Despite his fear that a train loaded with dwarves would suddenly appear in the early hours of the morning, some hidden hold out group would detonate the weapon cache, or some other terrible misfortune might befall them, the morning was a quiet one. It was only when the sun got too high for him to possibly ignore that Jon finally admitted to himself that he’d slept fitfully long enough. Their late night raid combined with the treasure hunt which had gone into the early hours of the morning had taken its toll, and though he would have loved more sleep, it wasn’t going to be coming until at least sunset, and depending on how their attempts to wake the giants went, it could be a lot longer than that.
Jon was in no hurry to start that headache, so while he had a few of his men fetch coal and water, so they could load up the boiler of the first machine, he sat in the shadow of the train and enjoyed a leisurely lunch of hard bread and thinly sliced beef regretting that they lacked much of anything to season it with, and then washed it down with some dwarvish beer that had been carefully watered down so that none of the inexperienced men would drink themselves to uselessness. That was the deal he’d struck with his lieutenants after all. The men could get drunk, but only after a major victory, and this had barely been a minor one. Still, the weak beer was safer than river water. It tasted better too.
It was only after all this was done, and he’d heard from several men about the supply situation and space concerns in his already overloaded train that he finally made his way back over to the depot and the giants. The large warehouse door that was just tall enough to let the machines escape was open, but even the extra light made them look no smaller. Instead, the way it was framed by the giant door as he approached made it look like it might burst through the roof at any moment. The effect became even more pronounced as he noticed the amount of people gathered around their feet gawking at them.
It took Jon half of the walk there to realize that these were probably the people that he’d asked Cristoph to look for last night, and by the looks of it he’d found more than a dozen people that might be short enough to fit the bill. For a moment he wondered why the man hadn’t just brought him the slightest soldier to be found, and then he realized that he probably hadn’t had a choice. Anyone with any sense would want to be the one picked to learn how to wield such a tremendous dwarven weapon.
That made Jon feel a little better about how long he’d kept the group waiting. Besides - these were largely children - there were not a lot of things they could be doing just now that were more useful than standing around and waiting to be told what to do. Besides - making Cristoph wait was an excellent way to remind the man who was in charge around here.
“Well, thank you all for coming,” Jon told the assembled group as he arrived without many of them noticing his approach. “As you can see we’ve got a strange problem, so we’re looking for some who's just the right fit.”
This time no one laughed, so after a moment he continued. “Alright then - let’s line up tallest to shortest. Hurry up,” he ordered, clapping his hands for emphasis. This got them moving, but it was an ugly knot of activity as they attempted to solve the puzzle by only looking at the person next to them. As a result Jon had to help them line up properly, pushing the taller candidates to his left and the shorter to his right until eventually things were mostly correct.
When that was done, he looked from one end to the other and then picked the person in the dead center, and said, “Alright, everyone else wait here - we’re going to see if … What’s your name lad?”
“Jeffrin, Sir,” the brown haired boy answered with confidence. He had to be at least 16, but probably not much older.
“Well - we’re going to see if Mr. Jeffrin can fit in the driver's seat. That will tell us a lot about who needs to stay and who can go back to their unit.”
Jon spent the next ten minutes trying to help the boy get into the giant’s cockpit. Young Jefferin desperately wanted to be the one to learn to use a giant instead of brand, and Jon could hardly blame him, but after trying every way they could think of including the removal of the cushion from the seat they just couldn’t make it work. He was just a couple inches too tall. The problem all came down to the pedals, which Jon assumed had something to do with making the thing walk. The cabin wasn’t much taller than the average dwarf, which put it a little under four feet. So, if you scrunched down you ended up leaning too far forward. That meant you couldn’t see the controls or sit in a way that would let you operate the pedals normally.
“I don’t think this is going to work,” Jon said finally, helping the boy down. “Sorry about that.”
As Jon brought the boy back to the line-up, he took the next lad that was only ever so slightly shorter than Jeffrin, as well as all the boys that were taller and said, “Thank you for your help, but without some serious modifications this just isn’t going to work I’m afraid.”
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Though the young men were obviously not too happy about it, they left with only a little grumbling. That left him seven people that might yet fit the bill. There were five boys, and two girls, and other than a redhead boy in a flat cap that was perpetually staring at his shoes, the other six looked eager for their chance to be chosen. The tallest boy that was left looked at Jon eagerly, but he was quickly disappointed. For Jon’s second attempt to find an operator he chose the shortest child that was left to change things up. This one would definitely fit, but Jon wasn’t sure that the sickly looking young man would have the strength to even turn the valves.
“Are you sure you’re 16,” he quipped as they started their second round of exploration. This time his potential pilot fit pretty well in the dwarven sized world with a little room to spare, but it quickly became apparent to Jon that he wasn’t cut out for the work. Jon knew well from operating the throttle and the brake on the train that dwarves didn’t build these sorts of things with comfort in mind. No matter how much easier the finely polished mechanisms of the Giant’s controls moved in comparison to some of the valves that Jon had to occasionally wrestle when he turned up the pressure on the train, they still required some real strength. That seemed to be true for the pedals more than anything.
So, starting from the bottom he steadily moved through the candidates that would actually fit AND were strong enough to operate the thing. Steadily, a person or two at a time, he worked through his line up until he began to doubt that anyone but a dwarf could really make something like this work. When he had four candidates left, Jon finally found someone promising enough in a sullen young lad named Mik that he actually had the boiler lit the first time. He spent half an hour going over what he thought each of the levers did, and they were able to actually get the arms to move, though the mechanisms seemed exhausting.
In the end, rather than try to walk, Jon had him come down. Though he was the first person in the whole army he thought might be able to actually do the job, he couldn’t help but imagine the giant machine toppling over and trapping the poor kid. He decided that this would definitely merit some more experimenting, so after asking Mik to hang out and wait, he hopped down and walked over to the quietest of his volunteers and grabbed him by the shoulder to spin them around and let them know it was their turn. “Alright, let’s see if…”
At that moment several things happened at once. The first thing was that the boy’s hat slipped off his head from the sudden movement turning he into a she, the second was that he suddenly realized he knew the girl that had suddenly materialized before him.
“Claire?” he asked dumbly, realizing he was as close as he’d been to her since he’d kissed her at his father’s funeral. “What in the hell are you doing here?”
“Same as you,” she said, “fighting for a better world.”
For a moment Jon’s mind reeled as everything turned on its head. This was something he would have never allowed if he’d known about it, but no one had bothered to bring it up to him because he’d been especially careful not to point her out to anyone to keep there from being any complications. And now here she was.
Fighting would have done nothing to improve the situation, and exploding at her would have only made people curious, so he did the only thing he could do. He called for a break and then when everyone else had scattered he pulled her over to the giant, so that they could talk in hushed tones without anyone suspecting that it was anything more than an education in dwarven magic.
“First you join my army without a word, and then you sneak over here to what—” Jon asked, trying and failing to stay calm as his heart began to pound.
“Sneak?” Claire asked a little too loudly. “The last thing I wanted was to draw any attention to myself. I’m not here for you after all - I’m here for your fight, and nothing more.”
“Is that so?” Jon asked skeptically. “Then why don’t you go back to your unit, and I’ll find one someone else to pilot this.”
“Within five minutes of rediscovering my existence, and you’re already trying to treat me differently Jonathan Shaw?” she teased. “I don’t think that sort of behavior will do at all. I think I quite like the idea of learning a bit of dwarven magic. After all - look what it’s done for you…”
There was something about the way she talked to him that unexpectedly made him feed like he was 16 all over again as his heart started to pound again. Even dressed in men's clothes, she was still pretty, and he couldn’t believe he hadn’t made the connection before now. In fact - thinking back on it, he realized he’d seen her a handful of times before now, but always so quickly that he hadn’t noticed, because he hadn’t expected to find his childhood sweetheart on a train of armed men. He realized that even if he had no way to send her back to Dalmarin now, he could order her away from him, though that felt strangely like admitting defeat.
“Well - I can’t imagine you’ll do any better than anyone else has,” he muttered, willing to let her fail like the rest.
“That’s your problem, Jonathan,” she smiled. “You’re always underestimating what I can do. I’ve got a whole lifetime milking and churning that says you don’t know the first thing about what you’re talkin’ about.”
Jon would have normally been the first to admit that he had no idea what dairying had to do with dwarven machinery, but just like with everything else that came to this girl he quickly resisted the impulse. Instead, he turned the topic to other things for the next few minutes, to try to make their interactions seem more normal before he called an end to the break and got everyone focused once more on the task. He was just hoping he could rule her out quickly, because he was not looking forward to having to tell Elise about this once he’d finally found someone that could operate these giants enough that they could get a move on before trouble found them.