NOVEL WEB Book 1, Chapter 6
"This is your ride?" Faith asked, as we entered the garage. Originally, this room had been added onto our house as a home workshop, with a big ol' door that lifted up and out of the way to move big machines and bulky materials in here. But then Mom lost interest in the still-primitive machine tools of the day, and they just sat here, gathering dust and rust, before finally being stowed in a Bag of Holding- nobody wanted them, due to being too old to be particularly useful without being old enough to be a genuine historical curiosity- so she could put her printing presses in here, and then she gave those away, leaving this room mostly empty for most of my life.
When I started learning machining, Mom busted those old (as in, three centuries old) machine tools out of storage for me in the hopes that I could use them, until, eventually, following the guidebook my machine shop teacher had given me, we melted them back down to cast iron and brass to make new machine tools that weren't hand-made by some poor half-rate journeyman with some out-of-square wooden forms and a lot of hand-filing.
However, she did have a lot of unused metal stock from those days, and, well. She wasn't using any of it.
(Yes, I did still steal the brass for Uncle Frederick's wheelchair bushings from school. Just because I'm from a family of means doesn't mean I don't have an aversion to spending money on things.)
"Beautiful, isn't she?" I said, smirking a little as I ran my hand over the polished frame.
Bicycles had been around for a while- a century or so, depending on how you counted. And while the basic pedals-chain-and-sprockets type were quite abundant, and used by plenty of people who needed to get around town a lot, there were also a lot of enchanted bicycles, which used magic to drive themselves forward, rather than the rider's own elbow grease- or knee grease, as the case may be.
The trouble with enchanted bicycles was that they were either expensive as hell, because an enchantment that could propel the bicycle with its rider without external energy input was no small feat, or they were deeply impractical, because they instead used an enchantment that made the rider supply the magicka for motion, which was only possible for riders who were mages, but mages didn't want those either because they used that magicka! For spellcasting!
Which brought me to my own enchanted bicycle- which I called a 'motorcycle,' after Uncle Frederick coined the term. Rather than a static enchantment to make a wheel spin, I'd instead created a piston-and-crank assembly that turned back-and-forth linear motion into smooth rotary motion, and on the piston, placed a modified version of an old dwarven enchantment for blasting hammers. The result was that the motor, as Uncle Frederick termed it, would keep spinning because the piston would throw itself downward with explosive force every time it reached the top of its stroke, and I could harness that motion with some sprockets and chains- although I did still need a power crystal to store magicka. Getting this thing started required a pulse of magicka to get it moving, and because I needed to be able to stop it, too, I needed another enchantment to do that. It wasn't a fancy power crystal, really. Just a big ol' chunk of quartz that Mom had made out of a big bag of sand.
"Did this even start as a bicycle?" Faith asked. "Or did you build it from scratch?"
That was an entirely reasonable question. The typical bicycle simply wasn't all that big, and it typically had a raised seat-post to keep the rider sitting upright or even leaning forward on the bike. My bike, though, was bigger, longer, and more substantial- you couldn't see straight through the frame, because it simply wasn't hollow the way a bicycle was- all that room was consumed by the motor and all the other vital components.
And, after some experimentation, I'd lowered the saddle, so I could sit lower to the ground, and lean back a little in the seat. Which necessitated changing the angle of the handlebars, and therefore the front fork... Which all combined to give me a ride that was unquestionably not a regular bicycle. It might have a skeleton of steel tubes like a regular bicycle, but after all the carefully-shaped panels I'd put over it to keep the gears from tearing up my legs...
If any two-wheeled vehicle deserved the name 'steel horse,' it was this one.
"They lowballed me pretty hard with just a Novice Certificate in Machining," I said with a shrug. "Anyhow! Talia, you'll be fine no matter what, but Faith... Would you rather ride in a sidecar, or be forced to hold onto my hips the whole time?"
"I don't like you that much," Faith said dryly.
"Side-car it is. Oh, and Talia's sitting in your lap."
"I don't like her that much either, although she is pretty convincing..."
Talia flexed her magic, and Faith watched in amazement as Talia shifted from an elf into a wolf, yellow eyes glinting in the harsh glare of my home machine shop.
"How persuasive is she now?" I asked, as I grabbed the sidecar and wheeled it over.
---
Our first stop was Magister Brown's office, and boy was he not happy to see me.
"Him! Arrest him, this instant! I just know that thieving little jackrabbit stole my statue!" Magister Brown shouted as I approached.
The Paladins guarding his office simply looked at me, a well-dressed elf in a long coat, accompanied by another Paladin, and then turned to regard Magister Brown with cold, unfeeling visors. Sometimes, there was something beautiful about the Paladins and their insistence on wearing full metal body armor at all times.
"First and foremost, Magister, we've been over the question of ownership," I said. "That statue was already stolen property; if there's any dispute over ownership, it's between Napoleon and Frederick Ironheart, the surviving heirs of the man who commissioned the statue to begin with, but they live in the same house, so that dispute doesn't matter. Secondly... Do you think I'm stupid enough to associate with Paladins if I had stolen it?"
"Additionally," the Banneret (third-grade Knight, leads a squadron of between two and five Squires or lower-rank Knights) on duty began, from behind his helmet, "we do require probable cause in order to arrest people. Your claim that this young elf stole the statue is not enough, especially not when he's already been deputized by Page Jones, here. I assume you've got that wolf under control, by the way?"
"She's a shapeshifted druid," I said, reaching down to pat Talia's head, and scratch behind her ears. "We figured that if we were going to sniff around the crime scene, we should have someone sniff properly."
The Banneret grunted and nodded. "Smith, go inside with 'em. Don't make a mess, alright?"
Another Paladin saluted, then opened the door to usher us inside.
"Names?" the Paladin- Smith, I suppose- asked.
"Faith Jones, Page," Faith said, before gesturing at me, then Talia. "Joseph Ironheart, deputized civilian wizard. Talia Jones, deputized civilian druid. No known relation between Faith and Talia, sir."
"Got it," the Paladin said, jotting all that down on their clipboard. "Please alert me and wait for the go-ahead before casting any spells or moving anything."
I nodded wordlessly to show I was paying attention, then patted Talia's shoulder. "Go ahead, girl. Start sniffin'."
It should be noted that, despite our confidence, Talia and I had absolutely no fucking idea what we were doing. Sure, I've read plenty of serialized adventure stories and dime novels, but there, the "investigations" mostly amounted to a handful of abstruse logic puzzles constructed around whatever stupid trivia the author had managed to pick up, which itself only served to break up the monotony of kicking ass and taking names, and then going to find the next guy to beat up and interrogate.
That felt like the sort of thing that'd only really make sense in contexts where you could, in fact, reasonably expect a guy to know a guy who knows a guy who knows who did the thing. Given that we were reasonably confident the Thieves' Guild was involved in this, however, we actually were in one of those contexts. The Thieves' Guild was a hotbed of organized crime, after all, and everyone was involved in someone's business. So long as we only seemed like we were gonna ruin someone else's day, I'm sure they'd happily tell us who to bother in exchange for not getting their shit ruined.
"Have you two done this before?" Faith asked, as Talia put her nose to the floor, sniffing around.
"Oh, absolutely not," I said. "I was, in fact, just thinking about how I don't know what I'm doing, and my only knowledge of investigation is from dime novels. Which... Squire Smith, do investigations usually involve beating up a Thieves' Guild member in a back alley until he tells you the name of his fence?"
"Torture and intimidation are unreliable sources of information," Squire Smith said, shaking his head. "Our interrogations take a long time, so we can establish a rapport, and convince someone that they do in fact want us to have all the information we need to conclude our investigation. They walk us through it in boot camp, but it's not a major focus."
"Huh, how about that," I said, glancing at Faith, who resolutely ignored me.
"I don't know what Castellan Tenpenny is thinking," Smith continued, also facing Faith. "But honestly, I do not think she's doing you a kindness here, Page."
"I don't know how useful a hound is going to be, here," Faith said, ignoring the Squire as well. "There've been a lot of people coming in and out of this office, and not all of them are here for Talia to rule them out. We're gonna get a lot of false leads, here, and whatever the true lead is... well, we're not the only people who've had the thought of using dogs to track thieves. Throwing off a hound is a pretty fundamental skill in the Thieves' Guild."
Talia reared back on her haunches, before shifting back into an elf, leaving her squatting there on the floor, deliberation written all over her face.
"See?" Faith said, unable to see Talia's face from where she was standing. "Talia's given up, too."
"The guy who did this," Talia began, "was a half-elf with a sick family member."