Travel.

The Radio was playing its old-timey songs. Occasionally it would blare a commercial for an impossible product or service, such as photosynthetic tendril ointment (“Why bother with ingestion?”) or probability manipulation odor control (“Understanding notwithstanding!” a slogan I still don’t get).

Some observations:

I was getting used to the idea of magic. Magic is a word people use when they don’t understand something. In my feeble way of thinking, things work because they work.

And yet I’d seen some things here. Magic things. Undeniable crazy magic, and Harrigan had even linked some of it to his busted-ass PC, to my knowledge a previously unexploited feature of Windows 7, or whatever ancient operating system he used.

Irksome. Things should work sensibly.

Halfway to sunset, the Radio’s playlist, or whatever it was, underwent a change. It was the same song, over and over again. It was was catchy, and had a rhythm to it that hooked into my head. It wasn’t a song I’d ever heard before, and it wasn’t a language I understood.

It sounded like a big band was behind it; the vocalist sounded like a human woman who would occasionally scream at the top of her lungs, EEEEEAAAGH, then keep singing as if everything was just dandy. I asked the Radio to put on something else. It ignored me. That song, over and over again. With limited commercial interruptions, of course.

Island after island was ignored. The Makers had another location in mind. And we finally got there. They stopped, and my raft drifted to a halt. I squinted my still-nearsighted eyes at it our destination.

What a mess.

It wasn’t a natural formation like the other islands I’d seen. Long, rusted steel superstructure bent and twisted and sunk beneath the water. Trees festooned the whole place, clinging and taking root in metal, somehow. The whole thing was absurdly overgrown with vines and what might have been Spanish moss, hanging down in nasty gray curtains.

It was stuck in a sandbar, or perhaps it had been an island once, as it had a sandy beach and a bit of jungle. Or perhaps the island had grown around whatever the metal parts were. Tropical birds filled the air over the place, circling like Technicolor vultures.

A single structure rose above the dirty peak of the thing. A metal dome, rusty and cracked. It looked an awful lot like a run-down, ruined astronomical observatory.

Observatory. “Oh,” I said.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The Radio started with a hearty male vocalist lauding a place he repeatedly named My Blue Heaven. His song was clearly about being happy at home.

It was a tumbledown haunted mansion dump. That big, rusty-ruined structure, the sand bar, the tangly, unruly jungle. The broken-down Observatory.

The Radio welcomed me:

Turn to the right, there's a little white light

Will lead you to my Blue Heaven

The Makers dropped me off in a cluster of tide pools. With a lot of clicking and rattling, the metal talon released my raft. And the gang of oceangoing sculpture crustaceans fanned out in different directions, disappearing into the sea.

With the exception of the Art Deco Maker, the one I’d started thinking of as, well, Art Deco. He stood in a tidepool, facing me. Art was a menacing figure: a dark steel spiked box with a ring of curved green spiked legs fanning out around the spiky base. Art was seriously Metal. I didn’t know how that gleaming shell had been made, but it was solid work.

I thought of him as He because, I suppose, monsters that launch exploding rockets at things seem quite masculine. They were simply missing the words Watch This! before doing something dangerous and stupid. I liked the Makers. I later learned that all the Makers you see are male, that they have a Queen deep, deep underwater.

The Radio spoke from a nearby stone, one now covered with its leaves and vines. The speaker, tuner and tuning window were larger than I’d remembered, glowing more brightly. Home sweet home, I suppose.

“The Maker glyphed to Owen: ‘Introduction: Cognitive buoyancy indicates confusion. Item presentation can recalibrate.’”

“What? It’s talking to me now?”

“The Maker was communicating as best it could, forming glyphs. It wanted Owen to come closer.”

So I did. I wasn’t afraid of the being; if he’d wanted to hurt me he could have done so many times. I knelt in front of it, at what I imagined was eye level. The shell had no opening or window, just a flat dark surface.

“Direction indicated: Base structural component of fabricated exoskeleton demonstrates proof of encounter. Suggestion: Analysis of foundational layer will provide verification metrics.”

That seemed clear enough, some of it. A little of it. I leaned in and examined the front of the Art Deco shell more closely. I could see the clean construction of it, the rivets forming swooping lines in the –

I blinked. Stamped into the steel shell were the words:

DEAR O.W.

ART IS COOL

YOUR PAL O.W.

LOL

My jaw dropped. In Comic Sans, no less.

Art rotated in place, scuttled hugely from the pool and headed out to sea without another word. Or glyph, whatever that was.

“Radio? Did you see that?”

It played that song. Eee-yagh. Clouds were rolling in. Rain? A storm, possibly.

“Radio, I need to get in there, please. The big building.”

But it wouldn’t let me in. I couldn’t even see anything resembling a door.