Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

Emily wakes up several hours later. A quick glance through the bird scout still latched to the balloon above tells her that they’re approaching another desert city, Ashdon, and almost at its walls already.

The walled city is about half the size of Eimdon: the sandy buildings follow a similar design style and layout, with the noble and trading districts being noticeable at a glance from above. However, outside the city walls is a sprawling cluster of tents and ramshackle houses spanning a far larger area than her home city.

Emily slides out of bed feeling refreshed. A quick glance at her status shows her resources filled to the maximum, including her health.

“That’s better,” she mutters, her mind finally quiet now that the buzzing activity within has gone.

What was my machina doing that whole time?

With the irritation gone, she lets her curiosity get the better of her despite an instinct telling her to ignore it. She focuses inwards on her cortex, searching for the areas affected by the recent phenomena. She quickly locates them, and the well-ordered structure along with her intimate understanding of the magical organ tells her immediately what those areas could affect.

My memories and emotions. Why are they being messed with, and why was it such a long process?

Poking a little closer, memories start flickering through her mind rapidly: standing in Herber’s shop, watching her father being dispatched by the now-dead Carlos; ripping the offending mage’s master to pieces as he begs for death; cowering under a pile of rags as her birth parents are torn limb from limb; discovering Juliana’s mangled corpse.

Emily quickly opens her eyes, tearing her focus away as she recognises the danger of looking through those memories again.

However, the moment her eyes snap open, she discovers an odd discrepancy.

I don’t feel anything.

As opposed to the expected reignition of her deeply buried emotions, she feels a disquieting sense of calm. Cautiously, she focuses on the affected memories again, picking out a single one to relive completely. She watches with cold apathy as she storms the Mandrago mansion, calmly judging her own actions within the final melee as she rips the gathered mages to shreds, not feeling an ounce of the rage she was consumed by in the moment.

“Huh,” she mumbles, opening her eyes. “It seems like I’ve completely separated my memories from the emotions associated with them. This could be useful.”

Her lips curl in a satisfied grin that sends an odd pang of guilt through her core as she quickly realises why she felt conflicted as the change was happening: she feels nothing about her recent sister’s death. The thought twists her gut in self-loathing and disgust, but those emotions fade abnormally quickly as she returns to a state of calm.

“Ah, it’s not just affecting my memories,” she mutters in realisation, a frown twisting her expression.

This could be a problem. Just how much has it altered my emotions? Is it just forcing me to regulate out negative ones, or will it balance positive ones too?

To test, Emily splits her focus and raises her hand, her eyes igniting with a cerulean glow as lightning flows out of her. She guides crackling plasma in a delicate dance, a smile creeping onto her lips as she enjoys playing with her power.

Another core tracks her emotional state as she focuses her primary consciousness on the energy manipulation, and she continues for a few moments before dropping the manifestation and letting her smile quickly fall back into her signature scowl. After completely resetting to neutral, she starts again, this time twisting the energy into a shimmering serpentine creature swimming through the air, her smile reappears and grows wider as she starts forming crackling scales along the illusory creature before bursting it in a fizzling display of light while releasing the manifestation again.

It’s definitely affecting all my emotions. My normal level of enjoyment seems to be muted slightly, though less than it has been since leaving Chroni.

When I made the snake, my happiness peaked and seemed to reduce more slowly afterwards than it did with the first test. Does that mean I can slow the balancing with a strong burst either way?

“That seems fair for regulating my negative emotions. As much as my anger helped me work out how to properly utilise elemental manifestation, I still could have dealt with that fight with the Mandragos better if I’d been calm,” she mutters. “Is this a normal change for mechanics?”

Without any way to answer her question, for now, she looks within her cortex again.

I definitely didn’t remove the emotions related to those memories though. Where are they?

Poking around a little, she quickly finds the answer as she reaches a dense bundle of microstructures that seems to resist her attention. With a little extra push, willing her cortex to give her access, she breaks through the weak resistance, more a suggestion than an actual boundary to her, and instantly regrets it.

An overwhelming wave of anger, sorrow, happiness, longing, and so many other emotions she can barely differentiate washes over Emily. She instantly flinches away from the closed-off section of her cortex, resisting the urge to scream, cry, and kill someone.

Within a few seconds, the aftermath of the emotional rush fades as she balances out again and slumps back onto her bed.

Fuck me, that was awful. Let’s not do that again any time soon.

Absentmindedly, Emily pulls her scarf up to cover her nose, breathing in the calming scent and letting out a relaxed sigh.

“At least I can enjoy this without feeling too sad,” she mutters before a frown creases her features. “Or much at all.”

She sits up and runs her fingers through the soft fabric as she processes the lack of any emotional response to the keepsake other than a calming sense of familiarity.

“I really am a monster,” she mutters, a lump forming in her throat that she quickly swallows as she inhales again, letting the scarf relax her. “I don’t think I should test overwhelming the balancing in the negative direction for now. I can cry about Jules as much as I want later. For now, we have a city to visit.”

As if on cue, the ship’s horn sounds, and a familiar presence approaches her door. Emily stands up and moves to greet them.

“Hey,” she says, swinging the door open. “Are we docking?”

“Yeah.” Podrick nods, not batting an eye this time at her predicting his approach. “Anton asked me to come grab you. He seems to be on edge, he’s been getting restless as we get closer to the dock. Also, he said you wanted to see the docking request drones that we use, so it’s better to get you now than to let you rest longer.”

Emily nods as she steps past him, skipping over the comments about the drone and thinking of the captain’s unease.

He’s definitely expecting trouble. Will they have marked our ship yet?

“It’s been bugging me, but why do you guys always call him by his name?” Emily asks as they walk side-by-side, her curiosity peaked by the boy’s seeming lack of respect. “Wouldn’t you usually call him captain?”

“I tried to when I first joined the crew.” Podrick shrugs, a playful smile creeping onto his face. “But he told me it’s too annoyingly formal: we’re not noble pricks so why bother.”

He says the last part while making his voice deeper in a poor impression of the man.

“Haha,” Emily chuckles lightly before quickly falling silent again.

Podrick pauses and, after taking a few more steps without him, Emily glances over her shoulder with a raised brow. Podrick is standing, staring at her with his mouth hanging open and his eyes wide in shock.

“What?” Emily asks, tilting her head as she halts for a moment.

“N-nothing,” Podrick stutters, a red tint to his cheeks as he breaks out of his shock and hurries back to match pace with her. “I just think that’s the first time I’ve seen you laugh.”

Emily rolls her eyes and continues walking. Podrick guides her in a different direction from the bridge, taking her to a small room around the midpoint of the ship where Emily knows a vertical hatch is installed. They enter the room to find Ash and Anton waiting for them.

“Sup,” Emily greets them, her attention quickly falling on the dog-sized object covered in fabric between them, sitting on top of the room’s hatch. “This our drone?”

“Indeed, it is,” Ash says, lifting up the fabric to reveal a boxy metal shape with several grills and pipes along the sides and a few propellers on the back and sticking out of the sides. “It’s not pretty, but it does the job.”

Emily nods, approaching and placing her hand on the drone to scan it. She realises the fabric is an uninflated balloon, and she finds a half-decent miniature steam engine within, along with a storage compartment big enough to carry an ingot of metal. She frowns as she looks at the internals, a question immediately rising to the forefront of her mind.

“How do you control this thing?” she asks, looking up at Ash and completely ignoring Anton beside them, awkwardly trying to find a moment to butt in. “It looks like it will just go in a straight line.”

“It does,” Ash replies with an exasperated sigh. “These things are kind of useless. They only go in a straight line and either up or down as they do. It’s only helpful for getting messages to and from the docks without having to land, and even that we have to do by attaching that.”

They gesture over their shoulder to an obvious winch system bolted to the floor and wall, powered by a pipe coming from the ship’s engine. It has a large spool of thin, finger-width cable with a clip on the end that’s attached to a mounting point on top of the drone, between the body and the balloon.

Emily grimaces at the solution, her mind spinning to create methods to control a drone.

I could do it with magic, but that defeats the purpose. Maybe I could do something with electricity? The universal transmitter works on long-distance communication, so maybe I can pick that apart and make a short-range version for sending instructions to machines. I’ll need a specialised workshop to start working on that though, and I’m still not quite sure how I’m meant to control the transmitter itself, or even how to receive the data they send. The blueprints mention data connection points to link to other systems, but nothing about those systems. It’s like I’m still missing key information.

“Emily?” Anton says, snapping her out of her thoughts and drawing her gaze away from the disappointingly basic drone. “Can we send it now?”

“Oh, sure,” she says with a dismissive wave, stepping back to let Ash get it running. “I was just thinking about ways to improve it.”

Anton nods and takes out a folded letter from the spatial pouch tied at his waist, crouching down to place it into the drone’s storage compartment as Ash loads the engine with coal and fires it up. The balloon slowly inflates as they all watch, and Podrick turns to Emily with curiosity. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

“How do you want to improve the drone?” he asks.

“Well, other than refining the visual design so it isn’t so ugly, I was thinking about how to send commands to it remotely so we can control it,” she replies without a thought. “I think I have some blueprints that may help me, but I don’t have a concrete way to do it without using magic at the moment. I’ll have to think about it.”

Podrick nods and falls silent, a thoughtful look on his face.

After the drone’s balloon is filled, Ash flips a selector switch on the side, redirecting the steam flow from the balloon to the propellers, before turning a dial on the side to set off a timer connected to the stops holding said propellers still. Moving quickly, they move to a lever beside the hatch and flip it, opening a hole in the floor and letting the drone slowly float down through it as the attached spool unreels.

Emily steps up to the edge, gazing down the long drop to the ground far below and watching as, a few seconds after clearing the ship, the drone’s propellers start spinning. The miniature airship slowly chugs forward, lowering down slowly as it heads towards the city walls.

“Are you sure the city will be the ones to receive it?” Emily asks, noticing the ramshackle housing spreading out from the wall even in front of the docks.

“They should be,” Anton answers. “The second they see a ship hovering nearby to request docking they send a guard out to receive the drone, and it’s a criminal offence for anyone else to interfere. There have been a few cases where the guards have been lazy and people have tried to steal the drones, but it’s quite rare.”

Emily nods in understanding.

“How come you don’t know this?” Podrick asks curiously. “Wasn’t it the same in Eimdon?”

“No.” She shakes her head in response. “The scrap and slums are only on the south side of the city, and the docks are in the east. It’s illegal to get within a certain distance of them outside the walls, and the city guards were constantly patrolling there. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure the Mandragos were paranoid about their magical resources being stolen in transit.”

“Is that what the deliveries they sent with guards will have been?” Anton asks, a light of realisation flashing in his eyes.

“Probably. Now, how long will we be waiting for a reply?” Emily asks.

“They should send the drone back in twenty to thirty minutes. Then, we’ll either be told which hangar to dock in now, or to wait nearby for a certain amount of time until one is free. I’m hoping we won’t have to wait: it looks unlikely, judging by the lack of other ships hanging around, but if we do, and it’s more than a few hours, we can just keep moving. We’re only about six hours from the next closest stop on our route.”

“Well, for now we wait.” Emily nods and turns to Ash, pulling a clockwork bird from thin air. “Here, I made this for you last night.”

She passes the bird and a small winding key to them, watching their eyes light up with interest as they take it.

“Thank you,” they say with a warm smile.

“No problem. I’m always happy to share my babies with people who appreciate them,” Emily responds with a matching smile of her own.