There was a lull in the conversation. Genevieve felt her mind start to wander, back to the Prince and his palace. His machines. The hole in Gryst where the magic should be. But she wasn’t going to let herself spiral. When she felt her thoughts turning dark, she threw herself back on the cot and kicked her feet out straight. “All right, enough! Enough feeling sorry for myself. I’m lost and scared as it is, I don’t need to wallow in that. Tomorrow will be a new morning, and I’ll decide what to do with myself from there.”

“Oh,” Marcie said. “All right. Sure. That sounds like a plan. All power to… not wallowing. Um.” She looked around the room and scratched the top of her head. “I’m really bad at this, sorry.”

“You’re fine, Marcie,” Genevieve said with a little smile. “Perfectly fine as you are.”

“Oh. Uh. Good, then. I’m, uh… glad about that. I’m pretty sure I’m glad about that, right?”

“I would be if I were you.” Genevieve turned over onto her stomach took another look at her, thinking over the day’s events. “Actually,” she said, “I did have something else I wanted to ask about, if it’s all right. Nothing so personal this time. At least, I don’t think it should be personal.”

“Yeah, all right,” Marcie said. “Shoot.”

“I think I’ll leave that to you. You’re certainly better at it than I would be.”

“Wh–oh. Yeah. Shoot. Okay.” Marcie rolled her eyes. “Are you gonna ask your question or what?”

“Well, it was kind of about that, actually.” Genevieve scooted herself back up to sit closer to Marcie’s cot. “That gun you were using–what is it, exactly? I’ve seen black powder pistols before, but nothing like what you’re using.”

“Oh, sure. I mean, they’re not like, mass produced or anything. I built them myself, so they’re, y’know. Unique.” She unholsters one of her guns and holds it up, taking very deliberate care not to point it at anyone or anything that might be inadvertently damaged. “The design’s mostly based on my dad’s work, plus a few personal touches and… some other stuff I picked up ‘long the way.”

Marcie moves over close to Genevieve, and holds the gun out so she can get a closer look at it. The overall shape of it was close enough to the firearms Genevieve had seen back home, but it was a sleeker, more sophisticated design, made of polished, precisely cut metal. If Marcie had really constructed it by hand, Genevieve was impressed by her craftsmanship. The long barrel led back to a wide metal cylinder, which stuck out from the sides and gave the whole thing a broader profile. Past the cylinder, the back of the pistol was flat and boxy, with a sort of metal tab poking out of the top, and a curved handle with a wooden grip at the bottom. All in all, Genevieve could safely say she had absolutely no idea what she was looking at. She knew Gryst made more extensive use of gunpowder than her home, but she was surprised at just how much farther they had gone with it.

Marcie kept her finger away from the trigger while she let Genevieve look it over. "The revolvin' cylinder here," she said, and she spun the cylinder in question to demonstrate, “that’s one of Dad’s big inventions. Lets you have more rounds at hand, so you don't gotta reload after each one. The first ones we made were a little bulky, though, so I found a way to slim it down, make the action a little smoother. Then I met this woman… uh, it was weird? It was like a whole weird thing. But she had a bunch of these, like, diagrams and whatever, for different types of guns and bombs and junk. Pretty scary stuff, honestly, lot of it wigged me out real good. But there were a few ideas in there I figured I could probably use without, like, it bein' a crime against humanity or nothing. So I added this mechanism to, like…"

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She held the gun in her hand, carefully pointed down away from anything a stray shot could damage, and pulled back that metal tab on the back of the gun. A heavy bullet wrapped in a brass casing popped out of the top, and she snatched it out of the air casually. "So, like, when you pull the trigger, the bullet fires, and there's a buncha force blastin' back through the barrel, which makes this thing here pop back and knock out the empty case. And then the trigger also rotates the cylinder, that took some figuring with everything else the mechanism has to do, and you gotta kinda pull hard for it, but it means the thing just kinda goes for you without too much hassle?"

Genevieve wasn't following at all, but she listened politely, and Marcie was deep enough in her explanation she had all but forgotten her audience.

"Uh, and all this stuff was a pain to work out, and I could never figure out a good way to make something like this quick or cheap enough to be practical, but, basically. You fire the thing, it rotates the cylinder one way–" she turned the mechanism one step forward to demonstrate– "and then you rotate it back the other with your hand." She does just that, and the gun makes a distinct click. "And that loads a bullet back into the chamber, outta the, like…"

She pressed down a switch on the side of the gun's handle, near the trigger, and a metal box slid out of the bottom. "This thing. The box in there. These are motherfuckers, there's a whole spring thing, I made a bunch last time I was at a workshop but I gotta be kinda careful with em cuz it'll be such a pain in the dick to make more. But, like, they just hold a buncha bullets?" She slipped the bullet she caught before into the case, pushing the stack under it down, and placed the box back into the gun's handle. "So basically, when you fire all the cylinders you got loaded, you just give it a spin and bam, you're full up. And I got pretty good at loading the clips there with my tail, so any time I have a second I can just slap one in and be ready to load back up next time I'm empty."

"That seems… incredibly convoluted." Genevieve tilted her head, contemplating. "I'm… not sure I followed any of that, to be honest. But… if you have those boxes there, loading the, uh, the cylinder… I mean, you could do away with the cylinder, right? Just have the barrel, like a normal pistol? And the box can put the bullet right into that?"

Marcie looked down at her gun and thought for a long moment. "Hm,” she said. “I mean, I did think about it. That was one of the designs we were working on, trying to slim the thing down. Make somethin’ easier to build. Dad might’ve cracked it by now, too, but since I was making a weapon just for me… I dunno, I liked this way more. Somethin’ tactile to the mechanics of it. You know?”

"I'm… not sure that I do." Genevieve couldn’t help feeling like she’d waded into something about Marcie she didn’t fully understand. Some nexus of habit and sentimentality that was beyond her. It was hard to imagine having those sorts of feelings tied up with a weapon. Certainly not something as frightening and deadly as a gun.

Before either of them had to figure out how to continue the conversation, the door opened and Lenn walked in carrying a pair of shoes and a shirt and pants draped over their arm. Their timing was so convenient Genevieve had to wonder if they hadn't been simply waiting outside, letting them talk. She wasn't about to question it, though, as she had never been happier to see a pair of shoes in her life.

"Thank you," she said, turning around to sit on the edge of her cot. "I appreciate it very much."

"Say nothing of it." Lenn handed Genevieve the shoes, and put the clothes down on the bed next to her. "There's another room just down the way, if you want to get changed now. Would you like me to show you the way?"

Genevieve eagerly slipped on the shoes and stood up. It was an incredible relief not to have her feet freezing on the cold stone floor. “Is it far?” she asked.

Lenn shook their head. “Not at all. If you leave the room and take a left, it’s the very next door just beyond this one.”

“I think I’ll go myself,” Genevieve said. She picked up the small bundle of clothes on the cot. “I’m a grown woman, I can manage ten steps down a hallway without getting lost.”

“I hadn’t expected otherwise.”

“I’ll only be a moment, then.” Genevieve bowed her head politely and headed for the door.

“See ya soon,” Marcie said with a casual one-handed half-wave.

“And you, dear Ms. Silver.” The tiniest bit of playful sarcasm on her tongue, Genevieve opened the door and stepped outside into the dimly-lit hallway.