Esme wasn’t the only girl that fell into another world.
“Can you have lunch packed?” Tinker knew that the enclave’s staff most likely had the meal half-finished. “We’re going out.”
“Yes, domi.” Lemonseed bowed and left to make it so.
“Where are we going?” Stormsong asked.
We? How did it get to this point that she was so comfortable with having all these people in her life? No, she guessed she wasn’t really that at ease — but the edges of her discomfort were wearing away. Like the fact that she could strip in front of Pony without thinking. That it took Lemonseed’s arrival to remind her that an entire staff of nearly a hundred people were poised around her — waiting for her to do something. Anything. Be the domi. Save the world again.
“The scrap yard,” she told Stormsong but thought ‘Home.’
She drained the tea to be polite, gathered up the cookies and went to change.
Two newspapers, still neatly folded and bagged, lay in the driveway of the scrap yard. She picked them up on their way in, wonder why Oilcan hadn’t brought them in. Tinker expected to find her cousin at work and was both relieved and disappointed that he wasn’t. She didn’t know how he would take Nathan’s death. Too her, it was a dark well of guilt and grief with a crumbling edge. She was trying to keep her distance just so she could keep functioning. Ironically, she was fairly sure she could deal with Oilcan being angry at her more than she could help him with his grief.
“You know — I just don’t get it.” Stormsong said as Tinker was puttering around her workshop off of the junkyard’s offices, trying to get back into being herself.
“Get what?” Tinker asked.
“This place, you, and Windwolf — it just doesn’t — doesn’t make sense.”
“Yeah, I’ve never understood why he fell in love with someone like me.”
“I do. You can go toe to toe with him. It’s this place that doesn’t make sense. You two are too big for something like this.”
“Big?”
“With your abilities — why did you limit yourself to this tiny corner of the world?”
That sounded like Lain — who had always pushed for her to go to college, leave Pittsburgh, do something more with her life. She thought her plans were big enough, but it suddenly dawned on her that they were plans she laid when she was thirteen. They seemed huge when she was a child — even though they were larger than what other people planned — but yes, she’d grown to fit, and then the limits were starting to chafe. Had Lain seen a truth that she herself was blind to?
She veered from that line of thinking. She distracted herself by poking at her insecurities. “I think it’s fairly obvious what attracted Windwolf to me — I look like Jewel Tears. She’s his prefect woman. And I can’t measure up to that — elegance.”
“No. You only think that because you’ve never met Otter Dance.”
“Pony’s mother?”
“Ever notice that Pony is the shortest of the sekasha? Otter Dance is half Stone Clan sekasha.”
Tinker turned to look at Pony standing beside Cloudwalker; he was a half a head shorter yet wider in the shoulders and deeper in the chest than Cloudwalker. Pony was the most compact elf she’d ever met until the Stone Clan arrived. Now that she looked at him, she could see points of similarity. His eyes were brown where everyone else was blue. The shape of his face was different.
“You mean we — Jewel Tears and I — look like Otter Dance?”
“To know Otter Dance is to love her. Personality wise, you’re much more like Otter Dance than Jewel Tears could ever pretend to be — and she did try.”
Tinker wasn’t sure how to feel about that. She cleared her iboard. She needed a project — something big and complex — to keep from thinking about Nathan and all the messy bits of her life. Something that would help keep Pittsburgh safe from the elves, the oni — and the dragon. Oh gods, in all the chaos she forgotten about the dragon. There was a worthwhile project, especially since she hadn’t collected enough data on the Ghostlands yet.
She called up an animation program and created a quick rough model of the dragon, using a ferret body, a male lion’s head and a snake skin to cover the frame. Dragging the dragon model out onto the iboard, she let it gallop across the vast white. There had been a spell painted onto the dragon’s hide. She wasn’t sure what the spell did. Was it how the dragon raised its shield or was it how the oni were using to control it? It seemed to her that the wild waving of the mane might have triggered the spell — much like the domana hand gestures triggered their shields.
“What do you think?” She asked Pony. “How did it raise its shield?”
Pony put his hands to his head and wriggled his fingers. “It’s mane.”
Stormsong and the others that had been in the valley with her that morning nodded in agreement.
Okay, so the mane worked like domana fingers. She paused the dragon, added a “shield” effect to her model, and restarted the animation. “Next question is — does anything breach the shield?”
“Our shields do not stop light and air, because we must see and breathe,” Pony said. “They also have a limit to the force they can absorb at one moment. They will take a hundred shots fired in a hundred heartbeats, but not a hundred fired in one heartbeat.”
“So light and air.” Tinker opened a window in the corner of the iboard and noted this.
“Spell arrows don’t affect the dragon,” Cloudwalker reminded her.
Tinker wrote: different frequency of light? And then thinking of Pony driving his sword point through the shield, she added, “Speed of kinetic weapon?”
“Pony, can I see your sword?”
He drew his sword and held it out to her to examine. “Careful, domi, it is very sharp.”
She knew that the ejae had magically tempered ironwood blades, but she never examined them closely before. It was single length of rich cherry colored wood with a bone guard. The very tip came to a fine point. There was no sign of the spell that created the blade, which she supposed was necessary since the sekasha used their swords while shield spells were active. The surface area of the tip was smaller than a bullet; if they both struck at the same speed, the ejae would have a greater PSI. Pony’s slow push through the dragon’s shield meant that wasn’t the factor.
She wasn’t sure how they could use a “slow” weapon against the dragon. It would be unlikely that the beastie would ever standstill like that again. She considered a giant glue trap, sleep gas, and mega stun guns. They all had their drawbacks from “what do you use as bait?” to “would it do anything but just piss the dragon off?” That got her wondering about what would affect the dragon once they got past its shields. Where were its vital organs? Would poison necessarily kill it? Elves couldn’t tolerate some of the food humans ate in abundance. The inverse could be true — what was poisonous for Elfhome creatures might not hurt the dragon.
Maybe the stupid dream was telling her that she needed to melt the dragon with a bucket of water. Waterjets had jet speeds around Mach 3 and could cut through several inches of steel. She didn’t have any in her junkyard, but perhaps she could salvage one and modify it…