The Hundred Reigns 246: The Workshop of Wonders (5) (Patreon)

Previous Chapter

How did these spider-cockroaches manage to keep bothering him over and over again?! It was maddening!

What is she doing here? The question hung in Simon’s mind as he and Magda sat in leathery seats too big for them. The office’s windows were closed and barred behind curtains, while dozens of toys and plushies of various sizes sat on shelves all around the room. Simon’s Dark Visionary sight detected miasma in a few of them, which suggested they were either monsters or constructs in disguise ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice. Is this a trap?  

Or had she guessed his true Overlord identity and now intended to ambush him? To pressure him? His false identity’s paper trail was foolproof according to Shabram, but maybe they had made an error somewhere? Did Voltobauta break his vow not to mention their previous encounter?

No, a coward like Velvet wouldn’t risk confronting the Overlord in such a place… He sensed no hostility from her, nor hidden reinforcements lurking in the shadows and waiting to strike. This is something else.

Velvet—Silk’s smiles were always cold or smug rather than sultry—smirked at him. “Have I left you speechless?”

“A bit,” Simon replied before deciding to play his cards on the table. “I’ve heard you work for the Bert Trading Company.”

While Magda tensed up instantly, Diamante let out a bellowing laugh. “She pretends she does,” he said, taking Velvet’s hand and kissing it like a toad with a fairy tale’s princess. “In truth, my dear Elsa here has been working for me for many years, singing sweet songs and keeping an ear to the ground for me. I wouldn’t be where I am without her sweet advice.”

“You flatter me, my diamond,” Velvet replied with a light chuckle. She played the canny mistress to perfection, and her patsy was too besotted to see it. “Please keep this to yourself. I would hate it if word of my presence here reached Ludwig’s ears.” 

“There is no love lost between my family and Ludwig Bert,” Magda said with a scowl on her face. She wisely trusted Velvet only as far as she could throw her. 

“I assure you that many in the company regret how things turned out. Your husband belongs in a cutting-edge lab rather than his current accommodations.” Velvet glanced at Simon. “So when your new assistant so doggedly petitioned my dear Diamante for an audience, I knew I had to help it happen.”

“Indeed, indeed.” Diamante rubbed the rings on his chubby fingers. “This year’s Planetary Exposition will be the biggest yet, and I intend to sponsor many wonders there, yes. Works of art and science our people will marvel at… and that will bear my name as well.” 

Simon subtly used Heart’s Desire on his hosts while they exchanged small talk with Magda. Diamante’s wish was pretty much what he expected: him standing atop a mountain of wealth, with his name written on every wall and building in Lampwick to endure across the ages. Naked greed and a lust for fame fueled his ambitions.

Velvet’s mind proved slightly more unusual. Her Heart’s Desire appeared in blurry colors for a start, like a half-finished drawing. He saw her and her sister standing in their ominous dungeon ‘larder,’ wealthy and powerful, with countless people Simon didn’t recognize trapped in their cruel embrace. Valravn was among their lot though, quartered and broken, a living trophy kept in perpetual agony. As expected, Velvet’s true desire was for her and her sister to be free of the Zodiac Fiend. 

Ah, I see how it is. Bert supported Verney, whom Silk and Velvet treacherously wanted to weaken and eventually overthrow. Of course they would try to screw him over without showing their hand. And if Coil and I happened to catch the Crafter’s attention at the Exposition, then the sisters would gain indirect access to them… we would also be indebted to her.

Should he allow it? Having Velvet and Silk getting involved would be a double-edged sword. He would earn himself a little more scrutiny unless he continued to play the fool exactly right, but it would give him insight into the Cobweb’s operations in Muse and potent allies to deal with Bert’s sabotage. 

Still, he had been betrayed too often by these rats to trust anything they offered. He wondered if he should ambush and brand her just to be sure, in spite of the risks. 

Simon decided to play along for now before reaching a decision. Diamante opened up negotiations with a falsely generous offer to purchase Coil Futuristics outright. His Land of Toys would take on the company’s debts and leave the couple with a rather generous sum… at the cost of claiming their patents and all potential royalties they might ever earn from them. 

Simon had spent enough time hanging around negotiators to tell that Diamante was using a rather common tactic: beginning with something utterly unthinkable as an opening move, then either following through with something more palatable to make it look better by comparison or wait for the opposition to make a concession. 

“Coil Futuristics is not for sale,” Magda replied immediately. She had been burned too much by Bert to accept the obviously poisoned gift. No one in their right mind would accept the offer. “However, we would be very happy to discuss our patents on an individual basis. A few of our inventions could be repackaged as mass-produced commodities.”

“They are old, old,” Diamante insisted on the term. “Nostalgia doesn’t sell as much as novelty. I need something new, something unheard of.” He smiled ear to ear. “Mayhaps we could discuss your planned wonder for the exposition?”

Magda hesitated, but Simon reacted quicker. “No.”

Diamante frowned at him. “No?”

“The project was privately commissioned by a Lorean noble of great means and influence,” Simon lied with a straight face, pressing his foot onto Magda’s own to subtly tell her to keep quiet. “We’re not at liberty to share its nature or patent without their authorization.”

“Which noble?” Velvet asked with a suspicious gaze. 

She’s taken the bait. “We’re not at liberty to mention it,” Simon replied, knowing it would inflame Velvet’s paranoia and let her mind fill in the blanks. “They insisted on our discretion, at least until we unveil the device at the Planetary Exposition.”

“Such secrecy…” Diamante’s eyes didn’t smile when his lips did. “Will you not even give us a hint?”

Simon remained stone-faced. “Would you want us to share what we work on with your company with outsiders, should we sign a contract? I’m afraid you’ll discover that particular project along with everyone else at the exposition itself.”

“Then what is there to discuss, my young lad?”

Magda smartly caught on to Simon’s strategy and quickly retook the initiative. “We were planning to present more than one wonder at the Exposition this year, but we’re still undecided on which ones to advertise. We could develop something specifically for the Land of Toys.”

“A joint venture…” Diamante muttered to himself, while Velvet leaned in to whisper in his ear. 

Simon couldn’t hear what she said, but he could guess what was on her mind. She immediately suspected Verney to potentially be their hidden patron, since the two-faced demon usually played both sides of a dispute. Getting a stake in Coil Futuristics would help her keep watch on them and the project. 

Diamante eventually nodded and turned back to his guests. “My Elsa suggests a joint-venture and patent-sharing agreement.”

“How would we proceed?” Magda asked cautiously. 

“Come back next week at eight with proposals for a device I can present at the Exposition and mass-produce. If I’m pleased, I can offer an initial advance of five thousand tokens—” A tidy sum that would be the equivalent of a thousand golden Endymian coins. “—then a twenty-eighty percent royalty split on the profits after I recoup my investment.”

“Forty-sixty,” Magda said immediately. The fact that five thousand tokens could heavily ease their debts didn’t make her lose sight of the stakes. 

“Twenty-five, seventy-five.”

“Only if we take the latter,” Simon quipped.

Diamante let out a bellowing laugh. “Now, who’s greedy? Fine, seventy for me, thirty for you. That is my final offer.”

“We’ll take it,” Magda decided while doing her best to hide her excitement and relief. “And we’ll be sure to impress you.”

“You already have,” Velvet said, staring at Simon with a bemused smirk. “See you very soon.”

Well, he had earned her attention for now. He would have to proceed carefully over the next few days. 

“What was that thing with the Lorean noble?” Magda asked the second they left the estate behind them. 

“A conveniently unverifiable story, of course.” 

“Where did you learn to negotiate like that?” Magda didn’t take long to come up with an educated guess. “You’re not a commoner, are you? You’re some exiled Endymian noble or the like.”

“It’s complicated.” Simon telepathically reminded Shabram to double-check his paper trail and ensure neither Magda nor Velvet would find fault in it. “Are you displeased?”

“No, but now we need a new project to justify the funds.” Magda raised her hand to call a passing coach. “Let’s grab something to eat. I’m locking us in the lab until dawn, and we won’t come out until we have a product to sell.”

So? How hard could it be considering the people involved?

—--------------

As it turned out, it was harder than expected.

“No, Jym, slime-brained golems won’t do,” Magda chided her husband. “We need something kids can play with. Aleph unnerves me, so I can’t see any family purchasing one.”

Coil’s golem assistant shamefully lowered its jar head in response to the comment, but his creator immediately moved on to the next idea. “A mechanical calculator that allows children to resolve complex equations. It will make them smarter.”

“Jym, kids don’t even want to do their own math homework. I’ll write down the idea, but we need something for families and children below twelve.” 

“A deceleration device allowing people to jump from airships safely.”

“Too small of a market. I can count the number of commercial airships in Muse with two hands.”

Simon was beginning to see why these two struggled with money. Jym Coil wasn’t short on brilliant ideas, but almost all of them were utterly impractical. 

Not that Simon was any better. “How about a machine that captures the image of someone’s hidden desires, like a mirror for the soul?” 

“Any painter can capture a subjective reality, whereas mental spells and divinations recompose an approximation of it through magic,” Coil replied dismissively. “It is the pure, objective truth that eludes us all.”

“A mirror of desire could work as a novelty…” Magda stroked her chin. “How would that work, Simon?”

“With miasmic enchantments—” 

“No.” Magda immediately shot the idea down. “No way families will buy anything with miasma in it for their kids.”

Simon grunted in annoyance. Devil Forgemaster tainted all of his ideas. Infectious suggestions invaded his mind each time he considered a concept, offering twisted, miasmic corruptions of it that kept derailing his train of thought. 

Jym Coil stared at him unblinkingly for a moment that seemed to last forever, his gaze more intense than that of a dragon, before suddenly speaking up. “Disassemble it.” 

“Disassemble what?” Simon inquired. 

“The device you want to make,” Coil replied. “Draw its blueprints, then disassemble them into separate components. You can sometimes make something new from observing the old, or by artificially replicating a natural or magical phenomenon.”

“It’s the same approach Jym follows to replicate natural lightning,” Magda said. “Finding a new way to reach an old destination is a worthy discovery too.”

Simon hesitantly wrote down his blueprints on a piece of paper. All in all, it was a simple matter of weaving Heart’s Desire into an enchanted mirror. 

Thankfully, neither member of the Coil couple asked how he got the idea or why. Being brilliant inventors themselves must have given them warped expectations when it came to others’ talent. 

That, or they suspected him to have a hidden Class and politely kept it to themselves. He couldn’t exclude the possibility that people as smart as these two could figure out he had his secrets.

“Interesting approach,” Jym Coil commented. “The mirror projects a miasmic psychic wave onto the onlooker, which is reflected back charged with an emotionally-charged negative. It then bends light to visualize it.”

“It’s not so different from how human vision functions, as far as current research can tell.” Magda grabbed a paper sheet and then wrote a highly detailed schematic of an eye’s inner workings. “A ray of light enters the eye through the pupil, where it is focused through a convex lens and passes through a dark spot before forming an inverted image on the retina, which the brain then interprets. The higher the subject’s Perception stat, the more detail they can extrapolate from the light.”

“What if…” Simon’s inspiration flared without Devil Forgemaster’s influence. “What if I created a device that mechanically captured an image by recording the lights and shadows? Not simulate an object, nor alter it… actually record the image as it was in the moment? A mirror that does not change?”

Magda snapped her fingers. “A device mimicking how the eye functions?”

“We could use sheets covered in powdered manalith to replicate the retina,” Simon suggested. “It would absorb the light and solidify—” 

“Manaliths are fossilized memories,” Coil cut in. “They may subjectively alter the result. Nonmagical chemicals will be more objective. Silver components are especially sensitive to light. They could serve well.”

“We can run tests with various substances,” Magda suggested. “I think the process is sound, and marketable. Who wouldn’t want to immortalize cherished memories?”

The three of them then spent most of the week testing out their theorized process. Results were mixed. The underlying principle worked fine enough, but nonmagical chemicals proved so sensitive that the images couldn’t survive exposure to dim light. They had much better success using manalith powder to record images, much to Jym Coil’s chagrin. That would have to suffice for the initial prototype.

I could create a variant capable of taking bites out of someone’s soul, or capturing the target’s suppressed desires in color… Simon imagined many applications for the technology beyond its entertainment value. It could become an effective spying tool, since crystal balls and similar devices can be blocked by anti-divination wards.

He had the intuition that this invention would have far-reaching consequences down the line.  

—------

Simon and Magda showed up at the Diamante estate right on time. Velvet wasn’t present at the meeting, but her patsy agreed to support the project after a short demonstration and eagerly signed a deal. 

The Coil couple decided Simon would work on the ‘pictobox’—a name he had come up with himself—as his Exposition project while Jym continued to work on his bottled lightning idea. Although Coil Futuristics’ debts dwarfed the advance payment, the cash influx and Diamante’s support meant they could cover their monthly interest rates. 

“I can finally pay you a small salary, Simon,” Magda announced with delight when they left the estate, contract in hand. “We’ve got to celebrate.”

“Just the two of us?” Simon wondered. “Jym didn’t look too enthusiastic about the project.”

“He’ll come around to it once we find alternatives to the manalith. He’s just against using it in general.” 

“Because he dislikes magic?”

“Because manaliths are a finite resource we use for everything,” Magda explained. “Manaliths fuel our factories, our ships, our energy production, our Crestones… our entire civilization runs on it, and we’ll inevitably face a shortage sooner or later.”

Simon immediately put two and two together. “Is that why he wants to tame lightning itself?” 

“Yes. He believes the energy can eventually replace manaliths without running out, and that it will eventually end war altogether. The likes of Endymion have conquered many lands in their quest for resources and Crestones.”

Was that why Coil disliked Classes in general? Because he subconsciously associated them with his homeland’s subjugation? “It’s a naive idea. Endymion’s conquests are motivated by greed, not need.”

“I agree, but a world with infinite energy would still be safer than one with limited resources.” Magda called a coach. “Between us, I’m not as rigid as he is on the matter. I think manaliths will always have uses.”

“And Classes too?”

Magda’s take on the matter proved more nuanced than her husband's. “I’m against using them as crutches, rather than amplifiers. It would have taken me decades to learn what my Rancher Class taught me with a single level, but I didn’t rest on my laurels. The issue is that most people become used to waiting for the next level or lazily replicate what their Perks unlock rather than push beyond them.”

She’s not wrong. We couldn’t have come up with the pictobox breakthrough without Devil Forgemaster’s foundations. Simon had built up upon the shoulders of others. An amplifier, not a crutch… 

“Maybe you could buy yourself a Crestone if the pictobox project pops off,” Magda teased him. “Jym would throw a fit, but I wouldn’t hold it against you.”

“I’m fine for now,” Simon replied. His current Class was already a handful to deal with. “Will you pursue a project of your own, now that our financial issues have stabilized?”

“Maybe once the Planetary Exposition is done. Too much work to do beforehand.” Magda looked at the sky wistfully. “Everything will become so much easier afterwards.”

Simon hoped as much. She and Coil deserved both success and happiness. 

He sensed a telepathic connection at the edge of his mind and focused on it. Shabram. 

Had Euphemia finally made a move against Louis? The failed Goddess Judgement’s date had recently passed, with House Malphas in custody and brought to the empress for interrogation. She should have been convinced of Louis’ guilt by now. 

Shabram’s message confirmed their plan might have worked a little too well. 

“Your Majesty,” his spymistress said once they opened mental communications. “I’m pleased to announce that your brother is now on the run.”

Next Chapter

A/N: yes, this will be a calm arc so far... until it suddenly isn't ;)