Chapter 21: Light And Safety (Patreon)

Turns out that walking six miles with a splitting headache and vertigo is a real challenge. But I manage it somehow–slowly and surely stumbling my way through stretch after stretch of same-y tunnel as my head screams at me to take a break. My body doesn’t actually hurt all that much for once; it would be a nice change of pace if I wasn’t in the process of finding out that my brain hurting means it doesn’t matter that my body doesn’t hurt.

By the time I finally make it to the thing Pearl insists is a workshop–but which actually looks like a weirdly flat section of the tunnel–my brain’s done screaming. Now it’s sending me death threats and not-so-politely reminding me that it controls all the pain in my body. Light hurts. Sounds hurt. Thinking too hard hurts. Even doing absolutely nothing hurts, which really doesn’t feel fair, but it gives me newfound sympathy for those poor bastards who have cluster headaches.

“Get us in.” I wheeze as I lean against the flat wall.

Pearl nods with a worried expression and gestures for me to move my head. I shift until her shell is pressed up against the wall, and she pokes out to press her cute little hands against the glass. Her body lights up in perfect silence, glowing a myriad of shifting colours that eventually settles on an iridescent sheen like motor oil in a parking lot.

“You need to get off the wall.” She whispers. “Or else you’ll fall when the door opens.”

I murmur in acknowledgement and drag my face along the wall until I hit a sloped part. Pearl pulls her mouth into a line and looks like she wants to say something, but decides against it with a quiet sigh and a shake of her head.

“Not quite what I meant, but it’ll do. Cover your ears–I don’t know how loud this is going to be.”

My hands barely make it up to my ears before the wall starts to vibrate. And I mean seriously vibrate. My body shudders along with it, from my head all the way down to my toes, which does absolutely nothing good for my headache. It feels like my brain’s rattling around in a metal bucket that some’s dragging behind their massive truck on an old gravel road.

Honestly, I can’t tell if there’s any noise. Everything sort of goes… monotone as all I can interpret is the extreme pain and discomfort from my headache. Pearl touches my head and whispers something that I can’t hear, then traces up my forehead to try and get me to look up at the flat wall.

Or what used to be the flat wall. Only a few long rectangular panels remain, which rumble up into the ceiling like a standard garage door–except it’s made of glass that’s somehow not see through, since there’s a pretty massive space just behind the door. One that I don’t even take in as I stumble through the opening, bee-line for what looks like some kind of bench, and collapse in a lump of exhaustion and pain.

Sleep doesn’t come comfortably, but it sure as hell comes quick.

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Light blasts down at me through closed eyelids; stirring a restful, dreamless sleep into an awakeness filled with aches, pains, and a mouth that feels like a texas lawn in summer. One in a neighborhood that actually abides by the water ban, I mean, not one of those rich-people homes that has green grass in the middle of a drought.

I groan as I force myself to sit up, running a finger over cracked lips and slowly wrenching open crusty eyes. Everything’s a little blurry for a few seconds, and I start to freak out that–just maybe–Pearl’s awareness thing had some lasting effects. But it fades within a minute and I’m just sitting there taking in a strangely normal place compared to everything I’ve seen so far.

It looks like one of those commercial auto mechanics. There’s bays for individual things to be repaired, lifts built into the ground, and huge chains hanging from the ceiling on rails that go over each of the bays. Then there’s all the random tools and carts haphazardly placed everywhere like someone threw them on the ground looking for something, control panels that look like they’d go up to about my belly button, and massive shelves lined with so many parts I can’t even start to describe them.

If I didn’t look too hard, I could almost imagine this was back on earth. Except for the one small fact that everything’s made out of glass, wood, and something that looks like manufactured sheets of seashell material. I wipe my eyes with one hand as I take a huge swig of my meal replacement potion with the other. But there’s one thing that hasn’t really sunk in until this very second.

It’s so… bright. Everything’s illuminated perfectly from every angle. I look down and see lines of light shooting through the glass under my feet–but not all of them are actually that bright. The ones I look at directly dim ever so slightly, and the ones furthest away from me are brighter than all the others. Almost like they’re trying to maintain a perfectly uniform amount of light in the shop.

“Pearl, what is this place?” I ask. And don’t get a reply. “Probably in her shell again. Well… might as well explore a little.”

I grunt and swing into a sitting position, then frown at the strange taste in my mouth. And at the lingering headache that intensifies for a split second when I move. It feels like I’m dehydrated, but shouldn’t the meal replacement potion deal with that? It kind of felt like it did yesterday.

“Rngh, stupid bodily functions. Making me go out of the way to make sure I don’t die.” I mutter to myself as I pull out the mana potion and my water bottle. “No need for this puppy, so let’s see if you can make yourself useful.”

I twist open the water bottle, shake out the sediment that’s been filtered out, and pour all of the mana potion into it. It fills the bottle about halfway full, which really isn’t enough water to live on, but hopefully it’ll be enough to stave off dying of thirst. I throw both into my backpack and go to heft it onto my shoulders, but then I realize that I can just leave it on the bench instead. No worries about some painted dane coming up and snatching it out from under my nose.

Just to be sure, I glance over my shoulder to check if I’m actually sealed in here. The wall that opened up yesterday’s all closed now without a single sign that it could open like it did in the first place.

“Relative safety. Nice.”

Leaving my backpack behind, I set out to explore a little of this new place. It’s not overly huge–there’s five bays that look like things could be set up in, and each of them is long enough to store a typical yellow school bus. But without any pillars dividing up the room, and ceilings three times higher than any normal mechanics I’ve seen, someone could easily set up one of those massive mine-site bulldozers in here and have room to spare.

I nudge a scrap of wood aside with my toe and make my way to the real gem of this place–the shelves. Gil bought scrap wood for what I thought was a pretty damn good price, and there’s nothing but machined planks sitting on the shelves here. Hundreds of them lined up by the dozens on shelves that reach up halfway to the ceiling. I look around for anything like a ladder, but unless they hid it somewhere, there’s no ladder to be seen.

Just wood, something I can’t make out on the other side of the room, and a massive stretch of wall with a… control panel on it? That’s… really weird. All the other control panels are obviously hooked up to one of the bays or the ceiling-mounted chains and clamps. But this one… it’s just built into the wall.

I ignore the payday of wood for a second and beeline for the panel. It’s glass just like the rest of the wall, but slightly inlaid with a bunch of numbered and lettered keys on it. They’re all backlit with a slight white glow, save for two of them–one of which glows green, and the other red. I can’t make out the symbols on a good chunk of them, but the numbers–those I know.

Should I mess with a control panel I know nothing about? Probably not. Am I going to? Of course I am.

I press the ‘1’ key, then the green symbol. The wall hums like a massive shop vac for a second, then lets out a pleasant ‘ding’ and folds down like an in-wall ironing board. Atop which sits a cube of frozen sand the size of a standard sugar cube. I reach down to pick it up, and the moment my hand is free of the opening, it snaps shut and goes completely silent.

The cube is perfectly smooth against my fingers, but it’s got a sort of… coarseness that the sand on the surface didn’t have. Like there’s bigger chunks of stuff in it, but I can’t see any difference compared to the surface stuff. Maybe it’s because it’s frozen?

“Shelby! You’re finally awake!”

Pearl’s voice comes from… somewhere else. I raise an eyebrow and look over my shoulder. She’s standing on the floor on two little legs and waving from a doorway that I hadn’t noticed yet.

“Pearl? How’d you leave your shell?”

She tilts her head to the side in confusion. “I could always leave my shell. There’s just usually no reason to, since you’re a much faster walker than I am. But that’s not important–come here, come here! I’ve got something really cool to show you!”

That’s news to me, but I guess I was the one that assumed she couldn’t leave her shell. And if I had a giant who carried my apartment everywhere she went, then I guess I wouldn’t feel the need to leave all that often. Pearl’s about to prompt me again, so I start moving before she can say anything.

“What’d you find?”

She grins and waggles a finger at me as she slips into the room. “No point telling you when I can show you so easily!”

“Fair, I guess.” I say with a shrug and stick the sand cube in my pocket. I round the corner into the room, ducking slightly to get under a five-foot clearance. “Huh. A lot cozier in here.”

Pearl skips over to a desk and taps her hand against its leg. “I know, right? This must be where they took their breaks and did all their paperwork.”

She’s not wrong. The smaller room looks like a big office mixed with a posh break room, save for any kind of food or chairs to sit in. There’s a pair of waist-high glass tables in the middle of everything, and a few glass desks like the one Pearl’s leaning around the room, but aside from that… nothing, really. Nothing worth getting this excited over, unless I’m missing something.

“It’s nice, sure but… I mean…” I gesture broadly at the room. “What’s to get so excited about?”

“Oh, not a whole lot, just plans for some unused inventions.” Pearl smiles wide and points casually at the top of the desk she’s leaning against. “Most of them were completely unmakable, but I picked out the ones that might actually be useful and put them here for you to take a look at.”

Really? I squint down at the desk, and sure enough, there’s glass on that glass. Four glass slates, to be exact, each littered with barely visible schematics and notes that I have to lean down to even make out. Even then, they’re not exactly easy for the eyes.

“Not to rain on your parade, Pearl, but I don’t think we have the resources or the know-how to build something huge here.” I say as I pick up the slates, but grow silent as I actually look through them. “Pearl, these dimensions… they’re human sized. And all these things around definitely aren’t shellraiser sized.”

“There’s not one size of shellraiser, silly. Some of us are much bigger than others, and they usually worked in places like this. Even smaller ones–like me–could get a shell custom-made that would let them be… well, bigger.”

She taps the desk for emphasis. “We couldn’t efficiently make huge machines if we were always this size. But I guess you only saw the destroyed version of those big shells, and your only reference for a shellraiser is me!”

“I guess, yeah.” I agree while I continue to read the blueprint-slates. “So we’ve got an arm-mounted harness, some kind of weird bladed weapon, some kind of hexagonal strappy thing, and a… an… huh. I can’t make out what this says.”

“It’s a portable shell for a ________ power supply.” Pearl explains as she shoots up my leg and settles back in her shell. “There’s one here powering this place, but I haven’t checked out the room where it’s supposed to be. You were asleep for so long, so I thought we could do it together! Maybe it’ll give us some hints on how to dismantle that machine you need to destroy for your quest.”

Or maybe I could use it to power up that beacon. …Wait. Asleep for how long?

“Pearl, how long was I out for?”

“Only about fifty-six hours. It’s not bad at all, considering your mind experienced the equivalent of staying up for five days straight when I did that thing to you.”

“Fifty… six… Pearl, that’s a shit ton! It’s almost an entire tenth of the entire time limit I’ve got! And… I’m not even close to a thousand Worth!” I groan in frustration and turn on my heel “We’ve got to get moving. I don’t care if this place has a decade worth of secrets to uncover, we need to be done with it by tomorrow.”

“Why tomorrow? We still have plenty of time left.”

“Because… because I don’t know how I’m supposed to make enough Worth to not die here! The risen grave gave me some, but since there’s nowhere around here for me to sell my shit to, I’m stuck with a ton of Worth in my inventory that’s just… sitting here gathering dust. The only way to get enough Worth to push me over a threshold is to finish a quest.”

Pearl thinks for a second, and I can see something come to her, but she doesn’t say it. But it bothers her.

“Pearl, what’s going on in that head of yours?”

At first she just waves it off. Then she frowns, hums to herself in an increasing tone, and eventually bursts into speech.

“How much Worth will your quest give you?”

My mouth somehow goes even drier. “Three hundred. But there’s all this lumber here that has to be worth… I don’t know… hundreds? Thousands? Pearl, why are you acting like I’m in trouble?”

“All the lumber… all the stuff in here… you can’t sell it. It still belongs to someone. Try putting any of it in your inventory and you’ll see what I mean.”

No. That… it can’t be. I pull the cube of sand out of my pocket and try to deposit it. A screen pops up with a simple warning.

These materials belong to the workshop of ?????.

Any attempt to remove them, whether through system-based or conventional means, will fail.

…Shit. What am I supposed to do now? I’ve got a three-hundred Worth quest I need to finish, but even that won’t put me over the threshold for the next level thanks to my debt. I was hoping this would be the payday I needed to make sure I don’t die once I got to that threshold, but honestly, I don’t know how I was expecting to get there in the first place.

I look over at Pearl, but she’s not falling apart. She’s looking forward at something. And hell, I could really use some optimism right about now.

“Alright, you look like you’ve got a plan, Pearl. Let’s hear it.”

She sighs in relief and puts her hands over her heart. “Thank goodness. Okay–you saw the warnings about the materials, but there’s something on these blueprints that’s different. It’s the entire reason I picked them out instead of all the others. Can you…?”

I splay the glass slates out like a deck of large cards.

“Thank you. Do you see this little symbol here?” Pearl gestures at the bottom left of each slate. There’s a matching symbol that looks a little like a spiral contained within a glass beaker. “That’s a specific symbol that means ‘still on order’. And when it’s put on a blueprint like this, it’s an open invitation for anyone to make it in their spare time, since the first one hasn’t been made or tested yet.”

Still doesn’t seem like a plan to me. “And?”

Pearl grins and taps the power core containment blueprint. “These shops have a rule they put in place to make sure all the prototypes actually get made and tested. Anyone who makes the first of anything gets to keep the finished product for themselves.”