One Month Later
Isse woke up in her hammock, a book lying open beside her face down on her soft silk. Her room looked like an empty void, so white was her silk. Or at least that’s what she liked to think: it wasn’t even close to being as white as Grandmother’s silk, or Aru’s for that matter, but she’d found out that if she spent enough time spinning her silk inside her abdomen she could, as Siidi put it, improve its quality. Which meant it was more resistant, less prone to burning up if someone put a candle in the wrong place (cough cough it had happened only once!) and, well, made it whiter.
She’d started this laborious process for that reason alone, actually, after Siidi had restored to its former glory the memory of their first visit in the Heart of Grandmother’s soul. She’d been doing that a lot lately, restoring her memories that is. They liked to joke that sooner or later she would get a [Painter] Class, but all she’d gained was Levels in her main Class, [Soul Curator]. She was Level 15 now, having gained a Level doing the repetitive action, restoring back to their old selves memories of her new life. Only happy moments for now, if you wanted to count the fighting between Isse and Siidi before the final Trial as happy moments too.
Isse turned towards the door, which was being slowly opened by Albert, who peeked his head in and smiled kindly: “Good morning Isse. Slept well?”
She nodded groggily, then face planted back into her cushion.
“Come now, it’s time to get up. There’s food to be eaten, training to be done and books to read.”
At those words she groaned and slowly began getting up, the legs of her spider half twitching as she stretched them, her arms trembling for that same reason, her mouth opening wide, then wider still as she yawned, showing off her first set of fangs, the one used to inject digestive enzymes into her prey (and the one she’d used the least of all).
Finally, rubbing her eyes, she descended from her hammock onto the floor, skittering out of the door, Albert having already reached the kitchen door and opened it.
“Come in, I’ve got your favorite krimou cut ready for today and some eggs.”
Immediately Isse’s skittering accelerated.
The breakfast was hearty and tasty, filling her with the strength and will to keep going another day instead of just loafing around on her hammock spinning silk and reading books. She liked days like that (she’d never really had lazy days back with her sisters) but she knew she couldn’t always have them. Also, they lost their charm after a while.
“So, what’s the program for today?” she asked as she finished polishing her plate.
“Oh, nothing much: a short lesson on crafting in the morning and afterwards… I think I remember you telling me that you had a playdate with that friend of yours from the Boneless Dancer.”
Isse’s cheeks colored slightly at that, both because she had forgotten and because of the way Albert had described it: “It’s not a playdate. We’re not kids! We’re going out.”
“That makes it sound like you’re girlfriends,” he retorted with a playful smile.
Any other day before Siidi had started restoring her memories she would’ve probably had the desire to answer back with a joke. But bringing back the memories to their original state was starting to have… consequences: first and foremost, her emotions were going back to normal. That also meant the sadness of having lost Anda. A sensation she would never again give up on: better to feel sad, to feel your heart break apart, than feel nothing at all.
“Shouldn’t have said that, am I right?” he asked.
She shook her head no, then tried to smile, and found it came easily.
“I’m not ready for a girlfriend. Not yet,” she said, not answering his question, not directly at least. He understood, nodding slightly and putting the dirty dishes in the sink, looking at them intently, as if trying to see the meaning of life written in a mysterious language on the stains, before shrugging and deciding that yes, the dishes could wait until later.
They walked down the corridor and the stairs, the place now a lot livelier than it used to be: Isse had since forced Albert to decorate the place, changing it from a sterile hell to a lived-in house. A few paintings now dotted the long hallway, bought cheap from a second hand dealer in the market, while the small table that had once held only a small vase for the shop’s keys now was also the proud host of an actual vase filled with delicate white flowers that had a name Isse couldn’t remember, so every time she went to buy new ones from the nearby [Florist] she just asked for the ‘pretty white flowers’ and caused the woman to chuckle and shake her head.
Down they walked into the workshop that had been decorated by Creanza years prior in a desperate attempt to teach Albert that even, no, especially, frugality had a limit.
It had not worked. Isse was pretty sure that it wasn’t working even now, no matter how hard she tried. It was just Albert’s nature, the only reason it seemed to be changing being that he knew most people liked things instead of sterile ambients, where, in his opinion, it was much more difficult for someone to find cover or hide.
Still, the workshop was cozy, and that was what mattered to Isse as she skittered towards the table they worked on most of the time and sat down on the floor, her spidery legs moving to anchor her to the ground and keep her stable, making it impossible for her to accidentally move around. A little trick she’d come to love in this line of work.
Albert sat down by her side on a comfortable chair, its cushion worn out while its backrest seemed good as new. Understanding the reason for that was as easy as just watching him work, his spine taking a C shape as he tilted his body over the table the better to watch every gear he worked with.
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There, a single clock lay on the table. Well, more the case with a few sparse gears assembled outside of it.
“Today we’re going to work on the mainspring and its chain.”
Isse groaned and for a single moment wanted to beat her head against the table. Then she remembered what had happened last time, the mess it had caused and the hour and half she’d been forced to spend to clean it all up. Albert hadn’t been angry, not at all, but he was a firm believer of the philosophy of ‘You break it, you put it back together’. Now, she hadn’t broken a clock, or gods help her she would’ve spent the whole night getting it back together, but she had accidentally knocked down a box of gears she’d accidentally placed too close to the edge and a few gears they’d need to use later on.
“Whyyyyyyy? That part’s so boring. And complex.”
Albert smiled: “Exactly for that reason Isse. Making the chain by hand is complex, time consuming and mindnumbingly boring. Crafting them gave me more calluses than wielding a knife for decades and, truth be told, their usefulness is overrated, since most clocks can work perfectly well without one. Buuuuut… it makes everything work better, and we don’t do things the half-assed way here now, do we?”
What followed was, by all standards, the most boring thing in the world. You see, creating a mainspring, per se, wasn’t complex: you just had to wind a long, thin rectangle of steel around and around in a circle, and that’s it. Job done. Easy, right? Wrong. It required a lot of patience, like everything when it came to clockmaking, but compared to creating the chain it was a breeze.
‘But Isse’, you may be wondering, ‘Whyever would you put a chain inside a clock? What’s its function?’
To answer that let us ask a question of our own: what makes a mechanical clock move? Answer: the mainspring, together with the hairspring, a much thinner version of the mainspring, more like, as the name entails, a hair. But how do these things make a clock move? Answer, by storing energy. The mainspring is charged up by contracting it, forcing it into a smaller state, therefore causing it to attempt to expand back to its original state, which releases energy. Now, imagine how much of that a mainspring could store. If one were to make a comparison, it would be more or less the same amount of energy that one can find behind a pugilist’s strongest punch. Now, imagine what would happen if, for some reason, the mainspring had a defect and broke apart. What would happen? Simply put, the clock would, quite literally, explode! If you were lucky, in your pocket. If you were decidedly unlucky, right in your face as you took it out to read the hour, gouging out an eye or both.
The chain existed to make sure that, if anything like that ever happened, the damage of the explosive release would be reduced as much as possible. It also has the secondary advantage of helping regulate the release of energy, making the charge of the spring last longer.
And that was how Isse spent the following two and a half hours: making chains with the smallest links she’d ever seen, assembling them with a magnifying glass kept in place by a metallic arm attached to her table, pincers in her hands, sweat dripping down her forehead because of how much she was concentrating on not fucking this up.
And… she actually managed to.
“Very well Isse. You’ve actually done it. The last time I tried to teach someone to make these they threw the table off in frustration.”
Isse frowned up at him: “I could see why they’d do it.”
“Quality work takes time and care Isse. If you want something done well, you must be patient. Patience, patience, and more patience.”
Isse smiled slightly at that: “That’s what Master said.”
“It was the second wisest thing to ever come out his mouth.”
He was joking, of course. They both knew just how big a piece of shit Master had been, but they also knew that he was like that because he cared, because he’d seen others fail, because he himself had failed, and he never wanted to see someone go through that same pain.
“What was the first?”
“His favorite alcohol. Used to be Sunlit Beer crafted in the City of Temples. Whenever I and the other students wanted something we corrupted him with that beer.”
She chuckled, wiping the sweat of her brow as she, too, lifted herself from the floor, her spine crackling like wood in a fireplace as she stretched out.
“How do you manage not to get back pain doing this Albert?” she asked with a wince.
“Oh, I have a Skill for that: [Improved Back Muscles].”
“...You’ve got to be shitting me. There’s no way that’s a Skill.”
“Language! And to answer that, I am not lying: that’s one of my Skills, and probably my favorite of the many my [Clocksmith] Class gave me.”
He turned around and paced towards the stairway, pointing up: “Now hurry up: you need to shower, and then you’re going out with your friend, right?”
She did.
----------------------------------------
That night, when Isse got back into her bed, she was smiling happily, for once tired enough that she decided not to read well into the night.
She and Morra had spent the afternoon walking around Scasce, visiting various areas of the city. At one point Isse had found a shop selling some kind of candies made out of milk mixed with some kind of herb that made them taste warm and also somewhat fruity. Sometimes they were strawberries, other times oranges, sometimes still they tasted like nothing she’d ever eaten before.
She enjoyed every single one of them, and she liked to think that the ones she’d bought Morra made her feel the same. She certainly couldn’t tell with the mask, which, as always, at most showed her mouth whenever she took off the lower part to put a candy in her mouth.
Afterwards they’d just walked around, listening in on people talking and gossiping while Morra gave her tips on how to discern interesting information from rabble and how to listen in on people without being noticed. Meanwhile Isse acted a bit like a social butterfly, unobtrusively joining in people’s conversations and showing interest. Looking like a young woman in her prime certainly made people act kinder to her and made them overlook her obvious lack of knowledge in certain subjects.
As she slowly sat down in her hammock, she smiled: today had been a good day.
And as her eyes closed, the day became even better as she heard a little ding and words were whispered in her mind:
[Spy Level 9!]
[Skill - Rumormongering Proficiency (Lesser) Obtained!]
[Conditions Met: Tinkerer -> Clockworker]
[Clockworker Level 11!]
[Skill - Nimble Fingers Obtained!]
[Skill - Fast Assemblage (Components) Obtained!]