BRRRRR
BRRRRR
Kaleb adjusted his footing and swung around the giant dish on the hangar’s roof. Moving his power drill into position, he tightened the last bolt and carefully slid back. The base plate for the dish was fully secured to the roof now, and he grinned as he wiped his forehead with his arm. Then the damn dish moved and Kaleb almost tumbled backwards.
“What the shit!?”
“Sorry!” A scream came from over the side of the hangar’s roof. “Farrah’s code is still set to follow our drones. I’ll fix it!”
Kaleb glanced over his shoulder toward the roof’s edge. “Damn it, Roy! You almost gave me a heart attack!”
“Drink less coffee!”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.” Kaleb mumbled to himself before he gathered his tools and made his way to the edge.
His harness and pulley system were there, and he quickly donned his harness. Once secured, he signaled for the Brute Clan lizards to lower him back down. The journey wasn’t long, but the morning sun beat down hard on him. Even in the early hours, the heat was already cranking up. Once on the ground, he quickly thanked the lizards and moved toward the hangar’s side entrance. Roy joined him, his head still staring down at the data the giant dish was sending them. He raised the tablet for Kaleb to get a look at.
“It’s just sending diagnostic data for the drones right now. We need it to send and receive data from the data server we’re building, right?”
Kaleb nodded. “Yeah, that’s why I have Terrance and Marie pulling all the hard drives they can find from the junk we grabbed. We’ll use them to set up the server.”
“Will that work?”
“Yep. Especially when we add what I found this morning.” Kaleb smiled and hurried to his workshop.
Already the hangar was full of the early morning staff doing their shift change. Roy, Terrance, and Marie had been some of the first few in. Kaleb could tell they were excited about their own projects as much as he was about his. But he had to put his foot down a little. They wanted the workspace, then they had to work for it. Early morning to noon, they helped him. After, they could work on their own projects. It was thanks to the two hunters that Kaleb managed to get the new dish forged and in position so quick. Sure, installing the computer system was a bit patchy. But it was holding.
Kaleb entered his workshop and grabbed his white lab coat off the rack. The sun outside was way too hot for the long coat. Underneath, he was wearing a pair of beige slacks and a red t-shirt. Just to mess with Roy. Although that immediately backfired when the little shit loudly announced that Kaleb had ‘finally changed clothes.’ It was a good get, but Kaleb would have his revenge.
At the back of the workshop, Terrance and Marie were pulling hard drives under Daivor’s watchful eye. The gnome was on top of Marie’s shoulder and calling out useful bits and pieces. As Kaleb approached, both of his assistants turned to him.
“Boss, I think we’ve pulled all we are going to get,” Marie said tiredly.
She brushed her hands off as Terrance, and Daivor nodded. Kaleb scowled at the small pile of hard drives they had pulled. Then he looked up at the pile of junk. He spotted several robot torsos still intact and waved his robotic arm at them.
“What about those?”
Daivor slapped his head, making his pointy hat almost fall off. “Of course, robotic brains are probably way better than standard hard drives.”
“Wait. Is that why you pulled the Titan-Class droid from MY pile of junk?” Marie asked.
Kaleb waved the young girl down. “Yes, but only to strip the thing for parts. You just want the metal, right?”
When Marie nodded, Kaleb continued. “That droid is a command series. Its brain has to be better at sifting and sorting data than a standard hard drive.”
“Did you want me to pull it, Doc?” Terrance asked.
“No. I need you and Roy to go to the store and buy some server racks. Or anything, really. Just something to store all these brains and hard drives we’re pulling.”
Both boys nodded and quickly left. Kaleb then turned back to Marie. “And if you could, Miss Kinley, I’d like you and Daivor to start removing those brains from the robots.”
The young hunter pursed her lips and looked down at her newly cleaned hands. Kaleb rolled his eyes and waved to her workbench.
“You can keep the metal off the bots you strip.”
Marie’s annoyed look quickly turned into a smile, and Kaleb was sure he’d been played. But raw metal was fairly easy to come by. So he figured it was a win-win. As Marie hurriedly lifted a robotic torso out of the junk pile, Daivor swung over to Kaleb.
“What about you, Boss? You going to finish your magical inscriptions?”
“Yep. This morning got away from me a bit, but I need to hurry and finish that up. Also, I’ll need to get the server room built out along with a way to keep things cool in there.”
“One of the blue Elentian crystals, maybe?”
“Yeah, combined with a fan or something. It would need a decent power supply. But I’m sure we’ve got plenty around here somewhere.”
“Agreed. Don’t burn yourself, boss. I’ll be helping the young Miss Kinley.”
Kaleb gave the gnome a nod and moved over to his own workbench. All of his equipment was still where he had left it the night before. So he immediately jumped into work again. He found the slim bit of metal he had forged and closed his eyes as he pushed his magic into it. Focusing on the Alchemic runes, he slowly embedded the magic necessary to break down and read molecules. He drained his mana twice before he was fully finished, and he had to duck out of the lab for some coffee after the second time. When he came back in to finish, Kaleb was sure he spotted a flash of green over by the junk pile. But when he turned to look, whatever it was had vanished.
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Shrugging to himself, Kaleb moved back to his workbench and finished his work. Once done, he admired the slim bit of metal. Runes marked the entire surface and he could feel them hum with power. Now all he needed to do was install it on his wrist computer and then he could get around to reworking the thermal imager into a scanner. He carefully attached the bit of metal to the outside of his scanner’s housing and reached for some epoxy. That’s when his hand almost bumped into a small green creature.
The thing had a pointed nose and long spindly fingers and toes. But it was less than three inches tall and its body was wispy, almost ghost-like. Its large black eyes were staring straight at Kaleb’s scanner and Kaleb could see the things finger’s twitching. Each of its four fingers was capped by a long, black nail that looked extremely sharp to Kaleb. He waved his hand over the thing’s head, drawing its attention. When it made eye contact with Kaleb, its bulbous eye grew wide and it started to disappear.
“NO YOU DON’T! HAI-YAH!”
Daivor suddenly swung into Kaleb’s view and stabbed at the disappearing creature with a small sword. The blade glowed blue and went straight through the wispy little creature. The small thing gave an unearthly cry before it solidified and started bleeding on Kaleb’s workbench. Daivor yanked his sword out of the creature and flicked the blood off it. The small green creature fell to the tabletop and turned into a rainbow colored mist.
“Where did you get a sword?” Kaleb asked dumbly as he tried to process everything that had just happened.
Daivor grunted and spun his sword expertly. As he did, the small silver blade shrunk and turned into a brown pipe. Daivor took a long drag on his pipe-sword and sighed.
“Fucking gremlins, boss.” the gnome almost growled.
Kaleb rubbed his eyes. “I suppose this isn’t a one and done kind of thing. Is it?”
“No, boss. Gremlins are like roaches or rats. If you see one, there can be hundreds. We need to stop all building and deal with this.”
“Stop all building?” Kaleb asked, confused.
That’s when Marie gave a cry of alarm and the pen-cutter she was using went out of control. The thin red laser used for cutting metal sparked and pulsed as Marie dropped it. But the device kept outputting the hot red laser. Daivor quickly swung over and broke the pen-cutter with his foot. Marie made a disgruntled noise at the loss of her equipment, but Kaleb quickly understood the problem.
“They make machines go haywire.”
“Not just machines, boss. Every bit of tech they can get their grubby little hands on. They’ll break test tubes, chew through wires, ruins streams of code just for fun. We NEED to get rid of them. NOW!”
Kaleb nodded. “Hit the alarm. I’ll spread the word.”
“Lock the building down as best you can, boss. The little shits can slip through the cracks, but Jar-lock’s wards should keep the bulk of them in.”
“Do we want them inside?!” Marie asked.
Daivor took another long puff of his pipe. “Hell yes! Otherwise, how would we kill them all?!”
The little gnome transformed his pipe into a sword again and started searching the lab, as a high-pitched warning alarm started echoing in the lab. The gnome had used his Alarm ability, and it rang through the entire hangar. Marie moved to help the gnome as Kaleb left. He rushed to the front of the hangar and waved for everyone’s attention. Already the NPCs were looking around for the source of the noise. Both the Hunters and the Brute clan had their weapons in their hands and looked ready for trouble. Kaleb grinned. He didn’t think they were ready for this type of problem, but it would be a hell of a test of their abilities.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” Kaleb called to the crowd.
Thankfully, Farrah had raised her little command center slightly off the floor. It made him easy to spot.
“We’ve been invaded. The perpetrators are two-inches tall, with green skin and large black eyes. They are magical creatures known as gremlins. They mess with or break all forms of technology. So we need to turn off everything except for what is absolutely necessary. I want us down to a minimum number of staff and drone crews until we purge them completely. This place is going into lockdown until we are sure we’ve dealt with all of them. Is that clear?”
“Total shut down just for some gremlins? Is that really warranted? How much damage can they do?” A hunter asked from her spot at a computer.
Kaleb could see she was running drone feeds through her computer and looked to be taking detailed notes on what she saw. Before Kaleb could answer her, the poor girl’s computer exploded violently, sending bits of screen and sparks into the girl’s face. The surrounding hunters quickly helped the young woman, and she seemed more shell-shocked than anything once Kaleb got to her. He tried not to grin as he unplugged her computer.
“That answer your question?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Are you alright, do you need healing or anything?”
The young woman scoffed as she brushed debris from her face. “That was nothing, Doc. We go through worse in training. Now, how do we find the little buggers?”
Kaleb opened his mouth to answer, and then quickly shut it. He had no idea. He stared blankly at those assembled around him until Daivor shouted over the alarm.
“They can disappear at will. But they can’t hold it long. It’s like holding your breath. Eventually, they have to come up for air. Once they do, you can slaughter the little bastards.”
The whole hangar turned toward the small gnome. The gnome had changed his clothes and now, on top of his normal attire, he wore metal armor that covered him from chest to boots. He didn’t wear a helmet though, his red pointy hat was drooping slightly as he marched forward. He had his sword slung over his shoulder and his eyes were scanning the floor. Daivor spotted something and immediately jumped at it, his sword coming down swiftly.
“AIEEEEEEEEE!”
A high-pitched keening screech filled the hangar, and a gremlin appeared. Its chest was cleft in two by Daivor’s sword, and it quickly keeled over onto the floor. Daivor took a second to spit on the disappearing remains of the gremlin before he addressed the crowd again.
“If you have any magical capabilities, then you may be able to sense or even see them. If you can, then call them out. My sword can pierce them even if they are invisible. Now! Hunt! Them! Down!”
Daivor raised his sword in the air and waited for a chorus of cheers. Nothing came as every head in the room turned back to Kaleb. The young huntress with the exploded computer looked up at Kaleb, confused.
“What did he say?”
Kaleb stifled a laugh as he repeated everything Daivor had said. He often forgot that not everyone could understand gnomish. The little gnome warrior trotted away, clearly embarrassed, as Kaleb’s repetition of his words brought a belated cheer for the assembled NPCs. The hunters and brute clan lizards spread throughout the hangar, searching for the little bastards. As they did, Kaleb brought up a screen that had popped when Daivor had killed the second gremlin. He grinned as his Familiar had finally leveled again.
Daivor Level Up
Crafting 5 [^]
Alarm 4
Alien Knowledge 2
Gnome Workshop
Please select a new Skill: [Build Speed 1], [Defense 1], [Computers 1]
Another screech filled the air as Kaleb closed the window. He’d consult Daivor about how he’d like to improve later. For now, there were gremlins to hunt.