“No! Just hold it by the leg! No, not like… Ken, I swear, I’m gonna throw you into the water if you…” Ni’s annoyed shouts heralded their approach from a good few kilometers.
Peter did not respond nor react in any way though – the machinery in front of him absorbed all the attention he could spare. And he absorbed all attention Ichi could spare. Despite how much he appreciated her concern, it was a bit draining at this point – constantly feeling her gaze, feeling the hot torrents around him, not even mentioning the tremors whenever she moved.
Finishing another weld, he risked a quick glance behind. The enormous, yellow eyes twitched when they found his. Probably the scariest part was that they weren’t blinking – she just stared, unwilling to lose line of sight no matter how reddened they got.
It really did a number on her, didn’t it? The threat of losing him forever… It brought her controlling tendencies to the very surface. That would eventually pass of course – it always did – but the exact timeline of it wasn’t thrilling. Last time she turned into dragon surveillance when Ni walked too close to him… And it lasted a week. This time it could very well last months.
Wait… Was it really Ni last time? Or was it just him slipping and straining his ankle… Or… Almost falling down from the counter…
He couldn’t remember, his memory was hazy for some reason… And when he tried to focus on it, he was met with…
***
Void. His immense focus brought him back into the void he was so desperately trying to escape. The immensity of dread a single moment of lucidity brought instantly undid itself by pushing him into a fear-induced, dreamlike state filled with hazy memories. Their pull brought him back to the present…
***
Peter massaged his forehead, glimpses of eternity rapidly evaporating from his mind. What was he… thinking about? Oh, right – Ichi was anxious as all hell. Truth be told, it was kind of weird that it affected her more than him – after all, it was he who almost got…
The mental wall he placed around those memories leaked, making him see the mixture of surprise and horror on the man’s face right before he disappeared in the darkness below. The image was so vivid that for a moment, Peter thought he was back on the roof – he could feel the cold rain dripping from his body, the wind tugging at his clothes, the piercing pain of cuts and slashes…
He pressed his hands against his head, plugging the hole. There was no time to get distracted now… He had to ignore it until they were safe… Had to let the guilt fester.
Without knowing when, he found himself cuddled into Ichi’s nose in a moment of warmth and comfort. A slight purr reverberated throughout her as she finally closed her eyes, finding physical touch enough of a substitute for sight.
Their moment was interrupted by an immense clang of metal falling to the ground.
“It is done!” Ni announced, her voice in equal parts exhausted and awed while Kendall collapsed head-first onto her bedroll.
After a slight nudge, Ichi lifted him up, letting him see their finding. And what he saw was…
“Pretty cool, huh?” Ni asked, her eyes glistering from excitement as he gestured at the silhouette.
Or rather, what was left of it. The enormous machine was heavily damaged – half of one leg was missing, while the other one got ripped-out along with a sizeable part of its hip and waist. Its head was gone, left forearm precariously dangled only on wires, but most importantly, its torso was pierced. Not punctured or anything like that – a massive, gaping hole in its chest, right next to the reactor exhaust, a few meters below the pilot cockpit. And of course, everything neatly covered in the sludge of kaiju-water.
It quickly dawned on him why the thing was never recovered.
“Wow, this sucks,” he mumbled, scratching his head.
“W-wha? This isn’t suck!” Ni gasped from sheer whiplash. “I mean, the fuck you on about, midget?!”
“Look.” He pointed at the Jaeger’s chest. “The reactor’s fucked, we can’t use it.”
Ni squatted next to it, gazing into the hole as if that could somehow fix it. When that didn’t work, she grabbed the rusted edge of outer armour plating.
“Can’t we like, I don’t know, pull it together? Weld it or just fill it with something so it would work?” Ni tried to pull the metal together as if it was fabric, which resulted in some of it getting ripped-off and her falling on her ass with a yelp.
“You know, I don’t think you should be touching that radioactive crap directly… Or standing near it,” he mused.
“And you’re telling me this NOW?!” she scoffed with disbelief.
“Well, I didn’t know it would have a hole! And besides, you’re big and have that regeneration thing… You’ll be fine.” He hesitated, thinking what could be scraped out of it. “Though I’d probably die if you put me in there...”
In an instant, Ichi’s fingers closed around him, sealing him off from the outside world.
“Really?” he sighed heavily.
“You’re not going near it,” she announced, not leaving any room for objections.
“First of all, let me see again. Second of all, I need to figure out if I can salvage anything.”
She finally looked straight down at him with a rather displeased expression.
“Why? You already have those boxes we’ve found; can’t you just use those? You said they can power your… thingy.”
He sighed, trying to figure out how to explain it without confusing or annoying her further.
“Boxes?” Ni asked curiously.
“Batteries essentially,” he replied quickly, focusing on the real issue again. “Ichi, those ‘boxes’ are kind of like a… like a cup. My devices are like someone who needs to drink each time they want to do something, but… but do things well if they get enough in one go… Does that make sense to you?”
“Mmmmmaybe?” She shook her head. “Still don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“Battery is not a power source,” Ni chimed in.
“Yes, it’s not. If you have a cup, you can feed my thing well, but when cup runs out of water, you can’t feed it anymore…” He hesitated again, feeling his analogy falling apart. “And that reactor was like a stream of water. You can drink straight from it, sure, but it’s better to let the stream like… fill the cup and then drink from it.” He performed a drinking motion. “I was happy, because the ‘boxes’ mean I wouldn’t have to make the reactor running at full power all the time… You know, make the stream into a huge waterfall so it can feed the machine adequately with no cup.”
Ichi stared at him for a while, then opened her mouth to ask a question, but seemingly realised that she… doesn’t really know how to ask what she wanted. Or at least, that’s what he had gathered from her expression.
“I feel dumb,” she finally admitted.
“You are dumb,” Ni snickered.
“Shut up!”
“Could I maybe…” he began. Ichi let him see the mech again before he could finish. “Thank you.”
Maybe instead of whining about what was impossible to fix, he should focus on what he could at least plausibly scavenge from it. There wasn’t exactly much of it undamaged but… Hmmm… Right arm could be useful, even if it had broken servos… And let’s be honest, after decades underwater, it probably did. The idea of strapping a dragon to the machine and somehow wiring the controls to work with their movements was obviously out of the question now, but he could probably use it as a partial exoskeleton…
Glancing at the rusted blades extending from the forearms, he noticed the heavily armoured vambraces. That was an idea. An outline of a new solution.
***
Kendall recovered after laying around for a dozen minutes. It wasn’t her who decided to move though – it was the horrific screech of tortured metal that prompted it. Unsettled, she sat back up and noticed her sisters were trying to rip off the metal man’s arm, huffing and swearing as they did so. A few minutes of watching them was enough time for her brain to produce a question – maybe she should help them?
A question abandoned once a voice in her head told her that she would be useless or harmful like usual.
Accepting it as fact, she instead decided to waste some of their food by filling her bowl with goulash. Before even beginning her meal, she hesitated, realising that there was someone more in need of a hot meal than her. The poor, tiny creatures they abandoned in the ruins.
Ichi hated them with a passion though and… and Kendall fully understood why. They’ve tried to take her little one… But it was still wrong. And so, instead of selfishly gulping down everything herself, Kendall sneaked out of the camp while everyone was busy abusing the metal.
Glancing behind one last time, she couldn’t help but let out a disappointed sigh – when she learned they were looking for a big, metal man she really hoped for something… different. Alas, what they’ve found looked nothing like Alphonse.
No matter, it wasn’t the first disappointment in her life and wouldn’t be the last.
As she made her way towards the ruined city, sadness filled her heart. She liked watching the little ones live their tiny lives… Make beautiful things, make their homes taller and taller each time she checked on them…
She hasn’t checked for a while now – hundreds, maybe even a thousand years at this point – and missed a lot. Her hand traced a building a few times taller than herself, making a bit of plaster fall-off of it. When she imagined the great towers the tinies sailing the ocean told her about, she imagined them… knee-high at most. Not dwarfing her own home. Kendall just regretted not seeing them grow. Not helping them grow.
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Yet at the same time, she knew Ichi was right – little ones grew to become dangerous when scared… And they were scared easily. Her only wish was that… They wouldn’t have to fear…
She found them outside, near a patch of exposed earth – the mother and son worked on burying something while the old woman watched in silence, cradling the youngest child. Her approach didn’t go unnoticed of course – Kendall could feel their scared, anxious gazes on her as she approached and kneeled on the street withing an arm’s reach.
“I have brought thee a gift,” she said quietly, placing the bowl in front of her.
The old woman glanced at it, before returning her eyes to the rapidly disappearing hole in the ground. “He was a good man…” the woman sighed, pulling the child closer to her chest. “Brash, stern, and too stubborn for his own good but…” She shook her head. “We survived thanks to him… He didn’t deserve to die.”
Kendall nodded, afraid to not agree with someone mourning their loved one. ”I prithee pardon me... I knew him not, yet I do offer mine condolences.”
A minute of awkward silence followed, before the woman raised her eyes again. “May I know your name, Great Dragon?”
Kendall hesitated for a second, considering which name she should tell her. And finally, decided on two most appropriate. “Mine name? I call myself Kendall... Yet thy kind once didst call me Yinglong.”
The woman’s eyes widened as she recoiled from surprise. “Yinglong? The… Great Dragon, forgive me, but… are you the… God of the rain?”
Kendall sighed, her mind getting flooded with memories of sadness and remorse she felt every time tinies begged her to save their crops. “I am no deity... I am but a dragon who once did unstop a river,” she explained apologetically.
“Oh… That… Explains some things…” the woman mumbled, recovering from shock. “How… how long ago was that?”
“Not so long... Five millennia, I trow... Six perhaps. Yet for thee, perchance it hath been an age.”
The woman stared at her with a neutral expression, as if her words were too much to process. Kendall just wished she wouldn’t ask about… That other thing she was known for… The guilt was still killing her whenever she thought about it.
The two other humans finally finished filling the hole. Zhou hugged his mother, crying quietly. Kendall felt a single, miniscule tear rolling down her cheek as well – just from the infectious sadness permeating the air.
“I guess he did succeed in the end… You will carry us hom…” The woman hesitated. “Somewhere safe.”
“Aye. My sister shall bear thee to our dwelling.”
“Hold on…” The woman froze, her voice filling with dread. “Your… sister?!” Unable to stand any longer, she collapsed onto a piece of rubble behind her and took a few shaky breaths. “We are going to die, aren’t we?” she whispered, cradling the child a bit stronger, causing it to have a coughing fit in response.
“What? Nay, of course not. Ni is not... Not so grievous... Thou shalt be safe.”
“Ni… Is that her name? She hates for the crime of capturing her servant… We will not survive…”
This left Kendall doubly confused for a good minute. Why was she thinking about that Ni hated them… And who would be this servant? As far as she recalled, no one ever served her. Maybe the woman said something different, and she simply didn’t understand her correctly?
She had a feeling that wasn’t it though. Her brain began hurting again as she strained herself, trying to connect the pieces. But eventually, it hit her – the woman had only seen Ichi with her… She might have thought that Ichi was Ni…
A slight shiver went down her spine at the mere thought. She trusted Ichi normally, but not recently, with how… unstable she had gotten. Realistically, Kendall herself was the only worse choice than Ichi. Which left Ni.
“Nay, Ni is mine other sister. Somewhat harsh and inconsiderate, yet will tend to thee,” Kendall blurted out, finally ending the pain of thinking.
“Your… other sister… Oh, thank the ancestors…” The woman sighed with immense relief, shaking from freshly released stress.
Kendall extended her hand to comfort her a bit… But stopped mid-way, when she remembered why it was a horrible idea. The motion hasn’t gone unnoticed of course – she felt scared, hesitant gazes of the two younger humans on her as she withdrew her hand.
Suddenly remembering about the food she had brought them, Kendall considered the size of the bowl, their height and decided to take a bit into the spoon. Once the utensil was on the ground, she awkwardly invited them to eat.
“What is this?” Zhou asked, carefully approaching the spoon.
“The dragon is offering us his… “The woman quickly glanced up at Kendall. “Her food.”
“Why? Does she want to poison us?”
“Boy! Show some respect!” the woman scoffed. “If the dragon wanted us dead, we would have been long ago.”
Kendall wanted to protest those words as unfounded, memories from a past both distant and recent hit her, nearly causing her to recoil. She observed their moods brightening ever so slightly once they’ve tasted the goulash. Fresh, well-prepared food they’ve lacked for decades from what she knew… It was the least she could do.
And yet, she couldn’t focus on them – her thoughts were stubbornly pushing her back to all the times she did good, kindness and… justice…
Even Ichi didn’t know everything. And besides them, no one alive knew anything.
***
“Is it good now?” Peter asked without looking back at them.
“It’s… better,” Ni replied, unconvinced by her own words. “Still not good though.”
“You can move in it, right?”
“Yeah, technically,” she scoffed. “Everything still stings a little.”
“Too bad.” He shrugged. “I won’t waste more saw blades on it.”
Ni grumbled angrily about her biceps getting almost punctured as Ichi helped her take the arm off, then carefully placed it on the ground and sat down behind him, awaiting further instructions.
“You know, if comfort is an issue, you could try making yourself some padding…” he threw nonchalantly, not taking his eyes off of the second vambrace.
He removed it without much issue, though emptying it proved a little more difficult. Not nearly as hard as cutting out the other arm’s insides of course – here he was dealing with an additional armour plate on top of the machinery, but still, the metal was uncooperative even after cleansing via dragon breath pyrolysis.
Nevertheless, the project was progressing rapidly, courtesy of having two titans to move everything heavy into place.
A few tests and simulations allowed him to place the accelerators so that the vambrace would not interfere with them to any meaningful degree while retaining the ability to deliver plasma to its destination. It was difficult to say if it worked without any tests… Which was exactly why he made sure to leave a few cells charged.
Welding them into place afterwards would take minutes at most anyways.
While he was busy doing that, Ni apparently decided that her own bedroll would make for a wonderful padding and… She was probably right; he just questioned the wisdom of destroying your own bed for that. Sure, whatever. He didn’t exactly have any high ground when it came to questionable choices… Especially when around half of his life’s worth of them was staring him right in the face.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the only laws his creation wasn’t breaking were those of physics, and even then, just barely. Five percent safety margins would’ve gotten him not only fired, but also sued, lack of grounding was just… Absolutely fantastic with voltages that high, to put it mildly, and the wiggly path the plasma took during sphere charging would probably give everyone with any knowledge of fusion an instant panic attack.
But it worked… probably. Nah, what were those thoughts, his stuff always worked, at least initially – after the grace period was over though, the unorthodox solutions could SOMETIMES remind him why no one else was using them. Hopefully, this wasn’t one of those cases.
Deciding that the vambrace’s new insides couldn’t get secured any better, he examined the enormous stack of power cells secured in a crude, metal backpack with leather straps. If his calculations were correct, this setup should suffice for around four full strength discharges… But since the cells weren’t exactly new, he counted more on two, maybe three if they were lucky. Not ideal.
Which was why Ni would be the first guinea…. Uhh, the first tester of the thing. That way – in worst case scenario – Ni would die, and Ichi would kill him. Much more preferable to Ichi dying, and Ni killing him.
Regardless, he still had a lot of work to do… That unfortunately required sunlight. And preferably, a fresh head.
“I’m gonna call it for today,” he announced, collapsing onto the leather as exhaustion and hunger finally broke through the barriers of busyness.
As weird as it sounded, he tuned-out even his wounds, belly one included, despite it not being exactly shallow… or painless. It wasn’t bleeding anymore, which was a good sign – the chatbot had told him that if the bleeding stopped, his chances of death would decrease by a factor of five, and the AI was probably more competent than him at diagnosing people… Even if just because he did not have the slightest idea about it.
But before he could fully relax, Ichi noticed something. “Where’s Kendall?”
Peter’s eyes opened, suddenly aware that he hadn’t seen her in a while.
“Dunno, she was like…” Ni hesitated, glancing around and failing to spot her. “I don’t know, she went somewhere.”
“Kendall went somewhere on her own…” Ichi took a deep breath. “Without telling anyone…”
“Seems so.” Ni shrugged.
“Fucking damn it, Ni!” Ichi snapped. “Do you remember what happened the last time she did that?!”
“Yeah.” Ni scoffed. “She was having a kissing session with a pillow.”
“You know that’s…” Ichi closed her fist, producing audible cracks. “The time before that?”
“Drawing spicy comics on rocks.” Ni shrugged again.
Peter burst out with laughter as the mental image hit.
“Dra… Wait, what?” Ichi stuttered, losing a bit of momentum. “Fine, then three times ago.”
“Yeah, she did get stuck on a tree… somehow,” Ni finally admitted. “There’re no trees here though… Not real trees anyways.” She kicked an ankle high trunk next to her, sending it into the distance. “Probably went to take a shit.”
“Six hours ago?!” Ichi snapped.
“… Constipation?”
“NI!”
“Alrgiht, fine! Geez…” Ni relented. “Will go look for her, since yer too midget-clingy to move yer ass.”
“Thank you!” Ichi threw her hands into the air.
And Ni did just that, even if with an immense amount of grumbling. But Peter didn’t care about that – he was too busy laughing. For great many reasons.
“What’s so funny?” Ichi asked, laying next to him and creating a miniature earthquake in the process.
“I’m just glad some things never change…” he mumbled, massaging the base of his nose. “And also, I think I finally know who looks up weird shit on the computer.”
***
Once the initial shock had passed, their chat got surprisingly… comfortable. Not really pleasant, since they had just buried a loved one but relaxed enough for the tinies to calm themselves. They really liked the goulash though, and seemingly not able to get enough, ate an entire spoonful of it… Which for them was quite a lot.
She couldn’t help but feel pride.
Quian – the old woman who was the only one to truly understand her – was asking a lot of questions about the past, about them, about their past… And Kendall obliged, at least partially. Mostly because there were subjects she preferred not to touch either because they were too painful, or too scary for them.
And yet, it was the second part that came to bite her.
The tinies suddenly tensed up, their weary faces growing anxious again. After a few seconds, she realised why. Footsteps.
Ni emerged from around the corner just as Kendall turned to watch for her. Ni’s face brightened up with a smirk that not long ago could have easily caused an anxiety attack… But nowadays, was just unsettling. The tinies seemed to have her old reaction though.
“Found you! You gotta bathe before fucking off if you wanna los…” Her eyes snapped to the humans. “Oh, hello there!” She waved, giving them a deliberately toothy smile.
Himans got a bit tighter together… as if it could help them in any way. Kendall though… knew very well that any reaction approaching fear would only rile up Ni further. Not that she was ever able to follow her own advice.
“You got yourself some new friends, Ken?” Ni asked, sitting down precariously close, making the tinies jump.
“Ni, p-please…”
“So, those are the idiots who tried to steal Ichi’s boytoy, eh?” Ni cut her off.
Kendall sighed and nodded, deciding to at least try to seize the initiative. “Ni, t-this is… Mrs. Quian.” She pointed at the old woman. “Mrs. J-jang, daughter of Quian… S-she doesn’t speak… Her baby, b-but I d-don’t know how…”
“Baby?” Ni asked curiously, then lowered her head to take a better look, which made the woman recoil and attempt to hide the child. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you,” she assured, making calming gesture with her hands.
“T-they don’t understand you. They speak t-that… d-different language.”
“Which different language?” Ni asked, turning to face her. “Quite a lot of them.”
“W-well…” Kendall hesitated, trying to recall a name and getting reminded why thinking too hard was a bad idea. “Y-you remember the tinies t-that built me a t-temple with t-that… waterfall?”
“Oh, THOSE!” Ni smiled before clearing her throat and directing her gaze back at the tinies. “Thou art safe with me, have no worries.”
Quian cautiously nodded, loosening her embrace of Jiang. “Thank you, great dragon. We are…”
“So there standeth the hag, the murderous wench, the babe, and the... what is the last of them?” Ni interrupted, glancing at Kendall again.
“The last one is Zhou… He’s the son of Jiang and the…”
“Son, thou sayeth?” Ni focused on the tiny man who shrunk under her blood-red eyes. “Thought I smelled a man.”
Without hesitation, Ni reached and picked him up before he could even think of running away. She brought his wriggling form closer to her face, turning him pale.
“Ni, please…” Kendall tried, with predictable outcome.
“Harming him not. Naught else hath been promis’d,” Ni responded, sniffing his head, and traced his head with her thumb.
Everyone watched in uncomfortable silence as Ni examined the boy in every possible way, save for a taste test. She moved his head a few times, focusing on his facial features as if trying to burn them into her memory.
“Please… Let me go…” Zhou huffed, utterly terrified.
“Nay, I shall not do that... Thou appearest far too merry.”
“What?” He asked, confusion added to the kaleidoscope of his emotions.
“The great dragon thinks that… Y-you look fun…” Quian anxiously translated.
“In what sense FUN?!” he screeched, making Ni laugh.
And it wasn’t a jovial laugh, though not an evil one either. Just… foreboding. But the response that came didn’t tell Kendall much.
“Thou know’st, I have been somewhat seeking a human… ‘companion’… Pray, tell me, how skill’d art thou at giving massages?”
***