Apparatus Of Change - Chapter 106 (Patreon)

I'm back for now!  I spent my break writing.  I'm so good at this.

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Unnamed - Apparatus Of Change

Available Power : 0

Authority : 7

Bind Insect (1, Command)

Fortify Space (2, Domain)

Distant Vision (2, Perceive)

Collect Plant (3, Shape)

See Commands (5, Perceive)

Bind Crop (4, Command)

-

Nobility : 6

Congeal Glimmer (1, Command)

See Domain (1, Perceive)

Claim Construction (2, Domain)

Stone Pylon (2, Shape)

Drain Health (4, War)

Spawn Golem (5, Command)

Empathy : 5 ><

Shift Water (1, Shape)

Imbue Mending (3, Civic)

Bind Willing Avian (1, Command)

Move Water (4, Shape)

-

Spirituality : 6 ><

Shift Wood (1, Shape)

Small Promise (2, Domain)

Make Low Blade (2, War)

Congeal Mantra (1, Command)

Form Party (3, Civic)

-

Ingenuity : 5

Know Material (1, Perceive)

Form Wall (2, Shape)

Link Spellwork (3, Arcane)

Sever Command (4, War)

Collect Material (1, Shape)

Tenacity : 6 ><

Nudge Material (1, Shape)

Bolster Nourishment (2, Civic)

Drain Endurance (2, War)

Pressure Trigger (2, War)

Blinding Trap (5, War)

-

Animosity : - - ><

Amalgamate Human (3, Command)

Congeal Burn (2, Command)

Trepidation : -

Follow Prey (2, Perceive)

The next few days pass in a mix of calm hope, and persistent small worries.

I tried having another conversation with Lutra, once I had recovered some of my magic and mental fortitude slightly, but they didn’t respond.  Either to trade, or command their eels, or anything.

They weren’t dead. I would have known, I am sure, if they were.  My best guess is that I had it backward this whole time about the enforced rest after killing another apparatus healing me.  Instead, it was the healing that put me into a state of rest, much like when I completely tap out my liquid nothingness reservoirs.

“Well, that means it worked then.”  Muelly had said when I had tried, and possibly succeeded, in having a bee convey the information to her via the creature’s bobbing dance.  “Now what?”

Dipan tapped one of her horns with the flat of the knife he was working with.  “Now back to work slicing yams, kid.”  The man’s voice, as much as it often sounds like he is whining about something, still carries a note of affection.

“My hands aren’t built for this!”  Muelly gripes.

Dipan slowly tilts his head up at her, away from the wooden board that I remember smoothing down for the kitchen what feels like half a lifetime ago.  He is halfway through turning a yam into small medallions with his knife, and has paused with the point of his blade just having punched through another adept cut.  “How?”  He asks the younger demon.  “Seraha does this all day.  Jahn does this sometimes!  What are you talking about, your hands aren’t made for it?”

“Oh!”  Muelly, distracted, nearly slices one of her own fingers in half.  “No, not because I’m a… because I hate knives!”  She glares at the object in her hand like she’s preparing to jam it into the cutting board.  An ill advised strike, because the soldier’s memories keep pointing out every way that Muelly is close to stabbing herself when she moves.  One of my smaller bees, hanging near the corner of the kitchen wall, gets her attention, and makes a gesture with their forelegs.  “What?  Oh.”  Muelly sets the knife down.  “This is stupid.”  She grumbles.

“…you need help?”  Dipan asks cautiously.

“What I need is to not be spending half the day slicing yams instead of learning magic!”  Muelly snaps at him.  “Or maybe what I need is less fucking humans in this building!”  She stops yelling as Dipan gives her an unamused look.  He’s very good at the one-eyebrow-raised thing, and I while I still don’t know what he actually did before I was alive, I think that stage actor is a possibility.  “Sorry.”  Muelly sighs out eventually, hands pressed to the counter, glaring at the yam in front of her.

“Nah, it’s fine.  I’m with you.”  Dipan answers with a shrug.  “You think no one else knows they’re a liability? Or… well, you probably didn’t mean me.  I’m great.”  He shrugs again, an easy and almost careless motion.

Whatever Muelly is about to say in return is interrupted as the rear door of the kitchen swings open and Sharpen comes hustling in.  All gobs tend to move at a hustle by default, it’s actually a more comfortable way for them to walk, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t very easy to notice.  Sharpen deposits as basket they’re carrying on the counter, of assorted food taken from one of the fort’s cellars.  Then, with wide eyes that are beginning to be ringed by soft green scales, they look back and forth between Muelly and Dipan.  “Sorry.  Interrupting?”

“Just me being an idiot.”  Muelly’s words are filled with dark humor.

“She’s mad there’s too many humans in the fort.  But since I’m not leaving, we’ll have to get rid of some of the other ones.”  Dipan says with a sardonic grin, easily finishing his cutting with smooth knife strokes before he plucks the mangled yam off Muelly’s tray and starts on that too.  “Got any plans for that?”

Sharpen is suddenly holding a short sword in a reverse grip, a questioning look on their face as they gaze up at the taller pair.  “Yes?  Which ones?”

Muelly stares at the gob with dawning concern as Dipan bites back a laugh over his work.  “I… no, I don’t… I mean… I don’t want to kill them.”

“Oh.”  Sharpen’s sword vanishes.  “Okay.  I must go.  Seraha’s list has more cheese on it.”  The gob grabs an empty basket from by the door, and is gone as quickly as their weapon was.

“I don’t know how to talk to them.”  Muelly says.  “I don’t know how to talk to anyone here!  I am losing my mind!  I have more conversations with bees than with people!”  There’s an amount of manic desperation to her words that, unprompted, the bee that’s been hanging out drops down onto the counter to scuttle over to Muelly and crawl up her arm.  She jerks initially, but quickly moves to petting the lightly glowing winged insect as it climbs her black fur.  “I want to go back to learning to borrow magic, and not cooking for people who want me dead.”

“You could always try to cut yams while learning to borrow the… uh… the food one.  The one that makes food better.”

“It’s on the broken list.”  Muelly says, sniffing as she glances at Dipan.  “Did you try?  Don’t hurt her.”

“No one tells me these things.  I just pick stuff up.”  The man’s defense is utterly absurd, and I ask the been to express my displeasure by folding its antenna and forelimbs at him.  “Am I being scolded?”  Dipan smirks.

The kitchen door swings open with a wooden scrape, punctuating Seraha’s arrival and her addition to the conversation.  “You will be shortly.”  The elder demon says sternly.  “Especially if there is an insect standing on my clean kitchen.”

The bee silently creeps over the edge.  I’m not sure what exactly allows my bees to stay perched on surfaces that they have no reasonable way to cling to; the small ones, I have studied enough to know the mechanic, but it simply shouldn’t work on larger ones.  It doens’t work on the largest bees, the ones that carry multiple glimmer and mantra. But this one crawls over the side of the counter, and begins sneaking away on the underside without falling, despite being large enough to wrap around Muelly’s forearm.

They keep talking, but I move my focus away.  I don’t want to fully drain Bind Insect, for one thing, but also… I mostly just wanted to let Muelly know what was going on.  I’ve given similar information to many of the others.  But no one particularly has anything to say that isn’t in the channel of “well, I suppose we’ll have to wait and see”.

Even if Lutra awakens and still has no ability to form more power, we can still rely on our previous plan, with a hopefully more stable apparatus ally to enact it with.  But that is a tomorrow plan.  Today, all I can do is keep working at my best, with what I have.

Even with spells that are not recovering as quickly as I would like, I can still manage to produce a Stone Pylon every day.  What I want is to use them to hold Spawn Golem, and make an increasingly large labor force.  Either that, or Congeal Glimmer, for partly the same reason, so I can form more of my little scouts that can also act as autonomous helpers.  But both of those uses, while they would be long term beneficial to, say, a civilization, are not what is required now.

So instead I use Distant Vision and Link Spellwork to place my Stone Pylons at the edges of our ‘territory’.  I’m forming a ring first, then will be clustering more around strategic defensive points such as passes through the rougher terrain or any moving water that flows through.  And every one of them is equipped with Drain Health.

I want to build a place to live, but instead I am making tools to kill.  And I feel a deep sorrow at that, not because I abhore violence - though I do - but because the majority of the world I have seen so far indicates that this violence is required for survival.

I want peace.  I want my friends to live good lives.  I want to live with them, to explore my magic and see things through myriad senses and cultivate simple bees into a whole new type of people and change things.  For the better, but change all the same.

But to get that peace, I must be willing to fight anything that wishes to cause harm.  Memories of old lives tumble around this point; the desire for harmony mixing with the willingness to kill.  And I find that they are not so alien to each other.

This is my home now, this isolated little fort in the Green full of strange people, including a group of somewhat antagonistic very traumatized newcomers.  And I want it to flourish, and I will destroy anyone or anything who tries to stop that from happening.

This is what I muse on as the latest Stone Pylon goes up, and I relax a mental tension I was subconsciously holding onto as the spell hooks into place and begins charging.  My own Drain Health I am still using to annihilate bug swarms where I can, or smaller animals when I find ones that are elderly or sick and won’t disrupt the natural order on too grand of a scale.  But it recovers slowly, and I will need more before I can reasonably heal someone.  The Stone Pylons, though I cannot figure out how to remove the health from them yet, actually generate more of the empty liquid than I do, which puts my injury into sharp contrast.

Aside from that, there is the farm to expand.  I am almost prepared to use a fully refilled Spawn Golem  to help with the labor, but until then, Form Wall and Bind Crop help to add two more plots over as many days, with Jahn, Malpa, and many of the gobs working to carve away vegitation and till soil.  The fort’s children join in as well, their lessons somewhat shortened as everyone is a little busier.

Though I do learn that Yuea has started using the mantra-imbued classroom as well.  I don’t know exactly what she told Seraha she would be doing when she offered to help with the children’s lessons, but I somehow doubt the demoness expected battlefield tactics.

Or maybe she did.  Maybe Seraha has adapted to this world more than even I have.

Yuea is a shockingly good teacher, too.  My beetles, who listen in on a lot of the lessons, have begun holding practice maneuvers with the growing bees in the evenings, and despite the communication barrier, two or three of the older children have been trying to participate as well.  I’m not quite sure how to feel about this, but it’s a strange mix of pride and concern.

I try talking to the newcomers from time to time, but I am giving them all space for now.  The humans and demons are close to breaking from the trauma of their experience.  But despite that, they are recovering.  Hot meals, even hot meals that almost exclusively feature yams in some way, are a very powerful tool.  A safe place to sleep also helps, though it does nothing for the nightmares.  The early plan some of them had to sieze the armory and take the fort, or perhaps ‘escape’, simply… goes away.  I am perhaps being uncharitable to them by using See Commands and Follow Prey to keep track of any potential problems, but the dissenters are rapidly silenced by the others, and by full bellies and actual sleep.

The gobs integrate nearly perfectly.  Of them, Nail is my favorite; the gob of something so small and innocuous, and yet having come through their torture still with a bright curiosity about the world.  They can’t speak anymore, and my supply of Drain Health is reserved for life threatening emergencies for now, if it could even fix them at all.  But their pointing questions and the explanations from everyone they have on claw to ask are an enjoyable way to see the world through fresh eyes.

It is toward the end of this third day of calm that the verdlings come out of their hibernation.  And so, still waiting for anything else to happen, I send a small escort of bees along with Kalip to speak with them.  The pair have been living in one of the cellars for the cool temperature, but verdlings can sleep as much as a damaged apparatus when recovering from outside stress.

This evening, I think, is an excellent time to talk to some of the new people in the fort, now that healing has started, and wakefulness is in good supply.

Among them.  Not me, personally.  But that’s alright.  I’ll get Yuea to translate for me.

…

I’ll get Muelly to translate for me.