Chapter Sixty - Copperfidget’s Engineerium

Chappy!

***

Rosario was expecting a rather quiet day where she’d go out and explore the shopping district and maybe eat some interesting new foods while doing some people watching.

She supposed that staring at Hailey’s back while the gnome moved ahead of her counted as people watching, in a way.

“Are you sure you want to accompany us?” Rosario asked Lucky.

Lucky shrugged. “I don’t know what else I’d do,” she said. “Besides, I feel like I need to work off those pastries. I’m not used to eating things that are so sweet.”

Lucky was a good kid. It felt more like she was tagging along to make sure that Rosario was safe than for anything else. Though Rosario supposed that there might be some truth to what she said. It was also true that Lucky simply didn’t know this city at all. She might get lost, and as a lower-levelled young woman, that could prove dangerous.

The city had seemed safe so far, but they had stuck to the wider, more patrolled routes, the ones that were lined with guarded shops and which served as main avenues of transit through the city. 

Hailey had very quickly led them away from those and through a few alleys, jaywalking across roads with the casual confidence of a local and the quick pace of someone small enough that being run over was a real risk.

A few more roads and they had left the less urban areas and entered what was definitely a seedier part of the city. The roads were still relatively clean, but the homes were mostly a less-modern version of tenement buildings and those were squeezed in between warehouses and small factories.

“The zoning here is strange,” Rosario muttered.

“Zoning?” Lucky asked.

“It’s... ask me again when you’re older.”

“Is... is zoning like sex?” Lucky asked. 

Rosario shook her head. “No. It’s far more complicated.”

Hailey eventually slowed and entered a small, curved sideroad. There were dozens of small stores and workshops there. The space smelled like industry. There was a persistent odour of leather, oil and that particular smell that came from heated iron. “This is it,” Hailey said. “Ah, I ought to warn you that, seeing as I wasn’t expecting guests, the workshop is currently in a bit of a state. It’s not entirely messy, but it is perhaps a little less organized than usual. Please forgive me for that. Also, keep your hands to yourselves. Not so much for your own safety, though that is a consideration, than for the safety of the equipment. Some of the items and inventions I’ve been working on are quite fragile, as you can imagine.”

Rosario couldn’t help but smile even as she agreed. “I’ll keep my hands to myself,” she said. It was funny, how Hailey became so verbose when she was talking about something she was passionate about. 

The workshop seemed rather small from the outside. A wooden building with a tin roof and a large sliding door at the front next to a smaller, more ordinary entrance. 

There was a small sign next to the entrance that read Copperfidget’s Engineerium - Inventions and Gizmos For All and Sundry! 

Hailey cleared her throat. “Right, the pitch...” Hailey said in a low mutter that was probably not meant to be caught. She turned and put on a smile. “I have dreamed since before I could walk of a better world, one where artifice and magic together solve all of our lesser woes, and maybe a few of our greater ones as well. And so, I invented.”

She moved back, arms sweeping out even as she rammed back-first into her door and then almost stumbled onto her face.

“Rusty cogged shit,” she muttered as she fumbled around in her pockets and removed a small keyring. A moment later the door was unlocked and she returned to her prior pose, pushing it open with her back and gesturing them in with a sweep.

Rosario refrained from laughing and graciously accepted the invitation.

It was rather dark in the shop, but Hailey soon solved that when she ran over to what looked a lot like a breaker and pulled it down. A set of magical lights clunked on the ceiling and slowly started to glow brighter, filling the room with a warm yellow glow and highlighting the myriad specks of dust caught in the air.

It was a garage. There were workbenches along the edges, most of which were comically low to the ground, and shelving units up against several walls with ladders built into them. She counted no less than seven step-ladders dotted across the room.

There was, at the back, a small area behind a hanging curtain that had a tiny bed, and next to that what may have been a cooking station.

Rosario suspected that this place doubled as Hailey’s home as well as her workplace.

Hailey cleared her throat. “Let me show you some of my most prized inventions!” she said before she skipped over to a large machine that took up the top of an entire repurposed desk. “This is the copy-matic 9000!”

Rosario listened attentively as Hailey demonstrated how the machine could be adjusted to hold onto the pages of an existing book. Then it used a clever system of lenses and a tiny spell matrix fed by the user to ‘scan’ each page of a book laid flat on one side in some clamps. The second stage was to burn that same image into a blank book on the other side.

Rosario hummed, then took one of the copied books and looked it over. It was some sort of engineering textbook, and the quality of the copy was... not great. 

It reminded her rather vividly of high-school textbook printouts, the sorts that a teacher might pass around after they scanned something out of a book. The images were too dark and the details lost and it looked like some letters were burned too hard. It was still legible, but only thanks to context clues. 

Still, she could see a use for this. “This isn’t bad,” she said. “But there are [Copy item] spells out there, no?”

“Of course,” Hailey said with a snort. She lifted a book from the table. “Do you know how many people can take something like this and just copy it?”

Rosario shrugged, took the boom from Hailey’s hand, then muttered’ “[Copy Item].”

The looked between the original and her copy, then opened both of them to the same page. They were identical, down to the ink stains and smudged on the binding. 

“Uh,” Hiley said. She swallowed once more. “Right. Of course. Uh.”

“Never heard of that spell,” Lucky said. “Is it good?”

“It’s somewhat useful,” Rosario said. “I think you can’t copy money. Real currency has some way to make it resistant.”

“There’s a tiny fraction of mythril mixed into every gold coin,” Hailey said. “Technically meaning that all coinage are made of a magical alloy, though it’s so little that it’s barely reactive. It does mean that a copy spell can’t simply make another. The spells can’t work on magical items at all unless you supercharge them quite intensely, and that would basically require archmage levels of strength. And why would an [Archmage] care about copying gold? A-anyway! The copy-matic 9000 is merely a prototype! But as you can see, it has lots of potential! Even an apprentice in the art of magecraft could operate one of these, creating copies of texts for later resale for only the cost of the paper!”

“Isn’t paper real expensive?” Lucky asked.

“Moving on!” Hailey moved them across the room to a table covered in small mechanical birds. “This is the Canary 9000!”

“It’s a mechanical bird?” Lucky asked.

“Technically, no,” Hailey said. “But I had a lot of decorative birds that I found in... nevermind. They look better and more sellable this way. The system uses a small ambient mana siphon to grab mana from the air to empower two enchantments. One of them detects foul air and the other immits a loud chirp.”

Rosario hummed. “It’s a fire alarm. Or the canary in a coal mine.”

“Yes! Exactly! These have a sixty-one percent success-rate at detecting lethal levels of smoke and foul air!”

“That seems low,” Lucky said.

“I’m working on it!” Hailey said. “There’s a world in which every home has its own Canary 9000, there to alert and awaken them in case of emergencies.”

“But only sixty percent of the time,” Lucky said.

“Sixty-one!”

Rosario watched as Hailey demonstrated how the canaries worked. It was ingenious and rather simple. She didn’t know too much about this side of things, but she had the impression that Hailey was truly gifted at using simple spells to great effect. 

She had potential. Honestly, Rosario wouldn’t be too averse to investing a little. It did something to her, seeing how the young inventor was having so much difficulty pursuing what was clearly her passion. 

Maybe a commission? She did have a few items that she wanted that she wasn’t quite sure she’d find just sitting out in the market, and knowing someone who could craft them for her would be nice. She was sure that there was some sort of shipping service in Aerie as well. It would...

Rosario’s ears perked and she turned towards the entrance a moment before there was a hard series of knocks.

“Copperfidget! We know you’re in there! Come on out. We have to talk.”

Hailey’s face immediately lost all colour. “Oh no,” she muttered.

***