Chapter 65: Drifter

Salamede POV

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It was the morning after the trip south to scout out the forts that I got up and went to my first day at my new job. While the work was nothing I hadn't done before, there was an element of precision demanded that I had never been held to before. I was in one of the dorm rooms that needed cleaning as I began my first day of practice with Jessica, an older woman with soft red hair and wrinkles that went around her green eyes.

The walls of the room were all white, smooth stone with an oak wood floor that matched the floor of the hallway. On the right side was a large, luxurious bed with a deep blue blanket and dark wood frame. Right now, the bed, the bookstand beside it and the dresser along the left wall were all a mess with bits of clothing and papers scattered about. The only item spared was the large window looking out over the main academy yard, but even that had dirt smears in the corners.

The work was a bit more demanding than usual, but the pay was so many more times anything I could have earned even after a years' time doing my regular side jobs. Eventually I got in the groove with a natural ease that impressed Jessica. That allowed my mind to wonder, even though the last thing I wanted to do was focus on the knot of worry in my stomach.

Once I finished that room, I went over to Jessica who was working on a room at the opposite end of the hall and asked her a question that had been nagging at me.

"Excuse me, but I've been wondering how much a mana crystal costs." I asked as gently as my rough voice would allow.

The shorter woman in a white maid outfit raised an eyebrow at that question but answered none the less.

"That depends on the size. From what I 've seen in my years here, a crystal the size of a pebble can run several gold coins, if the supply is good." She said, as I felt a stone drop into my stomach.

"Why do you ask?" She asked me in turn.

"Oh, just wondering how much getting one of these mana lights would cost." I said idly as I pointed towards the ceiling at one of the small diamond shaped crystals that was attached to the smooth stone ceiling.

"Bah, best put such dreams out of your head. Those are only used to impress the parents visiting and furnish the high tuition we charge here. Even the Academy heads tower only got them recently. Folks like us could never afford even one of them." She said dismissively.

I nodded and went back to earning my pay.

The day passed and it was an hour after lunch that I decided that I couldn't put it off anymore and finished working. After taking off the white robe that covered my green dress and placing it in the staff closet, I went over to Eli's house. I approached the tower with its vine ridden exterior and misshapen bricks with dull grey coloring, which was quite an eyesore to my fashion sense, but I suppose Eli found such an outer appearance… acceptable.

The lack of female occupants in the place was painfully apparent.

I knocked on the door and after a few seconds I heard the shuffle of feet approach from inside the squat tower. Then the door opened, and I saw Eli, dressed in a plain white shirt and brown pants, with his curious iron chain mail veil attached to two steel bands around his shoulders. His deep purple eyes that peeked out over the top of the covering got a bit happier when he registered me, something that still made me walk a bit taller and forced me to suppress a slight smile whenever I saw it.

The knot of worry loosened slightly but I scolded myself and pushed on towards what brought me here.

"Hello, Eli. Do you mind if we talked for a bit?" I asked him through a spirit connection as I came in. The house was lit up with a single mana crystal lamp in the middle of the ceiling, giving off a glow that played across the solid grey brickwork of the walls.

"Sure, I was just working on something for Cell. That was the name we eventually came to this morning." Eli said as he walked backwards and went over to the opened hatch made up of dark oak wood that served as the false floor entrance to the basement.

"Um… this is probably going to be a long talk, could we find somewhere comfortable to sit?" I said in a neutral tone.

He raised an eyebrow at that but went down into the basement and brought up the chair from his work bench and set it beside the hammock. He went to close the hatch, but he held off for a few seconds until his odd metal familiar came bounding through. It had two odd legs made of wood that it molded around and moved as its sphere dangled in the middle with nothing else but the rest of its blobby body and odd shapes moving across its surface.

"That's just so it… eh I'll just use he, 'it' feels too impersonal, can move without having to exhaust himself with constant wind spells. It took some doing, but he seems to love it. Once I get another little gadget done, he'll have a lot more utility." Eli said as he sat down in the hammock.

I just felt that knot tighten further and decided to sit in the chair. After fidgeting with my dress for a few seconds I looked back up and took a deep breath.

"Eli, I've been helping you with these missions through some pretty dangerous areas. Even so, you've done more for me than anyone else in my life besides my own mother. And it's not like I don't appreciate the things you've done for the Kelton community. Getting those roads was a huge boost-"I realized that I was rambling so I took a deep breath and started again.

"Eli, those mana crystals you've been using to make these devices are worth a lot. I didn't know exactly how much until I went into the academy and asked about their prices. The crystals you've been spending are worth far more than what we got from the troll. Not a lot more as in pay for my annual rent but a lot more as in buying my whole neighborhood and rent it out for free over the course of years kinds of worth.

Even before that I suspected the exorbitant amount of money involved in making these things, but I kept telling myself that you were just cheap when it came to anything but magical materials and saved stuff up and maybe you found a hidden treasure trove but… Eli, being a scion?

I could understand having that many mana crystals on hand, someway somehow, but having the resources to become a scion on top of that? Or maybe you were the progeny of some unfathomable coupling of two never before heard of dual element scions who somehow also hit the unfathomable luck of getting both their elements into their child and this 'science' was just some long-lost art of theirs. I could come up with a thousand different excuses to such questions and ignore this whole business with necromancers if that was all and I really, really pushed aside my doubts as I did so.

But, not knowing you're a scion?" I asked with an odd sense of hurt in my voice.

"That just doesn't happen. Every child's most dire dream is to reach that peak before they slink back into the mud of obscurity and you reached it without even knowing it? How… Eli our friendship means the world to me and while I know we aren't on remotely equal footing; I can't keep denying what my eyes are telling me. I've put myself in danger multiple times to help you and I think I deserve some answers." I finished, biting my lip at the last part, not from regret but from my own nerves.

Eli sat there for a while looking at me as I saw his mind working on some problem he was trying to crack.

"Eli?" I asked.

"If you had any sort of ulterior motive and were going to betray me it would have been when I was knocked out 'giving birth' as you called it. You would have had days preparation to set up an ambush and getting helpers to restrain and imprison me would have been child's play so there's no reason to hold out anymore. I'm just trying to make this as… digestible as possible." He said and he spent a minute more going over it before continuing.

"As much as I hate stories that do this, my tale will have to start in the middle as the beginning is lost to me." Eli said with a heavy-set tone.

I nodded and he continued.

"Science and technology were developed to help humans overcome our limitations. To help us grow food, travel at high speeds, and produce every other good imaginable. We needed to do that because my home had no magic."

I struggled to stay silent and not interrupt him with the dozens of questions such an absurd statement demanded. He seemed to notice and his purple eyes showed he was smiling but he continued after the momentary pause.

"I will take you back to my earliest memory. About ten thousand some odd years ago, I finished my work shift on an expedition to colonize untouched lands. But that shift lasted far longer than it should have. When we… traveled along special routes to get to our destination we were knocked out of the vast lanes that enabled us to go at speeds far faster than we could otherwise. Afterwards the colonists were put in a special kind of sleep that left them needing very little food or water.

As someone with vast ages of experience, I was elected to keep the ship running along with its… propulsion, farms, sewage facilities, communications-,"

"Farms? On a ship? "I couldn't keep it in anymore.

"It was a big ship." He said mildly and coughed. Then my mind registered how long ago he was talking about. I looked him up and down again, but his visible age was probably misleading considering his magi… wait they didn't have magic so how-? Eli started talking again so I pushed aside the question.

"Over the course of the trip I had to work myself very hard to catch whatever spare resources passed us by and keep the ship going. It took far longer for them to recover us than it should have and it was only after getting back that I discovered the cause of the whole mess." At this, Eli grew sour and his eyes showed an anger I hadn't seen them hold before.

"Some self-important governor made a play to take over his whole region and secede. He cut off the hyperlinks and tried to fortify his position. Of course, the leaders of the government who paid for my expertise in helping this expedition did not agree with his decision and through a long tale of tragedy and human sacrifice culminating in a betrayal that went down in history as a breeding ground for overly dramatic re-telling, the mess was sorted out and they eventually got around to rescuing us. But the damage had been done," His eyes grew pained and distant at this.

However, he turned around and moved his hair up as he lowered his shirt to reveal two long cysts in running along his spine.

"What do you see?" He asked in a distant voice.

"Two long cysts that are very oddly balanced along your spine." I said honestly.

He just huffed as he turned back around in his hammock.

"Those cysts are some of the most advanced technologies in existence. They can… to stick to our subject, I'll only explain the function that pertains most to my story. The human mind only has so much capacity and when its contents go unused, they get dumped. As I worked to keep the ship going, I had to make sacrifices to keep the people alive and…" His voice cracked a bit at the end.

"I spent centuries on that ship. Keeping the various systems going, using whatever spare resources I could scrounge up from rocks that were within reach. Over time I started to forget things as I tinkered and fiddled in the great expanse of machinery and one of those things was my family" The bitter tone in his speech was summed up in that final word.

"I loved them. I don't remember what they looked or sounded like, but I do know that not for a single moment did I stop loving them. But the demands on me were incredible and at some point, without my knowledge or consent, my mind began replacing them with maps of the ship, all the ways to put it all back together from the simplest bolts to the most complex engines and all the thousand other tasks needed to keep the people alive.

The… A.I. chips, which is what these are, would typically have been able to handle those tasks but all of their computational power had been used up to run the ship to replace what should have been the human crew who had sadly died when we were taken out of the hyper lanes. So, I did the one thing you ought never do and made a third." He said as he ran a hand over his right thigh, and he invited me to do so as well. As I ran my hand over the spot on his pants, I felt the bump of this chip-thing, in much the same shape as the ones I saw along his spine.

"This chip contains all of the memories of my family that I managed to save." He said in a plain, dead tone.

"Okay, that's… wow" I said as I went to sit beside him in the hammock.

"All right, before we get too deep into it, I have some questions about your home when you're ready to answer them." I said with a comforting pat on his shoulder.

He sat there for a minute taking in the floor before he stirred again.

"Okay, what do you want to know?" He said in an even tone.

"10 thousand years ago? How did you live that long without magic?" I asked.

He smiled and seemed to relax as he leaned back and laid down in the hammock while leaving enough room for me to lay on the other end. Relaxed and in a laid back position, he coughed and went on.

"Cloning is a process whereby a new body that is identical to ours is regrown from the earliest stages of development. The new body starts out the same as our old one but nanites, impossibly small machines, copy our brains patterns and graft it into the mind of the growing body. This allows us to transfer into when it comes of age. Another possibility is similar and cheaper but it's not as comfortable or easy in day to day life. That involves the nanites essentially cloning parts of your body and replacing the older organs and tissues in a gradual process of grafting and replacement, fiber by fiber."

I didn't understand what most of that meant and I didn't dare try to guess a what all was involved in such a convoluted set up. But I got the general idea. I think.

"Why do the A….I? things need to be in your body? And why not make more than just one?" I asked.

"Ahh if only I could have. The top section of the ship had been the property of the company who owned the ship and held their human crew who ran it while the bottom section I had been in was considered the domain of the government who had chartered the vessel. That top section had been torn clean off during the 'accident' along with everyone else who had the authorization to use the... I guess you could say the tools to create standalone AI chips as well as many other things that could have helped me.

I could have hacked thorough the higher-grade tools, but once they detected that all the crew had perished, they melted themselves into hot slag to protect the companies' secrets. But the cloning system and the tools to do basic repair and maintenance functions were considered universal goods. And the cloning system was something I knew just enough about to allow me the third chip." He said but I had to put up my hand.

"The tools could think?" I asked, completely mystified.

"In a certain way, but we're getting sidetracked with minutiae. When we got back, I spent a long time in a mercenary outfit. Trying to get in the most chaotic environment I could think of to cover the tracks of me using the third chip, but when that failed I just… for a while I just drifted in my work, trying to get the money or connections to get back home so I could start what would have been a long and arduous search.

Unfortunately, the government who employed me collapsed and was replaced in time with a new one. This new group took exception to me wandering about, not putting my considerable talents towards the 'revolution'. I took exception with their exception and made off on my own. It was during my time on the run that a security officer discovered the extra chip. I had a few tricks up my sleeves and more hiding holes than they had brain cells but when it's you against humanity the odds become long.

I was caught in due time and for my crimes, burned for the sin of heresy." Eli said. Then he went through explaining his journey through death, the meeting and death of the Druid Lilly, all culminating in his arrival here.

"Wow" was all I had to say to that. Eli gave a light chortle before responding.

"It's been far more exciting than normal as of late," He agreed.

"I… I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you don't seem like someone who's lived for untold thousands of years." I said.

His purple eyes looked at me with a sense of mirth.

"Why? Should every slash of my tongue weave a hundred tales with a thousand riddles therein, all leading you through a maze in the endless expanses of the mind?" He asked with a lighthearted tone.

"Well, that's…um" I fumbled.

"I've known people like that. They get past their first millennium and they think God himself put them there to rule over mankind. A lot of snotty shits who hid out in fortresses for centuries scheming and playing word games in business deals get the idea that they've reached the pinnacle of existence. Paying no heed to the advice of the 'servant' who worked with his hands building ships and… homes, they go out working some financial or political scheme. Sometimes these schemes involve taking me out to stop the construction of a new base to improve the prospects of some older one they owned or to replace me with their own construction crew.

But they never realize the true extent of the 'mundane mechanics' influence until they brush up against it. I can't count the number of times someone tried to seize control of a district I was in or take out the station I was at working on only to realize too late that they sent out the order using infrastructure I built all the while using computers whose manufacturers I had bugged centuries before they were even conceived.

Every time it ends with them in a trash heap hidden in the refuse or floating out to god only knows where.

What they never seem to realize is that impatience is a virtue all its own, if applied in the right quantities at the right time. I disdain word games and lies outside of the direst necessities. I care not a wit for the subtle word games and manipulations of the young." He said with a pointed look towards me. Despite myself, I couldn't help but smile.

"I know my nature. I am, at my heart, a family man who like to build things. I don't know if I can find the necromancers to get back home or if such a possibility even exists, but I do know that I can rebuild the connector, given enough time and considering the circumstances of how I got here, it may be better if I hold off on getting home for a while" He finished.

I just sat there for a while trying to take all that in.

Trying and failing.

"What did your family look like?" I asked the question I could most easily understand and ask.

"That's the strange part, there was no portraits or images of them in any of my quarters or on my person. I can't begin to imagine why but that's way, way down the line of things I need to solve. Although I should probably just be grateful it was only the connector that's missing, if it was the AI chips themselves the task would be orders of magnitude more difficult. Although, if it hadn't been all the of the AI chip that was lost that would have been better since its auto repair function would have engaged and I would be able to use all the tools available to me" He said in a dry tone.

I took his hand and gave it an affectionate squeeze.

"After everything else you've done, I'm sure you won't let anything else get in your way." I said with a pained heart. I had been hoping… for what exactly? That a quad element mage would deign to sire with a Kelton woman?

No, it was more than that.

That maybe I could hold his heart and enjoy his company as a woman with a man, not just as a friend. But if he was already taken… One thing at a time Salamede. I got up from the hammock and gave a light nod.

"I'm privileged to live in an age where I might get to see your wonders, much less help make them. If you want to talk or need any help, don't hesitate to come get me." I said with as warm a tone as I could fake. The thought that I had no chance of deceiving him as he was probably older than my entire species occurred to me, but my mother didn't raise a quitter.

Leaving his tower after a round of goodbyes, I headed back to my home and tucked in for the night. The dull ache in my heart was still there, but gradually I drifted into the land of dreams.