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Girl Genius - Nuée Ardente - 1/8+epilogue
-Sparks are mad geniuses. They fall into a mindset called the madness place and then invent things that warp or even break the laws of physics, they go on long rants about how they will SHOW THEM MWAHAHA, and they collect minions who get completely fascinated by their genius. Normal people often can't recreate their results. Then again sometimes the results really shouldn't be replicated holy crap why did you think it was a good idea to invent a machine to replace blood with molten brass. D:
-Constructs are created, living beings -- could look like anything, from purely normal human to any strange Frankenstein pile of awkward pieces. Often there's some discrimination against them.
-Clanks are steampunk, gear-style robots/mechanisms. The very advanced ones develop something like AI, but the overwhelming majority of them are just automatons.
-Most towns are surrounded by walls because outside the walls in the wastelands things roam and it's generally pretty dangerous to travel.
-Jägermonsters all talk in this horrible phonetic dialect and believe it or not I toned it down. XD
-Baron Klaus Wulfenbach is a spark who decided he was hella tired of the lawlessness and crazy experiments and wars everywhere and went about imposing peace through superior firepower. Most people at ground level agree to say that things are much better under him, but noblemen think a mere baron has no business ruling them, other sparks get all offended that someone would tell them they can't use their peasants as base materials to build a floating steam-powered castle, etcetera.
Sorin Petrescu is a perfectly normal blacksmith's apprentice, and is perfectly content with his life. He did not sign on to discover things he shouldn't know and go on the run with a Jägermonster.
Or make out with him, either.
Contains action/adventure, burn wounds, original dude characters macking on each other, some internalized homophobia, and horrible, no-good, very bad flirting.
--
The brand new secret tunnel behind Frau Crina's Bar and Bagels had not been outfitted with lamps, and it was the middle of a drizzly mountain night.
The reddish glow and dry heat that slowly grew the farther Sorin went had him chanting "Don't be lava, don't be lava" from the second he noticed his hair was drying to the time the tunnel opened onto a ridiculously large cave.
It was, of course, lava.
He flattened himself against the wall of the tunnel -- black, bubbly stone -- his heart trying to crawl its way up his throat. Vulkanburg was nestled in an ancient caldera; there was nothing inherently suspicious about volcanic rock. The squad of hulking creatures down there on the bank of the lava lake maneuvering with odd flamethrowers made him a bit too aware of how the tunnel had appeared in the first place.
Noise came up to him in a cacophony of unintelligible voices, clicking, cooling stone, bubbling. Even so high up the heat of the lava made his nostril hairs curl up. He didn't get how the minions working down there hadn't been baked already.
He scanned them all -- five, six -- ten, twice that many, looking for a swinging black braid. There had been forks in the tunnel but he'd been so sure --
There. There she was.
Rozalia was making a beeline for the center of the mass, waving a sheet of paper overhead. Sorin didn't need to hear the words to read them all over her body. "Mistress! Mistress!!" She was so excited. Good news.
She'd been so excited slipping into the passage that she hadn't even seen Sorin. Hadn't heard him call, despite all rules of prudence and the late, quiet hour, the curfew.
Master Iliescu was going to cry.
He looked over the cave a last time. It must spread under half the town, it was so large. The creatures looked like clanks, only without the shine of metal to them. Not like flesh either. Puppets maybe, animate statues. All well-armed.
Minions opened a gate and a thread of molten gold flowed into a series of molds that reminded him of the stone clanks. Others manned levers and control panels he couldn't make sense of; spark stuff.
Nothing he could do, if the Viscountess decided on war. Nothing he should. And perhaps there was some threat coming that they needed protection for, though he would have assumed the Baron's Peace would ensure they receive reinforcements for the asking. But Rozalia he could drag out of here, talk sense into... maybe...
Yeah, talking someone into abandoning their madboy of choice rarely went well. He gritted his teeth, raked sweaty curls out of his face, sank into a crouch. At worst he would just kidnap her. Her father would sort her out. Or forge pretty leg irons for her, either or.
"--perfect!"
All the hair went up along his spine.
This -- cutting through the noise, stretching to the limits of the room -- this was the voice of a Spark in the grip of madness.
"--report from Plovdiv that the Tectonic Dismantler is working at the maximum planned capacity! Bwahahaha!"
...Sorin had no clue what tectonic meant but he was sure it couldn't be good. Plovdiv was hundreds of miles away. He tried to hope it was the kind of weapon that left the area around its user untouched, for at least town-wide levels of 'area'.
And Rozalia stood at the Viscountess' left hand, face upturned in awe.
She had to come out at some point. (Never mind that no one had seen her in town for a week, that she hadn't been home for two.) She had to come out and there was a pretty even chance she'd use the same tunnel she had used to come inside. (There was, right? There was.)
He inched away from the opening, cautiously, and then turned on hands and knees to crawl toward the first bend. The tools in his satchel clinked together briefly, and he froze, eyes wide -- but no reaction out there, he was still safe, there was no way they'd heard. Breathing out, he shifted--
"Mistress! Mistress! Intruder!!"
Sorin jerked like he'd put his hand down on a live wire, whirled around. Down on the floor a guard was racing to the Viscountess, same way Rozalia had, not the same emotion behind it at all.
He saw the minions flinch, start to scan the walls of the cave, the tunnels' openings; he tried to move back, tripped himself, landed on his ass.
A hand pointed to him.
"There!"
He saw Rozalia turn. Recognize him.
He was fleeing in the next second, scrabbling on hands and knees and then running, uncoordinated from terror but all his limbs agreeing on forward, on fast.
"--There! Construct! Get him!"
The tunnel twisted this and that way; he barreled past a forking path and only noticed after he was five, ten steps past, and didn't, couldn't stop and go make sure he was going down the right one, oh by all his ancestors he was going to get lost, get caught, die here in the furnace-dark -- this one looked familiar but what if he was wrong?
Yells resonated behind him, wretched beast, traitor, cursed spy. He kept running.
Then they seemed to come from before him, and he stopped.
He was almost blind from the lava, his rainy-night vision hadn't yet come back and his hands were scuffs and bruises all over from catching the walls, but the light of the torches, that he could see.
No tunnel, no other tunnel, no fork no big rock no place to hide no nothing --
Something wrapped around his neck, covered his face. Shrieking, he threw himself back into it -- there was nothing behind him, not from the shoulder blades down; he tried to drop his weight to the ground, make it drop him, and choked hanging instead.
It swung him up by the neck and the back of his shirt and then he was being shoved in the dark against rocks and something -- a body. He could see nothing, understood nothing. The slope was bad and his fingers wouldn't catch; he backslid into the other -- person, thing, monster and it --
Caught him, an arm across his chest, hand (too big too big) tightening on his throat, his back pressed to someone's -- hand on his face, mouth, no--
"Shh."
He shushed.
He was on someone's lap up an almost vertical shaft in the rock and if he didn't shush he was going to be choked out until he was quiet. In the middle of his terror that was something he understood with crystal clarity.
Under them two small mobs met screeching -- firelight danced on the rocks. Raised voices. Flesh impacting with flesh.
"--Ow!"
"You lost him!"
"No, you--"
"Stop -- fight each other!"
The chest against his back jerked like a suppressed laugh.
Fighting each other, in frustration, confusion, anger. One of the men down there said something about going back to check down the last fork. Sorin closed his eyes so he would stop seeing the torchlight and breathed, trembled.
"Stop that," someone breathed in his ear, barely enunciating. "If your tools clang I'm dumping you."
Sorin found that one of his hands was on someone's arm and the other one on -- probably his knee -- and suddenly he was squeezing for all he was worth. He threw his head back -- not hard, but in rage. If there hadn't been a hand covering his mouth he might have yelled, how is that supposed to help?!
(Which probably would have been bad. But.)
The man didn't dump him or stab him with the handful of knives Sorin could feel on his neck, which was something he only thought to be grateful almost half a minute afterwards. He was laughing again. It made Sorin so mad he almost didn't notice when the mob broke up.
The tunnels would be infested with minions, though. Maybe with stone clanks even, though they seemed a bit big for the tunnels -- they did have those guns, and the more he thought about it, the more he thought they weren't flamethrowers but lava-throwers, which was arguably even worse. He pointed a finger up the shaft, exhaled against the leathery palm.
The man shook his head. "Blocked."
Damn. So then how--
All his organs tried to lodge themselves up his throat at once. He didn't have enough air to scream. They landed with a thud and he was still getting his bearings when he was shoved forward in the dark.
He ran. Dizzy and barely knowing where the ground was, but he ran. It was that or dying. He was someone's decoy and he still ran, there wasn't a choice. He wanted to be home, he wanted to never have broken the curfew, never have caught sight of Rozalia.
They were coming too damn close to the torchlight, too close but the other man was right on his heels and then they turned a corner at a dead run and a wall of backs blocked their paths
"Plow through!" the man behind him yelled, almost joyous.
He was never sure afterwards how he'd only bumped people out of his way, how he hadn't fallen or been grabbed. He was a blacksmith's apprentice, he had muscles on muscles, but he'd never been tall and they were lined up five deep, he was not that strong, he was not -- he was free of the throng, he was galloping away at breakneck speed and somehow not breaking anything.
Furious yelling chased them -- it took him too long to realize only the yelling did that, and then he hit a wall at a full run and tottered back, fell.
He was caught by the arm, yanked back up. "Hoy, whaddyou--"
Sorin wheezed, winded. "I'm blind in here, you jerk!"
"Hrrm." A rough (too-big) hand closed on his wrist. He let the man tow him, panting, dizzy with the impact and his terror.
He must have tripped them somehow -- the man had, or dropped a trap behind him or something. Sorin couldn't even hear yelling over the pounding in his ears any longer.
His shoes clinked weird on the rocks, not quite like steel-toed boots. He guided them in the dark, right, left, right; Sorin was hopelessly lost.
Only... "--I smell rain," he said, halting, unsure. Did he really? The dampness felt almost good on his dry skin.
A grunt. "Mm. Almost there."
He stopped walking then, so abruptly Sorin walked right into his back, nose first between his shoulder blades. "Ow!"
"Say, kiddo, how much did hyu see, 'zactly?"
Sorin froze, caught in conflicting impulses. Say everything, so he'd think him useful? But he'd stop needing him. What if he killed Sorin for spying, what if he just wanted to make sure Sorin hadn't ... he'd read too many spy stories, and now he just, which way to jump? He didn't know.
"I heard the name," he said, cautiously. "Of the Viscountess' invention."
He had. What was it again? Tik-toking. No. Ticking tonic. Something close.
If he admitted he'd forgotten he'd be useless, he'd be killed--
"--and how far it worked. The range."
The man gave his caught wrist a little squeeze. Not painful, just -- unexpectedly prickly. "Hmph. Guess Hy really can't get hyu killed, then."
He dragged Sorin after him at a run. Sorin went, because there was no choice, completely blind and feeling the walls brush past at speeds he didn't like.
The guy didn't even sound worried. Either he was crazy or...
There were pointy things against his wrist. Not knives.
Earlier they'd been yelling about a construct.
"She has stone clanks," he tried to say, and then the tunnel lightened and they turned into another, bigger gallery and bulldozed right through a trio of guards, whispering to each other around a snuffed torch.
"Sorry guyz!" the -- construct? his legs were -- there were things flopping that didn't look like -- that looked maybe like -- the construct yelled. "Hy can't pummel hyu today!"
"Don't yell!" Sorin moaned, "you'll--"
Suddenly wet was falling on him and there were little glowing lights at surprising distances, and they were outside, back in the streets. Not where he'd come in but he was sure in a second he would recognize it, only at the exit of the backstreet they'd come out on there was a squad of the stone clanks, and they'd seen them.
The construct charged them barehanded.
Freed, Sorin stood, indecisive -- the street ended here, no doors to be forced open, and there was no way he could get through the stone clanks on his own. Turning his back on the tunnel, though -- he took a few steps closer to the fight, hesitated.
Stared.
The construct had legs that folded weird in his dress uniform pants, one joint too many, like giant goat's legs, or a devil from some old Bible gravure, maybe.
That was a bit less important than the fact that he'd already broken off two stone arms and a leg, and that he was in the middle of total chaos, and was laughing like he was mad.
Not like the madness place, though. Not quite like that.
A noise behind him had him whirling around. Three liveried guards -- human -- burst out of the tunnel, weapons out.
"Halt! Civilian!"
Oh, he was so finished. So caught. At this point, after all that terror, it was almost a relief.
His hand was in his satchel for some reason, searching for his biggest hammer. Finding tongs instead. It was okay, it wasn't like he'd brought any of the big hammers, not for such fiddly repairs.
One of the soldiers lunged for him. Sorin stumbled back, pulling at the tongs, only they wouldn't come, too well-secured, they wouldn't --
Something whistled past, hit the guard in the helmet so hard he flew off his feet, landed flat on his back. Didn't move again.
"Whoops sorry forgot!" the construct yelled, and then gravity did something Sorin had not signed on to experience. Something impacted with the small of his back; his stomach tried to evacuate the premises.
He was jerked up, down, he wasn't sure, and when he could make sense of things again they were standing on a roof; he was balanced precariously on the man's shoulder, belly up, all his muscles straining not to let gravity fold him backwards now that it was catching up. He squirmed to be put down, was twitched across the construct's shoulders in a fireman's carry instead, and then -- jump.
The street was a lot lower on the other side. Being built along the rim of the caldera did that. The outer streets were... slope-y.
He didn't have a lot of air, so he didn't scream very loud.
"Hokay, hyu need to shot op!" the construct growled.
Sorin's answer wasn't exactly coherent. He'd jumped on top of another house again, bouncing off a bench and a mailbox on his way up.
"Not that way not that way not that way!"
"Hmm?"
"Lava pits," he babbled as they kept advancing toward the rim, "not shielded no heat sink we will roast--"
There was a reason Vulkanburg was built in the caldera. Viscountess Vaduva had canalized all the flow to the outside slopes. It drew very pretty, very exit-less labyrinths.
"Gates vill be guarded. Got a better idea, dollink?"
Sorin had the horrible suspicion that even if he hadn't been terrified and his brain shaken with every bounce he wouldn't have found one. "Um. No?"
"Great! Gates it iz."
He changed directions without warning; Sorin's head snapped back. Then they were racing downslope toward the main plaza. On wet tiles, under the rain. He was pretty sure the man had hooves. He waited, almost resigned, for the construct to slip.
He didn't see the flicker of firelight to the side until the construct was already dodging. They landed in a street, shutters all closed. Something splattered heavily against the roof where they'd been, glowed gold and then red as it sank into the tiles.
Lava. Sorin stared, horrified, praying for it to cool before it went right through and started a fire in the rafters. He could hear the rain sizzling as it plinked on it. Those little drops would never be enough.
"Woo! Target-rich enfi-vi -- place. Fun times!"
... Oh no.
They were surrounded.
They were surrounded but the construct picked a side, went charging like a bull -- muzzle of a lava-thrower aimed at th--already dodging, and picking up speed, and then he let go of Sorin's arm and grabbed the neck of his shirt and swung him right on top of a roof in passing.
Sorin rolled dizzily up the tiles, brain shaken, head hurting, ribs bruised, and then came to a stop halfway up the slope and started rolling the other way.
He was still scrambling to catch himself when the explosion rattled the house.
There was more light in the street now than there had been. When he peered down to check he found puddles of lava eating holes in the pavement, the remnants of a lava-thrower, and a very dead -- oh great God above -- soldier. Several of the stone clanks were squirming on the ground, leg joints broken so they folded the wrong way around. The other soldiers were standing back from the last intact clank, and he didn't get why until it toppled slowly forward and the construct stood and grinned.
His uniform vest's sleeve was shredded up to the elbow and he dripped blood like a faucet. He was alone, and the group at the other end of the street was catching up at a fast clip.
There were so many teeth in that smile that Sorin didn't even find it strange when the soldiers with the lava-throwers took an uncertain step back.
"Reinforcements!" Sorin yelled.
The construct's eyes flicked up to him, to the other end of the street and its stone clanks running at him--
"Behind!"
Too late.
A jet of lava burst up the street, splattered bright thick drops all over the place -- it had hit something -- construct's arm? No, a rock, a stone clank's part, the construct had parried at the last second, was bounding across the distance to --
Crunch.
In the next second he'd stolen the lava gun and melted the legs off the last stone clanks. They crashed face down on the pavement.
He was still grinning -- too wide, too pleased. Too hungry. Like that -- with the flames and the blood and the unhinged delight -- he did look way too much like a demon from hell. The half-dozen soldiers left took another few steps back, and then broke and ran. He started chasing them.
"Wait! You're on fire!" Sorin managed to yell as he went past, and threw a tile to get his attention.
It shattered harmlessly on the paved street. The construct braked, pivoted to stare him down in turn -- and threw himself in the nearest puddle, back first, cursing.
The street started shaking with heavy stone steps, several sets, in formation. The construct hauled himself onto the roof still dripping.
There was blood, he smelled like burned meat, his clothes were peppered with charred holes -- and he crouched like a beast before Sorin, ready to pounce.
"How far," he said, oddly quietly, oddly intense, "would hyu say zat weapon hyu heard about gets."
Oh red fire. Sorin couldn't give his intel now, he couldn't, he -- "Miles," he gasped. "Hundreds of miles, she said --"
A sigh, and he seemed to deflate, just a little. "Drat."
A clawed hand reached for him. Sorin flinched, a reflex. He was pulled up on his feet anyway and then --
Had that been a wince?
Then the construct was flinging Sorin across his shoulders again and taking off running for the gates.
His oddly smart uniform jacket was drenched, and it wasn't only with water.
Stone clanks everywhere. No cover on the plaza. The gate would be guarded.
So many stone clanks he'd seen down there in the cave. The construct was terrifying, but he would never get them all.
Little grunts, flinches on landing, when Sorin's weight came down on his shoulders. He wasn't one of the madboy creations that didn't feel the pain.
The ground rushed under them in sudden bounces, in fits and starts, tiles and then streets and then tiles; Sorin's stomach was bruised, was trying to crawl up his throat, he could have cried with terror. His tools dug into his side with each landing, into the construct's slick, dripping shoulder.
He wanted nothing more than to crawl through someone's window and hide at the bottom of their closet, shake until the monsters passed.
The curfew was absolute. Everyone in Vulkanburg knew that. Nighttime was when the Viscountess expected all her loyal subjects to be snugly in bed, and she'd taken a madgirl's fancy to the idea that proper rest was essential for productivity. There would be no shutters open anywhere in town, not even with the noise they were making. Especially not with the noise they were making. And they were arrowing straight for a trap, but there was nowhere else that the walls would --
"Left!"
"Wot?"
He -- somehow -- freed a hand -- regretted it instantly -- yanked on the man's long, floppy ear. "Left! Left, left, the aqueduct, left!"
No one in town could have climbed those smooth columns, jumped half that high.
Even for the construct it was going to be ...
He thought the construct answered something, but he couldn't hear past the blood rushing in his ears, the wind as they changed directions.
He'd been thinking of jumping from under the aqueduct. Climbing the rest of the way up, maybe, if those claws -- he hoped -- could make their own handholds.
What happened instead was that the construct threw himself at the chapel, those hooves finding purchase on the upper edge of a window's stone frame -- one inch wide, maybe, Sorin's face almost hit the wall straight on -- and ricocheted straight up, and they were several stories over the highest roofs in this area of town, coming at a dead run to the plaza the chapel stood on...
... Flying.
There were guards underneath staring up in consternation, there was the Viscountess in mid-snarl. (There was Rozalia.) There were all his organs floating like gravity didn't concern them (they were lying.)
Impact, hard -- stone, bone-bruising on his arms, his wrist; his forehead exploded in pain. He slapped half-blind at the bricks --
The edge. The aqueduct's edge.
He wasn't too sure how neither one of them fell off. His grip on the edge was one-handed; he slipped halfway off the construct's shoulder as the construct hauled himself up by the strength of his arms and pure stubbornness. One of Sorin's legs wrapped awkward and desperate around his back, his waist -- clothes drenched, he was slipping --
A last heave, and they both toppled over the wall and into about four or five feet of water.
Sorin resurfaced, spluttering, to laughter.
"Hy guess that will do for a bath. Come on, keed, up we go!"
"One minute," he protested, panting. The bricks were slippery under his feet.
A wet, animal snort. "Dey vill be shootink in a minute. Move."
But the water, Sorin wanted to say, there was no way they'd risk ruining the town's water supply? But he caught Sorin's wrist again and started hauling. The incline wasn't steep, the water slow, but they still had to fight the current and Sorin was in up to his chest -- exhausting.
In the faint light coming from the town underneath he could see a lot of shredded cloth before him, a mess of burned fibers and wet dark things that he was glad he couldn't see better. He made more of an effort to pull his own weight.
Something like a cannon hit the underside of the aqueduct where they'd been a minute ago. The bricks shuddered. Held. Someone screamed, thwarted rage and madness.
The Jäger looked at him in the dark and grinned. A faint glow fell from his mouth, haloing his breath.
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sorin alas knows nothing of hats. NOTHING. ;^;