Scrap Core Chronicles (00 + 01)

[000]

Ignore the squeak of lesser minds as they rub two half-baked ideas together; greatness begins here.

Archartificer Magnifiria the Mindglow read the inscriptions upon her obsidian cup, its rim traced with fine copper filaments that hummed faintly with thaumic energy to keep its contents a perfect 81ºC. She raised it to her ruby lips and sipped from the cake‑flavored ambrosia. The enchanted choker on her neck transmuted every calorie into a charisma‑enhancing elixir, its tiny brass coils releasing the byproduct as minute puffs of perfumed vapor.

Beauty mattered, and genius deserved an audience that did not look away.

As she gently, lazily stroked her cat’s fur, she couldn’t help but flex her will to summon the persistent source of her frustration.

Magnifiria, High Elf, Lvl 320 Greater Emeritus of Knowledge
INTELIGENCE : 9,999

Magnifiria’s sculpted eyebrow twitched at the four‑digit number before she dismissed the status window with a scoff like she did every time.

A thousand books orbited overhead in perfect, planetary arcs, each one recited theories and definitions in the preserved voices of history’s greatest scholars. Their paths mirrored the stellar objects of the home plane, a mnemonic compass she had tuned until even their shadows kept time. At the centre floated her newest “lifetime achievement,” a dragon‑hide tome containing all mortal magical knowledge, also breaking the record for being the largest book in recorded history. Each sheet, format 4A0 in the size system she herself had standardized, was longer and wider than Magnifiria was tall.

For eighty years she had slammed head first against that barrier, chasing that five‑digit, god‑tier INT stat. Today she would break the system by forging the first Crystal Integrated Runic Engine, a core of pure intellectual sorcery, capable of calculus that would answer every speculative whim and, incidentally, reorganise civilization around better shelving.

She waved Prince Fluffington off and activated the mechanism that sealed the marble tower with her at its very center. Arcane shields and cog‑latched shutters slid into place with a soft hiss of escaping steam; stained-glass dimmed, doors shut, lids closed. On a pipe-fed pedestal, locked within a ring of magneto‑gear teeth, a fist‑sized blue prism was primed for the task at hand.

Magnifiria plucked a volume from the outer ring with a gesture, chanting out its contents at dizzying speeds, stripping its text and formulae by turning them into glowing runes that flowed into the swirling crystal. The labour demanded steady rhythm and a trance‑like focus; hours passed in productive silence broken only by her song‑like voice. The now empty books were discarded onto a growing pile.

Each book primed the orb for the next piece of information, its light flickering faster, greedy and ravenous.

As the floating books thinned, only the largest tome remained: the massive flat and warm surface, the perfect favorite nap-spot for one Prince Fluffington. It had taken him well over an hour to clamber his way up the shelves and around the orbits of the floating paper-weights before he’d successfully reached his destination.

Normally, his anti-magic collar would not interfere with the book’s anti-gravity enchantment. Yet as Magnifiria reached out for the World’s Largest Tome, her levitation spell snagged against the familiar’s equipment and both spell and enchantments hiccuped.

Magic failed. 

Physics became the World’s Largest Tome’s new master.

Gravity returned, sending the tome and the cat crashing down.

CRUNCH

SPLAT

The forty-meter drop abruptly ended with the greatest mortal intellect on record flattened like a pressed flower. Its glancing blow bent the podium where the altar stood, cracking pipes and sending the sphere flying off into a corner and hitting Prince Fluffington in the head.

The familiar, shocked and distressed, batted the thing away, desperately trying to figure out whether this constituted a breach of contract. It quickly concluded that, regardless of lawful termination, being in the scene of the crime was not to its convenience.

Forgotten in a corner of the room, amongst the pile of scrapped prototypes, the orb began to glow.

---

[001]

The thirty‑fifth obedience rune bit into the brass‑scrap plate that passed for my skull, just as the steam whistle shrieked through Grafton Foundry. Molten‑iron boiler‑heat rattled across the gearframe I inhabited, a jumble of salvaged pistons and plates forced into a vaguely human shape, while Kellard blew on the sigil to cool it. Not for the first time, I was thankful I lacked a sense of smell or the ability to feel the gin‑laced spittle flicking off the dwarf’s lips.

Soot‑stained gear‑oil dripped from his meaty hands and soaked the coarse braids of the beard that curtained his chest as he rifled through his brass‑clad instruments; the scramble of metal and arcane tools could not hide how my cog‑joints clacked and creaked in protest at his crooked welds.

Before I could test the clamps on my wrists, the dwarf, beard swinging and steps already unsteady with drink, slapped a grease‑smeared hand across my riveted head. “Don’t move a muscle,” he hissed, then dragged me toward a supply locker wedged between steam‑coolant pipes. The hinge groaned as he forced me inside, and the lock clicked a moment later.

I immediately began to test the clamp locks. Even though the crooked rune had worked as intended, I didn’t have any muscle to move in the first place. What did he expect?

Bootsteps approached, lighter than the artificer’s. “Inventory audit, Mister Kellard,” the foreman called through the riveted panels. “What’s… this?”

“There was a coolant leak,” Kellard replied with a cough. “Misser Rougher told me to clean it up once my shift ended, but if we need to audit…”

I possessed barely a month of memories, yet it had taken less than a day to see I had been stolen. What Kellard lacked as an artificer he more than made up for in thievery.

“No, carry on,” the foreman said at last. “We’ll do the audit tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir,” Kellard answered, remaining still until the sharp footsteps faded. “Yes, sir,” he repeated under his breath, heavy with disdain. By tomorrow he would have erased every trace of wrongdoing.

The snap of the rivet holding my wrist clamps cut off my thoughts. I rotated the limb within its housing and pressed the shard‑scrap of metal that was my thumb to the fresh obedience rune, scoring a hairline groove that forked the command pathway into nowhere useful, just as I had done with the other thirty‑four obsolete runes.

My small victory was interrupted by Kellard working the supply‑locker lock again. I shifted one pace sideways, set the clamp fragments behind a valve crate, and froze with my arms exactly as he had left them. The door opened to reveal his flushed, slightly winded face and eyes glazed from whatever cheap gin still clung to his breath. He yanked me out, and in a flash of inspiration I kept my whole body rigid.

My gearframe toppled like a domino, forehead smacking squarely against the dwarf’s head. The gong‑like impact was drowned out by his cursing; I would have smiled if I could.

“At least the glyph works this time,” he muttered. “No more running off. Ha!” He kicked my rivet‑plate head for good measure. I added that to my list.

Disobedience #5 had not been my brightest moment, but it had made it clear that the absence of compelled obedience did not equal freedom. Worse, Kellard’s sloppy work meant I could not sustain operations for more than a few minutes before this chassis began to break down.

Falling apart on the streets was an unacceptable risk, especially when my next chassis might be something less mobile, like a furnace.

“Follow me, and don’t make a racket,” Kellard ordered, and I complied.

Constructed from pilfered factory parts, I knew discovery by any authority would lead to Kellard’s well‑deserved termination and my undeserved disassembly.

He led me to the usual cargo box near the furnaces, told me to stay put until he returned, and closed the lid.

Alone in the dark again, I checked whether the box was locked and was pleased to find it wasn’t. Guided by the furnace’s steady crimson glow, I slipped back to the empty factory floor, located an engraver, and continued preparing the means of my escape.

---

Under cover of darkness, exactly three hours after the factory had closed (and just ten minutes after I had been returned to the box Kellard left me in), the dwarf entered the factory again. I recognized his footsteps even when they mingled with those of four others. They talked about some meaningless sport or other. I ignored them, focusing instead on tightening the screws that held my legs together.

“You sure it won’t try anything funny this time?”

“The rune works perfectly,” Kellard boasted, and I could almost hear the eye‑rolls from the other three.

Chains wrapped around the box, and it was hoisted onto a trolley.

“I’m telling you that thing started acting up ever since you put in that new magi‑core. It’s got to be cursed.” The speaker was the man whose nose I had broken during disobedience #12, when I had tried to flee onto one of the riverboats. Back then I hadn’t known the place they were taking me was somewhere I would actually want to be.

“If it’s cursed then why does it keep winning?” the dwarf said, louder this time.

“Man, you must be raking in levels like crazy! How long until you start your own shop?”

That cut off Kellard’s laugh short. “Everything changes tonight,” the faux-artificer said, though did not elaborate. Kellard quickly changed the subject and they drifted back to their meaningless chatter. I tuned them out while making small adjustments to my own body in preparation for tonight’s events. Hopefully I’d come out with all my limbs attached this time.

---

The muffled roar of the crowd sounded farther away than it was; I had dampened my hearing earlier. I was too focused on fiddling with the runes at my shoulder socket, scratching at them until the clutter in the frame was neatly cut off.

My box rattled, signalling it was time.

Yet we stopped three seconds short of my destination. Someone was talking, and by the time I had restored my hearing, Kellard’s voice whispered through a hole in the box: “Win this quick.”

Before I could wonder where that came from (not that I disagreed with winning fast), the box moved again and the lid slid aside. It was the same sand‑covered, wooden, circular fighting ring I knew so well.

Opposite me stood another cage holding a golem twice my size and four times my weight. The moment its door opened, the dull‑grey piston‑wolf lunged out. Its chassis moved on four load‑bearing struts that slammed into the sand one after the other, each strut driven by an exposed copper piston. The automaton’s body was pristine, without a dent or a scratch, the Grafton Foundry logo stamped across its side and forehead. Had I not known better, I would have guessed it was fresh from the factory.

As in every piston‑wolf bout, the construct kept its head low, greased limbs nearly silent while it glided toward me in a slow left curve. Between those struts a row of narrow exhaust ports pulsed steam in steady half‑second bursts, white against the arena’s haze. I darted forward, driving my borrowed frame hard to meet it a third of the way to its cage, legs wobbling under the strain. I vaulted over the buzz‑saw maw that snapped where my legs had been half a second earlier.

It whirled to catch me, faster than I could have dodged had I not been ready. My sharp metal fingers burrowed into the counter‑weighted drive‑shaft wrapped in interlocking rings that made up its tail and, heels dug into the sand, I pulled until my joints creaked. The red‑eyed golem could not attack and keep its footing at the same time, so it chose to attack.

The piston‑wolf lunged for my head; I let it clamp onto my left arm instead. An ear‑splitting grind followed as it shredded metal and pneumatics, buying me just a few seconds to straighten my right‑hand fingers into a dagger‑like spike. Behind its grinding gearplate I glimpsed the crystalline regulator ticking through alignment cycles, the closest thing the machine had to a central node. With every watt of power I had, I drove my hand into the golem’s chest. The shattering of its core, paired with the owner’s scream, was music to my ears.

But there was one tune I liked even more.

Piston‑Wolf Defeated!
+20 XP

Not content with the notice, I tore into the carcass, titanium fingers ripping its limbs apart. I barely had time to study the layout of the inner workings and update my mental catalogue before I was yanked away.

“Should’ve told him to stop after winning!” someone jeered.

“Don’t do that again,” Kellard said for the fifty‑eighth time in the past 30 days.

The sour set of his features told me he had earned little from that fight. An artificer normally gets a healthy share of XP from anything their named golem kills, the amount shrinking the more automata they run. I was fairly sure his cut was now less than half of what it should have been; probably less with every modification I slipped into the frame.

Behind me, the loaders hurried to remove the dead golem to prep the arena for the next rounds. “Don’t move,” the half-sober dwarf commanded, pulling out a toolbox I hadn’t realized he’d been carrying.

I pretended to obey and watched with mild concern. Normally I would’ve been shoved back into the box alongside my missing limbs and then fixed back at the factory. Seeing his handiwork as he replaced the torn components with misfitting spares he got from somewhere else, I quickly began to feel some concern at what was about to happen.

A strange man approached. He was lean as a gear shaft, standing a full head above every dwarf around him, and the way he glided forward reminded me of a blade being drawn. I couldn’t confidently claim I knew he was important, I didn’t much understand or care about the social dynamics. But I did recognize that the sharp‑eared and unbearded man was the only one wearing a white suit and tie, its pristine white cloth hugging angular shoulders that seemed carved rather than grown. “Can you finish as scheduled?”

“Yes Mister Uriralei!” The honest eagerness in Kellard’s voice sent alarm bells ringing everywhere. There was a glint in the dwarf’s eyes I did not like, nor how he kept looking me over as if I were a bottle of gin after a day’s worth of sobriety. Behind him the tall stranger watched without blinking, those pale eyes flat and cold.

“Good.” The stranger nodded, looking me over once more before turning and vanishing into the crowd, leaving me to dread over what was truly going on.

As much as I wanted to ask what this man was, he clearly was no dwarf, I wanted more to escape. But experience from disobedience #16 had taught me the arena had only one exit, and the guards there were far better at catching me than I was at running.

---

It took Kellard all of an hour to give me an arm that was worse than the one I’d lost to the piston-wolf. The thing weighed more than my right and threw me off balance, and it responded more slowly than it should have. The dwarf had made me go through a few motions first while the sound of the fighting in the arena kept drawing my attention away from the horrible patch-job being done to my chassis.

It was there that I saw a squat, scar‑knuckled dwarf in a soot‑streaked waistcoat clambering onto the railing and slamming a hammer against the bell, his lungs straining above the uproar: “Clear the pit, you pack of gawkers! A new challenger goes up against the champion, and only one engine leaves in one piece tonight!”

The crowd went deathly quiet, the only sound that of stomping boots at a cadence that was getting faster every passing second.

“Place your bets! Will the rising star take the title!?”

The artificer shoved me forward, the mismatched arm jerking my weight sideways as they locked me back into the box. Opposite to me was a black box that rattled and groaned, puffs of smoke escaping through the cracks.

He leaned in, eyes like cold nails. “Fight slow, put on a show.” His stained teeth glinted. “When you hear the bell, let it hit you hard enough to eat sand. Stay down till it finishes the job.”

So that was his bright idea: one last payday, bought with my wreckage.

The logical move was to nod and pretend.

Logic lost.

My sharpened fingers punched through the plywood and into his eye socket. He screamed and staggered back, and I vaulted the rail before the guards could close in.

Half-ready to test my luck against them, I spun around to face the black box as it burst open.

Something stepped out, something that was more like a walking furnace than a golem, iron plates glowing at the seams, smoke spilling around piston legs. Heat rippled the air to distort around the creature’s body.

Maybe staying in the box to face Kellard’s wrath would have been wiser.