Val and I christened her new nest several times that night and she wouldn't let me sleep until she was absolutely positive that our scents were all over it. She wasn't even disappointed that she didn't have any loose feathers to add to it. I knew it was because she would have more available in a couple of weeks and she didn't mind waiting.

The next morning it was our work shift and Val was surprisingly full of energy and wide awake, even after being up for most of the night. I took her hand, something she was surprised by, even though I had removed her restraints during the night, then I led her out of the nest and down the stairs. I covered the entryway with Presence and some dirt and did the same to the window.

“You don't have to do that.” Val said sweetly.

“I'd rather prevent anyone from violating your space than having to clean it after they do and you kill them for it.” I said and we walked back towards the living area. “I also don't have any more blankets.”

Val warble-laughed and kissed my cheek. We met up with the two other avian women and they looked... better somehow. I wasn't sure why, even when they both gave me pointed stares and short chirps of respect.

Val gasped and let my hand go, then hugged both women. “Thank you!”

I wasn't stupid enough to ask her what just happened, so I stood there and waited for everyone to leave the living area as they started the long shuffle down the main mine shaft to get to work. I took out one of the not so great looking crates that the supervisor had given me and did my best to straighten it up enough for what I was about to do.

“Ladies, your ride awaits.” I said and waved to the slightly mangled crate.

“That looks dangerous.” The first avian woman said.

“I'll protect you and hold you steady with Presence.” I said. “The bottom is still completely intact, and it's just for show. I'll have a much better ride for you tomorrow.”

I took out two small pieces of crate and put them against the other one, so she had a step up and I didn't have to lift her.

“Thank you.” She said and climbed on and sat on the side.

“I still hate you and think you should die for the insult you represent.” The second one said and climbed on and sat on the other side.

“Don't worry.” I said and helped Val sit down on the front of the crate, then I covered them in straps made of Presence to hold them. “Black Laura is waiting for me.” I said and all three of them let out startled chirps.

“You know of The Raven?!?” They said as one.

“Know of her? I've met her.” I said and took out a cargo handle and attached it to the crate and turned it on. The crate floated up a foot off of the ground and I walked at a normal pace as I pulled it along. Everyone stared at us as I walked by with the three avian women riding on a crate that I wasn't supposed to have and using a cargo handle that wasn't supposed to exist.

When the supervisor saw me he had an angry face for a second, then he saw the slightly mangled crate and sighed. “You fixed one of the broken cargo handles.”

“It took me a while, since I didn't have a working one to compare it to.” I said, completely honestly. I wasn't going to tell him that I had nine more, especially since I wasn't going to keep them intact when I had twelve of them fixed. I was going to pull them apart and convert them into what I needed.

“You know we can't use it for shipping the crates.”

“That's why I'm using it like this.” I said and walked by him. “I don't need a laser drill issued, either.” I said and he sighed again. I didn't bother stopping at his spot where he distributed the laser drills and walked all the way over to section six. The three avian women didn't protest or even say anything until I came to a stop and they saw two empty crates waiting to be filled.

“We have to fill two of them?!?” The second avian woman exclaimed.

I chuckled. “No, I have to.” I said and looked at the expanse of wall. “I should probably dig this out.”

“What? How are are you going to do that?” She asked.

“Like this.” I said and took out ten digging machines and made two rows of five, then held them with Presence Hands and started to dig. All three women were chirping and tweeting furiously back and forth as I worked. By the time the other workers were walking by our section, I had already cleared out a sixty foot section of wall and stored the digging tools to hide what I did.

Luckily, I had revealed another nice vein of unrefined focusing crystals and waited until the other prisoners had walked by before I took out my laser drills and harvested them. Needless to say, after another two hours of work, I had both of the crates filled and even had a few extra to store for later.

“Now I have a question for you.” I said to the two avian women. “Do you want me to remove your restraints?”

Both women seriously considered the matter and talked with Val about it in their native language. She responded and both women looked at me.

“We will remain restrained for now.” The first avian woman said. “The danger is too great of being caught.”

“Is it?” I asked with a smile and used Presence Hands to activate the handles on both full crates and pulled them behind us as I walked back to the supervisor while pulling the crate with the women on it. He saw me coming and from his thoughts, he was going to berate me for leaving without doing what I promised. I held a hand up to stop him and took the corner, walked by him, and he saw the two crates being pulled along behind me.

“Yes, they are full.” I said and guided the crates around the corner behind me and I kept walking at a normal pace. I stopped at the living area and dropped the avian women off, stored the mangled crate and the repaired cargo handle, then took the two crates of unrefined crystals to the start of the mine. I put on my shackles and brought the two crates into the middle of the area and looked up at the platform.

Unfortunately, it was the Order member that didn't like me much and one of the men, which meant I wasn't going to be speaking to the female guard today. I didn't even bother speaking and left the area, took off my shackles, and ran all the way back to the living area. I gave Val a wave and surprisingly, all three of the avian women waved back. I gave them an award winning smile, a quick chirp of thanks, and ran down the main shaft to the supervisor.

“I really shouldn't let you.” The supervisor said when I stopped in front of him.

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“All right. I won't make you do something you don't want to do.” I said as I turned around and started to jog.

“WAIT!” He yelled and I ignored him and ran.

I knew he wasn't going to leave his position to come all the way back to the living area, just to come all the way back to let me in to the broken item warehouse, so I used my electronic key and opened it just enough to get inside and closed it again. I ran to the back of the room and cleared the pile of debris away from my half-completed platform, then started working on repairing more of the cargo handles. I only needed two more for the platform to go with the ten I had, then made five more, just because I could.

I carefully pulled them apart and took my time placing the various components from inside the cargo handles around the inside of the platform. The main parts needed to be on the outer edge of the metal and they had to be hooked in a completed circuit and not a series.

Once I had the twelve sets of components in place, one in each corner and two sets in the expanse between each corner that were an equal distance from each other, I had to cobble together some kind of control mechanism to turn them all on at the same time and connect them all with the appropriate length of wires. I immediately thought about the full and partial consoles I had seen at the front of the warehouse.

I ran over and looked through them to find an appropriate one. It took me a few minutes as I compared the controls on a cargo handle to that of each of the consoles I had access to, then I had to pull the console apart to see if it could do what I wanted. I found the right circuit board that I could have all of the components attached to and a single button on the console could be used to activate all of them at the same time without the need of a regulator.

I had to check the other parts and ensure that the field generators had a constant power supply from the internal batteries, which meant I needed a large regulator, like the one inside a Light sword that regulated the flow of energy from a focusing crystal. I sighed and tried to look around at all of the discarded appliances for a regulator, and was just a successful as I was when looking for one when I was trying to fix the laser drills. I wasn't.

I took out a Light sword and popped it apart, then removed the large regulator and stored the useless weapon. I attached the regulator and made all the proper connections, then brought the reconfigured console over to the platform.

Now the hard part. I thought and looked at all of the tiny things around me and the wires they contained that I would have to splice together... and then I chuckled and looked through the wall. I had hundreds of large machines that I could get really long wires from and moved the things out of the way of the large hole I had made into the warehouse. I stepped inside and found one of the broken automated crane arms, easily cut off the metal casing and harvested the large bundle of wires inside.

Of course, once I was there, I looked at the largest pieces of equipment there and was pleasantly surprised to find a large vehicle of some kind. It almost looked like an armored personnel carrier, except that it didn't have a place on the front for someone to drive the thing. It had been torn off somehow and all that was left was the back half.

I couldn't take the armored parts, obviously, so I looked at the rear cargo door. It was intact and I smiled as I looked at the mechanisms that controlled it and they were fine. The best part was that it was larger than the entryway I had made and would cover it completely. All I had to do was embed it into the wall and secure it. With all the easily available structural metal around me, I almost laughed at the simplicity.

I took out my Light sword and easily cut off the last foot of the back of the thing and I recognized the interior. It wasn't an APC at all. It was a shuttle. I now had the rear cargo hatch and the wire runs and I even left it attached to the floor to bury under the stairs as support. I carefully stored it into one of my bags of holding and felt the weight of it.

It's almost the same as the full size garglemacer. I thought with a chuckle and searched around for any battery packs that I could use to operate the thing. I found a pile of expended ones and walked back over to the hole I had made and covered it again after I stepped through.

I took out the large bundle of wires and pulled a pile of normal sized wires out of it and ran them all along the inside of the platform and connected the components that needed to be connected to each other. I looked at the console that I was going to have to attach after I put the top on the platform.

Dammit! How am I going to move the thing? I asked myself and sat there and thought about it. Come on, you can figure this out.

The thing was going to hover a foot off of the ground and didn't have the long handle to drag it, so I needed some kind of propulsion. The problem was, not only were there no volatile substances to use as fuel for any kind of propulsion, the shuttle only had the casing and nothing else, no engines and no reactor.

I sat down on the edge of my three-quarters completed platform and folded my hands together to think... then I noticed that my hands were folded together.

“Ha! Ha ha ha!” I laughed and ran through the warehouse to the huge container with hundreds of broken wrist and ankle restraints. “Who needs propulsion when I can just pull the damn thing!”

I took out my wrist restraints and used it as a model as I cannibalized a pile of the broken ones to make six functional ones. Of course, I didn't know what frequency they worked on, so I took out my electronics kit and tested mine and recorded the frequency. I knew it had to be different than all the others, because otherwise all of the wrist restraints would all try to attract to each other.

I thought back to the operating table and what the guard had done to my wrist restraints then. I smiled and checked to see if there was an electronics switch inside as I looked deep inside of it. It took a while, because I didn't have any way to operate them, except for opening and closing them. I hoped that it wasn't just software tweak to change the frequency. To my relief, it was an electronic switch that changed it from one signal to the other.

Now that I knew that, it was easy to discover their signals when I turned them on. They snapped out to the standard distance and I nodded. If positioned in a hexagon pattern inside the platform and their partners were placed at the living section, the supervisor's spot, and at the two ends of the shaft, then when they were wired into the console and through the large regulator, it should be possible to pick and choose which one the platform floats to.

I even have two spares if I need the platform go anywhere else. I thought and got to work.

Needless to say, I didn't get it to work right away. I had to take out my defunct Light sword and use even more of the parts and integrated them into the console and wired them up. Once they were in place, I cut a small hole in the top piece of the platform and pushed the ends of the wires through, then welded the top to the platform. I attached all the lose wires to the console and then welded that to the very front of the platform.

I made a small metal seat from one of the mangled cargo boxes for me to be comfortable while I used the platform, then I attached the bench seat to the very back edge of the platform to allow a bit of room while three people sat on it. Just for fun, I made three sets of two metal hooks that cargo handles could be latched onto. With them, the platform could handle pulling a single crate or two crates, since the platform was two crates wide.

I thought about making metal mounts for the orphaned cuffs to be secured at the destination spots, then changed my mind. Instead, I was going to bury them. I didn't know if I would do the one in the living area in front of everyone or try and dig a hole when everyone was asleep. Either way, I was taking a chance.

I'll wait for tonight. I thought to myself, stored the completed platform in another bag of holding and put the orphaned cuffs in with it.

I ran back over to the cargo hatch, looked around to make sure no one was there, then popped it open for a second and hopped out and closed it again. With no one around, I ran over to the entryway I had dug, absorbed the Presence and pushed the dirt out of the way, then used a Light sword as I painstakingly dug out the large furrow under the stairs that the shuttle bottom needed to be shoved into. I used a Presence Hand to hold the hilt to dig in the ten feet or so I needed, then I did the same on the sides and top and only dug in a foot.

Once I had the space prepped, I quickly dug out a spot for the battery packs and the signal receiver to open the hatch. It was going to take me a while to power them up, even with the adapter from the battery pack in the used Light sword. I attached it and covered everything with Presence, then I took out the rear of the shuttle and slid it into place. It was a snug fit and I had to tweak it a little to get it to sit properly.

Once it was in, though... I was happy. All I need now is a bit of time, and maybe a working battery pack charger and a large power source. I chuckled at the thought. All in good time.

With my current chosen tasks completed as much as they could be, I ran back to the living area and met up with Val and the other two avian women. I wasn't surprised that most of Val's feathers in the nest of blankets had been replaced with their own. I didn't comment on it, especially since they really thought I would. I gave them a smile and sat down outside the nest with Val and kept my mouth shut.