- [Elanoria Victoria Vanderheide] - Munitions Production Factory
Loose metal casings rattle around the space, the consistent high-pitched clinkering of small metal cylinders overtoning the cranking rattle of the asphalt gray conveyor belts feeding through the factory. Large, high window fronts raised up at the tops of the thick brick and concrete walls let out the noise and fumes of industry at work and allow in the idle engine noises of a line of slowly rolling trucks just on the other side of it. The open windows also let out the distinct smell of the factory. Metal is hammered by a row of workers grabbing trays off of a belt as solidified metal casings are hammered out of mold racks and into feeding mechanisms. The casings travel down a funnel, sorting them into the next line of assembly in the munitions factory — one of the pinnacle creations of the mid-war expansion effort.
Being the core small-caliber munitions factory, no expense has been spared to make it as efficiently streamlined as possible. Magical processes and casters are integrated into all factors of production, from the casings to the primers to the bullets themselves — everything has been designed to need as few hands as possible, as bodies are the rarest thing left in supply after the extensive defensive efforts of the world tree city. Overcompensation with technology is the key element to winning the final war effort, but it is also their biggest weakness. It’s a risky strategy with many weaknesses; however, it's the only one left available to them at such a time as this. This factory will produce up to three hundred thousand small caliber rounds per day, with this result shrinking the larger the day’s desired caliber becomes. They will produce set quotas of a specific caliber and then prepare a different mold and form for the next day. Today, small caliber 7.65×21mm rounds — the most common munition fielded by nearly every standard weapon in their arsenal — is being produced. They’re the bread and butter of the weapons fielded by the world tree city’s forces and, as such, are the most commonly produced.
A person stands, hunched over an assembly line, and monotonously slides a flat bar over an overturned row of cylinders, pushing in a relatively even amount of powder into each of the dozen rounds drifting past them. Moving almost lifelessly, the worker repeats the motion again and again as the belt continues down the line. All around the factory, people are droning after the work that needs to be done — day in, day out. It’s a rather monotone job, but it needs to be done, and for many, it’s preferable to being out there on the front lines. It’s very easy to simply enter a mindless flow state during one of the always-extended shifts, repeating the same motions in some sort of odd synchronicity with the repetitive machinery all around them.
A high-pitched, posh laughter breaks the drollness of the work, but most people ignore it. Their glazed-over eyes stay drifted down to their stations as they work.
Sitting on a stack of overturned crates that contained fresh shipments of powder from the alchemists, a human woman holds the back of her hand over her mouth and smugly laughs like a shrill harpy that just watched a hawk fly into a cliff. She sits there on the stacked crates, one leg crossed over the other, with impeccably straight posture. Her long, shiny, straight reddish-brown hair has been tied up into a regulation-adhering bun that is only visible as a lump below a gray woolen cap.
“Absolutely preposterous!” she says, waving her slender hand down at the dead-faced man standing below her. “What a scandal, Janson!” she says, laughing again.
— The man below her says nothing, just staring at her from down on the factory floor.
“Go on, you scamp! Get!” she says cheerfully, waving at him with her lace glove that had been resting on her lap. “And do fetch me some more refreshments, yes?” she asks, shaking a half empty bottle his way. “And maybe a cheeky little protein bar?” she suggests, as the man groans and shuffles away. She sighs and rolls her eyes, leaning back and enjoying the breeze coming from the worker sitting next to her and fanning her with a stack of health-and-safety regulations. “Good help is so hard to find,” she mutters to herself, shaking her head.
“Vanderheide!” barks a man suddenly from down below in a loud voice. The woman shrieks, jolting together and grabbing the edge of the crate. It begins to lean forward, tipping over. The fanning man next to her stumbles, falling off of the side and cracks himself against the concrete floor of the factory as she kicks her legs, flailing backward and resting on the crate as it topples back into place.
She exhales, resting her hand on her chest for a moment as she stares at the ceiling, and then sits upright. “Are you mad?!” she asks, glaring down at the man in uniform standing there down below, holding a clipboard. “You almost frightened me to death with that ghastly tone of yours!”
The foreman glares up at her and then down at the man lying next to him, groaning and flailing around, not able to get up from his fall. “Fuck’s sake…” mutters the foreman, setting his clipboard down, grabbing the worker below his shoulders, and pulling him up to his feet. “Lanyer, back to the line!” he barks, dusting the worker off.
The fallen man groans, shuffling back to the conveyor to resume his position.
Vanderheide and the foreman watch the undead lurch his way back to the assembly line, together with a few other dozen of them who are working here day and night without rest, pause, or complaint.
She lifts her gaze, staring at the odd, tomb-like structure that is suspended over the factory’s ceiling. It’s a vampire’s sarcophagus. Willing conscripts were able to sign over the permission to use their bodies postmortem — conditions of their death being fitting enough for them to be usable — in order to aid the defense of the city. Sometimes this means having them work as factory workers. The magic of the elder vampire is what allows this all to work.
It was a large scandal for a time. The arguments were severe, going so far as to almost leading to something akin to a violent pushback from the caretaker of the world tree herself and her zealous followers. Undead have always been seen as the enemy of the living, let alone greater undead creatures such as vampires — let alone an elder vampire, who, in her lifetime, must have fed on hundreds of people at the very least to reach her age and power. The thought of having them exist within the last bastion of the living, let alone be made up of their own brothers and sisters, was not met with great public reception.
And yet, the men and women signed up for for the program — not all of them, of course. But enough that the fears of the concept being forced on everyone who dies for a sheer, desperate lack of numbers were quashed.
Even if the caretaker wasn’t pleased about it in the least, she had no choice but to resign herself to the peoples’ will, but she ordered that all dead be buried below the shadow of the world tree so that they could finally return to nature with dignity.
She isn’t sure how many undead there are now, working the factory lines, digging trenches, and undertaking all manner of manual, simple tasks, but they have to be a significant number given the progress she’s heard is being made in all areas.
“Vanderheide!” barks the foreman at her. “I told you already the other day to stop commandeering the workers!” The man shakes his clipboard at her. “Your break is over, get back on the line!” he says, rapping his knuckles against the board.
“My good man,” remarks Vanderheide, switching her crossed legs over from one to the other. “It is not my place in this world to stand in such mundane places as this, like a toiling goblin in the old caves,” she says, starting to fan herself and then sighing and stopping because it was too much effort. “I still don’t know how you all do it,” she mutters.
The man plants a hand on his side, lifting up his cap with the other as he glares up her way. “I’m already up to my ears in shit, so you listen here, princess -” starts the foreman in an annoyed tone.
“— Countess,” corrects Vanderheide, tsking once and rolling her eyes again. “Countess Elanoria Victoria Vanderheide, third daughter of the house of -”
“- It’s going to be Private Vanderheide when I have your porcelain ass transferred to active duty!” he threatens. She gasps, appalled, lightly clutching her spread fingers just below her neck.
“You wouldn’t dare!” she replies, leaning in forward. “My bloodline has -”
— The boxes shake again, rattling as they slide an inch from the impact of the bottom of his boot striking against the lower crate. Vanderheide yelps, balancing herself and then jumping down to the ground rather than risking falling off. She looks at him with a cold venom, dusting herself off as she stands upright with an insectishly stiff posture. The corner of the clipboard waves toward her nose. “Your bloodline is going to be dripping down a trench if you don’t get your shit together, Vanderheide!” warns the foreman, narrowing his eyes. “Then I’ll have you back here downgraded into one of them, except then you’ll be productive for a change.”
“I don’t consent to being turned into one of these ghouls,” she replies. “My family would be aghast if they ever saw me in such drab rags alive, let alone dead,” says the woman, pulling on a loose thread from his uniform. “Listen, ah- Weidel, is it?” she asks, looking at his name tag with a disinterested gaze. “Let’s just forget this ghastly business. You go about your trivial duties, and I’ll continue to grace this sweltering hellscape with my presence, yes?” she asks, smiling, as she looks at the foreman standing there and chewing on some kind of stimulant gum with an open mouth like grazing cattle. “Just imagine the pride in your ancestral family’s eyes, watching you from the heavens above, seeing you standing in the presence of nobility,” she remarks. “Your mundane family tree has finally blossomed, I’d say,” says Vanderheide, a long, slender finger resting on her chin as she nods, feeling confident that she just sold her argument pretty well.
Foreman Weidel just stares at her with narrowed eyes, stopping his chewing for a second. All around them hammers the work of heavy industry in motion.
After a moment of processing, Weidel lowers the clipboard. “You know what? I think I’m sending you to be a ditch digger,” he says, continuing to chew his gum. “Or maybe to the rifle divisions?” the man ponders, turning away. He waves over his shoulder with the clipboard. “No. I’ll just make a call and leave it up to the powers that be. I don’t have time for this shit.”
Vanderheide laughs at his joke, her shrill, shriekish cackling cutting through the air. It’s not a real laugh. It’s one of those social laughs that one does when someone in good company tries to be humorous and you are polite enough to indulge them.
— The man keeps walking away.
Vanderheide watches him go.
Wait.
Is he serious?
She stands there, watching him make his way up a gray metal staircase, back toward his station.
A quietly desperate part of her starts to begin; he was serious.
Vanderheide watches the foreman climb up another step, and then, before she knows it, she’s bolted over after him. “Wait! Wait!” calls the former noblewoman, now a factory worker. “Mr. Weidel!” she cries out, waving her arms. “Wait! I’m not suited for such chicanery!” exclaims Vanderheide, grabbing hold of the fabric around his tucked-in boots. “Please reconsider!” she asks, latching onto his leg as she tries to shake her off.
“Let go!” exclaims the man, kicking his leg out and trying to shake her off.
“I won’t survive a day in such horrid conditions, Mr. Weidel!” she argues. “Have a heart; would you really send me to my final grave?” she asks, looking up at him from down at the bottom of the steps. “I might be the last noble alive; by right of succession, I may well be the queen-to-be!” she argues desperately. “When this is all over, I’ll grant you lands, knighthood, anything!” promises Vanderheide, starting to cry.
“Fuck off, don’t touch me,” says the foreman, finally shaking her off. He holds his hands out to his side. “Look around you, Vanderheide,” he argues, raising his voice. “Your world is dead. This new one doesn’t need nobility anymore.” He points down at her. “It’s time you learned your place. You’re done,” finishes the man, turning around and climbing up the stairs toward the door. She scrambles after him.
“Wait! Wait! I’ll be good, I promise!” she asks, clasping onto him as he opens the door and heads for a phone on the desk inside the room.
“Don’t make me call security!” warns the foreman, trying to pry her off of him as he reaches out for the phone. “You did this to yourself,” he says, grabbing the receiver off of the phone’s base and up to his ear. “This is Weidel -”
“- Please! Please! Please!” she begs, crying as he shoves her back with one hand. Vanderheide clasps her palms together, falling to the ground and clutching her cap between her hands. “I’ll work double shifts for the rest of the year, I promise!” she offers.
The foreman holds the phone up to the side of his head, looking down at her as a voice comes through from the other end. He sighs. “Never mind, forget it,” says the foreman, setting the receiver back down.
Vanderheide’s face lights up, and she jumps up to her feet, grabbing his hand. “You won’t regret this!” she says.
“I already do,” he replies, yanking his hand out of her clammy grip. He reaches across the small office into an open metal key-box on the wall, pulling out a key-ring from the collection there. He throws it to her, and she fumbles, trying to catch it. “We have a hurt driver and the line is behind schedule,” says Foreman Weidel. “Take truck number seventy-three onto the ferry and bring it across,” he orders. Her face, already pale, turns translucent with sweat and fear.
He picks up the receiver again.
“Okay! I’ll go right now!” she says, clutching the keys to her heart and setting her cap back onto her bun.
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“This is your last chance, Vanderheide,” he warns her. “You’re worth less to me than one of the zombies. Next time, you’re out.”
She runs to the door, looking back at him and tilting her cap. “You won’t regret it, I promise!” she swears, crossing her heart with her free hand and turns to bolt down the stairs.
— Vanderheide lets out a terrified yelp as she spins down the first step, crashing straight into the undead, who was walking up the staircase her way with her requested refreshment in hand.
She catches herself on the railing, a leg sliding through its gap as she slips. The bottle flies through the air, crashing into a pillar, and the undead worker crumples down the stairs, groaning in a broken heap at the bottom.
Wordlessly, she looks back into the office, and without a word, she sprints as fast as she can with the keys in hand to the cargo loading area.
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“Can’t be that hard,” she mutters to herself, nodding once as she climbs into the raised driver’s position of the cargo-hauling truck. Vanderheide slaps her face lightly with both hands, bringing some red into her cheeks. “Come on, Ela,” she says. “The family name is counting on you,” she says, exhaling as she wraps her hands around the thin, leather-wrapped steering column. She looks around herself, trying to recall her lessons.
Back on her family’s spring estate, she had learned to ride an anqa as a girl. This isn’t really much different than that, is it?
She sighs, thinking about the fine, regal plumage of her favorite anqa, that she was gifted as a girl — Butterfeathers.
A hand knocks on the door twice, with the worker below giving her a thumbs-up before walking back and slamming the cargo hatch shut. It’s time for her to move.
Vanderheide starts the truck’s ignition, her boot pressing down the clutch and then lightly releasing it as she shifts into gear. The vehicle rumbles to life and then slowly starts rolling forward from the loading bay toward a line of trucks ahead of her, forming a zipper pattern from dozens of loading bays. All of them are loaded with munitions and rolling toward a variety of logistics centers at various defensive positions. Packrats are transporting crates of materials off of fresh trucks and into the factory’s processing bays, the little vehicles darting between trucks that are colossal in size compared to them with little fear of being crushed. The factory lives and breathes with movement in its own way, with the mechanical heartbeat pumping out brass blood, which is moved to the rest of the body by these trucks. The war effort as a whole is an organism made up of living, breathing components. The former noblewoman looks through the smudged, dust-covered window glass of the truck’s cabin and then glancing into the mirror as she rolls her truck into a gap in the convoy as it heads out of the roofed factory hall and out into the world tree valley.
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Her arm hangs out of the window as she leans back in the confusingly slippery seat that her uniform somehow slides all over, but her bare forearms and neck stick to whenever they touch the material. Trucks divert from the line, one after the other, breaking away down one road or another. Some of them are moving around home, restocking fortified positions within the mesa itself. Others drive down the off-ramps through densely protected tunnels into the ashlands around the outskirts of the mesa that work has begun on replanting.
The ground below her changes as the tire-noise sings in a new tone as the truck leaves the road and heads onto a bridge that moves over a large river. Vanderheide turns her head to the right, looking into her mirror and the drop, and then at the world beyond.
The factory is at the edge of the mesa, so the roads all run near the cliff side at the end of their raised territory. Beyond and below are the ashlands, desolate and empty from here to the end of God, as they say. But things are starting to change. Endless water streams from the world tree mesa down from the cliff side in all directions, washing and flooding the area all around them. A lake has started to form all around the mesa, almost like a moat, as the light ash that covers the world becomes thickly saturated with water. Life is beginning to return to the world outside of the mesa. Seeds fall from the cliffs, together with drifting leaves and debris. Water and dirt pour down because of the wind and the rain, together with ejected bio-mass pumped out of the city.
Life is starting to spread back out into the world from the central island of the world tree mesa.
Vanderheide leans over, looking down for a second at the world below the edge of the bridge.
She can see grass growing outside the mesa.
Leaning back in her seat, she looks ahead of herself at the truck she’s following at a tepid pace and wonders how long it will take for life to return to the rest of the world from this little corner that’s left.
A flock of birds flies overhead.
One of them ejects some bio-mass onto her windshield.
She curses, turning on the wipers. But that just makes it worse.
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“The hell happened to you?” asks the orc woman.
“Pardon?” replies Vanderheide, blinking.
The bureaucrat lets out an odd noise, waving her off with an expression to match. “Forget it.” She looks down at the truck’s numbering. “This one’s not registered,” says the orc woman, standing by the ferry. “Truck seventy-three is out today,” she says, looking at her clipboard — an item that Vanderheide is beginning to loathe. If the scepter, crown, and ring were the old signs of power in the world, wielded by kings, the clipboard seems to be the newest such mark of authority. Such a mundane, ugly thing.
“Yes, you’re quite right,” replies Vanderheide, leaning out of the window. “I’m filling in today,” she explains. “Unusual circumstances, you see,” she says, leaning down closer from the high window of the truck.
“I see that all right…” The orcish woman takes a step back, lifting a hand and watching her warily. “It’s protocol. Without proper authorization, I can’t let you through.”
Vanderheide sighs, lifting her nose. “I’ll have you know that I, by right of my birth, have the right to travel these lands as I will and at my pleasure,” she explains. “As the daughter of Count-“
“Okay, turn it around,” says the orc, waving her clipboard in a circle and gesturing the next truck forward. “Come back when you have the papers.”
The truck behind her starts its engine, its lights turning on as it begins to roll forward a few feet.
“Wait, I can’t go back!” calls Vanderheide. “I’ll lose my job if I don’t make this delivery!” she explains. “Please! Have a heart for a woman who has fallen on hard times!” she asks. “Just this once!” Vanderheide looks in the mirror as the truck behind her impatiently flashes its lights. “Please, in the name of my father, Count Vanderheide!”
“Look, lady, just -” The woman looks at her and then stops, slacking her shoulders. “Wait, you said ‘Count’?” she asks.
Vanderheide nods pleasantly, flourishing with her hat. “Countess by birthright, Elanoria Victoria Vanderheide,” she says, presenting herself. “Pleased.”
The orc looks at her, rubbing the back of her head as she eyes her with an odd look. “Well, yank my teeth out and slap me sideways,” she says, taken aback. “You sure got the shit end of the stick, huh?”
“Pardon?” asks Vanderheide again, offended at the consistent use of such crude language in her presence. These rabble… if her father was still around, he’d -
“Go on,” says the bureaucrat, suddenly changing her mind. “Get out of here before I vomit,” she explains.
Vanderheide blinks, taken aback by such rudeness, but calms herself and starts her engine. “Thank you; have an interesting day!” she says with an icy chipperness out of her window as she rolls her truck forward and toward the ferries.
“…I sure am…” remarks the orc, watching her drive off.
Commoners. They’re all so crass and vile.
Vanderheide sighs, turning on the fan next to her for some fresh air as she drives down a ramp leading toward the lake. Several docks jut in in many directions, like a trident, with ships moving constantly on each side of each prong that leads out into deep water. Trucks run back and forth, together with packrats, as vessels of transport are loaded and begin to sail off into shimmering deep waters.
Waiting in line on the ramp, she looks out to her left, toward the world tree.
The giant sits there, its great arms shadowing over the mesa and the lake, looking a little more barren and tired than it always has. But it stands regal and proud nonetheless, towering over the landscape as an impressive titan — the king of all trees.
Vanderheide sits up straight, pulling her shoulders back.
Times have changed, but that doesn’t mean her blood-right isn’t true. She has to keep that in mind. These people will learn from their mistakes one day, when the fog over their eyes has cleared.
A man with a green sign in his hands, wearing a bright vest, guides her truck over onto a large ferry, where it parks in the midst of a row of several others. Many of the drivers get out of their trucks and stretch their legs or, like animals, urinate over the sides of the vessel.
She, being a woman of finer choices, leans back into her chair and calmly waits — as is proper, for the vessel to start moving. She’s a little nervous. She’s never been to the other side before. But this is what she has to do to keep her lifestyle intact. The last thing she needs is to be given a space and told to dig latrines. Even if she one day had a crown back in her hands, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if that were to happen.
Vanderheide watches through her window as the ferry untethers and then begins to drift over the open waters of the great lake toward something very bright.
She watches, unblinking, as they move toward the gate.
It’s a massive construction in the middle of the lake. Two steel and stone columns rise up on either side and are wrapped up in the manipulated roots of the world tree that hold them steady and feed them with powerful magic. Carved over their surfaces are inscriptions and runes of some obscure spell that she doesn’t quite know heads or tails about. She just knows the church is involved in some capacity. Suspended between the two columns is a sagging, white fog. It looks like a dusty sheet hung between two trees as it billows in the wind, releasing fine magical particulate that supercharge the air, causing electric crackles to form in broad, sunny daylight.
Gun platforms sit all around the lake, together with patrol vessels that scour the waters.
The ferry drifts toward a large, steel sleuth gate thick enough to hold back a leviathan’s fist and thick enough to crush a castle if it fell over onto it. Warning lights flash in a circular pattern as they move toward it. An overpowering hissing and electrical whirring fills the air, and then the sleuth begins to drop down into the water, submerging like a lost city on the coast. She looks out of her window, staring at the walls on either side of them as they float into a walled chamber. Soldiers patrol the walls of the gate, and men manning firing platforms train cannons down their way.
After a while, the next sleuth gate opens ahead of them, with the water on both sides equalizing, and the ferry begins to drift forward through and toward the glowing light.
She breathlessly exhales, grabbing the steering column tightly to hold herself steady, as a wave of sunshine-brightness washes over the ferry and then over her truck in a few seconds after that.
Everything is white.
Vanderheide looks around herself, staring.
She’s not in her truck.
She’s not on the ferry.
She’s nowhere at all. It’s just white and empty, as far as she can see.
— And then it isn’t.
A second later, a loud crash fills the air, and she yells, tumbling around the cabin of the truck head over heels from the impact. It’s as if someone had picked her entire truck up and just dropped it straight back down onto its wheels again.
The ferry and its load bounce around, swaying as it all rights itself back. Her eyes open wide as she yanks herself back up, adjusts her hat, and then looks out of the windshield. Vanderheide yanks open her door, standing up and looking out all around herself at the changed world she’s arrived in.
Everything is so… familiar.
Her eyes wander across the beachhead, looking at the massive military complex that has been established here. Tents and barracks sit lined up along a bombed out ruin of a fortress, from which jut long, thick metal antennas up toward the oddly swirling sky that moves in motion more like water than air. On the shoreline, hundreds of people move as life defiantly fills the spirit world. Lifting her hand over her eyes, she watches as a plane runs along a beachhead runway and takes off toward the fractured sky.
It’s hard to explain. But she feels like she’s been here before. Or at least some place close to it.
“…Maybe the summer estate?” she guesses quietly to herself, taking in the sights as the ferry drifts in toward land.
A soldier walks by, looking up at her, and then quickly walks away. “Ah! I’m not crazy!” she insistently calls after him. “Just talking to myself a little,” she explains, adjusting her wool cap and then sitting back in her truck, starting the engine again as the ferry approaches the shoreline of the new world.
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“Truck thirty-seven,” reads the man. “You aren’t scheduled anymore,” he explains.
Vanderheide lets out an audible groan, rolling her eyes back, causing the man to wince for some reason. “Look. I’ve had quite enough of this busy-body nonsense,” says Vanderheide down from the truck’s window with some coldness. She gestures back behind herself to the back of the truck. “Do you want the ammunition or not?” she asks. “I don’t rightly care. If you don’t, I’ll dump the whole lot into the ocean myself,” explains the former noblewoman.
The logistician looks at her and then waves her through. “I gotta make a call. I… just go unload your cargo and go home,” he says, staring in an odd manner.
“Thank you,” replies Vanderheide. “I’ll see to it that you are granted a baron’s title once this is all over,” she says, rolling her window back shut and driving down toward the warehouse.
He stands there, watching her truck go, and then heads over to communications, picking up a receiver and calling back through a cable line — suspended over multiple buoys — back to the homeland.
“Weidel?” asks the dockworker, calling the munitions factory foreman. “What the fuck is this?” he asks in a perplexed tone, getting straight to the point.
“Did it work?” asks the foreman’s voice, calling in from his office, the ammunition factory audibly churning out its products in the background.
“’It’?” he asks. “This is sick shit!” he replies sharply, shaking his head and scrunching his face in disgust.
“Look, did it work or not, asshole?” asks Weidel.
The dockworker lifts a hand in exasperation, looking out of the window toward the unloaded truck that is driving back toward a ferry, waiting to go back home through this side of the portal. “If you mean ‘did a dead woman with half a face just drive a truck straight up through my bay’, then yeah, ‘it’ worked. How about a warning next time, dickhead!” he replies, watching the undead driver get in line with her empty truck.
Static crackles through the phone. “I have a leather-winged, hell-beast, damned vampire sleeping ten feet above my head, dipshit,” replies the foreman. “Be glad you only have some semi-intelligent undead girl driving a truck past you.”
The line is quiet for a while.
“So, the countess, huh?” asks the dockworker.
“…I know, I know,” replies the foreman, exasperated. “Shame. I heard her family was decent enough for their folk, you know. Bit of a brat, but still.”
“Mm…” replies the dockworker, watching the truck load onto the ferry.
Neither of them say anything.
“Are they all this intelligent?” asks the dockworker.
“No, only a few like her can talk, let alone drive. Most of them are just blank dolls. Don’t ask me how the damn thing picks ‘em. I just run the line here,” explains the foreman. “It’s a new world for all of us,” he finishes.
“You’re telling me,” replies the dockworker plainly, setting the phone back down into the hook.
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Vanderheide hums to herself, letting out a long, relieved exhalation and feeling her shoulders go slack. She grabs the rear-view mirror, tilting it as she grabs a cloth, ever so gently dabbing the side of her face to remove the droplets of wet wickering on her skin. It’s not sightly or proper for a noble to sweat, ever.
— Of course, it’s not sweat; it’s condensation and maybe a little mildew.
But she doesn’t see that.
Smiling to herself, she nods contentedly. “You did, Ela,” says Vanderheide to herself, slapping her cheeks lightly to redden them again. “Father would be proud,” she beams, knowing that, even if she has to partake in this crude butchery of a profession, she’s securing the strength of her family name.
Her left hand’s fingers strike against her revealed teeth. Part of her cheek is missing, having been blown away when she died a while ago.
But she also doesn’t know that, simply not being able to be aware of it because of the nature of the elder vampire’s resurrection of her corpse. “Just gotta finish up the rest of your shift, and you can go home and rest,” she says, nodding confidently as the ferry sails back toward the homeland. “Maybe I’ll take a bit of a break when I get back,” she ponders, the vessel vanishing back through the mist.