NOVEL NEXT 2.21 Beep Beep
[Designation: Isabel]
[Make: Herkimer]
[Model: Portmanteau Jitney]
[Classification: Armored Mobile Home]
[Level: 4]
[XP: 34/100]
[HP: 9/9]
[Armor: 6/6]
[Fuel: 93%]
[Size: Large]
[Speed: 3 (1)]
[Acceleration: 1]
[Torque: 5]
[Handling: 4 (7)]
[Cargo: 3]
[Computer: 3]
[Welcome to level 4!]
[Please select a new upgrade]
"Nope, not doing it."
"Please, Mister Salazar, be reasonable. We cannot continue without your guidance." Tapper appreciated that he could manually set his tone to the default friendly bartender, otherwise the exasperation roiling in his emotional center would leak into his voice.
"Reasonable? I feel like I'm the only reasonable one here!" Salazar couldn't, or wouldn't, exercise the same control and his own negative emotions read clear as day. His neck frill kept twitching and his goggles kept zipping in all directions while he hugged himself, as if Salazar was afraid that the jitney would suddenly collapse on top him. Getting him to step inside the vehicle was a challenge, but now he refused to touch a single thing. "Like, you know that I know you're all bullshitting me, right? None of you are treating this nearly as seriously as you should."
The computer chair squeaked and Salazar glared at its occupant. Ricky slowly rocked back and forth in the chair, the world forgotten as he rapidly tapped a pen against the open page in his journal. "Man, how do I expand these? There's gotta be a description somewhere…" he quietly murmured to himself.
"Especially this one!" Salazar snapped, throwing out a hand over Ricky's head before he resumed his defensive huddle. "Probably have nanobots swarming all around us. Or ghosts from the phase. They even cleaned the counters! No way in hell am I plugging Soni back in."
Tapper's head cocked sideways at the new name. "Soni? I thought you had named your vehicle Isabel, as a delightful vignette of both form and function."
He watched Salazar's body posture shift slightly, from paranoid fear to mild embarrassment, and the merc cleared his throat. "Uh, yeah. Isabel is, was, the name of my mobile home. Soni is my personal AI assistant, I have her and all my backups safely isolated in the mainframe I detached."
Phanya suddenly snorted with laughter and leaned in their direction. "Soni and Isabel? There some reason why you give everything a girl's name, Sally?"
Tapper held up one hand and calmly but firmly said, "Phanya, please." He could read Salazar's deepening shame, and before he withdrew completely Tapper tried to redirect the conversation back towards camaraderie. "There is nothing at all wrong if Mister Salazar is romantically inclined towards machines and AI persons. I see it as a compliment!" Phanya laughed harder as Salazar's posture went rigid and his neck frills snapped all the way open.
Maybe Tapper went too far? He did not understand why, but Salazar looked like he was ready to flee for his life. Tapper needed to salvage the conversation. "Compromise! I mean, I suggest a compromise. Mister Salazar, if you can still access your maps through your personal computer then I see no reason why you cannot take over driving responsibilities."
Now it was Phanya's turn to defensively cross her arms and scoff. "Well I do. We can't even see where he's taking us! C'mon Ricky, time to get driving."
She jostled his shoulder, and Ricky brushed her hand away as if he were shooing a fly. "Yeah sure, just gimme a second," Ricky murmured, his eyes never straying from the screen.
Salazar leaned over Ricky's other shoulder and said, "Hey kid, try the directory. Just type D-I-R, and hit Enter." Ricky blinked rapidly to escape his dreamlike trance, looked at Salazar, and followed his instructions.
Four keystrokes later and a list of options appeared on the screen, and Ricky whooped. "Heck yeah, there's an option for upgrades! Oh and one that says 'Add-ons,' that's new..."
Phanya groaned and pinched the bridge of her nose. "You did that on purpose. Now he's not going to move for hours," she accused.
Salazar simply shrugged and said, "Just an old-school root command." His tone was humble, but the grin he flashed at her radiated smug self-satisfaction.
Tapper clapped his metal hands together once. It wasn't ideal, but it was progress. "Excellent! Not to worry Phanya, by now I am confident that Salazar knows the only way he can rid himself of our company is to deliver us safely to Neudopolis."
"The bot's got it in one," Salazar said, holding an index finger up in the air as he got settled in the driver's seat. "I want this little 'adventure' to end just as badly as you, Phanya."
"That's the spirit! Adventure!" Tapper cheered, but no one else joined in his celebration. Except for Ricky, who whooped again a second later when he worked out the commands and called Tapper over.
[Installed Add-ons (4/6)]
[Add-on: Sensor Suite (Mk II)
Upgraded sensor array now includes radio, satellite, radar, lidar, seismography, and atmospheric composition. Any connected monitor or projector can display any or all readouts simultaneously.]
[Add-on: Comfort Suite (Mk I)
You've got the bare necessities. Cot, kitchenette, hygiene station (privacy curtain sold separately), and water recycling, all as compact and fold-out models for easy storage.]
[Add-on: Panic Bunker (Mk II)
Double the armor, and now with basic life support for 24 hours. As always, a reminder that using the Panic Bunker as a storage space voids the warranty.]
[Add-on: Smuggler's Boot (Mk III)
Various panels and false walls expertly contain storage cubbies totaling 0.75 cubic meters of hidden space. Cubbies are lined to block out most scanners, including X-ray and Projection Sight.]
[Empty Slot]
[Empty Slot]
Ricky let Tapper read the screen as he mused, "So it looks like add-ons are modules that we, y'know, add on ourselves. I wonder how many bits of the Comfort Suite I can uninstall before it no longer counts and frees up a slot…" Then he quickly waved a hand in front of his own face and continued, "Bah, worry about that later. I'm here for the upgrades!"
[Level 1 Upgrade: Mana Battery
Mana is life force, sometimes more directly than others. As an artificial creation this mana does not naturally regenerate, but any kind of fuel can be broken down to aethereal components. This currently incurs a 75% inefficiency penalty, further upgrades can improve the process.]
[Level 2 Upgrade: XP Conversion (Repairs)
Experience is the best teacher, and the best healer. You can trade 10 points of stored XP to repair a single point of lost HP or armor, and you can trade the sum total of both (currently 90 + 60 = 150 XP) to repair more serious damage.]
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
[Level 3 Upgrade: Modular Mobility
What moves you should suit you. This special upgrade allows you to swap what form the tires take, though each must be manually installed first in order to learn its shape.]
[Please select a Level 4 upgrade]
"Yeah, mhm, that makes sense. I can see why XP Conversion was chosen, and your Tracks spell probably forced Modular Mobility to select," Ricky spoke to himself, barely heard over the sound of his pen madly scratching the new messages into his journal. "I wonder if you did anything that forced it to choose Mana Battery, as well. Oh I can't wait to see what else is there for the new upgrade!"
"Think about it while we drive, we're burning daylight here," Phanya said as she plopped down into the passenger seat. "Sal, you about ready to go?"
"Calm your neon tits woman, I'm about set up," Salazar dismissed her, poking at the air in his personal readout. "Though it's still going to take us forever; I don't think these tank treads could drive faster than maybe 40 Ks an hour if I tried."
"You should be able to switch back to tires, somehow! Check what's up there!" Ricky called from the computer desk.
Salazar shook his head, though Ricky hadn't looked up. "Nope, not doing that. I'm not touching a goddamn thing in this mutant car aside from the steering wheel and gas pedal."
"Well, I'll touch anything I want to," Phanya said. She raised a hand to dramatically slap it down on a big red button and solve all their issues, but paused when she couldn't find one. "Uhhh…"
Tapper leaned between the two seats and pointed at the dashboard. "I believe that knob wasn't there before the integration, Phanya." A simple analog knob of black plastic, shiny and untarnished in its supposed newness, but otherwise completely unremarkable and easy to miss. The knob itself wasn't labeled, but the three notches spread evenly around the circumference were: None, Wheels (All-Terrain), and Treads.
"Huh, obvious and easy to miss at the same time. Sounds about right," Phanya hummed. Whatever her reservations were didn't deter her, and Phanya clicked the knob over from Treads to Wheels without a second thought. The jitney rocked slightly, in time with the heavy bass ratcheting of heavy metal slats sliding into place underneath their feet, and after a few seconds their ride settled back down.
"Thank the Hand, I can feel that we have suspension again," Ricky sighed before he perked up. "And hey, the stats changed! Speed now says 3 and Handling is a 4, no parenthesis. So we should have everything back to how it was before we fell into the cavern! Oh oh, do you think we could drive back and forth to test out the actual top speed and —"
"No," the other three cut him off in unison.
Tapper patted Salazar on the shoulder, and although the merc grumbled he didn't flinch away. "See, Mister Salazar? You only need an open mind. Onward to the next destination, and adventure!"
It took six hours for the road trip adventure to grow stale. The trash mounds dotting the landscape were just frequent enough and just large enough to require constant vigilance, but not enough to be interesting on their own. Six hours in and all conversation died out as everyone settled into their own thoughts, just long enough for their defenses to get dragged down by the unrelenting pressure of boredom.
Salazar bobbed along, half-submerged in a VR simulation, while Phanya fidgeted with worry over her family back in Fableton. Meanwhile Tapper and Ricky debated the three available upgrades for the Jitney; Tapper wanted to choose an upgrade now so they could get accustomed to it, while Ricky insisted they wait to see if he could somehow get the three options to refresh.
[Magic Map | For questing there and back again]
[Add-on Additive | Now with a fresh mint on the pillow]
[Big Red | What does THIS button do?]
"Please Ricky, Add-on Additive makes the most logical sense. The description suggests quality, not merely building additional add-ons."
"Nah, that's still small profits next to a Magic Map. It has magic! If it's still there tomorrow."
Salazar suddenly shook himself to full alertness and he double-checked something in his vision. A grin spread across his snout and Salazar called out, "Hey, kids! Any of you ever see an angel in flight?"
The tank treads came in handy to mount another slope, this time for a better view. Salazar carefully drove up to the top of a garbage mound and parked the jitney, spreading his arms to the unnatural formation below them. A canyon opened in the tarmac, stretching from one horizon to the other in a perfect cylinder over a hundred meters across. Not one piece of litter or debris marred the smooth trench, save for a giant ring that outlined the cylinder just off to their side. Identical rings dotted the canyon at regular intervals several hundred meters apart, their exposed halves rising out of the tarmac in massive arches. They weren't close enough to see any fine details, but each ring gleamed with angular panels of a dull brassy metal.
Tapper's head slowly tilted to the side as he strained his optical's zoom limits. "Fascinating! I wonder which came first; were the rings buried in the tarmac, or was the tarmac poured around the path?"
"Well of course the angels came first," Salazar answered, laughing at the absurdity of asking such an obvious question. "Nothing we can build matches this. Oh! Oh quick look now!" Everyone was already looking at the canyon, but Salazar still jumped against the steering wheel with one arm pointing straight forward. His sudden excitement almost made Phanya flinch away, as if she expected him to spring a trap with the distraction, but stopped when Phanya saw the blue light out the corner of her eye.
It was just a spec in the far distance, but still bright enough to be seen from such a distance. A single blue light rocketed along the canyon, moving too quickly to even start gauging its size or shape. Maybe a headlight — except, Tapper realized at the last moment, that the giant ring nearest to them was starting to crackle with electricity. It wasn't a blue fireball rocketing down the canyon, it was the rings flashing with light, and in such a rapid sequence that it appeared as one continuous shining star.
Looking back at his recording, Tapper managed to isolate a single video frame where he could barely make out a long, cylindrical object floating exactly in the middle of the canyon. The nearest ring's blue light explosion backlit the object with deep contrast, but it was still just a long blur approximately the size of a passenger aircraft. Even if Tapper had the time to prepare a slow motion video recording, there was little he could do to capture an object moving faster than the speed of sound.
But he certainly felt it. They all did, and Tapper instantly understood why the rings existed. The rings absorbed the sonic boom of the gravity train's passage and dispersed the kinetic energy as light bleed-off, which is why standing this close to the shockwave didn't instantly kill every organic being here. And what kinetic pressure that did escape was still enough to rock the jitney, eliciting cheers and yelps of surprise. Tapper's emotions roiled between an adrenaline high and worrying how much pressure his friends would have just felt without the rings' protection; his computer mind automatically started to calculate an answer and Tapper hurried to shut the process down. He didn't want to know.
Ricky matched Salazar's enthusiasm and the two started jumping in time without realizing. "Told you, that's beyond us mere mortals. If you can get on that train then you have a guardian angel," Salazar laughed.
Phanya leaned against the windshield as she watched the blue light wink out over the horizon. She wasn't jumping around like a child, but she couldn't deny the sense of awe. "I wonder what it is about trains that are always so dang cool," She wondered.
Tapper perked up, eager for a chance to direct his knowledge towards answering less gruesome questions. "Actually Phanya, trains are deeply ingrained in humanity's collective psychology as an indication of your entry into the age of technology. To this day, even the original steam locomotives remain a popular brand logo for beers and whiskeys… likely because trains are, indeed, very cool."
Movement down below caught Salazar's eye and he stopped jumping, steadying himself to adjust in his telescoping goggles. Tapper followed his gaze and zoomed in on a small dust cloud zooming alongside the canyon; certainly a vehicle, but Tapper struggled to identify what kind. At first he thought it was a sports car with an oddly curved chassis until Tapper saw the one larger balloon tire in front, maybe a motorized trike with a rollcage?
Tapper's ponderings ceased when he heard Salazar muttering under his breath. "No no no, he's going to jump the rails in that?" Salazar's mutterings ceased when he saw everyone else staring at him. His goggles flicked back and forth between the concerned faces as his throat struggled to form words. "Um, I might need to, uh… I might need to ask a favor of you all."
"Of course we'll help you," Tapper immediately responded.
"But I haven't even —"
"Isn't it obvious?" Salazar could swear that Tapper's eyes gleamed slightly as it continued, "We must save the young lad before he falls victim to his own reckless abandon."
[New Quest: Defensive Driving
Detain the doomed daredevil]
"Huh," Phanya and Ricky both said in unison.