Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

The elevator slows to a halt before one of the sealed doorways lining the shaft, and Emily steps up to place a palm against it.

A small nudge with her machina slides the internal bolts out of the way, and she pushes the door open, letting out a wave of hot air.

Emily and Pod don’t flinch, but their visitors all take a step away from the heat.

“That’s intense,” Anton says, raising a hand to shield his eyes.

“We’re essentially walking into a boiler,” Emily explains, waving her hand and casting Water Plating, coating the unawakened merchants in a thin film of water. “That should feel better.”

“Thank you.” Anton nods in appreciation, inspecting the clear film sticking to his skin.

Without waiting for them, Emily heads into the heating chamber, stepping through an invisible barrier of mana into a heat so intense that even she starts to feel it. Her eyes scan the low-hanging metal ceiling, searching the glowing orange runes covering its surface for the faulty connection.

She spots the problematic runes and moves to fix them, pulling out her engraving staff and a handful of powdered fire crystals at the same time as Pod leads their visitors in.

“What’s this chamber heating?” Angela asks him.

“Water for our steam turbines, the engines that convert motion into electricity.”

“Where does it enter from?” Ash questions, searching the walls for any signs of piping.

“Oh, it doesn’t. We boil in the chamber above this one.”

“Why? It seems inefficient for it to be so hot in here if it's not the room you’re using.”

“So she can do that,” Pod says, gesturing to Emily with his head. “The boiling chamber is in a pressurised system, so it would mess with it if we had to unseal it every time we wanted to do maintenance.”

Emily finishes adjusting the room’s seal and puts away her staff, turning back to her guests.

“That’s part of the reason, at least,” she says, walking over and gesturing for everyone to follow her back to the elevator. “The gathering array below us only naturally produces water, earth, and unattributed mana, so I have to convert it first if I want to use it in fire-based arrays like the one heating the water above us. Setting up a room like this that’s constantly being filled with fire mana gives me a well to draw from if I need it elsewhere in the factory.”

“So, this is part of your magical infrastructure?” Anton questions.

“Exactly. To be honest, the magical side is what’s slowed us down so much,” Emily says, rapping her knuckles on the silvery-grey metal doorframe as they pass through it. “Just mixing enough of this heat-resistant alloy to help seal the mana into this chamber took a while.”

She shuts the door behind them, pausing in silence for a moment to make sure no mana is leaking out before she starts up the elevator winch again.

“I won’t show you the steam chamber for obvious reasons, so next is the vent hall.”

“The what?” Anton blurts in confusion, voicing the question also written on his companions’ faces.

“The vent hall!” Pod beams with excitement as the rising platform stops before another door, locked with a matching internal deadbolt. “It’s the first stage of water collection, where Emily cut a load of vents into the base of the cliff near the seabed outside.”

The door slides open to reveal an empty, narrow corridor of smooth stone without a single light or marking. It’s lit by the orb of light following above Emily’s head, but a deep rumbling emanates from the shadowy depths beyond, sending unsettling shivers down Anton, Angela, and Ash’s backs.

Emily and Pod step out of the elevator shaft without hesitation, and their guests follow a moment later.

As they walk, Emily disperses the film of water covering their guests and wraps all of them in an invisible, sound-isolating barrier, cutting off the unsettling rumbling that’s getting louder as they follow a bend in the path.

It doesn’t take long for the confined walkway to open up into a chamber wider than it is deep, stretching out to their left and right for hundreds of metres.

“Woah!”

Three matching exclamations fall from their visitors’ lips as Emily raises her light orb, illuminating the vast space.

Lining the wall facing them are dozens of thin, horizontal slots cut into the stone, spraying out cascading streams of water that join together into a massive artificial waterfall. A few metres below each slot, in the direct path of the water with a large pool forming below them, are large metal rotors, fixed to a central shaft stretching across the chamber.

The water gathering at the bottom of the chamber is white with motion, churning as it’s dragged deeper into the storage vats lining the corridor they’ve just passed through.

“The water flows through the vents and first passes over these rotors,” Emily explains, walking to the edge of the suspended metal walkway they’ve stepped out onto and leaning over the metal railing to point at the swill below. “It’s then taken into a storage chamber that feeds into the steam chamber. Later, I’m going to set it up to dump any excess back into the sea, but it’s not needed for now. We’re slowly collecting more water than we use whenever the vents are open, and I’d rather have that failsafe in place by the time it becomes a problem, so I don’t have to deal with this room filling up.”

“Wait, you can shut those things?” Angela questions, her voice tinged with disbelief.

“Yep. They all have an internal bulkhead a few meters in, ready to slide into place if we need it. They’re connected to the big shaft being turned by the rotors,” she says, pointing down as the others lean over the railing with her, “which also runs up to the Source to aid in power generation, so closing them isn’t too hard. Unfortunately, the amount of pressure against them once they’re closed makes it a pain to open them again, especially if the Source stops running.”

“You know, looking at this, a few weeks suddenly doesn’t seem like that long.”

“After what she did to Calypso in a month, I can’t say I’m surprised.” Anton nods his agreement. “Though, this is impressive on a different scale. It’s a bit weird not being able to hear anything, though.”

“I could drop the barrier if you want,” Emily responds, shifting the runes forming the spell to let in the thunderous cacophony of falling water for a moment.

Pod flinches, but the other three immediately slap their hands to their ears, wincing as the rush of sound hits them.

“But we wouldn’t be able to talk like this,” she finishes, reactivating the spell and plunging them back into comfortable silence. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

“Argh, ignore him. Not hearing my surroundings for a bit is fine with me,” Angela grumbles, rubbing her ears. “That noise’d make us deaf.”

“Ha,” Emily scoffs as Pod and Anton laugh at Angela’s comment. “You’d get used to it. Now, let’s go have a look at the Source. We wouldn’t want to keep them waiting.”

A nod of her head pushes the others’ attention towards Ash standing beside them, staring off into the distance as they try to spot where the rotor’s shaft connects to the wall in the shadows beyond Emily’s light.

“Huh,” they turn back, noticing their friends’ gazes and freezing.

“We’re moving on,” Emily clarifies, stepping back the way they came. “We’re going to go have a look at the Source. It’s what that shaft is helping to run.”

Ash’s eyes light up as they break out of their surprise, immediately moving to follow her.

“Only helping? You need more energy than that?” they question, glancing back over their shoulder as the artificial waterfall fades into the darkness.

“You can never have too much energy.”

“Didn’t we almost blow up the Source because we tried to store too much energy?” Pod asks with a cheeky grin.

Not just almost. It took three resets to fix that one without you getting scorched.

“And we would have gotten to see some beautiful, controlled explosions if we did.”

The others chuckle at their back and forth as they walk into the elevator again. Emily closes the door behind them, sealing in the faint rumble of flowing water as she disperses her barrier and starts up the winch again. She recasts Water Plating, protecting the group as they stop before yet another unmarked metal door.

It opens with a hiss of steam as water vapour rushes out through the initial crack, covering the group in a damp heat that clings to the back of Emily’s unprotected throat.

“Damn. Don’t you need that contained?” Angela asks, instinctively raising her arms to protect herself.

“The steam, yes. The pressure? Not at this point,” Emily replies, stepping through the open doorway with Pod as their visitors lower their arms, getting a clear view into the room. “It’s already passed through the Source.”

They’re left speechless as they take in the massive construct filling the hall that matches and exceeds the workshop above in terms of scale.

The metal monster stretches from floor to ceiling, tens of metres above, with enough spinning gears and moving parts to play tricks on the observers’ eyes.

“This is the Steam Source, generation two,” Emily states proudly, reaching out and gently running her metal hand over one of the generator’s walls.

“It’s incredible,” Ash murmurs in awe, walking forward and tentatively putting their hand beside Emily’s, feeling the purr of the machinery.

“I know, right?” Emily looks over with a wide grin, holding onto the bubbling excitement as she gestures for everyone to follow her around. “The steam chamber below pumps out through those pressurised nozzles.”

She gestures down a long row of metal rotors suspended on a rapidly rotating shaft, with small metal pipes jutting from the floor below, spraying steam up into them.

“The rotational energy from these is combined here with the shaft from below, before being used to turn the coils in this.”

They stop beside a large, sealed metal tube that hums with a faint crackle audible through the thick casing. Emily conjures a cluster of lights above the group, forming them into the image of a rotating coil of wire to illustrate the process within without destroying her masterpiece.

“The inside is magnetised, so it generates electricity.”

A small spark of lightning crackles across the spinning, illusory wires, dispersing the image before leaping to Emily’s metal fingers and vanishing.

“Which is then stored in this battery for now,” she finishes, stopping beside a metal box that takes up a quarter of the room, connected to the coils by a thick cable wrapped in beast hide.

She lifts a hand to the metal casing, feeling the buzzing power at the tip of her fingers as if there weren’t several inches of insulation blocking it from her grasp.

“I coined that one too,” she says, pre-empting a question about the unique term. “A battery is any container that converts between chemical and electrical energy. Hell, electric eel spines are basically natural batteries. That was a useful discovery.”

She turns away from the humming battery and sees confusion marking the faces of everyone but Pod.

“Right,” she mutters in realisation as her excitement vanishes into the ether. “Not a common creature.”

Emily pulls a thin, dark blue spine with a bright, crystalline bulb on one end from her belt. She holds it out to the others, letting them get a closer look at the faint streaks of lightning dancing in its depths.

“They’re a magical beast that lives in The Crystal Waters under The Glade, and in the deep ocean, most commonly in the stretch between Keban and the Lerus Isles,” she explains, releasing a thin stream of lightning mana along the dark flesh of the spine, watching as it sinks into the bulb, making it glow brighter and brighter. “They attack by channelling lightning mana through the ends of these spines, and they’ve naturally adapted to be incredible containers for charge. Meaning we can do things like this.”

She stops supplying the spine with power, shifting it in her grip to hold the bulb, pointing the thin end of the spine into empty space. Emily squeezes the bulb between her fingers, and it pops with a crack as a stream of lightning shoots along the spine, tearing out into the open air and dissipating harmlessly.

“It works perfectly to store lightning mana as is, and after a little processing and mixing in a few other materials, both magical and not, it makes a perfect medium for batteries.”

“Wait, is that what’s in this?” Angela asks, pulling the lightning fork Emily gave her from her pocket and squeezing its activation button, letting out a small crackle that’s similar to Emily’s demonstration but smaller.

“Yep.” Emily nods. “Though, that one was one of my test pieces and still has a bit of a lightning crystal mixed in. It’ll be slow, but it should use atmospheric mana to recharge itself over time, so you won’t need a proper generator.”

“Cool. Thanks, Emily.”

“That’s alright. I’d just end up tearing it apart for pieces eventually anyway. I’d rather it goes to someone who might use it.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that,” Angela says, flashing Emily a mischievous grin before glancing towards Anton. “It’ll see use next time I’m asked to take over a night shift.”

“Hey,” the man in question whines in injustice.

Emily scans him over with an analytical gaze, sending a shiver down the poor man’s back as she nods thoughtfully.

“Just avoid his heart and spine,” she says, with Angela eagerly nodding along like a child being taught to steal by her parents. “It shouldn’t be strong enough to do any permanent damage, but he’s pretty scrawny.”

“Hey!”