Quincunx

Ohh, how clever--he's gone and invented picture-in-picture. --Rydia, singing pointy ear shiny hunter

This will be reworked, so the critique can be as heavy as it needs to be. AGGO! The traveling tailgate party! Get in before the front gate rolls away! The Caribbean thresher! Fuel will turn your lips blue! Just two aggo! Twenty aggo! Ain't no use building a gate if nobody comes through it, that's why. You saw how slow we roll. You coulda run. Take the aggo. Five aggo for a drummer, for a hot beat long beat, the boy didn't last just like a boy won't you say aaaaaaaaaahhhoooo! What's that you play, a marimba? Yeah we heard one before, don't get Fifty aggo, but beat it for us for twenty. I like you. Forfeit! You lost the beat, five aggo the first time, and don't ask me what I'll take for mistake number two. Sweat! Five aggo for wearing black! Get some color in your life, girl, 'cause you are black and white. Aw, that's mean! You think? Yeah it's mean but it's true! Well fine, she can take a skirt for free but only a skirt. So you'll be yellow and white then and pink and thank that lady. I said thank her! Ten aggo for bein' rude! Your mouth will cost you, girl. Better cork it with a drink. We got here a new breed, a purebreed racing dog, faster than you! One hundred aggo if you can catch and carry it! The black not the brindle, not the brown, no traps and tools just cooperation, he ain't got a collar, if he runs out the back gate everyone loses! Go go look at him gogogo! We're sellin' fast puppies for aggo, puppies to race or attack! Watch out, watch out, the back gate's rolling closer! Go out? You break my heart. It's twenty aggo, same as you got when you fell in. Oh, you're broke, are you? Well break my heart. Stay in, keep dancing, earn some aggo.

Ah! That's what it looks like, like the rifle is an extension of the arm! Silly cloistered suburban existence and general lack of gunnery.

Same as Katzaniel, but I'm enough of a non-gun-owner to trace it; somehow the long rifle sticks in the memory where the short-barreled snake gun doesn't--the rifle contest with the Apaches intervenes--and with that long barrel in the mind of a non-gun-owner, it doesn't work so well to imagine a rifle being drawn and fired one-handed. Is that possible? You left no doubt as to his skill with it. But the flavor of this--my goodness, the phrases handled with perfect understanding even when the reader doesn't, the periods scattered like loose pebbles to slow down the reading to the pace of a wilderness thought!

Well, until we figured out that peanuts were killing the explosively allergic, not degrading the quality of life like diabetes and terrorists but actively killing them, food (and non-alcoholic drink) were a safe bet for a comforting transaction, universally positive. If food wasn't the solution, it was at least not likely to be a new problem, and it's much more concrete to offer a plate of happiness than to offer an empathetic ear. Your recipient can't be seen reaching out to accept an ear. Also yes, there's something to be said for eating celery when the mere thought of another glass of water puts bile in your esophagus. (Or was it the water itself? It's safe if it's sunny outside and the water tastes green ((like chewed grass stalks?)), but rainy weather and the muddy taste call for a filter, and changeable weather and a metallic aftertaste means filter and boil it.)

Rydia's ears droop as she surveys the tottering platform from top to bottom, and stress frizzles spring out of her upswept coiffure. "Ohhhh no. . .it can't be a red season! I hate changing fashion!" Backlit by red light, herself clad in green, the colors seem to drain right out of the elf's hair and clothing, yet the vivid red lettering of the AAFGW card is a point of light near her knee. Her toe stops prodding the penguin as its leisure suit drinks the light and gives off the aura of a power suit. Rydia looks around desperately for somewhere less red, and spies the polling booth! She's three steps away from reaching the curtains when security steps in and asks for proof of identity. "Proof of what?" The winning, vacant look doesn't work, and Rydia is propelled gently in the direction of Tanuchan, Stephen, and Angel.

Rydia threads her way through the light display as though it were a red velvet rope. "Shiny. . .shiny! oo. . .what's this?" One ear curls into a question mark while she scans the scene, then both prick up at the sight of the AAFGW sit-in. "Excuse me! Large fluffy polar bear with the collar! Can I have a button, please?" she coos, but the polar bear turns a few notches further away and pointedly closes its jaws around a mouthful of salad, while the red penguin tucks an AAFGW card into the top of Rydia's left boot. Rydia twitches her boot impatiently and mutters, "Oo, move away, you're nearly a complementary color!", prodding the pengie in the backside with the toe.

Wet strikes the world on the ground of itself, splattering, spraying soft Tissue and juice in a fountain, then slithering down to a rounded heap. Teeth are not necessary. All that have mouths now may exercise gluttony, Up from below, or inside chewing out, wounded world of the loam cast out. Flesh is still ripe when deformed by its violent gravity. Let them eat.

Alas, the spectre of being underlit had not yet been banished, for as Rydia adjusted Zool's frame (one ear leveled parallel to the floor, the other tracking one of the upper corners of the frame), a gnomie glow rod cast changing, soothing colors. "Ding-dong, wiggly-wong, polling song!" Minta squeaked, as Rydia's skin looked rather night-elf-ish from the flickering light, and "Ding-dong, wiggly-wong, polling song!" as she skipped out of the corridor, on a long loop back towards the polling station. "Ooo, that's catchy," Rydia murmured to herself, tapping the frame back to level. . .

Is it just me, or are we getting uplighting from Zool's portrait? Not the most flattering light. (Rydia picks up Zool and hangs him back on the wall, and her horrible, vicious, spike-like ear shadows go away. The ears remain long, though.)

Minta skipped around the periphery, picking up the tune! "Ding-dong, wiggly-wong, polling song! Ding-dong, wiggly-wong, polling song!" chanted the gnomie, waving a blinking gnomie glow rod and leaving a squiggly little light trail at about knee-height to a pollster. "Ding-dong, wiggly-wong, polling song!" "Is it just me or has the--" "Ding-dong, wiggly-wong, polling song!" "--chanting been speeding up--" "Ding-dong, wiggly-wong, polling song!" "--lately? . . .Oh, no. . ." That headache wasn't going away any time soon.

Without the benefit of form (extruded stanza, tails to snip) the puzzlement spins on-- Who dares to claim a spark and speak? A spark to strike, to claim the light-- perhaps it's best if unaddressed. Don't tell this to who taught me, who has taught the conflict caught in 'you', implying I'm correct--not you. A letter from myself to I; a poet's like a pious eye. It sometimes fades; it does not die.

The song of Mr. Flight Creature of habit. Yes, other people comment freely when something has been posted in the Library, but I don't. . . Feedback levels labeled, read down as far as you are comfy. 1. I read it. 2. Also I'm selfishly grateful to have another person around who understands meter and rhyme without working at it. Free verse outnumbers us. Good to set the "beeping" at the beginning of the meter too, so it sort of beeps along behind the stressed syllables. You could even play with that at the end, and did a little bit, with the two strong syllables of "goodnight", as if the beeps were slowing down, winding down, like the life. 3. Of course, most of it being effortless means that the line I have to strain to fit into meter (ending "into life's row"--awkward) stands out and not in a good way. The line above it is also not vital to the poem, so it would probably be quicker to cut out those two entirely than to try and shoehorn a substitute for "row" into place. A substitute has a low chance of easing that oddity. 4. The meter and rhyme came first, and the idea of the poem is secondary to them. That's a weak structure, which can be unraveled from where you wrote the first half of the line, then rammed rhyming words onto the end of the line until one fit--good for students studying a poem, not so good if you wanted to convey the image of death, or of the retreat before death, which the clearer images of the beeping, and the repetition of the angels approaching, points toward. This is probably more thought about what the poem meant than you gave to it, like dropping a 9volt battery into a D battery receptacle. It could be a 9 volt poem, but right now it's not. 5. This is the 'editing before publication' level and reserved mostly for stuff that IS destined for publication. I didn't get that impression from this poem.

Very good revision; it tightened the wandering strains of poetic prose into a poem and only set it into the meter afterward. For the next use of the raw material, could you try writing out the story in the first post in purely story form to preserve it intact, since that didn't happen in this revision? As for the poem--it did take me two readings to realize the narrator was outside the ship of Science and invited inside; I think that changing "in" to 'inside' in the second-to-last stanza, or a similar tweaking of a single preposition, would have made that clearer. There's a missing stop (not distinctly half or full, but given it isn't a glaring omission, probably a half-stop would be better) after "cease". The next-to-last line is a tad strange and not just for the length of it. It might be that "come deep" was a placeholder for a richer short verb, since rich words like "monolith" and "null" were acceptable earlier--'venture', 'strike', 'disturb' replacing nearly the entire line?

Struck speechless. Awe.

I haven't seen the movie--passed up an opportunity to do so--so tell me if the watchers of the watchmen have any ability to interfere with what they're watching? It's a thankless task to watch and record, impotent to change matters.

OOC: I'd be looking into active script-blocking if you're going to be clicking on those silly quizzes on livejournal, or else it's back to pop-up purgatory for your computer. Dear Pen Diary-- I still question why I'm participating in diaries. Better my touch than Aardvark's, I suppose. Reaffirmed several characteristics of creative writing as a form of exorcism: 1. Only the best quality is effective. Half-hearted writing leads to half the cancer being chopped out. 2. When the best quality exorcism is touched again (and by that I mean read), it can evoke the moods of the moment of its creation. 2.1 It's still not possible to objectively judge--for _me_ to objectively judge _my own_ exorcisms. 2.2 The level of emotional involvement, while a relief then, is now a deeper entanglement from the base state. 3. A new act of creation is needed to quiet the mood thus evoked, creating a sort of stepped series of emotional controls. 3.1 Is the curve the same as the descending curve of quality in many commercially produced book series? Jabbed myself in the ears with an accidental touch of the volume dial. Good gods, but unexpected volume hurts. The only mercy is that it hurts further back in the head than other people's idiocy hurts. (Tried doubling over in exaggerated pain when someone presented me with an idiotic argument. Person, while now more aware that something was hurting me, did not understand that person ws the source of the pain. Person maintained, in jest, that trying to understand what I write gives person a headache as well. Clowns, clowning at one another.) When have I become an elementalist of the earth, or was that quality present all along, and just now exploited? I could have saved some time with testing Rydia's soil, but then missed the scientific rigor. More importantly, what lies in a meteor that science could not divine? --Tzimfemme, the naked mage

Tzimfemme, arms laden down with scientific apparatus and three notebooks full of agronomic recommendations (three! more results in a day than she'd written up in a year), leaned one hip into the kitchen door of the Keep. Its central planks bowed outwards and tugged at the cross-bars, but those at the edges, fluttering as meteoric winds raced through the gaps on either edge, resisted. The face obscured by apparatus grumbled, then muttered a few spells which sloshed against the lock. The door did not spring open. The naked mage selected a spell with a bit more push to it and threw that near the hinges while shoving at the opposite edge with her hip. Mana, meters, and mage spilled out into the yard as the door cracked down the centerline. Tzimfemme's eyes followed one sharp-edged metal box as the wind tumbled it by and nearly gashed her face, then acknowledged the weird weather. Before conscious thought, she'd scrambled to her feet and bellowed upwards, "I'm still listening, you bastards!" The watchers at the windows saw her tilt her head upwards, look at the fist-symbol she'd thrust at the sky, grimace, and reel that back down. The naked mage kept her eyes pointed at the sky, but hopped and wandered alongside the craters and shattered stumps, sometimes pointing at a probable angle of descent, once leaping for a low-hanging tree branch and pulling herself up and away as a smaller chunk of falling rock tore up the turf where the undergrowth was still bent from her footsteps. She dropped back down, danced in sudden pain on the heated earth, swung up and away before dropping down on a less abused patch of ground. Here she stopped and collected her thoughts, fingers tapping rat-a-tat on the bark. The remainder of what the watchers could see was less straightforward: Tzimfemme digging her heel into the disturbed ground to form lines and symbols on the theme of eight, Tzimfemme casting spells with exaggerated and perhaps mocking gestures with no correspondence to the fresh drawings, Tzimfemme flattening herself to the ground and resting her ear in the center of the consecration as though listening for movement underground.

The light flickered from suspended loops of glass as Tzimfemme strode between it and the light, scribbling on a flat plate of a clipboard. At the terminus of every loop, a saucer of sampled dirt and rock resisted whatever pulsed down the tubing and dashed itself against it: the five flavors of mana, the four Aristotlean elements, various frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. The naked mage drummed her fingernails on the board and thought. The paradox of measurement and observation was tangled into these samples as surely as in the ground she'd scraped it from, and was no closer to figuring out why Rydia's sigil had tightened against her in the first place. All she'd wanted was the return of a borrowed textbook! All around, the poster-size blowups of the Ager Guild Book of Indiscretions glared and winked from the walls.

Tzimfemme leaned into the angled confluence of mirrors in her bathroom, winding the thinner braids into kinks and half-hearted spirals to add a bit of volume. The patch of condensed breath fluctuated to a beat as she flicked another completed twist atop the rest of the pile and reached for another, then paused as her ears received the message. Back in flesh? The Tzimfemme who skidded down the updraft to the dining level wasn't the usual forenoon zombie, but placing her feet into the wind like jumping checkers. One especially heavy step as she reeled herself onto the appropriate landing was forgivable. Several more might have been explained away by the tome she had balancing on one hip and the crook of one arm. The remainder of the stomping strut to the breakfast table was pure, direction-less aggravation. Nor was it necessary to drop the book flat upon the table before accepting the breakfast meats and gnawing with one hand while flipping through the pages with the other. And so it was that, while Tzimfemme sucked upon a slice of marbled meat so well-preserved it melted in her mouth with the taste of faintly meat-flavored salt and peppercorns, whoever spoke didn't quite dare raise their voice to the point of being identifiable, "Who has the stomach to read that sort of stuff over _breakfast_, anyway?"

THERE WERE NEVER NINE It's almost obliterated, with fingerprint marks and two plum-sized swirls betraying that the eraser was the palm of a writing hand. Underneath, in neater small-capital letters: Exponentially, there could've been, but we didn't deal in exponents. Our population growth was multiplicative. Proof available at Cftm!

I liked all of this, but what I liked more than most was the waterfall of detail at the home scene. The noblewoman's description was the same rush of details, but a tad more than was necessary. Maybe the later details were better because they were applied to the place, about which I didn't know much, instead of to the person, whose overbearing nature is not a novelty. I hope that the later chapters are about as long as this one. It's a rich diet of detail and meant to be taken in doses of a few paragraphs at a time, like this post was.

Epilogue. . . Druid spires can only dissolve and reform the body; it's each soul which controls how fast its body becomes its home. So it was the magician, with many levels of practice in coalescing mana, who was able to mount his pale pony and ride towards Ak'Anon first, and then the dark elf pair conjuring black steeds before racing towards the Steamfont Moun--Steamfont Pit That Used to Be Part of the Minotaur Cave Complex. Minta, her mind on other matters, came through only slowly, and stretched the mana-shepherding ability of Portingya to the limit--he almost lost his grip on the world before coalescing within the circle. When his eyes started to see the physical world again, he found Minta, and only Minta, watching him with a worried look. "Where is everyone? Don't they want to see this?" he asked. "Star's not interested much an' Fasren had to go inform on me," Minta told him, pointing one hand towards each destination. "OK," Portingya replied, and unpacked a picnic cloth from a misty thicket picnic, laying it out upon the hill, before catching the implication. "--He's going to tell on you?!" "Is gnomie law," Minta explained, without any anger. "No Meldrath clockworks get to be taken into Ak'Anon, ever. Someone's afraid he'll send in a device to make them all revolt or somethin'. Plus I think Fasren's gonna get a finder's fee from the Libraria Mechanomagica for information. But I got the clockwork!" Minta laid out the wrenches, English, metric, and gnomish, along with the trumpeter tinytop, and then, reverently, a mended misshapen gear. She unhinged the crab-cracker attachment on a gnomish army knife, slipped that around the tinytop's torso, paused, sighed. "What's wrong?" ". . .Am just missin' a gnomie or two. Astralis woulda wanted to see this. Asma honorary gnomie too. . . .But you did come along. Portingya honorary gnomie." She shook off the gloomy moment, beamed at the halfling, then bent down over her work. CRUNCH. Minta wiggled the extend-o-pliers into the crack and opened tinytop's chest, detached rods, sharpened pinions, separated cogs, slipped the misshapen gear between the cogs, set the styluses into the groove, re-attached rods in the three axes at the three attachment points, shut and fused the chest plate. Portingya got a little fidgety at the keyhole tinkering, unable to see much of what was going on, and instead took a closer look at the trumpet clutched in tinytop's hand. There wasn't any air bag attached to it. It was just a plain, miniature, put it to your lips and toot, trumpet. Minta picked up the tinytop, stepped off of the picnic blanket. "Um, couldya roll that up please? Am not certain what's gonna happen an' I don't wanna char a hole into the middle of it." Once he'd put the blanket away, Minta set tinytop on its feet, let it droop down, gave the key two turns, and let go. Tinytop straightened up, looked from side to side, lifted its trumpet, and played! tootadootatoootaadooootaaaaTOOT! "IT'S A TALLERTYPE TINYTOP!" Minta shouted! "I GOT A TALLERTYPE! NO GNOMIE EVER GOT ONE OF THOSE BEFORE!!!" Portingya cheered as loud as he could! "IT GREW BIGGER!" "THEN IT'S NOT A TINYTOP ANY MORE," came an annoyed shout/mutter from the northwest, just before Silvershadows and Starmender rode beyond the range of hearing. Both gnomie and halfling stopped cold, then took another look at the tinytop. Star was right! It had the delicacy of tinytop construction still, but it was as tall as a full-grown gnomie. Minta raced to its side, drummed her fingers on the tinytop's head and chest. It rattled. "Lookit lookit lookit wait here lookit I gotta see!" Minta turned the extend-o-pliers to the bonking attachment, swung, cracked the new weld, and eased the chest plate away from the rest. While she knelt down and opened up the factory welds along the tinytop's legs, Portingya looked inside the chest cavity. The chest plate was still tinytop-thin, not constructed to the standard of a full-size gnomiework, and the tinytop's gears and rods clung to the back plate like cobwebs. Minta snipped an opening down tinytop's arms down to the elbows, and Portingya watched two thin rods strain to stretch the arm plating even further, guided as they were by the misshapen gear in the heart of the clockwork assembly. He didn't quite get it. "'Scuse me please, is gonna be a close fit," Minta interrupted, poking him with the extend-o-pliers. Portingya moved over a step, and then a step more, and then kept moving until Minta stopped poking. "What are you doing?" "Watch!" Minta stuck her extend-o-pliers in the hand which didn't have a trumpet attached, bounced a few times until she was levitating at the highest possible point, then turned her back to the opened clockwork carapace, and stepped backwards into its legs. The titanium tinytop shell shook as she maneuvered her leg into place, then slowly lifted a foot and wiggled its clockwork toes. "I think it's gonna work!!!!" "WOW!" Portingya got it now, and lifted up each clockwork arm to help Minta get her own arm into it, and tilted back the tinytop head so Minta could fit her neck into place, and lowered the clockwork helm over her head. She turned her extend-o-pliers towards herself, and with greatest care welded the seams shut one more time, then dropped her arm in the weighty clockwork fashion and swiveled her head. "Minta?" he worried. "Can you breathe in there? Say something if you can't. I mean, bang on your chest if you can't! I'll get you out!" "No WAY! Is a trumpeter tinytop, it draws air through its mouth grille same as we do! I could stay in here forever as a GNOMIEWORK!" Minta bounced around the druid circle, babbling the praises of tinkering and gnomiehood. . .tooting her own horn.

Evah found out anyway, and fumed throughout the Mines of Malfunction, squashing unoffending rats. Minta took the hint. No talkin' about the Meldrath part. Still, that meant she could ask about her tinytop dolly, and she did. Out in the sunshine of Steamfont, weird too-tall not-quite-gnomies hadn't even heard of tinytops. Across the Ocean of Tears, a lost gnomie called Timmit tried to make a copy of the gear from Minta's memories, but it wouldn't work in his tipsytoes tinytop, or his cousin Ashrot's twirlabout. Pharren gnomie grew up too fast to even care very much about tinytop dollies. Bastler the Starfleet gnomie lectured her on a parallel plane of discordant existence, discussing the history of tinker propulsion and Starpyre's theories of space-time tick-tock-ulum, and concluding that her missing tinytop's gear was not a motive gear. Guky gnomie gave her a brand-new tinytop dolly, but that one turned out to be a trumpeter. Supermann and Kecks even let Minta peek inside their very rare, twinso'tin tinytops, but they didn't have any familiar parts. Never a word about Meldrath the Meanie. Not a hint what that unique gear could have done. Still, when the Steamfont Mountains trembled and a chunk of them shuddered free, and flew into the sky bearing Meldrath and his stinky minotaurs, Minta figured that Evah was gonna be more angry with him than she ever could be with herself. ***** ". . .Idiots. I'm surrounded by fleshy idiots," Geartop wheezed. Raiders poured in through the unlocked doors, some of them tying on bibs as they ran after the assistant, others peeling away from the fleeing gnomie and surrounding the pot-bellied clockwork! "That's the one, he's gonna spit out my tinytop!" Minta squealed, shoving and elbowing her way to the front of the raid, ducking a swat from this weapon or that. "Am here tinytop, it's safe to come out nownow, cut that out 'chanters, come back tinytop!" Geartop unlatched his stomach hatch and disgorged a tinytop trio. Instead of performing some funny trick, they all whirred thin soprano notes and converged on the nearest plate-wearer, working their limbs like can openers as the tips began to glow red-hot. Minta froze mid-caper. "They're--they're not good tinytops! They're torturers!" On cue, the hapless shadowknight yelped as one torturer tinytop got through. Minta looked down at her neato new multitool an' scowled, "Gonna salvage them for scrap." Tiny springs flew, tiny 'sproing's repeated. Tankthrasher tinytops which mimicked Geartop's every punch and spin. Tynodyne tinytops funneling their electrical power through their little limbs like the wizzy clockwork carapaces. Tearapart tinytops which ganged up on Fenik gnomie an' tried to spin his arms in opposite directions. Cruel, evil tinytops kept bursting from Geartop's guts, nothing like the innocuous dolly in every home in Ak'Anon. "They're not right at all!" Minta wailed in Ruikahrn's general direction. Fenik had run off by that point, decommissioning the full-size gnomieworks mobilizing one by one. "What aren't and start helping us with Patch," he replied, powering up the iksar version of a mana-slurping crazy straw. Minta, instead of turning away from Geartop and his terrible tinytops, just poked her epic over her shoulder and waggled it a bit; vivid red blood dripped off of the six tines, coalesced into a shining skeleton, and charged at the patch thing. Ruikahrn's instruments of mana dissection arced in the same direction, and just as quickly rebounded at the necromancers. "The tinytops aren't!" Minta squealed as she pole-vaulted over the deflected implements. "Soon I will be all grown up!" Ruikahrn ducked under the reflected spell and spared a glimpse away from his fight. "What tinytops?" "Whatcha mean what tinytops ooooooooooo NEATO!!!!!!" Minta tossed her epic back into storage, grabbed the extend-o-pliers, and squinted through the eyepiece with inscribed gnomish scale. "They are, they really are! There's somethin' growin' them an' it's not an Anizok's device! There's no room for a mana battery inside a tinytop when it's still tiny! That's amazin'! That's neato!" "That's irrelevant, we're STILL FIGHTING!" Ruikahrn waggled tail and unoccupied hand in tandem, and several dead raiders lurched to their feet, falling forward and converging on Patch. The rest of the raid struggled to subdue the other figures: Fenik at the head of the gnomiework disassembly group, Ruikahrn flinging an endless supply of inventive melee pets at Patch the engineer, and the Seneschal in his punk steamwork, which glowed from an innovative but dangerous innovation linking the heat dumps with external armor--an assignment meant for Minta, but she never noticed. She was sending spectre around the edges of the stage with a broom and backing up in front of him with a dustpan in hand, salvaging every scrap of Geartop and tinytop she could find.

thirteen hours later. . . Ding Ding Ding Decision! Juline woke up, leaped upright, and clonked her noggin on the curving-falling stack of empty buckets o' parts. Only she and a robed gnomie who hadn't arrived until the sixth hour were still watching over Minta. "Bucket," snapped Eonis Mournunder, shoving another one down the table. Minta peered over the rim, then heaved a sigh, "Why have the necromancers' clockworks gotta suck? I wanna raise a zombie ARMY but not if I gotta have terrible clockworks!" "Now Minta," yawned Juline, "necromancy is a very naughty discipline. Not at all suitable for young. . .yawn. . .gnomes. . .Much better to be an enchanter. You could make this hard desktop feel as soft as a pillow. . ." She didn't remain awake long enough to cast the illusion. Eonis, on the other hand, was quite awake and glaring sideways at the gnomeling. "You've gone through thirteen buckets, Minta. How many were necromancy kits?" "Three; the first one an' the tenth one an' this one. This one an' the first one had mana collectors an' life siphons with little holes drilled in them to let most of the life leak out. The middle one had a tri-headed gear mesh for bone chippin' which woulda taken a huge chunk of bone in order to make bone chips instead of bone dust. Somethin's wrong with them." "Curse those Eldritch Collective!" muttered the teacher. "They swore up and down the girders of Ak'Anon's palace! Did they think we had an infinite supply of our own parts? I asked for no favors!" He swung himself up onto the table and stared down into the bucket also, knelt and sorted cogs and tubing. "Well! You. Minta. Were there any other gnomes in your year who noticed this?" "Umm. . ." Minta thought 'bout it. "Nope. I told one of them 'bout it but he didn't care. He didn't know how to put together the mage clockwork so I don't think he woulda been a neato necro anyway." "You know." "'Course I knew!" Minta rolled her eyes at the impossible denseness of boy gnomies. "You're about to know a lot more. Juline! Wake up. I'm taking this one!" Juline blinked awake, looked over at Minta's last incomplete clockwork carapace, then smoothed her hair back to severity. "No, she hasn't completed her clockworks, and she isn't on the list of tinytop innovators. In fact, I don't believe she even completed tinytop assembly. She needs to be held back for another year." Minta goggled, but Eonis cut in. "Absolutely not! Girl's a natural. Maybe you remember the last gifted gnome that you tried to force through tutelage in the Libraria?" Juline's eyes lost their sleepy look. "Yes, that gifted. I don't want her to be self-taught. Understand?" Eonis grabbed Minta's wrist and marched her out of the examination room. Down the unplated by-ways of Ak'Anon they marched, Minta staring at the extra slime and rust on the girders in this section of town. The Stoppit Place was starting to look very nice in comparison. Eonis halted at the top of a bank crumbling down into the water. "Minta. Listen. Tell no one. Evah will find out anyway, but tell no one. Some months ago, one of our Dark Reflection renounced King Ak'Anon and fled. He had to bring a bribe. Stop Meldrath from feeding him to the minotaurs. He stole all of the Dark Reflection's parts for indoctrinating young gnomes. Also a unique gear. Channeled sides, three attachment points, asymmetrical, function unknown. Sound familiar?" When Minta opened her mouth to shriek, Eonis clamped a pile of musty old cloth against her mouth. "I said tell no one. Especially not at top volume. Do I need to bring you into the Mines with a mouth full of mummy wrappings?"