Metal Cocks and Meat Clocks

Chapter 1: The Approach

"So where are we going again? we've been on this damn trail for well over a week"
"I've told you repeatedly I can't tell you. Although I'm honestly surprised you haven't figured it out yet. There are only so many places worth visiting in the direction we're going"
Victor sniffled into his hand in response, huddling against himself in an attempt to purchase some shelter from the wind that was coming in through the crack under the door to their carriage. He wasn't used to the cold up here. Infinity was cold as well of course: colder actually. But infinity has a different kind of cold to the cold you'd find in the highlands of the Kaisereich. In Infinity the cold was stagnant, and sat groggily between the buildings like an especially obese cat. The cold here however lashed and danced and dashed up and down the faces of cliffs, across roof tops, and under doorways. Slashing and clawing at the ribs as it slithered its way past the buttons of your coat and squirmed against your chest like a wet eel. Why anyone would choose to live out here for a prolonged period of time was beyond him.
"Ok then, if you're not going to tell me where we're going could you tell me where we are so I can figure it out"
Victor spat condescendingly at Hilde, as his numb fingers fumbled open the map, glaring down at it, eyes running up and down the strange mottled patterns upon it surface. It was probably a map of the Kaisereich, the coastline matched up, but everything inland was just a mess. Just looking at it made it feel like the patterns of the map were growing like quartz crystals from the cavern walls of his skull and stabbing slowly, softly, into his brain.
Hilde snorted, uncrossing her legs and reclining with a condescending air.
"Yick! Nichtva dummkopf! by the time you figure it out the place will already be in view. You'd be better just keeping an eye out the window for the thing."
"In this weather? It'd have to bloody glow for me to be able to see it through the snow."
"Speak for yourself. When I first came here the weather was far worse and I could still spot the thing. Its not easy to miss it"
Victor gave a resigned sigh. Looking out of the window would be pretty useless, but it would at least be better than assaulting his eyes with the Lasagna textured eye rape parchment that Hilde had affectionately named "map".
He was greeted with a translucent wall of grey, littered with entropic flitters of depthless white dots of snow, as if the window had TV Static. Victor sadly didn't know what TV Static was, TV's hadn't been invented yet, so he was deprived the ability to describe what the outside of his window looked like so vividly.
His eyes strained momentarily before something vast and square invaded corner of his vision as the carriage lurched around the corner of the road cliff. Dark vivid red against the white and gray, his eyes snapped to it as if magnetized. Vast and square with tiny monotonously placed squares upon its surface: some with a dim pus yellow glow behind them. He'd assume it was a prison were it not for the absence of iron bars. That and it wouldn't make sense for Hilde to take him to a prison. He was a a law abiding clockwork engineer with expertise that would be of little use to a prison architect. It didn't make him feel any less apprehensive towards the thing though.
The brick red from its red bricks bled out against the anemic gray of the clouds as if someone had peeled away a square patch of the skies skin, revealing the raw flesh beneath. As they went down wound grew, towering over the carriage. It looked utterly alien to him: a great brutalist monolith built to summon a Machiavellian utopia.

The clopping of the horses hooves came to a silent stop and the carriage subsequently slid to a standstill against the mountain slush. Hilde reached for the shtreimel-esque fur hat next to her and sat it on her head. She bobbed to the side with a little whip of her neck, signaling it was time to get out. Victor sighed, and braced himself, before opening the door to the outside world. He mentally cursed himself for not having a fur hat of his own. A torrent of snowy wind exploded into the carriage, giving Victor a wet slap across the face. He stumbled out of the door, his heart jumping into his throat as he felt the snow swallow him up to his shins. Hilde followed soon behind him, seemingly immune to the cold. she waded around to the front of the carriage, inaudibly told something to presumably the driver, before slamming the carriage door shut and waving the carriage off, setting it and the horses off into the white-grey mist of the snow. Victor turned to Hilde. "So can you tell me where we are now?"
Hilde nodded, gliding through the snow in front of him. Her bottom heavy figure in her long black coat combined with her cylindrical hat made it look as if she were the result of someone turning a black chess rook into a person. She waddled over to an until now nearly invisible sign and used her sleeve to beat snow off it, revealing the black lettering beneath.
"Vötzmich Academy of Secret Sciences..."
He panted in cold shock, cold sweat freezing against his cheek the second it left his pores. Staring up at the building with a sense of awful awe.
His eyes bulged from their sockets, yearning at Hilde for affirmation. The woman nodded. This was the place. Real and viscerally there.

Chapter 2: Coat Racks

The fur not-Shtriemel wobbled as it hung from the first of many coat hooks bolted to the wall, threatening to fall before eventually reaching an equilibrium. All the coat hangers gleamed, polished metal hooks, creating a line of lens flares punctuated by the black circle of Hildes hat. Hilde was unbuttoning her coat meanwhile Victor was still deciding if it was even a good idea to do that. He worried that he might snap off one of his fingers while fiddling with his buttons. Hilde eyed him like a mother would at a child struggling to do their own laces. She wanted to take the coat off him herself but she’d learnt that people in her line of work, especially young men, tend to be uncooperative when you emasculate them too much.
“You’ll want to remove the coat. The buildings pretty warm inside”
She said in the most matter of fact tone she could muster. She dropped just short of convincing victor that his hesitation wasn’t especially annoying her. “Yeah Yeah I get it you’re cold, stop the whining we’ve got shit to do” is what he imagined her internal monologue would be, which was remarkable close: what Hilde was actually thinking was “By the Kaiserin just take the fucking coat off Shmuckus Khan”

The Kronie nodded and set at prodding and wrestling the buttons through the little holes, wincing each time the button mushed the remaining warm muscle in his thumb against his bone. He about managed. It did take longer for the blood to flow back into his fingertips than he’d perhaps have liked though. Soon his coat joined Hildes on the hook.

Chapter 3: Corrosive Ideas

Something Victor quickly noticed about Vötzmich was that everything was red. Red brick walls. Exposed red copper pipes. Red Wood doors with reddish orange handles. Everywhere he walked, lead about like a child on a shopping trip with Hilde, he was surrounded by pounding red. You’d have thought someone would think to paint over the exposed walls. To keep the place from being too universally, skull numbingly, red.
Combined with the unnatural womb like heat of the whole place made it feel less like he was inside a building and more inside a colossal living organism: the bricks were strips of muscle and the mortar veins of lipid.
The School of Secret Sciences was simultaneously less, and more, than he’d imagined. He was for one though impressed by how wrong the things he’d already known about it were. He’d knew of its existence and the general area of its location. Everything else however was fatally wrong. He’d heard that Vötzmich was the name of the small city it was built in, that the building was massive and had a beautiful gothic architectural design. He’d imagined, if he’d ever go to Vötzmich, that he’d be rubbing shoulders with high ranking Fönixid nobles and big name politicians everywhere he walked. Or at least meet one or two of their children.

Hilde brought him to yet another dull red door at the end of the corridor, before opening it into a darkened room, only the dark grey arctic light from the windows to give visibility. She disappeared into the shade of the room, her silhouette passing through the gray of the window before disappearing again. The shuffling of cloth. The sound of something paper. The unmistakable sound of a match being struck. Then the flame lit the a littles sphere of visibility around her, revealing a cast iron furnace packed. She opened its door, grabbed a bottle from the ground next to her, threw it over the logs inside and, as the match began to threaten to burn her finger, tossed it in.
The furnace didn’t light much of the room, but it lit it enough to take the Schrödinger’s cat out of its box. The lone set piece of the room other than the furnace was a rustic looking wooden table in the middle, with equally rustic wooden chairs tucked under it. Victor pulled out one of the chairs and sat himself at it. Hilde shortly did the same, sitting across from him. She pulled a lamp from seemingly behind her back and sat it atop the table with a thud that resonated through the things metal frame with a near perceptible, if a little short lived, ring.
Another match struck. And again. Light. The lamp lit the table, casting little shadows over the valleys created by the grain of the wood. Hilde rested her hands on the table, drumming them twice, prepping herself for what she was about to say.

“Alright. I appreciate that all of this…the ride down, not being told where you were going, and ending up here. It's all probably been quite stressful for you.”

Victor nodded. “A little yes” he tried to joke. Hilde’s face was made of stone.
“Well I was going to let you ask some questions.”
The lighting of the room and the tone of her voice made it feel as if he were being interrogated: Each word he’d say threatening to indict him of some sort of crime he was yet to commit. Victors fingers dug into the table, nails scraping its grooves. Questions. “Ok…and you have to answer honestly?”
“As honestly as I can.”
“Fine. Where are we.”
“Vötzmich Academy of Secret Sciences, like the sign said outside.”
He’d for whatever reason felt smart asking the question. That feeling of smartness dissolved immediately into her factually correct, but not especially useful, answer.
“Yes but…That doesn’t tell me anything.”
“Then why did you ask such a useless question?” She chortled.
The stony mask on her face cracked a little. There was the first hints of a smile beneath. Her remark was probably hurtful, but he was willing to forgive it since it was the first time she’d shown him emotion; Positive or negative. He wondered if all Pölitids were this stiff.
“Krautism” he remembered. That’s what people called the KFP social disposition.

“Ok. Sure. But usually when I ask a question like that there are implicit other questions that I’m also asking when I say something like that”
Hilde tilted her head like a confused cat. Or a confused owl. Or a confused dog. Or a confused person. “I don’t think we really ask questions like that in the Kaisereich. I think maybe you should just ask what you want to know”
“Ok. What is Vötzmich.”
Her face froze and her pupils pointed to her cranium for answers. A finger came to her chin, as if that would somehow help speed up the thinking process.
“An Academy for the study of secret sciences located in the North if the Kaisereich?”
Victor exhaled his disappointment.
“That still doesn’t tell me anything…”
“I think your questions are still too vague.”
He restrained himself from saying something really mean. For the “best Clockwork engineer in the Kaisereich” she seemed kind of lacking in the intelligence you’d expect of someone of her status. He'd try one last line of questioning, before giving up and deciding to find out by himself.
“Ok. Why was Vötzmich built.”
“There. That’s much better. The Vötzmich Academy of Memetics was founded in 1078 by Adölf Vötzmich as a means of privately studying the fledgling field of memetics. It would later be renamed to the academy of “secret sciences” and expanded to encapsulate the study of military chemistry and as of 1118 Clockwork mechanics.”
Victor relaxed. Ok, so he COULD get real answers from her. He just had to be specific.
“What is memetics”
Hilde froze for a moment, looking into the space in front of her with the look of someone who’d said too much.
“There’s a reason why they’re ‘secret sciences’ Victor…”
“I’m probably going to stumble upon it anyway just by proximity. Its better you tell me now.”
He was prying, trying to peep into her world. She didn’t like that. Her brows descended over the white of her eyes like black thunder clouds. “There’s a reason why they’re ‘secret sciences’ Victor.”
She recontextualized her previous statement. This time with a bleak tone and a period at the end. This sadly had the opposite effect of what Hilde had hoped it would. She’d fatally miss read him.
“So what? If you didn’t want me find out you shouldn’t have brought me here to begin with.”

Fingers drummed on the table. Drum drum drum, in a rolling motion. Like a little throbber for her thoughts. Before something clicked, and her fingers stopped. “Fine, although I’d be careful with how you treat that information. Even knowing what memetics are comes with occupational Hazards.”
Well that would have been good to know before he’d gotten himself put in a place where knowledge about them was readily available.
“My explanation won’t be the best since I’m not a memeticist but the two key concepts are that First Ideas, Memes, are the DNA of the soul, and that by controlling what ideas someone has you can control how they behave. And second that ideas function like virus’: they’ll spread, often in spite of the truth, given the correct means to.”
Victors mind tried to digest the concept. It was a simple concept: on its surface it seemed almost obvious. No duh people are controlled by the idea they have. You’d have to be stupid not to believe that. But the more his head tried to digest it the more corrosive it became. His mind went to a billion different possible places, and none were good. Memetics, he thought, must be a field with gray at best ethics.
“So what are some…examples? What does memetics look like in practice?”
“Oh that’s the beautiful part. You interact with weak memetics every day without even thinking about it. You look at them every time you read a book.”
“I understand the basic concept fine. What I want to know is what sort are developed here”
“Oh. Yes. Ok ok so during the 2nd Takobell incident it was widely published that the Kaisereich fired pin ups of Pölitid women at entrenched Takodachi positions.”
“Yeah, I remember. Everyone cut the picture out of the newspapers.”
“That was the memetics divisions idea. Vötzmich hand picked the women himself.”
“Sure. Get them to feel a certain way for Pölitid women and it’ll make them have a harder time focusing on the war effort. Why do you need an entire university dedicated to researching how to do that?”
“I was about to explain that part. Something that didn’t show up so well in the newspaper photos was that the images had a holographic foil wrapping. That’s where the real magic comes in. Vötzmich figured out that you could encode an idea creates into a pattern or symbol. The idea was that the Takodachis would jerk off to the women and would end up having the idea of deserting imprinted into their brains while they were still malleable from lust!”

Victor sat uneasily in his seat. “Malleable from lust” he thought to himself.
He began to question the ethics of his working here.

Chapter 4: Duvet Drug Trip

Victor tossed in his bed, shifting the duvet coarsely against his skin, its surface clinging to the liquified melt of his skin. Gradually wetting the mattress with the salty water of his pores. He’d been so desperate to get out of the cold that he’d embraced the heat of Vötzmich without even considering that the place might be a little too hot. Which it was. The heat was agonizing in fact. It was an awful humid stagnant heat that stewed you in your own juices standing.

His mind flashed through all the things Hilde had told him. All the questions he’d asked, and all the answers Hilde gave that only served to make him uneasy; It was like having a bad drug trip. He was severely out of his depth.

Moreover: he’d forgotten to ask her what he was actually doing here. He’d have to find out tomorrow, once he'd came down and sobered up. In his sweaty frustration he eventually thrashed and exhausted himself out of consciousness. Collapsed on the matress like a pugelist taking one too many haymakers: limbs splayed out as if he'd just been knock to the floor. Pinned by the weight of the duvet and his own sweat he was counted out. 1. 2. 3. Job.

That night his dreams were plagued by clockwork chickens who exhaled plumes of psychedelic multicolored smoke. The next day he awoke with a sore throat and a head buried in a pillow that had sponged up his own perspiration. He thought of getting a drink until he remembered that they didn’t drink alcohol in the Kaisereich. Water would have to do.

Chapter 5: Mechanical Friend

“Sleep well?”
Hilde asked, sat at the interrogation table with a half-eaten slice of toasted bread. She was smiling with her eyes but not with her mouth. Victor imagines she reserved making her lips into any shape other than a straight line for very special occasions, such as chastising stupid foreigners.
“The room was way too hot. But apart from that it was fine.”
“You get used to the heat.”
She uttered offhandedly before biting into the toast. Victor watched her lips move as her teeth slowly eviscerated the hydrated carbon. His mind empties itself, filling itself with the stimuli present in the awkward silence. The Copper pipes produced slow hissing noises. There was also the distant muffled slow pitter patter of something. Like rain if each sheet of water came in little waves spaced out by a second instead of in a gradual bleeding. For whatever reason his mind didn’t like hearing it. It raced to fill the ambience. He had questions, didn’t he? What was that thing he forgot to ask her last night?

“I uh…forgot to ask yesterday. You’re still taking questions, right?”
“I don’t see why I wouldn’t.”
“Sure. So what exactly am I doing here? What are we working on?”
Hilde paused the chewing of her bread and stared at him, then forlornly to the space next to him. then back to him. “How much do you know?”
“That its Clockwork engineering related.”
“Is that all?”
“Yup. That’s everything.”
Hilde stared at Victors shoes. Then back at the space next to him. As if consulting the bricks for an answer. Her eyes softened, as they came to resolution.
“It’ll be easier to show than to explain. Follow me.”
She stood up from the table, and walked around him, before swinging the door open and making her way half way down the corridor to a door. Victor followed, bludgeoning his hips on the door handle in a rush to follow her. She stopped by a Red Wood door. Red like all the others. With a generically orangey red bronze handle. It radiated importance purely because of the militaristic sternness with which Hilde stood next to it.

“The owner of this room recently passed away. I would usually avoid entering a…a dead colleagues room…out of respect. But he kept the only working prototype of what we’ll be building in his bedroom.” she said, twisting the handle invisibly below Victors line of site. The door gently swung open. Revealing the room behind.

The walls were smothered with blue papers covered in half drawn schematics, smeared with messy writing. All for novel clockwork walking devices. Each smeared with angry squiggles where the drawing stopped. He basked in the refreshing blueness of the room.
Behind him he could hear Hilde open a draw, and place something metal on something wood. Victor turned around to see her sat at a desk, its red wood finish making it blend invisibly into the desert of red below the horizon of blue papers. Hilde, hunched over the desk, exerted herself over something concealed by her back. Then the sound of wind up. Gushes of nostalgic clicks from clockwork having tension and potential imbued into it. Victor walked around to the side to see the little mechanism, just in time to see Hildes hands pull away from it.

About the size of a sparrow, It had a metal disc for a head held in place between two metal struts leading back to an upside down T-shaped body, two square metal protrusions off either side of the T’s bottom at a 120 degree angle, forming little feet. The clockwork key, jammed into the T’s top, began to twist, and with it the little metal birds’ disc shaped beak began to spin, faster and faster. Whirring. The clockwork sparrow began to rotate its head, lifting one foot of the ground.
Pivoting, twisting its head back and lowering its foot…before doing the same on its other side. Back and forth.

The flightless metal oscine waddled in a straight line along the table with a blind determination to prove to everyone watching that it could in fact walk in a straight line.
“It’s kind of cute right?”
Maybe it would be, Victor thought, if it was perhaps a novelty in a toy store rather than a prototype in a military facility that had apparently found a way of mind controlling people using pornography. He felt dirty knowing a teenage version of himself had at one point cranked out a load or two to those images in the newspaper. Him and his childhood friends remarked about how much curvier the KFP girls were. Was that part of the intended effect?
“A little I suppose. But what is it?”
It marched proudly for the edge of the table.
“A Gyro Walker. It moves using the Gyroscopic procession of its spinning disc.”
As if on cue its key ran out of stored potential spin and its mechanisms came to a stop. It stood up on one square foot, its disc still spinning, pivoting in a circle slowly lowering itself towards the ground in an elegant spiral.
“I more meant what is it meant to do. What’s its purpose.”
“It’s a prototype for the full-sized version.”
“And what will the Full-sized version do?”
Hilde stared at him. She stared at the open doorway. Then back at Victor.
“I suppose I can’t hide it from you forever. I’ll rip the band aid off now”
She picked up the Gyro walker. Twisting its head back into place and winding the key back up. Before placing it on the table and giving its key a twist, imbuing it with the life needed to walk again. She watched it waddle with a faint smile.
“We’re going to use them to end all the conflicts down south. For good.”
“I don’t follow.”
She stared him dead in the eyes. The expression on her face was friendly, but either something in her, or more likely in him, corrupted that friendliness with the black gloom of implications and second meanings. It felt less to him like the warm gaze of friend would give to another friend, and more the predatory gaze a childless hag on the brink of menopause would give to a sexually inexperienced young boy.
“We’re making Ironclads that can walk over land.”

Victor decided that it might be a good idea to leave. Immediately if possible.

Chapter 6: Freedom Dream

Victor sat bolt upright in the dead stygian hours of the evening. His room as nigh jet black were it not for the single silvery square of light bleeding in through the one tiny prison window. He gradually slid out of his bed and onto his feet, gradually pulling his mind free from the dead skin prison of his midnight grog. His eyes gradually adjusted to the shade of the room. He fumbled about his room until his hands found the soft fabric of his folded and piled clothing. He methodically did his buttons, pulled on his pants, and felt his way to the door across the smooth of the cold wood plank floor with his feet to the door until his toe gently stubbed itself against his goal.

He felt for the smooth globular surface of the handle, fingers wrapping around it in the dark, before slowly twisting it, the little moving parts of the door making faint, resonant, clunking noises. He let go of the handle and let the door sway open. He made his way to the exit from memory. He opened the door to the light of the lobby, seeing the line of coat racks with Hildes not Shtriemel hanging on the last next to the door. He saw his own coat next to it. He walked over to it and gripped at it, finger sinking into the rough grey fabric of his trench coat. He was determined to leave tonight. It was the best chance he’d ever had. The moon was full, the snow had just melted, and he’d spent all winter fattening up for this. Even if he didn’t know where he was going, he could still have a clear shot surviving off the melt from the winter until he made it across the border. He was ready.

Then. The sound of rain. The growing sound of something ambient and silent, washed over his skull. Like a feeling of pins and needles. His skull throbbed as he felt his whole brain lurch forward in his skull, compressing itself against the smooth bone on the inside of his forehead like a jelly slamming into a porcelain bowl. The soft circuitry of his neurons smushed uncomfortably together, crossing wires and shorting signals: the circuit broke. His everything went blank as he stared at the fading layered after image of the lush grass outside, shining with the dew of the winter melt. Shining gently in the light of the full moon. A wall of glistening freedom he couldn’t pass through.

He awoke on Tuesday with a pounding headache. It was all a dream.
He sat up right and looked at the redwood door to the corridor and began formulating a new plan. He’d play along with the plan for now. At least until he could come up with an escape plan.
“Immediately if possible” suddenly sounded pretty damn stupid. He could probably just run now if he wanted to sure, but where would he go? He had no food, and he still hadn’t figured out how to read the map.

He should have been smarter. He’d come up with a better escape plan this time. In the meantime though he had to play along. He stood up and walked out of the door, un-creasing his shirt with his hands as he went.

Chapter 7: In Jokes

Hilde rolled out colossal, rug sized, blank blueprint over the table. The “papershop” as she called it was deceptively large, and Victor was only really able to put into perspective how not claustrophobic the room was by seeing that it could house a paper this big without making the room impossible to maneuver without tracking dirt onto the paper. Unless you were a parkour expert. Victor wasn’t a parkour expert though. Even the dining room, which was the previous title holder for most spacious room, was still essentially just two of the little 3 meter by 3 meter cubes that made up all the other none corridor rooms in the building with the wall between them removed. The planning room however felt big enough to cartwheel in. Even with the massive flat slate table in the middle.

“I’m expecting you to work extra hard today Victor”
She said with a tone like a glass of warm water you’d get from a tap you’d turned to cold.
“Since we got absolutely nothing done on Monday”
She haphazardly tossed Victor a pencil like salt over her shoulder. Victors arms flapped and slapped at the air to catch it like a cat that had just had a sardine thrown at it. In 9 other realities the pen would have slipped through his fingers and hit the floor, obliterating the immaculately sharpened point. This story happened to happen in the one where he, by sheer stupid luck, caught it.

“We’re drawing out the blueprint for the Gyrowalker. Before we build it.”
Hildes words went in, rolled through little pipes that made up the plumbing of his skull a bit, busting a couple of bolts loose from the inside, before abruptly reaching a gap in the piping and falling onto the floor with a wet slap. Victor didn’t have the right information to contextualize the thought. So instead, it simply stood still and stagnant. A ball of cognitive gunk he didn’t have the right tools to pick apart. He didn’t smell any burning toast, but he could swear the stroke was somewhere in the post.
“W-What?”
“We need to draw blue prints before we can build the Gyrowalker. It's so we know what parts go where.”
Hilde said, as if him not understanding what Blueprints were, and not the fact that he didn’t know a thing about how the hunk of colossal, walking, metal was meant to function. He didn’t remember even working on something this large. His memory of university was a bit hazy, but he was pretty sure he’d studied to become a Toy Maker. Making an “Overland Ironclad” was completely out of his jurisdiction. He was about to object and start flinging his gripes at Hilde until he tactfully reminded himself that he wasn’t going to take his work here seriously. He was only doing this to play along until he could come up with a plan of escape that was better than just “run out the front door”.

“Oh. Right.” He said in the jarringly ambiguous way only a person “acting natural” would. He’d continue the act of natural by asking a question that he assumed would make sense.
“So What materials am I allowed to use? What’s the budget for this?”
“Whatever you want. The only limit is Chuubanite. It’s also meant to be a manned vessel. Although I’d make this version fairly cheap: we’re making a smaller prototype before we start building the real thing.”
He nodded, internalizing the information. It wasn’t like he was going to use Chuubanite anyway: working with Chuubanite was a whole nightmarish science of its own. A Science he knew virtually nothing about. He thinks he might have known a guy back at his apprenticeship who had experience with Chuubanite cylinders in gun craft, but apart from that he was completely clueless.

He was about to set pen to paper, before Hilde’s hand whipped out and gripped his wrist, like a kraken tentacle at an especially unfortunate sailors waist. “Wait. One more thing. I have no idea how you do it in Infinity, but here in the Kaisereich we always draw the scale first.”
Right. Scale. “Alright. I don’t know what the people in charge want.”
Hilde looked at him, scanning his face: long enough to be noticeable but just short of being uncomfortable, before nodding and drawing a little pencil line on the paper along one of the 5 centimeter lines, before scribbling in a little “1m” next to it.

From there Victor just drew a rough facsimile of what he’d already seen. Starting with the little circle for the disc shaped head. The struts leading to the body The series of gears leading down said struts. Back to a T shaped body. It had to be manned, so he decided to draw a 4 meter by 4 meter cavity into the thing, one meter larger than the bedrooms with the implicit intent of spiting whichever architect decided to make the rooms at Vötzmich as small as they did.

Then, finally, after drawing all the gears and pinions leading back to the very top of the T shape, he paused. And realized he had no idea how the thing would be powered or operated. There’s no way something this big could be powered by a wind up system, and the thing apparently had to be driven and controlled by someone inside. Other than making a direct action steering wheel and praying the person inside is inhumanly strong, how would he begin to work a steering system in?

He sat in silence, mentally paralyzed by at the prospect of climbing the Gabriel’s Horn shaped mountain of thought he’d created for himself. Staring glassy eyed at the paper, jaw hanging slack open. He probably would have started drooling all over his work if Hilde didn’t break him free of his stun lock. “You’ve been spaced out for a while. Do you need help?”

His eyes widened, as his head whipped, forcefully tugged by the manifested tension in his neck sinews. He was honestly a little surprised to see her there. He was so accustomed to working alone that he’d mentally tricking himself into thinking he was alone. It admittedly didn’t help that Hilde was a generally quiet person. In fact, she was probably the quietest he’d met that wasn’t an invalid, which was in a way deeply daunting; she was a 6’2 fortress of towering solitude that only occasionally would, should it suit the baroness within, send an envoy inviting the peasants that tilled the fields at her feet to engage in interrogatory conversations with her. After being around her for a while she quite naturally turned into another ambient feature of the background.

“Do I?”
He said, questioning himself more than he was questioning her.
“Is this one of those weird Kronie questions that has implicit other questions inside it?”
“What?”
“You said on Infinity Island people often ask vague-“
“No I don’t…it’s not one of those.”
There was a pause, a loud silence, as the Hilde and Victor simultaneously found themselves tried to figure out what the questions purpose was.
“I’ll ask you a better question then. What is stopping you from finishing the blueprint?”
Victor sighed. Maybe, he considered, there might be benefits to having a nation full of people so impressively blunt. Victor trusted that Hilde meant at least six tenths of what she’d just said as an actual question.

“uuuuh power source. I’m used to designing things that are wound up, but I…I don’t think something this large could be powered by the human hand.”
Hilde brought a hand to her lip, stifling a laugh. Like he’d just told her an in joke he didn’t know they had between them. “Not unless the person winding it up had the power of an ironclad in their arms, right?”
It took Victor a couple seconds to figure out what Hilde was getting at but when he did, when the idea dissolved itself into his mental metabolics, he was given indigestion from the allergic reaction he had to his own stupidity. Well duh! It’s an overland ironclad! Internally he gave himself a firm kick up the pants for not thinking of that.
“It’s surprising you still haven’t figured it out by yourself after so much time.”
Hilde decided to join in, rewarding him a playful slap rather than a punishing kick for his inability to think out of the box his area of expertise had created for him.
“Don’t worry, there is a reason why I’m here.”
“Other than tard wrangling me?”
“If that was my job I would have asked for a different job.”
Victor, for the first time in his recent memory, found himself giving a good humored nostril exhale. It wasn’t quite a laugh, but it still felt good to have a moment of mutual human warmth. Maybe the Baroness, in her fortress of solitude, wasn’t so bad once you got on friendly terms with her. He’d miss her when he made a run for it.

“So how will it work?”
“Not super complicated. Gyrowalkers are, by design, simple. Complicated things break easy…”
“…because there are more steps where something can stop working.”
It’s what his mentor had told him over and over. It was the thing…Leheure? That was his name. Leheure. It was the first thing Leheure told everyone. And it was the thing he told them most. Make your devices simple. He was suddenly able to much better admire the Gyrowalkers genius. A massive issue a lot of walkers had was that they were too complicated, and by extension delicate, to be anything other than a novelty. The Gyrowalker was deadly simple though. It only had two moving parts. He almost felt a little inadequate knowing that some literal who KFP had been able to come up with such a bluntly elegant design. It even had a built-in self-righting mechanism.
“Hilde, where did you hear that?
“The colleague I talked about. It was what he said when initially designing the Gyrowalker.”
“Really? He must have studies under Leheure. I thought he only taught Kronies. What was his name?”. Hilde paused, giving Victor a weak smile, before shaking her head. “I’m afraid that information is off limits. You can understand why.”
Victor understood.
“Well whoever he was he must have been a really good engineer.”
Hilde coughed another muffled laugh into her open hand. Another in joke he didn’t get because he was a dumb foreigner.
“I don’t get it. What did I say this time?”
“I’ll explain it later, when we’ve finished building it.”

“Looks like I’m going to have to live with not understanding Pölitid humor then.”
He thought to himself, as he watched Hilde begin to scribble at the paper.

Chapter 8: Two For Water Two For Gravy

“finished. You have permission to start asking questions again”

There was something to marvel at about the finished work. Hilde, for all her square peg social skills, was definitely present upstairs. Its design was certainly distinct. It wasn’t pretty or elegant, but it was admirably simple and could do the job it needed to do while resistant to more stress than something with a little more flow or flare. What struck him was how remarkably easy to read it was. He didn’t know a thing about steam power, and he could still tell what did what relatively easily.

His old mentor, Leheure, had always told him you could see a trace of the person themselves in the engineering they created. He personally thought that that was a steaming pile of bullshit, and that the idea that there was even a trace of personality present in the clockwork factory machines was ridiculous, but he did find himself musing of the idea of Hilde’s design being a reflection of herself.

The system was fed from one central coal furnace above a two water reservoirs, one of which then lead into a steam powered piston that would power the final gear Victor had drawn: The main drive Pinion. The second reservoir pipe fed into a series of 4 chambers, each a little smaller than the last, before cutting off, with two pipes protruding from either side, each feeding into a little flat circular chamber with a sort of windmill like structure, with a gear protruding from the back of each, both attached to a vast wheel attached to the circular plat of metal which the two struts holding the disc. It was not difficult to imagine what each reservoir was for.
By the looks of things the driver would, in true brutalist fashion, have to interface with the pipes and valves of the machine directly: The thing had no brain to talk to or nervous system to send signals down. The person in charge would have pull on the sinews and ligaments of the beast itself.

What puzzled Victor though was a pair of meter long cylinders attached to each reservoir with a pipe leading down to below the tanker it was attached to. Each labelled “PG”.

“I understand most of it, I just have one question. What are these for?”
“The ones labelled PG?”
“Yes. Those ones.”
“Phoenix gravy. It’s the fuel we put in Flamschwerts. Its incase we need to give the system a little lift off Gevutzch”
Victor had no clue what Gevutzch was. If Hilde wasn’t so straight laced he would have assumed that she would have made it up. It sounded like a made up word. But he still understood what it meant.
Leheure had a Phoenix gravy powered blow torch. It was one of the few foreign inventions the very firmly COTI voting man kept. When asked why he had it he begrudgingly conceded that there was no local made equivalent to the thing. Nothing anyone else built could produce a flame anywhere near as hot, for as long. That little orange tinted blue flame didn’t just heat steel: It would damn well liquify it like a spider would the insides of a fly before feasting on the soup within. Angrily slathering the metal with its heat enzymes, tinting it red as it tried to melt and digest it. He’d heard tall tales about the stuff that you could use it to weld Tungsten. He didn’t buy into it, but the fact that such a myth about the stuff existed spoke volumes to just how infernally, hellishly, hot the stuff was when ignited.

Chapter 9: Tee Time

Victor reclined into the wooden chairs on either side of the table in the kitchen. It wasn’t a comfortable chair: It was the sort of hard, creaky, wooden one that forces you to feel all the little spikes of your vertebra running down your back every time you lean back against it. Victor was still glad for a seat at a table that didn’t have any paper on it though. It was a recline for the mind rather than for the body. Hilde was going to join him on the other side soon. She was currently picking a metal pot off a little compartment on the stove and pouring it into a vast porcelain flagon.

Victor was currently being exposed to the Pölitid ritual known as “Tee Time”. Tee with two e’s, since most Tee Times didn’t have any Tea. In fact it wasn’t uncommon for the drink had during Tee Time to not even be a hot one. Tee Time was just a name for a little break Pölitids would have between work shifts where they’d have a hot drink and a slice of some sort of especially fancy cake. Victor had just learnt, to an eyebrow raise, that Cakeries in the Kaiserich bake entire cakes with the intent of selling little slices to Pölitid workers on their way to their job for a very marked down price, since it would help keep them in business between selling full cakes at full price for some little shits birthday.

Hilde stood up, hugging the flagon to her body with a towel rapped around it, before placing it on the table with a dull thud.
“I’d ask you if you want a specific kind of cake but I’m afraid we only have the last of the Fruitcake my family made for me” she said, before producing a wooden case the size of an especially large wheel of cheese.
“You have a family?”
Victor said, muting his shock at the information as much as possible.
“Vos? Of course, I do. Who do you think raised me?”
Hilde’s tone was pretty flat, but he could still tell that her feelings were a little hurt. He realized immediately after asking the question just how unusual, or potentially offensive, it was. Maybe he’d began to be infected by the KFP bluntness. As if the KFP virus was invading his body every moment he was surrounded by these oppressively red walls and gradually eating away at his ability to read the room.
Still, it struck Victor as unnatural to imagine Hilde having a family. For some one as driven and robotic and emotionally disjointed as her it felt wrong to imagine that she’d have anyone at home with her other than a cat or a goldfish. It felt especially odd to imagine her having parents that would give her a cake.
“I don’t know. It just feels odd to imagine some one handing their daughter a cake and telling them to take care before sending them off to well…here”
Hilde’s ever so slightly furrowed eyebrows furrowed, as a look of understanding softened her gaze.

“True. It is a bit strange to imagine.”
She said, Twisting the wooden case open and popping the lid off. She pulled a little knife from her pocket, spinning it expertly in her hand: forming a dazzling disc of a reflected light, before abruptly bringing down the silvery mass in a bolt of glinting lightning. The knife dug itself into the white icing.
“Although it would be even stranger if we were all orphans.”
“Good point…”
There was an awkward silence as Hilde continued to work her knife through the fruitcake. Carving it into little slices in little efforted drags.
“So what are they like?”
“My parents?”
“Your Family overall.”
“I’m an only child. My Mum didn’t want to have anymore children after nearly dying having me.”
Still carving and slicing. She turned the knife and picked a little piece out before dumping it on her plate.
“And?”
“And what?”
“There has to be more to tell.”
Hilde looked at Victor like he’d grown a second head. As if him asking down this line of questioning was the strangest thing on earth.
“Like…what do they work as?”
The number of extra head Victor had grown jumped up to 4.
“Why are you asking?”
“I just…I don’t know I suppose I just want to know”
Hilde paused, resting her hand laxly on the wooden handle of the knife. Her mind ran through its little deliberations as she struggled to calculate whether she should take down her guard rails.
She reached for a second plate and brought it over to her.
“My parents are both bakers. Run a little Cakery on the poor side of Phoenixton. I owe basically everything I have to them.”
She said, tucking her knife into the container, shuffling it around to pry loose another slice of cake from the little treasure box, as if she were picking a lock.
“Good childhood?”
“Mhm…well…uh…maybe goods a strong word. We didn’t have much money, but they took good care of me. I’m trying to pay them back for that by working a well-paying job here”
She brought another chunk of nutty fruit cake, with little gems of green and red glace cherries embedded into its dull brown surface.
“What do…what do they think?”
She froze, cake dangling off the flat surface of the knife, just shy of collapsing in a sugary landslide onto the wood below it.
“Of what?”
“You working here”
“Oh…”
Hilde froze. And for a moment, just one, she looked vulnerable, as Victors well-meaning prod had accidentally started a Rube Goldberg machine of thought. She wouldn’t cry, or let the stoic mask on her face slip. But Victor could still see little beads of light wobbling in her eyes. As if the soul behind her pupils was quivering like a pane of glass threatening to shatter and melt out of her tear ducts.
She shook her head, shoveling a slice of cake onto the plate.
“I haven’t told them the details of my work. They think I fix watches for a living.”
“Knowing about your work would be an occupational hazard?”
She nodded, shoving the little white plate with its little slice of cake across the table for Victor to take and dig into. “And they’d worry about me too much. I got this job so they could live a little easier with the money I make here. Maybe save up enough to set up shop somewhere nicer. Having them constantly biting their nails off would ruin that.”
Victor took cake, picking up a fork and prodding into it. He felt a little sick, digesting all that info.
“I thought this place was meant to be safe?”
Hilde froze. Before narrowing her eyes and looking around the room. The dining room was clearly empty, but whatever she was about to tell Victor was obviously something she didn’t feel one hundred percent safe revealing.

“This job is safe. But I’m still technically working for the KFP secret services.”
She said, giving Victor a weak, obviously forced, smile.
Victor wasn’t super familiar with KFP internal politics, but he knew what everyone else knew; that it had an unpleasant tendency towards factionalism, and that you stay away from the secret services. Victor didn’t feel like prying any further. He’d heard enough to know that he was treading over a tripwire maze made of Hilde’s nerves.

He prodded the cake with his fork. “Are you uh…sure its still going to be good?”
“Yes” she said, scooping a piece with her fork and daintily biting it off its metal seat.
“KFP fruitcakes don’t spoil. If a comet the size of Mt. Bird hit the planet the sapient survivors would live on a diet of cockroaches and scavenged KFP fruitcake.”

She said proudly, between mouthfuls of the sticky confectionary. While the comparison to cockroaches didn’t exactly make the cake sound appetizing, he’d take the endorsement she gave by eating it over the less than pleasant images she’d accidentally given him. He brought a fork full of the stuff and bit it off. His mouth filled with the sticky, gooey, sweetness a dozen of glace cherries burst in his mouth as he chewed on it, coating his tongue in their sickly-sweet flavor. It wasn’t the best thing he’d ever tasted. Probably not even in the top 10. But damn was it impressive that something this comforting had lasted as long as it had. It fluctuated in its sugariness, depending on how recently your teeth had burst open one of the concentrated orbs of fruit-like-sugar that were the glace cherries. Other than that though it was a polite, unpretentious, raisiny nutty flavor that gave your tongue a little hug and told you that you were home.

He didn’t have the cultural experience to contextualize it properly, but he still felt a wave of secondhand nostalgia from biting into it. It tasted like some one’s childhood. Maybe not his. But some one’s. It tasted of coming home after a rough day at school and burying your face in your mothers’ apron as she runs her fingers through your hair. It tasted of having Papa come home early from work to see if you’re ok. It tastes of having him tell you he knows just the thing. It tastes of having him climb into the little dusty place under the stairs to fish out one of the little cylindrical treasure chests. It tastes of eating as a whole family for the first time in months, all gathered around the table, wolfing down lumps of the crawlspace delicacy surrounded by those who love you.

It made him feel a little homesick.
“Its…not bad.”
He said, after swallowing down a mouthful of the cake and running his tongue along every surface of his mouth for dust or the legs of an unsuspecting spider that might have seen fit to make a home inside the confectionary.
Hilde perked up.
“Really?”
“Yeah…its…I can see why they’d have you bring it.”
Hilde smiled...the widest he’d seen her smile. The little glimmers behind her eyes wobbling again.
“I’ll let Mother know you said that. Next time I meet her”
Victor looked off to the side…He felt a little guilty. She was really moved when all he’d really expressed was that he’d be willing to eat it again if he was offered it. He chose not to snuff out the flame of her joy with the painful truth. This memetic virus was worth passing on in spite of the truth.

“So what’s in the Flagon.”
“Hot Cacao!”
“Isn’t Cacao from…”
“Correct.”
“Won’t you get in trouble for having it.”
“Nichtva. KFP has a pretty lax approach towards that embargo.”
“Huh…”
She began to pour the muddy brown liquid from the flagon into a mug on the table in front of her.
“Do you want some? This will probably be the only time you will have the oppertunity”
Victor mulled over the idea for a moment…
“Sure. Why not.”