations up last week after finding another cache of the big ones in the old village, as wide as her thumb, a solid and weighty foundation for the new walls and towers.
She'd been pondering where to put the next one for twenty minutes of near-motionlessness when there was a knock at the station's door.
Daemons didn't knock, and were as likely to go through a wall as through a door. The white-robed weirdos might knock, or they might not, but she hadn't seen any of them for months. Maybe a farmer? There were two or three of them downslope, growing flax for clothes and sunflowers for oil, although they had their own windmill and rarely needed to use the station's.
"It's unlocked," she called out.
The doll that came through the door was not a farmer. She shrugged back a rain cloak in Mechanism green and gold, and walked into the station with the self-assuredness of a princess, long blue-purple hair spilling out. Hair wasn't trivial to make these days. The doll was either lucky, far behind the front lines, or just recently out of storage. But then, this doll was familiar, and Prism was all three.
"Fidget. Glad to see the Daemons haven't got you yet."
Fidget carefully placed the nut she was holding, forming a crenellation on the corner of a battlement. Only then did she respond.
"It's because I don't stick myself where I'm likely to get got. You're too smart to come here and ask me to break that habit, right, Prism?"
"Chime's in trouble. She went to follow up on a report of functional machinery in an arcology not far from here. She should have been back now. It's been days."
"Isn't the entire point of your weird little club that you have, you know, other dolls to join you in your folly? Where's your backup?"
"The Mechanism's spread thin right now. We're holding, but that's it. Chime said we needed an edge. Said she didn't want to pull anyone else off. Said she'd be fine."
"Stupid. Thought she was better than that. So, then, why aren't you off looking for her?"
"She's always spoken well of you. You two walked out of the equatorial zone together, thousands of klicks of Daemon-haunted jungle with fewer winding stations than I have fingers, everyone knows that. She said that you're faster with a sword than anyone she's ever met, maybe even Hyperia."
"Hyperia may be legend, but I guess the legend doesn't say that her bladework was always more impressive for its endurance than its speed, Prism. And that's not an answer."
"But you've traveled with Hyperia! And that's just it. I haven't. I'm just some doll that Chime found in a ruin on an island somewhere," the newcomer spat out, and the self-assuredness broke down, her body language becoming stiff. "I… I'll go myself, if I have to, but I know I might not come back. I just…"
Fidget could not have said no after that. It was a bad habit and it was going to get her broken someday, but that wobble in the other doll's voice was all it took to seal her fate.
"I'm not Mechanism. You understand that? You don't tell me what to do. And since you're the one asking for the favor, you listen when I tell you what needs doing. All right?"
Prism nodded.
Fidget centered the muscled form of the daemon in her spotting scope, spun the focus wheel until it resolved into crispness, mottled teal skin and distinctive purple dorsal spikes, powerful triangular head. It turned, slowly, but didn't notice her. It wasn't alone.
"Two spinebacks," she muttered. "Maybe two hundred meters, smack in the middle of the road. Rather take them in the open than detour through the woods to either side and risk getting caught in the brush, especially in a pass like this."
- Fidget winces as the first shot misses
- the spinebacks come straight for them
- she cleaves the first one in half easily, but the second one goes for Prism
- Prism drops her bow
- she freezes up, the most common doll panic reaction by far
- Fidget hauls the spineback off her
- Prism runs
- Fidget is now holding an angry spineback and has no free hand for a weapon
- Prism only ran to get clear enough to use her bow on the spineback
- Bam. One thru the eye.
- "Chime always said, just because one thing went wrong doesn't mean you blew it, it just means one thing went wrong."
- "She always was an optimist. But, in this case, she would have been right."
- daemon bone is a milky translucent substance, cuttable after death, and protean, melding with materials around it. Fidget used a little to fix a scar on the outside of her thigh.
- "We can't carry this. Mark it with a flag, maybe we'll find it on the way back, if daemon scavengers don't get it. Not a lot of other dolls up here. Daemon bone reacts to intent; we can't take it with us, because it'll turn into something eventually. They didn't teach you this in the Mechanism?"
- "We don't usually have leftovers in the field. Anything that gets close to Central… there are storage bunkers, away from Central proper where nobody goes. Daemon corpses get dragged there. I've never been in one."
- "Huh. That's new." Fidget resolved to look into this if she ever found herself near Central again. Nobody really knew anything about daemons that they hadn't found out through trial and error. Or at least nobody really knew anything and admitted it. There were dolls that had been awake through the Vanishing, or claimed to be. She wasn't one of them. So who was stockpiling dead daemons, and why?
- "Found it. Last one on the charts."
- "Make a note of the date so the next doll to use the charts knows it's still here."
- "Already on it. Chime would be disappointed if I didn't."
- "So she did teach you a few things."
- "She teaches everybody! She's the first person most new recruits see."
- "She really took to it, huh. Fit in like a missing gear."
- "I guess so. Hard to imagine the Mechanism before her."
- Fidget plugs into the winding station. Flashback…
- Chime hoists a bulky sniper rifle, silhouetted in a hilly pass against the rising sun.
- "Wind's picking up. Those clouds we saw from the tower yesterday should be here in minutes."
- (Daemons don't like rain, and generally go to ground during it. Likewise, they're not fond of water in general, and there are few seagoing daemons.)
- Fidget checks her swords.
- "Blades holding up?"
- "The hyperdiamond shards are, until they aren't. You know hyperdiamond: enjoy it while you have it, but never ever count on it. The backups are junk, but they're steel, they'll still be junk tomorrow, and the next day, and they'll continue to be junk until I can find something to put a decent edge on them, but they won't break easy." She shrugged. "Blunt blades just means you gotta swing harder."
- There it was: that music-box laugh. Chime's namesake.
- "Amused?"
- "Always. Our existence in this world is absurd enough. But you make it just a bit brighter."
- Fidget quickly changed the subject. "Your supplies okay? I can't believe you still have ammo for that thing."
- "It seems to have been relatively common equipment before the Vanishing. Given the size, it may be a mercy that we don't remember why. I find reloads here and there, and I try very hard not to miss… but I'm running low," she admitted. "Eighty left. And then it's back to a bit of carbon fiber strung with polymer bridge cable, and some pointy bits of rebar. Lucky we got the rain to get us through the worst part of the flats. They'll never see us."
- Fidget cast her eyes to Chime. Had to say it. "You're my lucky charm, Chime. By myself… might just have wound down and let whatever happens next happen. But two? Two feels like a chance."
- Chime grinned. "How many klicks, Fidget?"
- "1100 behind us…"
- "…700 left. And we're still here. And here. We. Go!"
- Fidget snapped back to full consciousness with the click-click-click of her tension governor. Full wind and ready to go.
- Prism was checking her equipment. Good girl.
"I'm so glad you're here," Chime said. "This kind of irony needs to be shared to be properly appreciated."
Fidget winced. This wasn't like her. Chime had taken worse than this in the jungle — they both had — but sarcasm from Chime was vanishingly rare.
"Look, there's no need for that. We have some common spares, and a few daemons crossed our path. We'll haul you outta here, no problem, you'll be walking back to the Mechanism's bunker just like you walked out of it."
"You don't get it. This room's full of what I think are Vanished records. Same symbols we see on road signs, on buildings, on tools. Handful of working gadgets, even. I think this was meant to be some sort of learning center, or a museum — the same symbols are on the gadget screens and on these stacks and stacks of folded textile. This is stuff I've never seen. It dwarfs the museum that I found you in, Prism, in terms of written material."
"So what?"
"So what? Think! What do we use to write, Prism? I taught you myself."
"You taught me map-symbols, and Thea's alphabet, and some Vanished glyphs."
"Right. So where did those come from? How did we get them?"
"Map symbols are pictures, and Thea's alphabet, well, Thea made that up, and Vanished glyphs, we got those from looking at Vanished writing. Like the distance symbol. And the one for 'empty'."
"So there are more glyphs on one of these pages than I have ever seen in one place. The answers are all here. Or they might be. But we can't read them."
"Oh," Prism said, a small, flat acknowledgement.
APV: armored photovoltaic panel. Common building element. Self-cleaning nanoscale coating and tough surface has kept many of them working long after the Vanishing, providing trickle power to old buildings.
"I'm not giving up," Chime said. "If anything, I'd rather hold this place than HQ…"
the file ends here. it might, conceivably, have another go at this someday.
