As they walked past the barricade and out of the city, Felix felt a weight start to lift off of his shoulders, and he had to focus to avoid breathing a long, heavy sigh of relief as he felt the pressure of avoiding the soldiers of the government, the poverty of the slums, and the danger of the ever-present gangs slide away from him.
He took a final look at the city they were leaving. He looked at the giant clocktower in the distance, the giant boats that sailed through the sky, defying gravity with naught but the power of industry to back them up as they flew against nature itself. The endless rows of factories, smoke, and brass. The streets filled with people using mechanical limbs, empowering their actions and giving people safe and easy ways to recover from accidents or strengthen themselves.
Paradoxically, in addition to relief, Felix felt a twinge of sadness as he left the city. Being imprisoned as a test subject for several years had been miserable. But despite the way the people of Verne had treated him, he still couldn’t help but admire what they had built. For all of their other flaws, Felix admired this city with all of his heart.
He wondered if, someday, he would be able to do something similar. The past few years had been tiring, but exciting, since he had spent most of them figuring out exactly how and why a gun worked. In his first life, he hadn’t had the time to pursue his passions, since he had been caught up in the pace of life around him. He’d had a job to go to, friends and family to take care of, and he had never had the time to pursue the kind of life he had always wanted. On the islands, he had once again let the people around him pressure him away from his passions.
But during the previous life, he’d finally stepped forward and made a way to learn more about crafting. He had spent years learning as a blacksmith, building a foundation of knowledge for his future. Sure, the laws of physics might not always be terribly consistent from one world to the next, and so a specific technique that worked in one world might actually be harmful in another. But as long as he understood the hows and whys of the way metal, leather, and wood worked with each other, Felix was confident he would be able to adapt to any new world, given enough time and materials to experiment with.
Of course, Felix would have much rather not been forced to build a gun while hiding in Miria’s closet and hoping her drug-addicted mother didn’t notice him. Not that Miria’s mother was particularly observant, since she was high almost every moment of the day. But the working conditions he’d been given were… less than ideal, as much as he appreciated Miria helping feed him and the rest of the group risking their lives to break him out of prison.
Felix turned back to his friends, and noticed that Miria’s shoulders looked lighter and less tense than he had ever seen them. At least in this world, Miria always looked stressed out. Now, she looked excited to be moving forward.
Felix felt a bit of a grin tug at his lips as he saw how energetic Miria looked. While he didn’t consider himself quite as driven to protect his friends as Miria, he was still happy to see her practically bouncing on her feet as she moved along. Even her mother’s literal weight on her shoulders didn’t seem to affect her mood.
Felix turned to Anise and Sallia, and was more than a little amused to see Sallia was in a similar state. He hadn’t noticed much of an impact on Sallia’s mood when he saw her while they were living in the slums, but now that they were leaving, it was clear that Sallia was just as excited to be gone as Miria.
Felix just hoped that the next city they went to also had a strong industrial sector.
Living in the heartland of Verne’s industry should have been a golden opportunity for Felix to learn more. He would have loved to go to an alchemy academy, pair it with some sort of education on how all of the machines and factories in the city worked, and then learn exactly how and why the industrial revolution had happened in this world. If Felix could learn about both machinery and alchemy, he thought he would be able to make something really special in this world - and quite possibly, replicate at least some of it in future worlds too.
It might not always be physically possible to make machines in each world, but Felix was sure that he could learn something useful from all of the factories, industrialized potion-making, and mechanical prosthetics in this world if he had the opportunity.
Sadly, his status as a test subject had prevented him from learning much of what he was interested in.
But seeing his friends so happy to be leaving the city made up for the fact that Felix wouldn’t get a chance to learn in the center of the industrial revolution itself.
“Do you think it’ll be possible to enroll an alchemy academy in the future?” He asked, mostly in case Old Mo had an answer for him. Old Mo hadn’t said much about their destination yet, beyond the fact that they were leaving the city.
“You’ll see when we get there,” said Old Mo. Felix swore he could hear the man smiling, even though he hadn’t turned around enough for Felix to see his face.
Felix huffed in annoyance. Old Mo was very nice to Miria, but whenever he was talking to somebody else, he seemed to enjoy driving them up the wall.
“Where are we heading, Old Mo?” asked Miria, a few moments later.
Old Mo paused, as if he was considering giving her a similar non-answer, before he chuckled.
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“I’m thinking of heading to Damilius,” said Old Mo. “They were the only nation with any sort of real power on the continent that decided to stay out of this war, which makes them an ideal destination to get away from all of this. I have a few contacts that can help set me up, and their count is fairly defensible. Over 70% of their border with the rest of the continent is mountains, so nobody is dumb enough to invade them anymore, and they have a strict neutrality policy.”
Felix shot Miria a grateful look, and she grinned back at him.
“Are there a lot of alchemy academies there?” asked Miria, apparently having picked up on Felix’s desired topic.
“Depends on the part of the country. The country’s population is a bit smaller, since so much of it is mountains, but there are a lot of people living on the coast of the country. But interestingly enough, most of the alchemy is located a bit north of the cities - they have a lot of anti-pollution laws that prevent industry from taking off in quite the same way it did in Verne. However, it’s a much nicer country to live in since you’re a lot less likely to breathe in smog.” Old Mo eyed Miria’s mother. “And it’s also a lot harder to make or smuggle in drugs, so addiction is less common.”
“Does that mean the country hasn’t industrialized?” asked Miria, sounding a bit more genuinely curious now.
“Well… yes and no,” said Old Mo. “Their country has slowly been lifting some of the anti-pollution laws where needed, since the government seems to be realizing just how big of an advantage the industrial revolution is bringing to Verne. But due to the distance between industrial centers and population centers in Damilius, there is definitely much less machinery and industrialized potion-making there,” said Old Mo. “I don’t think that the country will remain as hard to invade as it currently is if they don’t start buckling down and making more factories, but…” Old Mo shrugged. “That probably won’t be a problem for a few decades, at least. I sure won’t be alive by then,” he said, before chuckling.
Miria nodded thoughtfully, and Felix shrugged.
The big alchemy centers being a bit distant from the ‘regular’ cities wasn’t exactly ideal for him, but he could work with it. But that did make Felix wonder about something else. Something that he hadn’t thought too much about before leaving the city, but had started paying more attention to recently.
From living in the slums with Miria, Felix had started to get an impression that prosthetics were mostly rough replacements for already-missing limbs. The gangs all used mechanical prosthetics to enhance certain limbs, since metal backed by binding essence was much sturdier than human bones and flesh, but until Felix had seen Anise’s mother and her mechanical hand, it hadn’t quite hit him that prosthetics could be so… artistic. And functional.
Now that Felix could manufacture guns, he had the confidence to at least feed himself, as long as there was a place to sell them. Which meant that Felix had time to think about other things again.
How did prosthetics… work exactly, in this world? It was obvious that people’s bodies, and the binding essence inside of them, were built to allow substitute limbs when needed. Felix suspected that this was just a normal evolutionary advantage this variant of humanity had developed - being able to replace a limb with nearby rocks and tree branches had pretty obvious and useful survival benefits, after all.
But Anise’s mother had a hand that was more than just a crappy replacement. Based on the way she moved and held things, her metal hand was strong, didn’t seem to consume much essence, and gave Anise’s mother a decisive advantage if things turned into a fistfight.
“Old Mo, are there a lot of prosthetics in Damilius? Or any academies that might teach people about them?” asked Miria.
Old Mo paused. “I… suppose? Prosthetics these days are a lot more detailed and cost a lot less energy, since it’s easier to produce high quality metal now. But I don’t think Damilius has fallen behind on prosthetic production. After all, people have been studying the human body for centuries to create better prosthetic limbs. It’s just much more economical these days. I would be shocked if there weren’t academy classes dedicated to prosthetics. I imagine those would be attached to medical schools, or alchemy schools that focused on material creation?” Said Old Mo, after a few moments of thought.
Felix grinned.
Felix started to think about whether there were any uses for prosthetics in his body.
Originally, he had been hesitant about the idea. To use an extra limb, he would first need to cut something off. Then, he would need to have a good replacement for whatever he removed - after all, he didn’t want a cheap piece of scrap metal attached to his body for the rest of his life, eating up all of his binding essence and leaving him with none for crafting.
However, Felix also had a dream that in the future, he might not be quite as bad at combat as he currently was. He wasn’t useless in a fight, sure. But he knew that as things currently stood, Miria and Sallia would outgrow his combat abilities soon enough. Felix didn’t want to become useless to the group, even if he knew Miria wouldn’t say anything about it.
But what if, in future worlds, he had a few small, useful metal substitutions to his body, to give himself exceptional physical abilities? A few joints here and there, a bone or two swapped with a metal replacement, and Felix felt that he might be able to become much stronger than a regular person, without requiring a crazy amount of binding essence to make everything work. He might not be able to ever overpower someone with a magic System like Sallia’s - but if Felix combined his metal attunement shaping abilities and his thoughts about mechanical limbs, and then tossed in a few inspirations from gunpowder, he might be able to create something really special. And he also wouldn’t have to give up his dreams of becoming an amazing item craftsman, either.
It would take a lot of understanding of mechanics and the human body, but Felix felt like it was a promising direction to take his research and focus in this world.
“All right, let’s get moving faster,” said Old Mo, disrupting Felix’s thoughts. “I want to be at least a decent way east of here before nightfall.”
“Why east?” asked Miria.
“To the east, the terrain is a lot more hilly. I doubt the coalition army will try to lug their cannons through such rugged terrain,” said Old Mo. “So we should be safe there. The strip of hilly terrain also extends quite a bit to the south, so we can just keep following it for several days. With any luck, we can completely dodge the army and move right past it, and then we’ll just have one coalition country and a bit of marshland to move through before we reach Damilius,” said Old Mo. “And there, unless things go horribly wrong, we’ll have a new home.”