- Chapter 038 -

  Professional Disgust

  Carl followed him out, pulling the heavy wooden door shut with a solid thud. The sound was immediately swallowed by the rhythmic clang and hiss of the Artisans' quarter. Mark watched as the gemsmith produced a simple, unadorned iron key from his pocket and inserted it into a lock that was just as plain. A quick turn, a satisfying click, and the door was secure.

  It was a simple, profoundly normal act. In a world where men could punch through mountains and doors were reinforced with magical wards, the mundane security of a key in a lock was the last thing he'd expected, less so with a shop that was probably worth a fortune.

  "I have to ask," Mark began, unable to suppress his instinct for risk assessment. "In a town where people can punch through mountainsides, is a simple lock like that enough to stop a thief?"

  Carl let out a short, derisive snort, not even glancing at the door. "The lock? The lock is a social courtesy. A polite suggestion," he stated flatly. "It's to stop the local children from wandering in and swallowing a gemstone hoping that will have them spitting fire."

  He tapped a knuckle against the doorframe, a faint, almost imperceptible shimmer rippling across the wood for a fraction of a second. "The doorframe, however, is infused with a trace amount of volatile fire dust. My own little recipe." A dark and professional satisfaction entered his voice. "Should someone try to force it, the resulting thermal release tends to... discourage repeat attempts. The survival rate for the uninvited is, estimated at moderate."

  Mark just stared, a fresh wave of respect washing over him for the grumpy, pragmatic craftsman. He could see the law suits in his mind already from back home at this kind of suggestion, a world where lights needed to be left on in case a thief stubbed their toe. He let out a small laugh of amusement.

  "Right," Mark said, deciding not to ask any follow-up questions about the definition of 'moderate'. "Before we walk and talk, I have one more stop to make." He gestured vaguely down the street. "Deirdre mentioned another Provisioners' shop in this quarter..."

  Carl paused, a flicker of genuine annoyance crossing his face. "Ah. You must mean Esto's place." He said the name with the same tone one might use for a persistent stain on a table. "Esteban, but everyone just calls him Esto. That man is a menace. An absolute void of competence." He grumbled, his frustration clearly a long-simmering one. "I swear, it would be faster for me to go spelunking in the Mimas caves and dig out the gems myself than it is to wait for him to remember to put in a proper order."

  He then pointed, a sharp, impatient gesture with a tool-stained finger. "It's right there. Two doors down, on the other side."

  Mark wheeled himself toward the indicated shop, Carl following a pace behind, still muttering under his breath about incompetent managers and late supply requests. The shopfront was identical to the others on the street, a simple, functional facade of dark timber and glass. Mark hadn't even reached the door when it was suddenly wrenched open from the inside.

  A young man, his face a mask of pure, frantic panic, practically exploded onto the street. He wore a rumpled Provisioners' apron and a flat cap pulled down low over his brow. He didn't even seem to register Mark's presence as a person.

  With a single, desperate motion, he dropped a heavy, sealed wooden crate directly into Mark's lap, the sudden weight making the wheelchair lurch.

  "Deirdre messaged me," the young man blurted out, the words a single, panicked exhalation. "Said you were coming. Said to give you everything. Just... take it."

  And with that, he spun on his heel, scrambled back inside the shop, and slammed the door shut. The latch clicked with a sound of final, terrified finality.

  Mark sat there in stunned silence, a heavy, mysterious crate now occupying his lap. He looked from the closed door to the box, and then to Carl.

  The gemsmith was frozen in place, his mouth slightly agape, his earlier annoyance replaced by a look of pure, unadulterated astonishment.

  "Well," Carl said finally, his voice a quiet murmur of disbelief. "That's the fastest I've ever seen Esto move in his entire life."

  With the heavy crate of accounting ledgers balanced precariously on his lap, and the box containing his own strange history tucked under Carl’s arm, they began the slow walk back toward Silver-Vein Terrace. The rhythmic clang of the Artisans' quarter slowly faded behind them, replaced by the more general, ambient hum of the town. For a few minutes, the only sound was the smooth rumble of the chair's wheels on the cobblestones.

  It was Carl who broke the silence, his mind clearly having circled back to the first, most baffling anomaly he had encountered that day.

  "Alright, I have to know," he began, the question a pure, unadulterated itch of professional curiosity. "Assuming all the rumors are true, and you're really from 'Earth'... why the flammable clothes? What possible advantage could there be in wearing something that's practically suicidal in a world with open forges on every corner?"

  The answer was so simple, so fundamental to Mark's old world, that it felt almost absurd to have to explain it. "It's cheap," he said with a weary shrug. "Most synthetics are."

  Carl stopped walking, his expression a mask of genuine, intellectual confusion. "Cheap?" he repeated, the word clearly not computing. "How? To create a new material, something not grown or mined... the ritual process, the refinement, the containment of the Whispers... the cost would be astronomical. It's cheaper to enchant a steel plate than it is to invent a new kind of fabric."

  Mark let out a slow breath, using the moment to stretch his arching arms, the bakery next to him seeming to call out with the smell of fresh bread.

  He was a project manager, not a chemical engineer. He was now expected to try and explain the concept of mass production to a man who likely handcrafted every component of his own life.

  "I... don't know the full details," Mark admitted. "It's not my field. But it's not a magical process. It's industrial. Most of those materials, plastics and synthetics, they're made from oil."

  He tried to assemble the fragmented pieces of his own general knowledge into a coherent explanation. "It's a thick, black liquid we pump out of the ground. We refine it, heat it, put it through some chemical process... and it becomes other things. Fuel for vehicles, and the base material for... well, for almost everything."

  Carl listened, his brow furrowed in concentration, trying to fit Mark's crude explanation into his own framework of reality. "A liquid from the ground that becomes a solid fabric..." he mused, his mind clearly working through the alchemical impossibilities. He shook his head.

  "No," he stated with the absolute certainty of an expert. "There is no substance like that in the Collective. I've worked with every mineral and reagent the Miners have ever pulled from these mountains. And I've read the geological surveys from the first pioneers. If a substance like that existed on The Ark, we would know about it."

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  The finality in Carl's voice was another small, definitive click in the tumblers of Mark's new reality. "So no oil," Mark mused, more to himself than to the gemsmith. "That confirms it, then. The technological path here is completely different." He looked up at the hiss of a steam pipe running along the side of a building. Here, they had mastered crystal-powered steam and ambient magic. Back home, they had built a world on a foundation of refined fossil fuels. Two solutions to the same problems, born from the resources they had at hand.

  Carl, however, had already moved on, his restless, analytical mind latching back to the more fascinating puzzle for himself.

  "But the timepiece," he said, his voice regaining its earlier, enthusiastic intensity. "That pocket watch. Why a purely mechanical design? I can see the advantage in the size, of course. To create something so small, so portable... it's a marvel of miniaturization."

  He gestured with his free hand, his fingers tracing the intricate, invisible shapes of gears and springs in the air. "But the complexity... the sheer, painstaking effort required to cut and assemble that many non-magical components with that level of precision... it must be astronomical. Why would anyone bother when a simple, enchanted quartz crystal can keep perfect time for a century with no moving parts at all?"

  Mark let out a small, almost nostalgic laugh. "They're mass-produced," he explained, the concept feeling even more alien now than it had in Deirdre's shop. "Factories. Assembly lines. Machines making other machines. And some people even build them as a hobby, just for the love of the craft." He thought of the intricate, silent clockwork in the silver case. "Repairing them, though... that was always beyond my skill set."

  The admission seemed to open a new, more personal line of inquiry for the gemsmith. Carl's sharp, curious gaze settled on him, the analytical focus shifting from the artifacts to the man himself.

  "So what is your skill set, then?" Carl asked, the question direct and stripped of any social pleasantry. "The report says you're a... 'civic consultant'. But with no Heart, no observable craft... that leaves a lot of blank space. What do you do?"

  The question was a simple one, but the answer felt complicated, a ghost from another life. For the first time, he found himself admitting not just his job, but his passion, the thing he did when the meetings were over and the spreadsheets were closed.

  He set the chair to powered mode as they started to walk again, Mark using the time to pick his words carefully, the extra little time allowing him to really think of what he was.

  "I'm a builder," Mark said, the words feeling truer than any job title. "Of models, and of systems." He thought of the half-finished Babylon 5 station on his desk, a project now lost across a chasm of a thousand years. "My last real project, before..." he gestured vaguely at the world around them, "...all this. I built a machine. A 3D printer. And then I was using that to build a miniature replica of a space station."

  The term "space station" was met with a blank, uncomprehending stare. He had expected that. But it was the other term that snagged in Carl's analytical mind.

  "Printing?" the gemsmith repeated, his brow furrowing. He pointed toward a small shop they were passing, its window displaying a stack of neatly printed handbills. "The concept isn't new. A press, movable type... it's a simple enough mechanical process." He looked back at Mark, a deep, professional skepticism in his eyes. "But '3D' printing... that doesn't sound right. You can't print a dimension. How do you print... an object?"

  They continued their slow journey up the incline toward Silver-Vein Terrace, Mark alternating between pushing the wheels of his chair with a steady, practiced rhythm and activating the steam engine. Sam’s phantom glare prevented him from using the easy option all the way up.

  "It's not printing like a book," Mark explained, trying to find the right words, to bridge a technological gap with a simple conversation. "Imagine building something, not by carving it from a block, but by adding one tiny layer at a time. My machine took a long, thin thread of that... cheap, flammable plastic we talked about... melts it, and then draws a shape with it. A single, flat layer. Then it moves up a fraction of a millimeter and draws the next layer on top of the first. And it just keeps doing that, over and over, for hours, sometimes days, until you have a solid object."

  Carl was silent for a long moment, his mind clearly working to deconstruct the process. He wasn't impressed. His face was the definition of horrified.

  "Layer by layer?" he finally said, his voice laced with the professional disgust of a master craftsman contemplating a crime against his very ethos. "You don't shape the material? You just... stack it? Like bricks?"

  "Essentially, yes," Mark admitted. "It's slow, but it's precise. And it lets you create complex, hollow shapes that would be impossible to carve from a single piece."

  "But the integrity..." Carl protested, gesturing with his free hand as if physically trying to grasp the flawed logic. "The joins between the layers... they would be a catastrophic weak point. And the waste! To melt a material, only to have it cool and reharden... the amount of energy required for such a crude process..." He shook his head, a look of profound, almost pitying disapproval on his face. "It all sounds so wonderfully, monumentally inefficient. So... primitive."

  "It is, in a way," Mark conceded with a tired smile. The conversation was a perfect, absurd mirror of his own existence here. He was the product of a cheap, mass-produced, and fantastically inefficient civilization, trying to explain his value to a world of bespoke, master-crafted magic. "But when the material is cheap and the energy is plentiful... efficiency becomes less important than volume."

  They arrived at Silver-Vein Terrace just as the sun began its descent, painting the sky in fiery strokes of orange and gold. The street was quiet, the day's work winding down. Carl, who had been completely lost in the theoretical impossibilities of Mark’s world, didn't even seem to notice where they were until they stopped in front of the house.

  His gaze fell upon the elegant stone facade, then to the ugly, splintered ruin of the door. And then his eyes went wide.

  "By the Founder's Forge!" he exclaimed, his voice a mixture of shock and dawning comprehension. He looked from the luxurious house to Mark, sitting in his simple, functional wheelchair, and a slow, cynical smile spread across his face. "They weren't kidding, were they? The Oracle's favorite. You've certainly been given the best cage in the valley."

  Mark didn't rise to the bait. He was too tired, and he had reached the end of the line for any further personal enquiry, even if provoked. He looked at the gemsmith, his gaze direct and stripped of all pretense, there was an opportunity here, but he needed to be careful.

  "Carl," he began, his voice quiet but firm. "I have one more question for you." He paused, letting the weight of the moment settle. "How much of what you've been asking me today is for an official report to your Guildmaster, and how much of it is just you, the craftsman, hoping for some random breakthrough from a 'primitive' source?"

  Carl froze, the cynical smile vanishing from his face. He was a man who dealt in the hard, absolute truths of crystal and stone, and he had just been confronted with a question that demanded the same level of honesty. He stood there for a long moment, the box of artifacts clutched under his arm, his mind clearly weighing the query.

  Then, he laughed. It was a short, sharp, genuine bark of amusement.

  "Report?" he scoffed, shaking his head. "Don't be ridiculous. The top wouldn't know a technological innovation if it bit them on the nose. Too busy arguing about the philosophical implications of a new shade of blue." He met Mark's gaze, a flicker of grudging respect in his eyes. "And I'm quite sure the primitive ideas you've shared won't amount to anything useful. But," he conceded with a wry, self-deprecating grin, "a good discussion is always good for business. Keeps the mind sharp, and that pocketwatch.."

  Mark laughed with him, a quiet, weary sound of shared understanding. The tension that had been building between them, the subtle dance of interrogator and subject, finally broke.

  "Well then," Mark said, a new, calculated thought clicking into place. "Let's make it official." He gestured to the house, to the street, to the entire political stage they now shared. "You know where I live. So why not drop by in a few days? Ask your Guildmaster or whoever. Get their blessing. Be the Artisans' official negotiator for the ‘Oracles Chosen’"

  Carl stared at him, his expression a mask of pure, unadulterated confusion. He had come here for a simple, informal debriefing, a chance to poke at a fascinating anomaly. He was leaving with a formal invitation to a political meeting he hadn't even known he was supposed to be a part of.

  "I... Right," he stammered, completely wrong-footed. "I suppose that would be... the proper procedure."

  He seemed to rally himself, falling back on the simple, transactional courtesies he understood. He carefully placed the box containing Mark's belongings onto the crate of ledgers in his lap.

  "Alright, then," Carl said, taking a step back. "I'll... consider it." He gave a final, slightly awkward nod. "Have a good evening, Mark Shilling."

  And with that, the gemsmith turned and walked away, a man clearly in need of a quiet workshop to process a conversation that had gone completely off-script. Mark watched him go, the weight of the ledgers and his own strange history a solid, manageable reality in his lap. The game was still on, and he had just successfully managed another stakeholder.