Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 1.23

1.23

+++

My wings flap one last time, and I finish my descent to the ground gently, my covered feet sinking slightly into the mud and the dirt.

I breathe in, still tasting the filtered air from my mask, and I hum to myself, my wings shifting behind my back the for moment.

It is absolutely incredible how much better I feel after having flown. It is very nearly a physical relief. Just... It had felt like I had been tense for so long that I’d forgotten what it was like to not be tense, but now I’ve relaxed.

This is not too far from the truth. The difference is that it isn’t physical, it’s metaphysical. It’s my Essence that has been... stiff, not my body.

Not for the first time, my Chozo half considers the impact the loss of wings had upon my people. It was, perhaps, a bit more pronounced than that part of me had realized.

Something for me to keep in mind, going forwards.

I shook my head, and turned back to the Aerozep.

From the outside, it looks completely unchanged. The rust, the decay, the metal structure fighting valiantly to stay together... It all seemed exactly the same as it had been only a few hours ago.

And the outside was, indeed, unchanged.

Incongruous with their surroundings, however, were the new additions to the area.

Seven trucks are lined up next to each other underneath the canopy of the Aerozep’s envelope. They looked no different from any other truck that would deliver goods throughout Night City, carrying cargo to and from various businesses. Each one was completely identical to their fellows, not even the slightest hint of a difference to tell them apart.

People in the city saw probably two dozen of these things every day. That meant that nobody would be paying any attention to them whatsoever.

Which was good, because they most certainly were not regular trucks. Under the hood, they were much different beasts, and their trailers weren’t loaded up with regular cargo either. Six of them were carrying dense blocks of elemental material surrounded by a thin veneer of an intermodal container. Between both the trucks and their cargo, each one weighed exactly thirty tons, and that meant that one hundred and eighty tons of material had been ripped from the interior of the Aerozep.

The seventh was slightly more special.

I moved over to the entrance, and looked inside.

Compared to a few hours ago, the inside definitely looked different. All the spare material had been extracted, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at it. The nanomachines had been programmed to leave behind patterns consistent with different types of work, with enough noise and chaos programmed in that it wasn’t obvious.

I looked around.

The panels of the walls were gone, markings consistent with crowbars, pliers, and Gorilla Arms obvious all over the place. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that an entire crew of people had been through here and ripped out absolutely everything of real use, possibly even literally. Parts of the plating were peeled back, left exposed, and by the rust of the parts that they were covering it was ‘obvious’ that it had happened some time ago.

My raincoat wasn’t present anymore. Neither was the Nanofactory brick.

Excellent. Congratulations, me, I did a great job this time.

I stepped outside, noting immediately that the rain was slowing. I had expected that, and I had also made allowances for it. The rain would take some time before it faded entirely, and so long as it was going, nobody would willingly be outside, and all the tracks that anything had been in this area would shortly be washed away.

I sent a mental command, and the trucks activated. The first one immediately started to head out, its electrical engine nearly utterly silent as it moved off.

The lights stayed off, for the moment. They wouldn’t turn on until they were closer to the city, to people, who might see the difference.

The next in line soon followed, but I reached the seventh by then.

Its trailer opened automatically for me, and I wasted no time jumping up into it. Inside, of course, was not simple bare metal, but a nice big recliner for me, several holographic emitters, as well as my raincoat and the nanofactory brick.

The doors swung shut as I moved over to the recliner. I flicked my wings, launching every last droplet that had gotten stuck between the barbs of my feathers away, before I turned around and took my seat.

My wings loosened, and draped against the floor. I exhaled, simply relaxing for a moment before I reached up and pulled off the air mask.

The air of the container smelled a little bad, but it was already being cleared up, the ventilation processing it quickly. Along the floor, a layer of nanomachines were dealing with the water that had come in, ripping it apart into useful elements before storing it.

I felt a brief shift as the truck began to move, but it settled quickly. I waved my hand, and my Autgents appeared, projecting a three-dimensional hologram of Night City’s roads. The routes that my trucks were planning flashed as they were displayed, multiple different lines all leading to the same location.

A convoy of seven would be too obvious, after all. All of them ultimately arriving at the same place would be hidden a bit more, especially since there weren’t enough cameras on that particular street to catch precisely where they all went.

I didn’t Foresee any problems with them, so I simply allowed myself to relax as the trucks drove back.

I could be there more quickly, but I could accomplish my work here perfectly fine.

I brought up another series of holograms, taking a look at the materials that my Nanofactory had managed to recover. The haul, as I had hoped, was quite good, a nice spread of decently valuable materials that would mean that I could skip a lot of time spent waiting in order to synthesize.

It wasn’t everything I wanted, but it was enough that I could synthesize the remainder in the week that I had before the tarp was removed. In turn, I would be able to get everything that I wanted done before the week was up.

Truly excellent. That would be effectively all of my short-term goals achieved, and then I could move on to the next steps for long-term goals.

I waved my hand, dismissing the screen and relaxing into the recliner.

It would be a relatively short trip back, and so I took the opportunity to relax. It would be better than getting into the groove of things, only to be interrupted.

+++

The trip back didn’t take more than twenty minutes. The roads were empty, and my chosen base of operations wasn’t far from one of the main roads that passed through Santo Domingo.

I had already been sending commands to my Autgents before I even arrived. By the time I actually got there, the drones that I had left behind had unzipped the tarp at the back of the building, and opened parts of it up for the trucks to come inside.

It went perfectly, and I hopped out of the back the moment that I arrived, holding my breath for a few seconds while I made my way towards the air barrier.

It stopped the worst of the smell from lingering in my throat, at the very least.

Prepping for the arrival of the rest of the trucks was easy, with plenty of nanomachines to spare. I had them set up new facilities upstairs, the new infrastructure growing like slime moulds.

Even with the sheer scale of how much was available, the first truck had only just started processing when the next truck rolled in, five minutes later.

Exponential growth was a hell of a thing, though, and by the time the last one came in, forty minutes later, they were already halfway done, the material flowing across the floor and heading downstairs.

I stayed busy the entire time, planning out the majority of the new look of my building.

A depot wasn’t what I wanted to live in, after all. And it most certainly wasn’t what I wanted to present to the rest of the city.

By the time I was done and had something that I was happy with, it was just after ten at night.

I stared at the hologram, looking over it in detail.

The upper, visible, part of the building was staying... roughly the same, in terms of dimensions. The main depot itself was a rectangle sixty metres long and forty metres wide, while the office that was attached to the front was another ten metres in length, but twenty wide. Those combined horizontal dimensions wouldn’t be changing, but the original building was eight metres tall, and its roof was a curved, squished half-cylinder.

I intended to change that. I would be dropping the height of the building down to six metres tall, and I would be making the roof flat, and more importantly, accessible through an internal elevator and stairs. I had a plan to make use of that space, and that plan was going to cement me as an eccentric... And, when people inevitably tried to fuck things up, their lack of success would be cementing a completely different type of reputation.

Dimensions aside, the exteriors and interiors were going to be changing completely, too.

It was mostly in the former that the aesthetics of the place would be demonstrated. What I ended up with was... well, to my Chozo half, it was perfectly sensible architecture that had been in use for over a thousand years, and to my Human half, it was a strange mix of futuristic design mixed with spiritualist evocation.

Visually, it looked like it was made out of stone, but it was stone that had inlays of patterned geometric designs across its surface. Regular pillars and extensions broke each wall into segments every ten metres, and those pillars had triangular glyphs falling vertically along their surfaces. The glyphs were, in truth, symbols of the Chozo alphabet.

It was not, of course, just stone. If I’d had the time, I’d have hewn them myself, but I didn’t. Instead, I’d taken the somewhat more practical option of just threading them with metal in order to produce a layered composite that was a lot more durable that it might have otherwise been.

While it was uncommon for a Chozo, there were no statues to be found, either. It would have been sacrilege to create our statuary with such methods. I would add them later, once I had the time to properly dedicate to the long and involved process of their creation.

It would stick out quite notably in this area, which was completely acceptably in my opinion.

The interior was a much more subdued version of the same aesthetic, though I planned for specific rooms to diverge completely.

For the ground floor, I was going to combine the office with the main building, and transform the relatively poor add-on into something properly integrated. The space that had once been a part of the office would extend back into the main building, with internal walls and doors to separate it out from the rest of the place. What I was planning to do there would see it receiving a decent amount of foot traffic, and so isolating it from the rest of the building was necessary. Access was still possible through doors, but they would not be publicly accessible.

The front right side of the building, as well as the back left side, were all marked off for different things. I had a plan for the front right, and it would leave most of that area covered in clean, sterile metal and panelling. The back left would be a private area, while the back right would provide vertical access to the other floors, and vehicular access to the back part of the building.

The underground area was, for the most part, either going to be support machinery, or my private space. Whether living space, material storage, workshops, or things more exotic, I was not likely to invite anyone down there anytime soon.

I was going to expand it, though. Plenty of space to do so, since I could go underneath the road and carpark to the left of the building while staying on the property. Subsurface scans had already revealed nothing that would actually stop me from doing it. No infrastructure in the way, just a bit of foundation, and what I was pretty sure was the buried body of a small animal that had fallen into the concrete. Perhaps most importantly, the deed to the property didn’t actually specify a limit on the construction allowed here.

Regardless, it was mostly incomplete, but the bones of it were there, and the only parts that did need to be complete were, so I could get back to it later.

I had but a single extra thing to do tonight, and after that, I’d be going to sleep.

I needed to send an application.