Tunnel Rat

Chapter 124: The Rational Decisions of Students of the Arcane Arts

Milo left the house of the Shadow Skulker clan in a good mood. He was getting tired of having to play 'surprise' and be on guard all the time. While it was good for his perception, he had a lot of things he wanted to do, and the distraction was annoying. The temptation to beat them all with his engineer's spanner had been growing. Hopefully things would ease up a bit now. And if they didn't...well, he could start using the wrench.

The clan wasn't all sneaky ninja types, but that was what it was known for, and everyone trained in skulking and climbing when young. Old Healer had told him that some of the whelps became scouts who explored the large area of caves surrounding the hollow, while others trained to defend the Hollow using stealthy methods. The clan also produced many of the Hollow's healers. The novice healers got a lot of practice putting back together the students who failed to surprise guards, or who poisoned themselves in alchemy classes. It was an odd system, but it worked for them.

The day had been eventful. Trying to catch Larry who was chasing two skulkers had worried him. He was happy things had turned out well. Larry had walked away very content with his cookies. Old Healer was happy his novices were still alive, and Milo was happy that Larry would soon have a new friend. Charlotte had shown she played by the rules, so he had made it a rule that anyone exploring the old tunnels with him would have to make friends with Larry first. Larry wouldn't like not-friends going through his house. With Charlotte meeting Larry for the next couple of meals, Milo had time to catch up on other things.

The market place was busy. It seemed like everyone in the Hollow was either shopping or selling. He strolled casually through the vendors, looking at stands selling cookware, weapons, clothing and food. Players were here in force, selling things they'd found in the caves and buying new weapons and armor. It was like the bazaar in Shadowport, just with more fur and tails. He found Scrap Hunter at the end of the marketplace, working his way through a pile of bones, cleaning and sorting them. He waved to Milo as he came up.

"Back for more? I made a trip out to some old lairs that have been cleaned out and loaded up a bunch of the bigger bones. I have forty of the size you wanted. That's them tied up in the bundle over there." Scrap Hunter pointed to a bundle of femurs and arm bones wrapped in a piece of scrap leather and tied up. "Found this old thing as well." He held up an old weapon made of a wooden haft with several carved bones or fangs mounted to it. It looked similar to Milo's own weapon, but the wood was rotten and he could tell that most of the bones were gnawed by animals and falling apart.

"I've seen something similar before." He examined it more carefully. Two of the bones were in good shape, though covered in ancient blood and dirt.

Scrap Hunter nodded. "It's a popular design, or was, before the Hollow started making metal weapons. Out in the caves they still make a lot of weapons like this old thing. Shamans sometimes enchant them. There's even a record of a bone-carver who used to come through the area every couple of years and would enchant weapons for a large chunk of cheddar."

"Really? Where can I learn more about him? That sounds interesting."

"The records would be over in the Tower of Strife, but I'd wait for a day when you don't see poison clouds forming up top or hear the thunder. Those tower mages go at it all the time and you don't want to get between them when they fight." The older ratkin rolled his eyes and looked in the direction of the top of the tower.

Milo could see a green haze at the top of the roof. "Are they enemies? Or hate each other? Why doesn't someone do something?"

"HA! Oh, we do something. We stay away! How they run their marriage is up to them. No one wants to get between them when they go at it. Or worse, when they make up. They get disgusting, holding hands and writing little poems and such. I like it when they fight better."

Milo just nodded. He saw the old rat's point. He understood fighting, but not the other part. Good to stay out of it. After a bit of haggling, he bought both the bones and the old weapon from Scrap Hunter. At another stall he sat down for a big bowl of fried honey grubs. He had smelled the sweet scent of the cooking on the breeze and was ravenous again. His stomach made enough noise that people were laughing softly at him and helpfully pointing him towards the food stand. After two bowls of tasty sweet grubs and a slice of mushroom bread he was ready to get to work.

He wanted to take a better look at the huge, complex pile of machinery by the waterfall and tunnel to the mushroom fields. He planned to do that after a little bone carving. His spells used up a lot of bone, and if he got into a fight while exploring the tunnels, he wanted to be ready. He sat down on the far side of the machinery and leaned against it. It was peaceful here with the smell of burnt wires and the sound of running water. It made it easy to concentrate on carving the runes he needed into the bones.

He summoned his storage, the magical chest appearing in the shadows next to the wrecked machine. He needed both his carving and drawing tools, along with some wrenches and calipers to start work on whatever this was. Sitting in the shadow of the machine he carefully drew the needed runes on each of the bones and shaped them into miniature harpoons. Concentrating hard, he used one of his claws to carve out the velocity runes. Each rune drained some of his mana and glowed briefly as he finished it. Bone after bone, rune after rune, he worked for two hours carving the ammunition he needed for his spells. As he finished each one, they disappeared into his handy Scout Master's ring.

He was quite thankful to Charlotte for pointing out the rule that let him keep all the things he'd found. Old Healer had assured him it was fine, and 'Finders Keepers' was an old and respected rule among treasure hunters. Having only enough ammunition for his spell had hurt him against the spiders. With the storage ring he was better prepared for next time.

He completed ten of his rune-carved harpoons before he gave in to the need to take a peek at the strange machine. Just a little bit of poking around, and he promised himself that he'd get back to work on the bones. The bolts holding on the outer panels showed signs of having been removed several times and were worn and dented, some of them even stripped and barely holding the panels on. With three of the panels off he could see the inner workings, and started trying to guess at what the machine did.

That wasn't readily apparent. At the end closest to the waterfall, he saw what he suspected was a dynamo for generating electrical current from the mechanical energy of the water wheel, but it was horribly inefficient with the components in poor alignment. The two spinning faraday discs were too far apart and the wire coils were horribly made. Whatever power it produced went to a basic magitech storage system that first converted the current, and then used a series of crystals in glass casings to store the electrical based mana. It didn't look right at all, with cracked glass and missing cables.

After that was a series of separate sub-machinery for a variety of uses. There was a primitive subragator that would separate impurities from ore, but nothing to process the ore further. The impurities were further divided by a broken centrifuge and would have been outputted to barrels, if the barrels were present. There also looked to be an oven or furnace, a ceramic kiln for making glass, a wire drawing device that was missing parts, and a large glass magitech globe that had no purpose that he could see at all. More sub-assemblies were mysteries to him, with not enough parts left to tell what they had been made for. The whole machine was a patchwork Frankenstein, and he wondered if it had ever worked at all? He knew that once he started, he'd be working on it for hours. Reluctantly he put the down the wire coil he had started to rewind, and went back to his carving.

After the harpoons were done, he started on the lizard skulls, carving the runes that turned them into bombs. He was drawing a particularly tricky part of a rune, when loud banging broke his concentration and ruined the rune. Very annoyed, he went to see what was going on.

A student from the tower in a ragged black robe was banging with an old hammer on the side of the machine, while two others in blue robes laughed and gave encouragement.

"Maybe if you hit that bolt a few times, it will give up and turn!"

"Maybe...but he hasn't hit it yet. Put a Death Cloud on it Gehlter! Then it won't dodge so much."

"I'll put a Death Cloud on you two idiots! The bolts are stripped! It isn't coming off!" Gehlter hit the bolt with the hammer a few more times, deforming it further."

Milo couldn't take it anymore. Both the noise, and the stupidity of abusing a poor bolt that way made him angry. "Excuse me, but what are you doing! That's not how you dismantle a machine."

All three turned to look at Tallsqueak. They knew all the student mages in the tower. Despite the tattered cowl that the interloper wore, they knew he wasn't a mage. That was further emphasized by his black pants and the large spanner in his hand. They closed ranks, and tried to look as inscrutable as they could.

"And who are you to tell us what to do? We don't answer to silly skulkers, do we guys." Gehlter had been the one to step forward and speak, but he also checked to make sure that the other two were backing him up. They were friends, but from opposite sides of the tower, and you never knew exactly how far you could trust a student storm mage. The lightning tended to fry their brains. But both Squiggel and Bunt were backing his play, preparing spells and letting sparks dance on their fingers. There adversary seemed unimpressed.

"Ok, we can do this one of two ways: We can have some silly magical duel with explosions and pain where someone gets hurt, or we can all calm down and I can show you the proper way to turn a bolt. Which way do you want it?"

The three students looked at each other, nodded together, and yelled, "Duel!"

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