Picking up a magic circuit imprinter, I huff in amusement and look it over, my muscle memory is only sort of gone. Finding the on button, I am amazed by how it still works and laugh a little. Moving the glowing end towards the nearest flat surface, I adjust the nozzle, bringing its light from a pale orange to something closer to God's light. I doodle a quick and easily understood expression so I have something to smile back at.
The magic forced into the metal glows brightly initially and dies down. I knowingly didn't make it correctly, I just wanted to be able to make something with the tool. Putting it down, I move on to some of the other things until I arrive at a sealed glass container. Grabbing onto the locked handle, I twist it and let it loose.
On four separate lines, strong metal string secures dozens of dripping power gems. The concoction doesn't have the glow that it should have, but, maybe I can fix that. Moving the amulet closer, I call upon its power and try to have it interact with anything here. A glow seems to enter the liquid, only, when I move the amulet away it becomes clear that it was just it.
I sigh, putting the thing back and snap my eyes up when some kind of alarm sets off. There's an echo to it and yet, it still sounds like it came from within here. Baltanthan is right next to me, it can't have been him so what was it? I look at the amulet and watch its divine glow.
The gem at its crimson core, it doesn't have a name but, sometimes, I feel like calling it Iderim's Eye. It doesn't look like an eye in the slightest, I just can't think of anything else. I idly think about it on occasion. With how important this amulet is, it's hard to ignore it even when I was refusing to use its power.
"You remind me of a child visiting your shop." Baltanthan huffs and I smile back at him, following along when he starts to idly walk off. We pass by an empty machine with two likely steel frames covered in all manner of sensors and little pads. On the floor are a pair of sockets meant to secure mechanical feet and he briefly tests one of them. It doesn't budge, either because it needs both to have pressure on them or it's broken.
Given the age of everything, I am willing to bet a lot on the latter.
"I know it is silly, Baltanthan. But, so much of the stuff in here, it's exactly the same as what I used back when I was on the airship. They trained me to perform mechanical duties and engineering maintenance. I was a handyman for all intents and purposes. We couldn't really afford to have anyone just doing one job. Well, most of us had to be jacks-of-all-trades." I explain, growing quiet as the exhausting nights come back to me in undefined blurs. Even on a massive airship filled with my kind, we didn't have the bodies to have people do whatever they felt like.
Everyone had to be able to replace someone else.
"Why not talk me through it, then? The fancier stuff, I mean. I know what a screwdriver is and what wrenches are." he tells me and I smile, picking up a power drill.
"Well, this is a drill, you pull this trigger-like button and it goes whirrrrrrrr!" I giggle out, holding the dead tool against his temple and wiggling it about. Its battery-weighted bottom turns up into his field of vision.
"And apparently made in Hohhkelurn." he remarks and my eyes widen, the pair quickly finding the label stamped into the battery. A workshop called Dayve & Joh's made this. I frown and put it down, paying close attention to how many human tools are in here.
"They must've been going through here and taking apart what they could." I comment, bending over and opening up the electronics of a nearby control console. I fiddle with some wires, bundling up pulled-out plugs and sighing in annoyance at the lack of other things. Even if I could repair this stuff, I can't, not while it's being treated like the product of some copper thief. Bad enough that those were actual troublemakers back on the airship.
But one of many problems caused by us ddrai'och being able to eat metals, our food needed to be used in construction. Miners were held in the same regard as farmers and ranchers. I guess humans have trouble understanding that. Using a pickaxe and mining explosives to dig up pasta garnish.
"So, what are you trying to do?" Baltanthan asks, leaning over the console before I get back to my feet.
"Well, nothing right now..." I mutter, looking around until I spot a white box. Moving up to it, my smile comes back a little and I make a little prayer to God. Opening it up, the one good thing the humans have left behind enters my hand and I turn to face my friend.
"What?" he asks, staring back at me.
"Well, come on, let's patch you up." I tell him, urging him closer while I find the end of the bandage. Grabbing some other things, he brings over a makeshift seat that comes shaped like a toolbox. He bangs his bottom onto it and I wet a small cloth with some high-magic mixture. He hisses when I start to wipe the wound clean of blood, I am by the nature of it, forced to rub it in and make his knuckles white.
"Come on, keep me distracted. Tell me about this damn place." he barks, hand waving about at all the machinery. It suddenly slaps his leg when I press down.
"Uh, it's an engineering bay by the looks of it. Whatever comes through here will be fixed up on the benches and tested in all these broken charging stations. I think that's what they are anyway, I was never trained in looking after the robots." I explain, getting a click of the tongue for him for the trouble and he gets in his own way to look up.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
"Not hearing anything new." he goes and I roll my eyes, moving his head back into position. I try to be as careful as I can, but, with nails like mine, I may not be the best one to handle a delicate wound like this. My toes may be thoroughly and entirely solid claw, but my fingernails aren't far off either.
"Alright, then, the tool I picked up earlier. That was a magic circuit imprinter. The way it works is that it focuses God's power through a raw magic battery within. Buffed up with divinity, we can control the flow and create means of amplification and control." I explain to the best of my ability, thinking back to all the lessons of warning I got in my time as a worker. There was only so much divine power to work with, we had to do a good, bordering on perfect job or not one at all.
Even training was done with basic pens and whatever surface we could find until we had it down...
"So runes." he comments.
"In practice, I guess, yeah." I say, my mind shifting towards all the ways humans have learned to put magic into materials. I'm uncertain as to how similar the sciences are, but, superficially, it's all there. If I could, I would experiment and try out if it is possible to see which system is better, if the difference is even there.
Maybe when we get home, once I figure out how to use my amulet's power to recharge the faith in these tools and devices? I thought I was done customising my shop around the gimmick of it being an old blacksmith, but, now, I might be able to make it properly Ddrai'och! I can make the lighting handled by magic circuits and I can hang up the tapestries and everything else. God be praised, I can even swap out my cutlery and use the ones my people have made if there's any here.
Licking my thumb, I catch the bandage on it and get to work using one properly for once. Thankfully, living with Nin and his strange choice of attire means I am pretty adept at handling them now. I make quick work of Baltanthan's need for some wrappings and pat his shoulders. He gets up and moves the front a little.
"Thank you." he almost whispers and I lean closer.
"What was that?" I ask, grinning.
"Walking away." he goes and I follow after, cackling while he huffs his smile away.
"But, uh, yeah, like I said about this being an engineering bay. The soldierbots, what tried to kill you would step into here and the machine would attach itself. The console would give you a diagnostic and you can make sure everything is alright." I explain, touching and fiddling with the lifeless controls.
"So, uh, how come your people relied on... Robots... To fight? Did you not have witches or something? I can't imagine that you didn't, your magic doesn't seem to have ever been dependent on the Emerald Awakening occurring. You'd probably have decimated any pre-Liquid Mountain civilisation." he asks and I start to nod along as he is right in that regard. Our magic is divine in origin, God, Iderim-Ovi himself gave it to us.
"I was young when the war was happening, very young. But, from what I recall from my time on the airship, it is due to the fact that humans knew we could not handle silver. They developed many kinds of weapons designed to saturate the land with it. In particular, those in charge of looking after our anti-missile defences, you had to be of the best skill to be allowed near them." I explain, a mist appearing in my mind's eye.
"Your kind were threatened severely by rockets so you built armies of metal men?" he asks, huffing in amusement at what must be quite a silly idea to him. But, to me, I can't see it as anything but life or death. All my life the importance of those countermeasures was placed as being of the utmost importance. Old footage was kept in the recording archive, we all had to watch it.
Shrieking things, no launcher in sight, a peculiar buzz as it falls to the ground. Only, even with its fragile tip, that isn't what it did, it didn't strike the earth. The air shattered it and that same air carried the shining poison far and wide. An entire town breathed it in, in that footage and their bodies ate them alive until they fell apart at the bone.
Cloudmakers.
And that was just silver, to say nothing of the utter terror that goes through people when thunder meets gold. All the divine metals, really. War's Bronze, Thunder-Gold, Defender's Zinc, City-Steel, Musicians Brass. There are so many metals we can normally eat and consume and be around safely. But, when the power of a human god or goddess becomes involved, it becomes lethal to us, indescribably so.
I can't comment truly on what caused the war between us and the humans all those millennia ago. Though, I have a feeling and the word of mouth pointed the cause to being their ability to just push us out. Priests would come to our mines under false pretences and poison it. Their factories bellowed out the smoke of refining it and slag corrupted by their faith would smother the land.
It might seem silly as well if I explained it to Baltanthan, but, brownfields, polluted lands. They became graveyards for us, the humans intentionally poisoned what they could and mocked us with what little they could still grow in it. The elders still alive the last time I was on the airship, they passed down stories of being pelted with cabbage. The jokes grew stale quickly and ended just as fast when the war turned in our favour.
The soldierbots, they could march on without fear of anything the humans had grown dependent on. Well, at least until the crack of thunder started to mark the arrival of that man along with other champions. The humans had many, so many in possession of the gear of their divine overlords. But, only he, only Thunder stuck in our minds even after all that time in the cold sleep.
I have to suffer hearing stories praising that thing, that creature of the sky. The champion of the evil god even the man I love looks up to. My older brother, the last time I saw him, he must've been fighting that monster. So much, I have forgotten so much about him and all I can remember is his terror during that final, confusing video call.
I was just enjoying a small bowl of snacks one day, playing at the computer and-
"Liadanann, you still anywhere in there?" Baltanthan asks, gently smacking my head and it shakes as my focus comes back. The sadness quickly shifts out of my eyes.
"Oh, sorry, I got lost thinking about it all rather than explaining it to you, didn't I?" I ask him, smiling awkwardly while he shakes his head. Apparently, I've been paying so little attention that I have walked into a workbench. I glance over its contents and pick up the taken-off arm. I toss aside the human tools and let my friend get nosy.
"Well, time for you to make up for that. Give me the rundown of this thing that nearly killed me with this damn blaster thing." he goes, making silly shooty noises when his fingers trace the network of power gems and magic circuits. A focusing path to blast out divine power. Deceptively advanced looking for what is actually just a magic vent.
"Believe it or not, Baltanthan, and this might sound silly, but-"