Chapter 68 - The Snowpiercer

Note :

Finished at the very last minute, damn.

Chapter 68

Starborn Mountains, Starfire Valley

Workshop

Kalia gazed up at the snowpiercer.

She'd never seen anything like it. It was...weird. Like a massive brick of metal on equally large wheels. Yet it was...rounded. As if someone had tried to remove every edge they could. It gave it a rough and sleek feel simultaneously, strangely enough.

And it towered over her like she was an ant.

"Wow." She simply said. "It's...huge."

"It has to be. It has to house ten people for a semi-extended period of time." Said Sapphiria, and the mage-magistrate smiled hesitatingly at the Ancestor.

"Yeah, but still. I'm amazed you dreamt up something like this in the narrow tunnels down there."

The artificer looked like she was about to say something for a moment, before deciding otherwise. She seemed to do that often, especially when they mentioned her living down there.

"I have nothing if not a wealth of imagination."

"Yeah. I suppose so." She gestured behind her, at the group of people trying -and failing- not to gawp at the gigantic vehicle. "I've assembled the expedition group for your briefing."

"Good. Who do we have?"

"Ramina and Paul. Two gendarmes. Not our best combatants but both of them have a good helping of common sense and they had some experience as hunters." Actually, they had experience as poachers, before she had given them a choice during their day in court between putting on a uniform or going to the copper mines of Cuprum. Strangely enough, that had made them extremely loyal to her. "Then Truvan to serve as a medic." The mage-magistrate paused, and the Ancestor nodded. Good, she remembered her. "After that, to round it out I got one of Tramistres' hunters, and before you say anything, Malry cleared him for this duty, as well as one of our miners and two stevedores."

The artificer blinked.

"A miner and a pair of stevedores?"

"She's never mined mana, but she had intended to, and gone through the courses before everything came falling down. And the stevedores handled a bunch of crystals, refined or otherwise, moving through the trade route. They know how to handle and transport large quantities of it safely, as well as the best practices to teach you all."

The ancestor nodded, slowly.

"That...will be useful." She admitted, before smiling at the taller woman. "Thanks Kalia!"

The mage-magistrate felt her cheeks warm up as she gazed at that brilliant smile, and coughed, looking away.

"Glad that you appreciate it. I kind of thought you'd, uh..."

"Protest more?" The artificer put a heavily armored hand on her shoulder, and Kalia had a pang, wishing she could feel her bare hand instead, despite how awkward the gesture was given how much smaller the ancestor was. "Don't worry. I'm going to use golems whenever possible, but I don't have much experience with this, and I'll take all the advice I can get."

Kalia blinked. She didn't have much experience handling mana? Then how-

Her line of thought was thoroughly derailed and completely forgotten as the diminutive woman went on her tip toes and whispered in her ear, her knees suddenly weakening as the warm, husky air caressed her.

"Besides, just between you and me, I'm all for having people like that on board. We're going to need people that know how to live in confined environments or laugh while doing backbreaking work, and they both qualify for at least one."

"O-Of course." Kalia cleared her throat. "They're all yours then! I need to return to Astralis."

"Sure. Safe trip!"

The mage-magistrate nodded, and left with less than decent haste, trying not to look as if she hadn't been thoroughly flustered.

*****

Sapphiria tried not to show how off balance she was as she stepped up in front of the expedition group. What had she been thinking? Getting so close to Kalia had almost been...intoxicating, and seeing her blush...

"Greetings everyone." She said, quickly rallying. "As you all know, we have been hard at work preparing an expedition north, into the Convergence. All of you have skills or expertise we deem vital to our success. But, rest assured, this is volunteers only. We won't force anyone to go out there with us." She gestured behind her at the towering vehicle. "This is the snowpiercer. It will be our home in the coming weeks. This vehicle is meant to navigate the roughest of terrain, go through the worst weather, and carry us all in safety throughout. Comfort onboard is...relative, as is personal space, but it will be a great deal better than camping out under the stars in a bedroll. Of course, this will be much worse than a normal camping trip. Our goal is to gather and bring back mana crystals, which means getting into the Convergence. Paul here, who some of you may know, will deliver a short briefing on Convergences and what to expect."

And then, to their surprise, she stepped away from the command team, made up of herself, Ramina and Paul, and joined the crew, who looked at her awkwardly, before refocusing on the magehunter as he stepped forward.

This lecture was, after all, as much for their benefit as for hers.

"To start off of, know that we are not heading deep into the Convergence. Only the outskirts. Icerend has, as far as we know, never been seriously harvested. As such, there should be mana crystals far, far out. In most Convergence, the few that would form that far would be immediately collected and we would have to delve deeper, but thankfully that won't be the case. Make no mistake however, a Convergence, however deep, is a Convergence. It is alien, and foreign to our normal perception of normality. Floating hills, places seemingly frozen in time, weather that seems to oscillate on a whim, and of course the dangers that haunt these places. Lesser dangers, but still. I don't believe I have to list monsters among them, as we have all had plenty of experience with them as of late." Everyone nodded, as he began pacing back and forth. "Nevertheless, I will reiterate basic safety. Never head anywhere alone. Ever. If, for some reason, nature calls and you cannot head back to the snowpiercer to take care of it -yes, it has bathrooms, thank Sapphiria for that-, you get a buddy to watch over you. Period. That goes for everything. Never get drawn out of position. If something odds happen, you report it and brace. Don't investigate. And lastly, scream for help. Don't just stand there, hoping it'll leave or thinking you can take it on. We are lucky to have an honored high elder artificer in power armor. Call for her help. Got it?"

A sea of bobbing heads answered him.

"Good. However, the most common, and one of the deadliest dangers in a Convergence isn't monsters. It's abherrations." He gestured at Ramina, who cleared her throat and stepped forward.

"Abherrations are magic. Pure magic. Studying them is how we learned the first spells, and even today their study and cataloguing continues to yield great advances in the various fields of arcana." The artificer twitched, as if she was going to begin pacing, like Paul did, but stopped herself at the last second. "They are, in effect, just that. Spells. Natural expressions of magic following the cataclysm of a manastorm. Some of them are technically harmless. They can be the cause of those floating hills Paul just talked about, reversing the gravitational pull of our world. Or they can be exceedingly deadly, pillars of flame rampaging across the Convergence or raining lightning bolts. Generally they are immobile and...dormant, at least after their initial 'birth' during the manastorms, which is one of the reasons for their lethality. One could argue, in fact, that manastorms are just giant abherrations but I digress."

She smiled at the group, and Sapphiria smiled back, encouragingly, which seemed to give her a much needed confidence boost. It was then that the AI realized that the artificer wasn't nervous because she was doing an exposé to a group of people, she was nervous because she was doing it to her in particular.

"Their biggest problem is that they are ever changing." Continued the artificer. "They are born during manastorms, and either they die off, running out of mana to sustain them, or they can be reinvigorated by the storm, or moved, or just destroyed altogether by its violence. Every storm can completely rearrange the abherrations in a whole Convergence, and the only way to know for sure that one is in front of you, at least without sending someone in to check and potentially get destroyed, is to have an augmented mage." She pointed at her eyes. "Which is the main reason for my presence here."

"Thank you." Said Paul, before gazing at everyone else. "Which brings me to the meat of this. Manastorms. Simply put, if we encounter one, we have to dive for cover. Immediately. No ifs, no buts, if someone yells out 'manastorm!' you drop whatever you're doing, delicately if it's crystals or something hazardous, and you either go in the snowpiercer or find the closest piece of cover. If you are very, very lucky, and get exposed to the full might of the storm, you'll die."

One of the stevedores shifted, and raised his hand.

"What if we're unlucky?"

"You become something else. Animals aren't the only things that can become monsters."

The silence that answered that was deafening.

"Obviously." Finally said the magehunter, after his point had sunk in. "No pranks on this will be tolerated. We will do drills, and honest mistakes happen, but if someone does a false alarm for the sake of laughs, I will personally nail them to the front of the snowpiercer to become one with the next tree we ram, understood?"

Sapphiria had a targeting solution on his head before he'd even finished his spiel, then forced herself to relax. He was making a threat no one was sure he would put into practice or not, to enforce discipline. Crude, but sometimes a little hyperbole went a long way.

And if it wasn't...well, she was the one with the plasma gun.

Still, better to make sure no one tried to challenge him on this.

The AI stepped forward, joining Ramina and Paul in front of the others.

"Just to be clear." She said. "That is if he is the one to get to you first."

Everyone turned towards her, then back towards him, and all nodded, one by one. She hadn't said what she would do -and it sure as hell wasn't going to involve killing the squishies-, but their imagination and her reputation did the heavy lifting. Now they were so scared thinking of what she would do they weren't even thinking Paul's threat might be empty or worth testing.

"Alright." Said the AI. "Take the night to sleep on it. If you wish to bow out, no one will blame you. We haven't announced the expedition members to the whole community specifically to minimize this kind of crap. If you're still in, assemble by morning at the edge of town, and you will be brought here for safety drills and other familiarization with the vehicle and the mission. Dismissed."

They all filtered out, and she turned towards Ramina and Paul.

"You should grab some rest too. Tomorrow's going to be eventful."

"I will." Said the artificer, before gazing at the vehicle. "But you did promise me a test drive."

"That I did." The AI looked at the magehunter. "Care to hop in with us?"

"Sure. You already gave me a tour of it, but I'd love to feel how it moves."

"Excellent." She neared the vehicle, and a door opened automatically, allowing her to climb the ladder bolted onto the chassis and enter the airlock. She waited for it to cycle her through, before Paul and Ramina came in.

"I don't understand why we have to do this every time." Said the artificer.

"First, because it's a good way to test it. Second, because not doing it builds up bad habits." That was something the navy had drilled into her at basic. Even when on a habitable planet, you cycled the airlocks of the damned shuttles. Even if you had freaking androids onboard or the squishies were in their suits and no one was breathing in the air. Because otherwise there was going to be a day you'd bypass the safety protocols when you shouldn't have and you would either kill someone or wipe a whole damned shuttle crew. "Besides, you seemed to like it at first."

"The mechanisms and technology is amazing. But it does chafe after a bit."

"Well, let me make it up to you." Said the AI as she sat down at the pilot's console, twitching slightly as the system confirmed the connection and it hooked into her armor's power systems, allowing her to use its reactor to help feed the snowpiercer. "Strap yourselves in. It's time to roll out!"