I make my way down the street, carrying a fairly heavy bag of groceries and a backpack full of metal parts. I managed to get some surprisingly good sleep last night after having to flee Penny’s house, so I’m feeling pretty alright today, all considered. The maintenance bunker Victoria led us to is certainly less comfortable than Penny’s house, but I’ve had to stay in much worse places.
I went alone to pick up the groceries, since we’re pretty sure I’m the only one out of the four of us who shouldn’t be on the mob's radar. Neither of the combat demons that attacked Penny’s house seemed to have gotten a good look at me, and it’s unlikely that my former employers are looking for me. Victoria’s hit on the warehouse the cores were being stored in was close enough to when I arrived that they probably assume I’m dead. To anyone keeping an eye out for the rest of the group, I should just look like some random street urchin, not worth paying any attention to. So, I was the natural pick to leave the base to grab supplies.
We don’t need much, really, beyond food. Alice and Victoria are just training, which they can do just fine with their bare hands, and even when they start working on Alice's new halo they aren’t gonna need supplies for that. The halo’s pure cosma, and that shit’s everywhere. Penny, similarly, doesn’t really need any physical materials for the kinds of basic wards she’s been throwing around our new home. She did ask for some porcelain so she could repair her doll, which was easy to get. I need some basic components so I can keep practicing engineering, the kind of thing you can get at basically any hardware store. I was half-tempted to try and retrieve what I was working on previously from Penny’s house but that’s probably not a great idea. They don’t have any reason to be looking for me currently, I’d like to keep it that way if possible, and I’d assume they’re probably watching the place and getting very interested in anyone who happens to pay a visit. Shit, that means some of the other local kids have probably gotten hassled about it. Maybe even Sam. I hope they’re doing alright, we didn’t exactly get a chance to give them a heads up before we left.
I duck down an alleyway that splits off from the main street, and look toward both ends before dropping down inside the manhole cover that sits halfway along its length. Just because I don’t expect anyone to be after me is no reason to refrain from a little healthy paranoia. I may have spent the past few weeks safe with Penny, but that doesn’t erase the previous decade and change. It’s easier to feel safe once I’ve entered the dry, still darkness of the maintenance tunnels. Rationally I know there could just as easily be someone watching me down here, but it doesn’t feel like it, it feels like I’m already home safe and sound. I make my way a little further down the tunnel and find the pile of trash the door to our new home is hidden behind. Before pulling any of it aside, I quickly cast a darkvision spell and glance both ways down the tunnel. It’s as empty as I expected, so I quickly dispel the enchantment, slide a piece of scrap metal out of my way, and enter the bunker.
When I arrive, Victoria has Alice jogging in place in one corner of the room, while Penny sits in the other, with the doll she had me carry out of the house sitting on the table in front of her. Periodically Victoria calls out “Drop!” at which point Alice drops to the ground and does a push-up before standing back up and returning to jogging in place. She looks like she’s in agony, but I suppose that’s the nature of training to survive combat demons. I ignore them and set the groceries down next to Penny. “Whatcha up to?”
She glances over at me, then turns her attention back to the doll. “Seeing if that bullet from yesterday is still lodged in the hole it made. There may not be any vital components in a doll’s head, but I still wouldn’t want a foreign object to just stay embedded in it.”
“Why didn’t you just take its core out like others, anyway?” I ask. “Wouldn’t that have stopped it from getting shot in the first place?”
She stiffens, stuttering for a moment before answering. “I’m- Er, that’s to say, it’s a bit of an… experiment. I’m not certain how it would react to the removal of its core.”
“An experiment? What do you mean? It looks like a normal doll to me.”
“I… Don’t think I can properly explain it right now, it’s quite complicated. Anyway, did you run into any trouble out there?”
I briefly consider pressing the issue, but decide against it. I am still a relative layman when it comes to this stuff, there’s a good chance that she’s right and whatever’s unique about this doll would go right over my head. “Nah, nobody seemed to notice me, or care. Same old same old.”
“That’s good, then. And the money I gave you was enough?”
“Yeah, no problem, I even got myself a good amount of material to work with.”
She nods and returns her attention to the doll in front of her. “Excellent. Let me know if you need any help with your work, I’m nowhere near as busy now as I was a couple days ago.”
“I think I’ll be alright.”
She gives a soft smile. “You really do have a knack for this stuff, don’t you? I wish I’d started teaching you sooner, you’ve been an excellent student.”
I walk over to the other table, set into the wall next to the door I entered through, and empty my backpack onto it. None of what I grabbed is anything fancy, which suits my purposes just fine. All of Penny’s dolls are made out of pretty basic components; from what I understand, there are plenty of more specialized parts out there, for constructing dolls with specific purposes in mind, but Penny’s never bothered with them. When it comes to cosma, the more simple something is the more adaptable and reliable it tends to be. Sure, you can purchase complex, specialized servo units and cosma processors and whatnot that are designed to perform specific actions efficiently and effectively, but they’re gonna need serviced a hell of a lot more, it’s gonna be a hell of a lot harder to do that, and they’re not gonna be any good for anything outside of the one thing you bought them for. On the other hand, if you can make a solution out of basic plates and conductors, which you usually can if you know what you’re doing, that’ll usually hold together better in the long run and even when it doesn’t, replacing a broken component is a lot easier and more affordable when it’s just a piece of metal with some lines drawn on it.
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Particularly when dealing with cosma, there truly is a lot you can get done with very simple chunks of metal. Learning a spell to arbitrarily warp the shape of the metal, and then set it in that shape, is actually pretty trivial. It takes time and concentration to cast, so it's not exactly viable for combat situations or anything like that, but it's quite useful for tinkering.
First thing’s first, if I want to get any use out of these chunks of metal I lugged back from the hardware store, I’m gonna need to split them into smaller, thinner plates. Given the size of the blocks I should be able to make quite a few usable plates at the thickness I’m looking for, I’d say each inch-thick brick can be split into about 20-25 plates. That’s another nice thing about working with cosma, you can make the physical components pretty small and delicate without sacrificing integrity, which means a little raw material goes a long way. With the amount of metal I brought back in this bag, I could probably completely coat my body and still have a little left over.
Hm… Maybe there's something to that. Cosma-based mechanisms have historically been free-standing, independently-active machinery, but I don’t see any reason that has to be the case. You could just as easily build it to fit over an underlying body, and it’d be pretty good armor, I bet. I guess it’s just because witches aren’t usually looking to go out and fight? And gods certainly aren’t. I’ve heard more about them from Penny and Alice over the past few weeks, it sounds like their entire organizations are structured around ensuring they don’t have to get their hands dirty. They use cosma to make angels and dolls to go out and handle their shit for them. Why make a tool for yourself to use when you can make one that uses itself for you?
I decide to run with my idea. Victoria and Penny certainly aren’t planning to just sit back and let this combat doll situation work itself out, and I don’t think I want to either. Scrappy though I may be, a life on the street doesn’t really tend to turn you into an ideal physical specimen who could stand up even to a well-fed and trained adult, let alone a combat demon. But with some cosma and some engineering, I think I can make myself useful, and I won’t have to subjugate anyone else to do it. Magic and metal should be plenty. Once I’ve got my stockpile converted into nice thin plates, I set to work shaping them into a usable skeleton. It’s probably best to start small, just some gloves. I’m sure it’ll take plenty of time getting just that much right. It’s not like I don’t have enough to work with, and once I’ve got them built they should significantly improve my capabilities by themselves. Plus I’ll have learned enough about this stuff to be able to make the rest of it much more quickly and easily.
I start with some basic hinged rods, in the rough shape of a hand. I make it slightly bigger than my own, of course, as it’ll need to fit over it with enough room that I don’t crush all my fingers when I close my fist.This part is pretty simple, honestly, I’m essentially scaling up the underlying design of a doll’s hand, with some slight adjustments for comfort. The underside is slightly concave so that my hand can fit into it comfortably. Once I’m satisfied that I’ve got the basic shape correct, I set to work drawing cosma conduits onto it. It’s probably best to err on the side of lower capacities; I’m gonna have to do some testing with this thing to get the moving parts working correctly, and I’d rather avoid injuring myself during those tests if possible. The best way to keep that from happening is to just limit how much power it can generate. I won’t lose any fingers if it doesn’t have enough juice to hurt any of them. Once I’ve got a good sense of mechanics, I can start gradually building up the level of power running through it.
“What are you working on?”
I jump slightly, and scrape off the line of cosma-conducting paint I just botched as a result. A glance to the left reveals it was Alice who interrupted me. I guess she’s done training for the day, or at least taking a break. “A glove.”
She dabs a cloth at the sweat on her forehead. “A glove? For what?”
I lift my goggles onto my forehead and turn toward her. “Self-defense. And offense, I guess. They're gonna be a hell of a lot better than my bare hands.”
She looks a bit dejected. “... I guess that makes sense, yeah. Even if no one's looking for you specifically, you're likely to get caught up in things from being around the rest of us.”
“I mean, even if that weren't the case, I'd still prefer to be worth something in a fight. I don't want to just be the gopher forever.”
“What? Jackie, you're just a ki-”
“Don't.” I fix her with a steely glare. “I'm just as much in this shit as any of you are, and I know for a fact I've lived through more than you have, Alice.”
She gives me a look of shock and turns towards Victoria, who's sitting on her cot, for support. Victoria shrugs. “He's probably right. A 14 year old street urchin wouldn't exactly be my first choice to bring into a fight, but I'm sure he's seen some shit.”
“So you're just fine with him putting his life on the line?”
“Why not? He sure seems to be, and I'm sure he knows what he's signing up for. It's not really my business.”
“But he's-”
Victoria rolls her eyes. “He's gonna be properly armed, and he's making his own choice. As long as he doesn't get in the way it's no skin off my back.”
Alice looks like she's about to argue back for a moment, but instead she just silently walks over and lays down on her cot. I glance over at Penny, who is doing her best to look like she's focused entirely on her work. I already know what she thinks of all this, and she already knows how much good it will do to try to argue with me about it. I put my goggles back over my eyes and return to my work.