NOVEL NEXT 2.18 Soup my Ride
"Alright fine, hoist me up then. I'm not some super soldier like your owners," Salazar grumbled. Yet despite his request, he refused to stop squirming against Tapper's assistance, and the robot eventually used both arms and nozzles to wrap around Salazar's torso and throw on him top of the car. By the time Tapper joined him, Salazar had brushed himself off and was pretending that the throw didn't happen.
"What seems to be the damage, Mister Salazar?" Tapper cheerfully asked.
Salazar grumbled and kicked at an armor panel. "Damn near everything here is broken or jammed. I don't even recognize my Isabel anymore… And spare me the apologies, robot. My software is what really matters and that's safe, the rest of this is mere stuff. Just help me pry open this panel, alright?"
Tapper tested the indicated panel, but noted the spots of rust under the paint. "I do not believe this panel has been operable for some time, but maybe it just needs some oil to loosen the rust!" Tapper detached his hand and triumphantly held his wrist over the panel, waiting for the gremlin's blood to well up and drip onto the rusty joints. After two drips and no success, Salazar started to look impatient and Tapper started to feel a little sheepish. "Maybe it needs a little more. I shall, uh, execute command: SPRAY!"
Mana welled up in his chest, but instead of zipping to his spritzer nozzle Tapper directed it down his arm. The spell shot out of his wrist and dragged the gremlin's blood with it, spraying a gout of oil all over the panel and surrounding instruments. And it hurt! Pins raked down the tactile sensors on Tapper's arm as if he were being scratched from the inside, and Tapper cut the spell off before the pain overwhelmed him.
[Status effect: Bleeding
Get the bandages! You lose -1d4 health per round, until you either stop the bleeding or pass a Constitution save against the initial cause.]
Whatever the spell did to his arm tore open some sort of seal, and oil continued to pour out of his wrist at a steady pace. Tapper scrambled to reattach his driller hand, missing the port several times as both the pain and the implications distracted him. Tapper assumed the perk's name was just metaphorical, he shouldn't have to act as if actual blood flowed in his veins! He didn't even have veins! Did this also mean he was now at risk of dying from excessive blood loss, just like a human?
By the time his hand finally clicked into place Tapper had lost most of his health towards gaining a wound, and the program for his spatial orientation was sending mundane error reports. He felt almost dizzy, and assumed this is what humans meant when blood loss led to feeling light-headed. Slowly, he looked up to see that he had drenched the array of instruments and panels in oil. Salazar's legs were also drenched in oil up to the knee and he silently fumed in Tapper's direction. That strange sensation of feeling like a sheep redoubled, and Tapper tried to offer a good-natured chuckle to ease the mood.
"Heh, whoops?"
Phanya tried to tune everyone else out as she sat down on the floor, turned away from the fire and leaning back on her hands. Not much of the campfire light reached the high asphalt ceiling, but Phanya tried to flex her brain in that uncomfortable way whenever she used her Commander senses. She imagined directing soldiers to walk along the ceiling, as if it was the floor, and directed her sense to look out for any weak points in the "road".
As her eyes adjusted to the light Phanya started to make out imperfections in the tarmac, peaks and pits where the road had warped in the heat. Then she saw where the subway had broken through, the hole now filled by a giant scab of slagged metal and charred flesh. Obviously that was the weak point, but was it the most efficient spot to bring down the ceiling? A mild meditative state draped over Phanya as she planned their escape, her eyes and mind wandering all over the dark surface. The system did seem to reward Phanya when she put a bit more flash into her maneuvering…
"Aha, I've got it!" Ricky suddenly shouted, surprising everyone. He emerged from the vehicle holding his artifact in the air, parading it around for everyone to see. To everyone else it looked the exact same, save for the silver gremlin horn now jutting up and backwards at an angle. "Behold, the transmorgifier!"
A beat of silence, before Phanya snorted with laughter. "The what now?"
Ricky grimaced slightly, but powered on. "Yeah yeah, I know, wish I could change the name. Not important now! Point is that I was overthinking everything, I don't need to generate the metal wholesale! Now where is… ah, here's the cable," he said, looking in every direction before he noticed the coils of towing cable hanging directly in front of his face. He fed one end of the braided metal cable into the open end of the horn, and kept feeding past the volume his device should physically be capable of holding.
"Now I can use Split on the cable, break it down to its material components, feed that into the Chain construction, and make something way stronger!" Ricky explained, radiating excitement as he quickly wound the spring. He wasn't scared of this attempt exploding in his hands, not after the flash of insight that the gold's magic gave him. Without any preamble he turned around and pulled the trigger, and this time the chain he wove between the vehicles gleamed with the strength of steel. Ricky worked quickly, subconsciously keeping pace with the ticking of his gears, and Tapper slowly stepped into the vehicle to watch him work without interrupting. The others, failing to see any novelty in the nuance, stayed outside to work on their own tasks.
Ricky alternated between the vehicle halves without breaking the Chain spell, so when he finished one unbroken length of chain zigzagged around the entire circumference. He stood back and judged his work with a solid nod, but his confidence faltered just a tad as he resumed fussing with his artifact and muttering to himself. "Okay, Chain is still in effect and clock is ticking, but if I move this gear to reverse the flow… wonder if I can put a transmission gearbox on this…" With some strain Ricky managed to shift one of the gears, and instantly pulled his hand back as the metal teeth snapped and slipped. Tapper could vaguely sense the strain Ricky was putting on his artifact, even if he didn't understand how, but it held and Ricky gave the key a few more twists.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
"Okay, I learned this from mending clothes and — whoa!" The artifact jumped in Ricky's hands and he yelped, suddenly fighting back as if he were holding a fishing pole that hooked a shark. Every length of chain rattled and went taut at once, drawing into and shortening themselves against their anchor points. Tapper couldn't see what happened to the excess linkages, but he felt what it did to the vehicle when the chain ran out of slack.
Everything lurched, metal groaned in protest, and the two vehicle halves slowly closed the gap. Just like pulling a stitch tight, except that sewing fabric usually didn't cause panic in anyone nearby. Phanya shouted in concern and threw open the door, and Tapper waved her down. "Everything is okay, Ricky is doing this on purpose! Probably!" he shouted, straining to make his voice heard over the sound of twisting metal.
The two vehicles were not cut in perfectly straight lines, and now they were fully flush at some points along the circumference. But the chains kept pulling, and proved to outmatch the metal they were anchored on. Both vehicles started to warp and morph against each other, until every gap closed and Ricky went slack with an exhausted huff. Tapper looked all around him in wonderment; this was no longer the jitney with a trailer made from half of Salazar's car, this was now one continuous vehicle with an oddly lumpy seam around the middle.
"Ricky, you have exceeded all expectations!" Tapper celebrated, and Phanya nodded in agreement as she poked at the unyielding chain. Each length of chain only had three or four links now, with the rest seemingly absorbed to strengthen the bond.
Ricky was still panting with exertion, but his smile was bright and proud. "Damn right I did! And I think this baby still has some juice for one more trick." He patted his artifact affectionately before he leaned out the door and shouted into the darkness, "Hey, Salazar! Where are ya?"
The hatch on the jitney's roof swung open and Salazar's head poked through, glaring at them with full force. "Thanks for the fucking warning kid, I almost fell off! What do you want now?"
"Yeah yeah, sorry. Listen, where's the universal port in your half of the car? I want to try something."
"What? No I'm not giving you access to that!"
"Dude chill, I'm not going to hack your skrat or anything. Come on, I'm on a timer here!"
Phanya leaned into Salazar's sight line to give a knowing stare, and he eventually relented. "Alright fine, hold on! Bossing me around… no damn respect…" Salazar muttered, trying and failing to gracefully drop down from the hatch. His rooting around on the roof, and attempts to not get thrown off, had spread Tapper's oil splatter all the way up to his chin, and Salazar slipped a few times while trying to stand.
"I got it, I got it, no one try to help me," Salazar said, sarcastically waving off Tapper's attempts to give him a hand. He moved over to the workstation covered in computer equipment and started pulling plugs, until he freed a computer terminal the size of a briefcase and waved at the space it once occupied. The small Universal Access Port gleamed in a recess on the workstation, and Ricky squeezed around him to reach the port.
"Okay, what I'm going to do is conceptually chain your workstation to the dashboard," Ricky explained, leveraging his bulky artifact into the cramped space. He touched the end to the port, and when he pulled away a glowing chain of light dangled in the air. Ricky giggled with excitement, and everyone got out of his way as he hurried to the front of the car and crawled underneath the dashboard. "Dang Tapper, I forgot you melted this thing. Oh well, too late to stop now!" Ricky completed the connection, and as he stood up the links of energy flashed before fading from view.
Ricky tilted his head in confusion, but remained undeterred. "Huh. Well, won't know if that worked until we try it out. What else, gotta be something else I can fix real quick…"
Phanya gently waved a hand in front of his face. She couldn't read magic, but she could read his energy plain as day. "Hey Rickster, want to take a break? You're sounding kinda manic right now." She figured he would just scoff and brush her off, but Phanya had to try anyway.
"Pshaw, it's fine," Ricky scoffed, brushing her off. Not enough time to explain to her how little time he had to work with. "I'm on a roll! Now, if Chaining that didn't work then… oh!" He snatched up the holographic projector from the floor and gave its shattered end a hard look. Ultrafine crystalline fibers sprouted from the end of the spindle, looking more like a secondhand toothbrush than a piece of high technology, but Ricky kept nodding to himself. A few scant months ago this would only be worth a few credits at the recycling facility, but now… "Yeah, this'll make a good test. I'll use Split on the end, but still only on a conceptual level. No physical transmorgification yet… jeez, that's such a dumb name… and then conceptually Chain it to the stub…"
As he spoke, Ricky shoved the spindle's broken end into the horn funnel and pulled the trigger. His artifact kicked as several teeth slipped and a tiny gear ricocheted off the wall, and when he pulled the spindle out the broken end looked strangely out of focus. "Hold it together, almost done," Ricky cooed as he touched the unfocused end to the Chain end of his contraption, and the bug mandibles spasmed as they tried to form a chain link that didn't exist. He stood to repeat the process on the stub mounted to the ceiling, but after using the Split portion Ricky's artifact had finally suffered enough abuse.
Gears flew, springs bounced, and mandibles shattered in an even more spectacular mess than the last time Ricky's gizmo failed, and Tapper stepped forward to console his friend. "I'm sorry your invention failed Ricky, but what an impressive display! I did not know gizmos could be so flexible."
To his surprise, Ricky didn't appear bothered at all. "That's the thing, they aren't flexible like that. I knew I was pushing my luck too much, but —" Ricky looked around the vehicle; Salazar had removed himself at some point and Phanya was busy working a small spring out of her hair. "Alright, Sal's gone. It's the gold, Tapper! Best I can figure, absorbing a gold coin gives you a huge bonus for casting spells. It's a one-time bonus and my gizmos aren't actually permanent, so it was temporary no matter what I did or didn't do. Figured I might as well do what I could while I could, y'know?"
Tapper nodded along, matching Ricky's growing enthusiasm. "Excellent reasoning! We must make a point to collect any gold we find in the future, then. I wonder if they must be in coin form?"
"Can't wait to find out," Ricky said, flashing a brief smile towards the future, before he pulled the small blowtorch from his hauler suit. "In the meantime, I've got some welding to do. Should be as ready to drive as we'll ever be once I'm done."