Author's Nightmare: Chapter 121 (Patreon)

Solitaire POV: Day 98

Current Wealth: 211 gold 39 silver 22 copper

My mother had been right, the fucking bitch. She’d been a violent, paranoid crazy cunt, responsible for ruining my life and, I was almost convinced, a fairly prolific serial killer. But she’d been fucking right, too. Friends were just enemies who hadn’t taken a swing at you yet. 

Humans. They were all the fucking same, animals. Pigs. Dull, grunting cows. They didn’t know anything, because they didn’t want to know anything. And they called the people that did crazy, unstable, they diagnosed them as schizophrenics or paranoids, they shovelled pills down their throat until they stopped noticing inconvenient truths and were content to stuff them away in the loony bin. Unless they lived outside the West, of course. Then they just got vaporized by some fucking drone pilot.

Well not me, never me. The fucking cunts could come for me a million at a time and I’d get rid of them all. Stupid rats, I’d like to see their diagnostic abilities when I’d finished turning this entire steaming shitpile of a planet into a radioactive wasteland. I could do it, too. Nukes? Fucking easy, any idiot could figure it out. Maybe I’d even try to give myself a challenge and see if I could do something with antimatter. 

For the time being though I was still stuck with the shitting, dull idiot technology this world had left me, and that was taking long enough to improve on already. Still, I’d been making progress. Ish. Not nearly enough for comfort though, and not nearly as much as I’d have hoped to make before the day of the tourney’s next round. It was with a heavy heart that I watched Beam and the others head off for it.

From the mansion, that was. I wasn’t leaving the damned place, not with all the time I’d spent setting up my perimeter. I’d noticed a “jogger” outside the mansion lately, bastard. He was a spy, readying to send out the word to his bosses if enough of us left it at once and send in a bunch of bastards to steal all our stuff. Well, he had another thing coming with me, that was for sure. I could practically imagine the thugs he sent in finding the….

Anyway, that was for another time. 

It was just me, Magnus, Alora, Elizabeth and Helena in the mansion. Not including Shango’s bitch wife, of course, who was fortunately still giving me a wide berth. Very fortunately, because if she started whining about some new minor infraction like it was the end of the world I was going to hurl either her or myself through a fucking window. Things were rather calm around the mansion, which was why I was surprised to find myself with company while I worked.

Elizabeth and Helena, both at once. Apparently they were taking a break from scissoring each other into a coma, and that made me suspicious. Not to sound paranoid, but if someone modified their usual behaviour even slightly, the safe thing to do was always assume they were about to try and kill you. 

“You’re still working.” Elizabeth began, looking at the fruits of my labour with a considering eye. Then a confused one. She was clever, most of our group were, but there were some things that pure cleverness didn’t help much with. I was processing mercury, compressing air, carefully locking mechanisms into one another with millimetre-scale precision. It wasn't the sort of work one unfamiliar with modern technology would grasp.

“I’m still working.” I replied, deciding to hurry and save her the embarrassment of having her ignorance displayed fully. “I reckon there’s decent odds our enemies make a move once the tourney is over, or possibly before. Our being almost half the current participants is probably half the reason they haven’t done it yet.”

Both women looked rather perturbed at that. Good, it was a bloody perturbing thought. 

“They had Aja the Pithound maim me.” Helena muttered, eyes hitting the floor. “If they can bring him on for another assault…”

“Then I’ll shred him to bits.” I told her, finding my voice louder than I expected. Sharper. Oh god, was I getting protective? That was revolting. I was acting like a damned human. “Relax.” I added. “You saw what I did at Rinchester, what’s coming next is going to be a lot more powerful.”

“How much more?” She challenged. “Because he was wielding Draconian bronze, wearing plate that might even have stopped Shango’s staff. He moved like a damned cyclone. Do you have anything capable of measuring up against that?”

It was an interesting question. I’d specifically designed Shango’s gun with our own growing strength in mind, and allowed its power to hit heights which would’ve produced far too much recoil for a normal person as a result. And Helena probably wasn’t wrong that Aja’s plate could’ve put up a fight against it all the same.

He wasn’t invincible, not in the slightest, but there was a good to fair chance he could’ve taken a big notch out from a squad of modern-day marines before going down. 

But I’d designed my new projects with that in mind, too. And I gave my subordinates the run-down. By the time I was finished even Helena’s brown skin seemed noticeably paler, her eyes widened to dinner plate dimensions with shock.

“How is that even possible?” Elizabeth gasped. 

I’ll admit, it was satisfying as hell to get that sort of reaction from her. I just humbly shrugged. 

“My people are very good with moving parts, and I’m smarter than all of them by a mile. I’ve never actually made one of these, mind, but give me a while and I’ll have all the kinks hammered out.”

And, if I was lucky, a big snack of experience points too. I was fairly sure I’d gotten a few for my last creations at least, and these were taking me much more work than those had. 

“You could fight a dragon with that.” Helena muttered. 

In fact, I couldn’t, but better to avoid letting her know. We needed morale with the sorts of threats we were staring down. 

“We’ll be fighting a lot less than a dragon, in any case.” I noted. “So as I said, relax. We have this. Particularly with Arthur bloody Nightne on our team, eh?”

Helena smiled, with slightly less of a fragile twist to it than I’d seen before. That was progress at least. I knew what sort of effect a beating like hers could leave psychologically, if I could so much as chip away at that I’d consider it a personal victory. 

The two women did not leave me alone, which isn’t a sentence I’d normally consider a bad thing. They were, however, blessedly silent- which is a sentence I’d normally consider a good thing. 

I got quite a bit done, too. My reloading mechanism was going smoothly, pneumatic system slowly but surely coming around to levels of reliability I’d almost let myself think were impossible within this world, all while I took the measure of exactly what point my springs would and did recoil down to the millimetre. Everything was coming together- almost enough for me to unveil this to you, the readers. 

As an aside, if you are reading this, sorry about the booby trap. It probably took most of your fingers off, maybe a hand. Not actually sure why I’m setting it up as I bury this journal, just habit I suppose. 

It was later on, hours later, that I was finally interrupted in my glorious work. The others returned home. Shango was with them, and I didn’t glance his way even a second on account of him grabbing hold of our friendship and violently fucking it to death right in front of me. Beam, though, deserved my attention, and when I gave it to him…

Well, his face stunned even me into silence.