Kaia the Argent Wing

“Here,” Chloe said, laying the piece of paper down on the desk in the classroom she'd claimed. All her plants were in here now too, lined up on the thick windowsill. A windowsill that was now covered in badly cured animal pelts to keep out the freezing cold. It even muted the screaming wind as it plucked at the building, desperate to find purchase in the steel and concrete construction.

On the desk where Chloe had been working was a simple snowflake shape drawn on paper, but heavily annotated and obviously redrawn multiple times in pencil before it was finally inked in with pen.

“I don’t have a lot of understanding about how this works,” I admitted, tracing a couple of fingers over one of the lines.

When I looked up at her again, she was still staring down at the page. Removing my hand caused her to blink and look up at me, her face startled and guileless. Then, slowly, it became redder and redder.

I couldn’t help but give her a sly smile. “Feeling things about the ritual, or my fingers?”

Her pretty dark eyes widened.

The bottom fell out of my stomach when I heard my own words replayed in my mind, and I swallowed hard. “Uh… that came out… weird…”

Chloe just stared at me for almost five seconds, then smiled and shook her head wryly. “Sure. Um… Right, so I have everything I need except for a wind Elici. If we get that sigil section then it'll probably work.”

“Need more books,” I sighed. “A sailing one would be great.”

“Yup,” she said. “I could try making shit up, but I'm not sure how effective it would be.”

“Maybe someone might come back with what we need today?” I asked hopefully.

“There's a team in the library today. There's also a team in the elementary school, actually,” she told me, pulling a chair out. “I guess we'll wait?”

 

While we waited, we worked on other projects in her room. For me, that meant my steam engine, but for Chloe, it was her plants and hex bags.

“Ugh,” Chloe huffed, throwing a pile of leaves to the ground. She stomped on them for good measure, then stared at them accusingly.

From my desk nearby, I peered at her. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t get the plants to grow right,” she said, slumping into her chair. Looking over, she met my gaze with one of tired defeat. “This is the second batch now, and… So my hex bags do actually require certain ingredients. For example, the one I use to buff the witchy bolt is one garlic clove, some furrel fur, and some ash from a redcap that’s been burned. The quality of each ingredient increases the potency of the overall hex bag, so I’m trying to grow better garlic using water from Cynath’s shrine to speed things up, but every time the cloves come out too small to use. I’m not sure if I just have to wait the full eight months that some books say is the growing time for garlic, or if it’s the overcast sunlight when I take down the window skins, or if the seeds I have are shit, or…”

“How do you know if an ingredient will even be useful to you?” I asked curiously.

“Touching it,” she said with a shrug. “I’ll get a general sense for how it will work, plus a sense for if it needs to be processed in some way, and what it might pair with.”

Oh no. An opening. Must resis—

My mouth opened, and flirtation came out. “Do you think I would make a good ingredient?”

Her gorgeous face gained a frown of confusion. “What… How… I don't know?”

“I guess you'll have to touch me and find out,” I said with a wink.

She stared at me again and her eyes began to narrow with annoyance, but her lips twitched with amusement, and her soft cheeks flushed. “Kaia.”

“Sorry, sorry,” I said, holding my hands up defensively. “It was a good opportunity, I had to…”

“You're too witty for your own good,” she grumbled, turning back to her hex bags.

I continued to watch her for a minute, admiring the curve of her jawline while I considered the interaction. What did her response mean? Was she into me, or had that been a gentle dismissal? Did I annoy her with my flirtatious joke? It was so hard to read her—figure out what she was feeling.

Pursing my lips, I settled back into my work, but not before I admitted that I had a big ol’ crush on my new friend.

 

Steam engines primarily get their power from the difference in pressure between the heated water and the outside air. When heat is applied to the water in the boiler, it heats up and expands, rushing into a machine that will convert that to power. The books I had on hand showed how a piston would be driven with hot steam going in one end, pushing the piston until it had access to a release hole, then it would compress again.

The tough part for me wasn't actually what used to be tough for the old inventors. I had the material tech in squiron and squeel, what I wanted was a way to really ram heat into a traditional—if reinforced—setup. Getting it to be a closed loop would be incredible too, since it would limit or outright negate the need to carry a large stock of water.

“If only we had a way to do enchantments,” I said, mostly to myself.

Chloe looked up at me from her desk. “I don't see why the ritual sigils wouldn't work if they were etched into something.”

“Yeah but how to get intent-mana into them?” I asked, curious but not really very hopeful.

She shrugged. “Sing to it?” Her eyes lit up, and she looked over at the desk where she’d abandoned the ritual planning stuff. “If you made a staff or something and etched the walking sigil into it, it would take a huge load off the conductor’s shoulders.”

“That sounds promising, and we could use it to test theories,” I mused, getting up to go and look at the walking sigil that Chloe had copied onto printer paper. “I might go and make a staff with that symbol on it now, see what we can do with it.”

“Here, let me…” she said, trailing off as she placed a blank sheet of paper over the walking sigil. Working with impressive speed and dexterity, she traced out the pattern onto the new piece of paper, then handed it to me. “The sigils don't have to be geometrically perfect, but the closer they are, the better the sigil will be at doing its job.”

“Okay, excellent,” I smiled, taking the paper from her.

With that in hand, I left the room and descended down the stairs to a lower hallway that connected with the workshop. Stepping inside, I was greeted with the usual industrious hive of activity. Anything and everything you could think of was being put together, including, to my surprise, a loom. Some big burly looking dude was meticulously carving little pieces of wood to fit into the large, complicated contraption. It was honestly very impressive.

Since I was on a mission, I made my way over to the small metal parts shelf and took a squiron plate. I also snagged a wooden pole from the shelf that marked it as storm infused, and snagged an empty work table to use.

Using a metal scribe—a thin rod with a tough, blunt spike on the tip—I began to mark out the sigil. When that was done… ah, shit. Our mundane metal engraving tools weren't going to work on the squiron.

Leaving my bench, I popped outside to where April was eternally toiling away at sisyphus’ forge. “Hey, can I interrupt your schedule real quick?”

April gave the weird metal plate she was bashing one final tap, then placed it into the fire to heat again. She looked tired when she gave me her attention, and I suddenly felt very guilty.

“What's up?” She asked, chest heaving with exertion.

“Do you… need a break?” I asked, rather than voicing my request for tools.

She chuckled and shook her head. “I'm fine. I like exercise.”

I fixed her with a dubious look. Wait, when was the last time she had food?

Holding up a finger for her to wait, I turned back into the workshop. The food bench was pretty bare these days, but there was a pile of berries and a couple of toasted breadleaves. I spread copious amounts of hazelnut chocolate spread onto it, because April loved the stuff, and filled a large glass from the pitcher of homemade lemonade that was always there.

When I came back out with a handful of berries, the breadleaf, and the lemonade, my friend's expression brightened gratefully. “Oh, you angel!”

I scowled at the cheeky compliment, which only made her smile broaden. She then proceeded to inhale the food and drink like a starving raccoon. I had raccoons on the mind recently. I wonder how they were doing.

“Thanks,” April said when she was finished. “I get so wrapped up in the smithing process I forget to eat sometimes.”

“I figured,” I said with a gently disapproving shake of my head. “You need to take better care of yourself… or find a girlfriend who will.”

She gave me a look. “If you were older and not so obsessed with a certain witchy girl, I'd ask you out in a heartbeat. Other than that, my options are limited. There aren't a lot of people from Edgewood in their twenties.”

She wasn't wrong. When people finished high school, they usually left for college. Some might return later to settle down, but this area was expensive and few at that age had the money to buy a house. Those that did tended to be both heterosexual and married.

“Sorry,” I said, then frowned and shot her a glare, “Wait, obsessed?”

“I see all,” she giggled, wiggling her eyebrows dramatically.

“I…” I sputtered, then stomped a foot and changed the subject. “I need tough squeel engraving tools to work metal. I'm testing something.”

Laughing at my expression, she patted my shoulder affectionately. “No need to thump, little bun. I'll get you the tools, but you can grind them down yourself, I ain't doing that.”

“Thank you,” I grumbled.

 

April got the tools done very quickly, which wasn’t surprising considering they were basically just extremely tough rods of metal. The time consuming part was down to me. I had to hand sharpen them until they could cut softer metals, which in this case meant the only barely softer squiron I intended to use.

I was sanding and grinding the tools into shape through the day and into the next morning by the time I was done. I let Chloe know my project would take longer than I thought.

When I finished, I decided that I was going to focus on the steam engines. We really needed them, especially because grinding metal by hand fucking sucked. Now I knew why all those youtubers I watched complained about it all the time. I was definitely going to be doing this again, too, because there was no way these little engraving tools would keep their edge. They weren't, after all, proper tool steel. What even was tool steel anyway? What made it so much harder than normal steel? Could we make it here? So many questions, and only so many hours in a day for a tiny tinkerer girl to find answers!

Man, if I could only split myself into Silver and Kaia… Then I realised that one of us wouldn't be able to turn small, and the other wouldn't be able to blast things with holy lunar fire so… Yeah, no thanks. I was keeping both bodies, thanks. My hypothetical clone could stay hypothetical.

Right after lunch, I was midway through carving the walking staff when I saw Chloe slip silently into the workshop. She made a beeline towards me with a guarded look that masked a fiery excitement in her eyes. Did she get it? Did she figure out the sigil?

I stood up to greet her with a grin, and like the sun on an overcast day, a shy smile peeked out. That looked like a yes!