8 - New Storm

There weren’t well-defined streets through Barrel like in the other town I had seen - beyond what passed for a perimeter, the road narrowed to a footpath and quickly got lost among the disorganized buildings. It was early in the morning, but it was much busier than the size of the town would suggest, and the narrow, haphazard alleyways were woefully under-prepared for the foot traffic they were carrying. This place seemed like a quaint fishing village from a distance, and the architecture reinforced that - the buildings were made of old wood, set on posts and even rotten through in some places, but many of the buildings had metal parts crudely nailed onto them and hammered into shape.

Mercifully, once we arrived, the guild branch itself was relatively quiet. Though it was opulent compared to its surroundings, it wasn’t nearly as impressive as the one in Millstone. The footprint was small - hardly fifteen feet on each side, by my estimate - and there didn’t seem to be a quest board, just a young human woman snoring at the front desk.

I approached the desk, not sure whether I should wake the representative, when something else caught my eye - piled behind her were vacuum tubes, circuit boards, motors, and other early electrical components in various states of disrepair. I knew I needed to hide my incredulity, but I couldn’t help but stare for a moment. How the hell is that stuff here? It’s tech from the fifties, but it’s completely out of place in a world like this.

Before I was able to regain my composure, Raaf noticed me staring. “What’cha lookin’ at?”

“Oh, the stuff in the back is just, uh…” I raced to find an excuse. “Pretty?”

He gave me a quizzical glance. “…Sure.”

The woman at the desk began to stir, before bolting upright and greeting us in one jumbled breath. “Hello welcome to the Barrel’s Guild at Adventure my help is Kary how can I name you!”

“Oh my goodness, are you okay?” I couldn’t help but shrink back a little when she jolted to attention. She was a mess - her hair stuck out like she had been struck by lightning, the bags around her eyes told me that she hadn’t properly slept in days, and even through the usual unpleasant smells of this world, it was not fun to be this close.

The long pause she took to stare into space before answering made the real answer obvious. “Yes, I’m fine, perfectly. Uh… Yeah. How can I help you?”

“…All right. I was, uh, wondering where the quest board is?”

“Oh, you don’t know? There aren’t any, here, it’s just, uh.” She gestured wildly at the piles of components behind the desk. “Collecting Dwarvish scrap, no rank restriction or anything. Nothing much else to do. That’s why there, uh…” She paused to stare into space again. “That’s why it’s just me here.”

“You mean the wreckage in the field?”

“No, but there’s parts of the old Mountainhome that are still intact. All of a sudden the King started buying the parts from there, so the guild’s selling. Good timing, too.”

“Good timing?”

“The, uh, lake started heating up a few months back, so there aren’t any fish to catch. The only way anyone’s putting food on the table is by renting out beds to scavengers.”

---

The field was abuzz with adventurers walking between the town and a few openings around the field. I had trouble imagining there was nearly enough space for this many people even if they were paying townsfolk to let them crash, some of them had to be doubling up. The wreckage in the lake loomed to the west - I had assumed the lake was just a huge hot spring, but if it was a recent change, the machine had to be at fault. The only thing I know of that could keep a whole lake this hot would be… I shuddered to even think it. The Dwarvish parts I saw could have been the right time period for a reactor. Water’s supposed to be good at blocking radiation, but if there’s fuel leaking into the lake, all these people…

Surely they would move away if the water was killing them. The guild would notice if their adventurers started dying, too. I struggled to convince myself. I can’t risk it. If… If I hear about anyone getting sick, I’ll speak up.

“What’s up, Lily?”

“Oh, it’s… nothing.”

We turned to follow one of the streams of adventurers, but before we got far, we heard a familiar voice from behind. “Lily! Raaf! Reunited again, are you also taking part in the salvage?”

Raaf gave me a side-eye. “Uh, yeah, man. You’re… How are you holding up?”

“Fine! Perfectly! And you?”

I scoffed. “Well enough. I assume you want to come with us?”

Brask flashed a tense grin. “We’re still a team, aren’t we?”

I raised my eyebrows at Raaf. “Sure.”

We followed Brask into what remained of a hallway sticking up through the grass. It was fairly dark, though a few people were carrying the same type of lantern that I saw in the Millstone inn, this time with a handle and a bracket to stop them from rolling away. I was surprised at how well I could see - even far away from the lanterns, I could see the vague impressions of the space if I took a moment to focus. Furthermore, even without actively using my magic, if I paid attention, I could feel my own “warmth” reflecting off of the walls when I got close. Brask, however, didn’t seem to be so lucky; even holding out a lantern of his own, he didn’t seem confident at all.

“Hey, Brask? Are you doing all right there?”

“Not to worry, Lily, I have everything under-” In the middle of his sentence, Brask tripped over a scavenger, apparently crouching too low to be visible in the lamplight.

“Twat! Pay some fuckin’ attention!”

“Damn, I knew Homs had pretty bad night vision, but even with a light?” Raaf jabbed.

Brask stood back up, dusting himself off. “Argh. I can see… well enough.”

“You clearly can’t, come on.” I helped Brask up and started to guide him through the center of the hallway. “Are we going anywhere in particular?”

“No, uh, just… Following the wall until we find a good spot.”

---

After increasing our pace, it only took a few minutes to find a room that looked promising. It was a mess, of course, and the remains of the furniture were pushed away from the walls, but in the center of the ceiling there was what appeared to be a fluorescent light fixture.

“Hey, check this out.”

Brask stayed close to the wall as I clambered to the center of the room. “Sorry, what are you seeing?”

Raaf stood between us, at the edge of the debris. “It’s some kind of box on the ceiling..?”

Oops, I shouldn’t know what a fluorescent light is… “No one’s checked it, they’re all looking along the walls.” The bulbs were long gone, but I imagined the ballasts might be valuable.

As I was fiddling with my tools to try and get into the fixture, I heard Brask sit down. “Hey, Lily?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m… sorry for how I acted before.”

I paused in my work, but I didn’t say anything out loud.

“I, uh, wasn’t thinking of you as an equal.”

Raaf bristled. “And how exactly were you thinking of her?”

“Oh, uh, not like that! Sorry, I meant…”

The air felt heavy.

“I wasn’t thinking of you as an adult.”

“…Go on.”

“You’re your own person. It’s not my job to tell you what to do, and it was wrong of me to try to impose precautions on you like that.”

“And?” I turned back to my work, intentionally making some noise so Brask could tell.

“…And I shouldn’t have treated Raaf like a threat in the first place. You know him better than I do, and it was your decision to make to begin with.”

I sighed. I’d have to set some boundaries, but… He was clearly trying to make things right. “…Fine. Apology accepted.”

---

We’d been scavenging at Barrel for well over a week, earning a respectable amount of money by checking places the human adventurers couldn’t reliably see, and the route to the exposed section of the Old Mountainhome was becoming second-nature. When we first mentioned not having a place to stay, Kary mentioned that the guild had set up a shack with some bunks on the edge of town. She was so swamped she hadn’t been able to use it much, but she offered to let us stay there in exchange for some help with her work.

It was fascinating to see the variety of components the dwarves had managed to make - Kary only knew how to break them down and sort them by shape, but I recognized them for what they were. There weren’t any integrated circuits or transistors, but all the tech to make a radio or a vacuum tube computer was here. Actually building anything would have outed me immediately, but… I couldn’t deny that the temptation was there. After we managed to work through most of the backlog, though, Kary started getting her life back together - a fact for which my nose was very grateful.

We were on our way back to the salvage site for the third time that day when it happened.

“Lily-person does feel strangely the air?” Raaf was teaching me some basic words in the Cat’s Tongue. I had some trouble with vocabulary, but the grammar was simple enough. “You reach knowledge of speech (conditional) I leave to place person (conditional) you come socially to building mine” was one of the sentences he used as an example, which I took to mean something like “If you learn the Cat’s Tongue, you’ll be able to visit me if I move to the Beast’s Den.”

“Right, air does, ah… tall fur?”

“What’s going on?” Brask always seemed on edge when we were practicing.

“There’s something off about the weather. It’s making my fur stand up, I don’t like it.”

“Do you think it’s dangerous?”

“It feels kinda like there’s gonna be-” Before Raaf could finish his sentence, there was a blinding flash from the east. When we turned to look, where the sky was overcast just a moment ago, we could see the orange evening sun filtering through a hole in the clouds.

I fell backwards as the ground shook, so filled with terror at first that all I could do was stare. After regaining some control over my faculties, I pointed a shaky finger at the hole. “What… What the hell was that?”

Brask and Raaf looked quizzically down at me. Raaf broke the silence first. “Lily, what do you mean? It’s a Celestial crash-landing, the same thing that happened three weeks ago. Admittedly, it’s definitely not good that it happened again so soon, but…”

I blinked, still unable to think straight. “Oh, yeah, of course! That’s what it is, I thought it was something different because, uh… Silly me?” Fuck!

Brask looked concerned. “Lily… Do you need to lie down? Should I get you some water?”

“…Yeah, I think that might be a good idea.” Or, at least, a potential excuse? The shockwave roared past us as Brask helped me back to the shack, and by the time we arrived, I could already see dark clouds forming at the center of the hole.