Kevin welded the torn plates of clocksteel together, wearing a heavy apron and welding mask. His patient groaned as he kept his little fire-spitting rod on a thin sheet of metal for too long, “Sorry about that,” he said, keeping his face down and doing his best to not face the metallic monster he was treating.
Said monster, looking down at him, chuckled, “You’re uncomfortable,” she said, her voice echoey and distant, “Relax, I don’t bite.”
Kevin winced at her words, regretting how rude he was being, “Sorry… I come from far off and… I never knew people could be so cruel like this.”
The woman entombed in the warcasket held her hand up to her masked face, “That’s fine. I never thought what I did was bad enough to be warcasketable. But that’s what happens with nobles. They put you in a tin can forever with the most flimsy of excuses.” She groaned as Kevin welded another plate to her arm, “Thanks, hun.”
“Don’t. This isn’t… right. I don’t know why we can’t just take you out of this thing already. Most of the nobles are dead and even more of Gribnik’s army is against this,” he remarked, splashing some magic water onto the hot clocksteel. He was told that the water reinforced the rapidly-cooled metal even more than it usually does. Supposedly.
“That’s not what’s important, wrenchy,” she said, “Even if we were able to get Gribnik to agree, which they probably won’t even consider, we still need these suits to fight. These metal struts are our bones now. These gears are our muscles and these mana conduits are our veins. The only thing that our fleshy interiors do anymore is feed the machine around us with mana. And pilot the thing. If we got taken out, we’d be frail, nearly dead, and unable to fight. And we won’t back down.”
Kevin stayed silent after she finished, quietly finishing his work and secretly adding a few runes to the interior of the armor. Doing so was very illegal, but no one stopped him, even as he did it in the middle of the mechanic’s hall, within the keep of the fortress, “Alright, you’re ready to go back. Don’t wreck my work, please,” he joked, slapping her metallic back lightly.
The warcasket giggled, standing up and taking her newly-made casket rifle, courtesy of the engineers of Mount Averus, “Thanks, wrenchy. Don’t work yourself to death in here, either.” The woman jogged off, passing a group of very large, extremely mutated-- which was what the earthlings called people with a large number of appearance-altering Traits-- men and women. On their shoulders was another warcasket, his armor shredded and torn to pieces.
The group, seeing his little station open, rushed over and dropped the man before him, “Wrenchy, this guy needs your help. He’s in a bad way,” the leading chimeric, who looked like a snake-person, said, “We already sent for a healer to keep him alive, so can you please repair the rest?”
Kevin looked at the man and saw how bad it really was. His arms were both nearly stripped of their armor, with nothing but a thin, dented layer of mundane steel laying between the internal components of the warcasket and the open air. His chest was blown open and blood stained the brass-like shell. It was so bad that he could even see the shattered remains of his shell rise and fall with his breathing. His legs were not spared, but they were left in much better condition than his arms or chest, only having a few deep gashes running along the two of them. Kevin grimaced, working his jaw in an attempt to articulate any number of ways to tell them that they need a healer first, but he eventually decided that he could work on the arms and legs before the healer arrived, “I can do the arms and legs, but then I’m going to wait for the healer to show up; I don’t want to get in their way,” he said, grabbing his welder and extra plates of clocksteel as the group of chimerics rushed off.
He got to work, welding the armor to the arms in thin layers, adding a few runes to the middle layers in case of emergency. Just as he was about to finish the top layer of the right arm, someone came close to him, “Oh, good, you’re here,” he said, not looking up, “Can you start healing as soon as possible? I need to take care of his legs, so I’ll stay out of your way.”
There was a pause, the stranger not moving, leading Kevin to look up. The woman in front of him was a chimeric, but the only thing that tipped him off to that fact were the red scales around her eyes and the wings on her back, which twitched up and down awkwardly. He suspected that they were new additions, judging by the psycho’s, Natasha’s, first physical mutation, “I’m not a healer,” she said quietly, as if disturbed by the peace of the mechanic’s hall. It was understandable, seeing as how the hall was disconnected from the outside world by a noise-isolating barrier. Courtesy of an independent mage and rune-maker, “I’m off for a few hours, and I heard that he got hit badly.”
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Kevin nodded, moving on to his other arm to apply the last plate of armor, “He’s not doing so hot, I’ll admit, but he could be doing worse. The innermost armor probably blunted most of the force, so he didn’t get eviscerated, but he’s still hurt. That medic better hurry up or he’s going to die,” he remarked, shaking his head.
He felt something smack into the back of his head, dinging off of his welding mask painfully. He recoiled from the blow and turned behind him, only to see a familiar face, “Calm down, you bastard, I’m right here,” Natasha said, grinning at him. Kevin spared a single glance at the massive scorpion’s tail hovering behind her, along with its stinger, but refocused onto the woman herself.
Suddenly, her words came crashing down on him as he realized what she just said, “No… don’t tell me you’re the healer…” he said, shaking his head, “You don’t even know magic, let alone healing magic.”
Natasha smacked him over the head once again, using the blunt side of her stinger, “Don’t be like that! I’m perfectly capable of healing him! I have my stinger!” she triumphantly proclaimed.
Kevin shook his head, moving to the legs with more clocksteel plates, “Healers don’t usually stab their patients. Or poison them,” he said.
“I don’t have poison up here,” she said, “I took a body part from the ‘Sting-Leech,’ a parasite who uses a tiny stinger to inject a fast-acting regenerating agent into their host, preventing death. I’m giving him this since I’m off for the next sleep cycle and I’ve got a few doses left. Now let me do my job, please.”
She moved to the side of the warcasket and branished her stinger above the man. With a sudden movement, she plunged the thing, an inch long at most, into his chest, where his heart was. The stinger contracted, injecting the agent into the man’s body. Then it did so again. Then a third time. Natasha pulled back and wiped sweat from her head with a sigh, “What was that?” Kevin asked, “I thought you were only giving him a single dose.”
She shrugged in response, leaning against the pillar in the corner of his designated area, “Well, he seemed like he wasn’t doing so hot, and you can’t really overdose on this stuff, so I gave him everything I had.”
The chimeric shifted as she stood in front of the warcasket, “Will he be alright?” she asked, “I can probably find a… friend to help him.”
Natasha smiled at the woman, “He’ll be fine. If he doesn’t bounce back with all the healing agent I gave him, I doubt many people could help him. Thanks for the offer, though. What’s your name?”
“Cecilia,” she said, “And this is my bonehawk,” she added. Kevin looked up to see a bone white bird perched on her shoulder, glaring down at the warcasket. Before being dropped into Granulous, he was quite close to his neighbor’s dog, and he knew that, sometimes, an animal could pick up on social cues that no one thought they could. To him, the bird looked very jealous of the person in the warcasket. For whatever reason.
“You didn’t name him?” Kevin asked, noticing that the man’s chest was beginning to heal, “He seems pretty close to you.”
Cecilia smiled softly, “He is. But every time I tried to name him, he shook his head, getting mad at me if I called him the name.”
Kevin nodded, moving on to the chest armor of the warcasket in front of him, “Sounds like he’s pretty smart, then,” he said, “How many names did you go through before you gave up?”
Cecilia sat down next to Natasha, who had somehow dozed off in the middle of the conversation, and leaned up against the same pillar, “I think it was… twenty?” The bone hawk shook his head, nudging his head upwards, “More?” He nodded, “Then thirty,” she said, the bird nodding.
Kevin chuckled as he continued welding, “He is smart, then. So, what’s going on out there? We kinda become isolated down here when we can’t hear anything going on.”
Cecilia frowned, looking down, “They haven’t pushed past the outer wall, but that’s only because they’re keeping the new flying ones in reserve. If they brought out anything that can fly, then we would be screwed. Other than that, we’ve been seeing some very strange Clockworks on the field. Multi-limbed monsters, strange emulations of different Traits, new weapons, all sorts of stuff only half of it is even effective, half of that being dangerous and half of even that being scary. But it’s enough. Sleep hours are being cut and the necromancers are finally bringing out their abominations of nature. It’s chaotic, let’s just say that.”
Kevin nodded, welding the last plate into place and standing, “Alright, thanks for talking, but this guy’s done. Make sure you take him with you. I doubt I’ll have a minute to rest,” he said, packing up his tools scattered around to be ready for the next warcaske in need of repair. Cecilia nodded and silently picked up the metal man’s upper body, dragging him out from the hall without even garnering a glance. Kevin rubbed his eyes, stretching and shaking his head.
He still could not get used to normal people being able to drag multi-ton piles of dead weight around. He did not even think about it when he said it, but he was simply tired. He sat down beside Natasha and closed his eyes to rest a bit. It was short lived. Soon enough, another warcasket limped over to his station and asked for a repair, more specifically to his gun. It had taken a round from some big Clockwork and needed to be repaired. Kevin agreed and got back to work, using the blueprint to parse its mechanisms. It was hard work, but it was needed. Especially with enemies at the gates.