Metal Mage 11

by Eric Vall

  “But … they tasted good,” the elf tried with an adorable pout. “I couldn’t help it.”

  “No hunting,” I ordered as I leveled her with a stern look. “No eating humans, griffins, sphynxes, anything. You eat like an elf from now on. Understood?”

  Deya toyed with the edge of the moist rag without meeting my gaze, and I crossed my arms while I waited for her to respond.

  She didn’t, though. After a quick and guilty look at me, the elf abruptly vanished, and I shook my head.

  “That won’t get you out of this,” I warned the empty air.

  “Mason, she’s not going to listen to you,” Cayla informed me.

  “I know,” I sighed, and I stepped out of Alfred’s way as he came in fully armed to take on the puddle of gory puke in my workshop. “Thanks, Alfred. Let me give you a hand with those bones.”

  “Do not trouble yourself, sir,” the butler replied. “I believe you have a new project you were about to embark on.”

  “Right,” I sighed. “Metal dragon.”

  “I’ll go get Shoshanne from the infirmary and assess Toby’s abilities,” Cayla decided.

  “Will you let her know that Deya’s still sick?” I asked.

  “I will,” the princess chuckled, and she grabbed an extra case of cartridges before scooping up Stan and heading for the door.

  “Guess this means I’m your building buddy today,” Aurora said with a grin.

  “Hell yeah, you are,” I chuckled, and the half-elf’s emerald eyes lit up as she bounced on her toes.

  “Metal dragon!” Aurora squealed. “Where do we start?”

  “Well, considering Deya’s in hiding now, this might be a bit difficult,” I admitted. “I was hoping she would be able to give me some input on dragon anatomy.”

  “Wait!” Aurora gasped. “She has a book about this.”

  The half-elf hopped over a splatter of puke on her way to the door, but she was only gone a few seconds before she came back.

  “Where did we put the library?” Aurora asked with a frown. “Was it second floor, north wing?”

  I furrowed my brow and thought for a moment, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember.

  “Maybe the first floor, south wing?” I guessed.

  “The library is located on the first floor in the north wing, Lady Aurora,” Alfred announced from the floor.

  “Thank you, Alfred,” the half-elf giggled, and then she was gone again.

  “Hey, Alfred, do you know much about dragons?” I asked out of curiosity.

  “I do not, sir,” the man replied. “However, if you intend to create a winged creature, I recommend you pay particular attention to your body to wingspan ratio. With most birds, the length of the body is the square root of its wingspan. That might be a good place to start.”

  I raised my brows. “Damn, Alfred. Are you an animal caretaker, too?”

  “No, sir,” Alfred said. “I simply enjoy studying birds. The possibility of flight has always fascinated me.”

  “Has it?” I mused. “You know, if I spent enough time on it, I could probably build a machine that would make it possible for you to fly.”

  “With all due respect, sir, that is an impossibility, but I admire your imagination.”

  I smirked. “Fair enough. I don’t suppose you have any other tips?”

  “The mass of a bird is equal to its body length cubed, sir,” the man answered, and I quickly grabbed a pen to write all of this down.

  “Alfred, you are the best butler,” I chuckled. “I’m gonna have to pick your brain for this project if that’s alright.”

  “Certainly, sir,” Alfred replied. “In the interest of transparency, though, you might wish to know there are partially digested human skulls in this vomit.”

  “Yeah … that’s not ideal. Deya uses rune magic to transmute with dragons. Basically, she can embody them, but lately, we’ve been struggling a bit with her hunting habits.”

  Alfred paused in his scrubbing for only a few seconds before he nodded and continued.

  “Understood, sir.”

  “So, back to my predicament,” I continued. “This dragon is going to be way bigger than a bird, and based on these ratios, a dragon thirty feet long would have to have a wingspan of about nine hundred feet, which is just impossibly huge for it to be able to fly.”

  “Dragons certainly have stronger muscles than a bird,” Alfred pointed out. “Therefore, they would require a smaller wingspan.”

  I nodded as I thought this through. “I saw a green dragon once that must have been about thirty feet long. I was preoccupied at the time, but I would guess his wingspan maxed out around seventy or eighty feet.”

  “Then you might be better off basing your design on a two and half times ratio,” Alfred mused.

  “That’s a good place to start,” I agreed. “My other issue is that I initially designed this metal dragon without a bone structure. Do you think that’s a bad idea? Because my other machines don’t have the inner constructs of a human even though they have arms and torsos similar to one, so I thought I’d just do the same here, but when I rode a dragon, I could feel how important the whole body structure was for such a large creature to take flight. Now, I can’t decide if I should really build, from the inside out, a literal dragon.”

  Alfred sat back on his haunches while he thought about this.

  “From my understanding of birds, I would say the mass of your creation is the most likely factor to determine whether or not it can achieve flight,” the butler decided. “If a bone structure made of metal increases the mass of the machine to the point of hindering flight, then it seems logical you might want to avoid this.”

  “True,” I agreed, “but the hardware required to hold all the external pieces together without a bone structure might add just as much weight.”

  “Indeed, sir,” Alfred muttered as he furrowed his brow. “Might I suggest a trial machine?”

  “You read my mind,” I chuckled. “Prototype dragon it is.”

  “Very good, sir,” the butler said with a nod, and he returned to swabbing up the last of the mess on the floor while I grabbed a fresh slip of parchment.

  My initial sketches were mostly based on my interpretation of the dragons I’d seen in Mors Pass, but I hadn’t paid much attention to ratio. Now, I calculated out a few options based on Alfred’s input, and I tried to decide how large of a prototype I should start with.

  Ultimately, it wouldn’t matter so long as I could make it fly, but as I eyed the deserted stash of scrap metal on the corner of my table, I realized I could put this prototype to good use. So, I closed my eyes and searched my mind for the original dimensions I’d used when I first formed Stan, and I was factoring his weight into my calculations when I heard Aurora coming down the hall.

  “Finally found the book,” the half-elf announced as Alfred gathered his supplies and dismissed himself with a bow. “I can’t read Elvish, though, so we’re going to be working from diagrams until Deya shows up.”

  “That’s fine,” I replied. “Alfred gave me some input that cleared up a lot of my confusion. We do need to decide what the basic structure should be, though, so we’ll start with a prototype. Can you find me a diagram of a standard dragon in that book?”

  “Standard?” Aurora snorted. “Mason, dragons are complex creatures with none of the varying breeds being considered a standard, so you’ll have to be more specific.”

  I cocked a brow at the half-elf’s know-it-all tone, and I was on the verge of pointing out that she used to know nothing about dragons except how to slay the fuck out of them. Then Aurora blushed and turned back to the book in her hands.

  “Give me a second,” the half-elf muttered, and after a minute of flipping back and forth through the pages, she slid the book toward me. “Like that?”

  “Yes,” I chuckled. “Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m just excited,” Aurora admitted. “I’ve never seen you build something I recognized before. Can you
imagine what you could do next if this works? We could finally have our own flock of dragons!”

  “I knew you were going to ask for that,” I told her. “As soon as I came up with the idea, I thought, ‘Now Aurora’s going to ask for a bunch of metal dragon babies.’”

  “Aww, I didn’t even think of the babies!” the half-elf moaned. “You could keep building them up as time goes by so it’s like they’re really growing.”

  I smirked and looked over. “Or maybe you could go for something that’s already alive … you know, something that grows up on its own?”

  Aurora’s emerald eyes darted back to the page of the book, and she just shrugged.

  “Metal dragon babies sound cute, though,” the half-elf mumbled.

  I sighed as I grabbed a bit of steel, and I was about to begin reforming the metal when Aurora shifted her weight and cleared her throat.

  “Hypothetically,” the half-elf began, “and I’m only asking because you brought up the baby dragons … do you ever wonder if having baby dragons around would be a bad idea? Not because they’re dragons but because they’re babies. Like … maybe it would be dangerous for them given the kind of life we lead? What if we couldn’t protect the baby dragons?”

  I shrugged as casually as possible while I tried to play it off like my heartrate wasn’t suddenly jacked.

  She obviously wasn’t talking about dragons.

  “I think baby dragons would be a lot of responsibility,” I admitted, “but hypothetically, if they’re your own baby dragons, it seems feasible that you’d do whatever it took to keep them safe. I mean, any responsible dragon would dedicate themselves to making sure the more dangerous elements were resolved by the time their baby dragons were … hatched.”

  “So, what you’re saying is it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have baby dragons,” Aurora clarified, “because you would do whatever it took to keep them safe until they could fend for themselves?”

  “Uhhh, yeah?” I mumbled in confusion. “Of course. If they were our baby dragons. I’d do what I needed to do to protect them.”

  “That’s good,” Aurora sighed. “I mean… I like dragons a bunch. You know… the babies and all…”

  I furrowed my brow at how convoluted the conversation was getting, and I chanced a glimpse at Aurora to try and gauge the situation. I couldn’t tell if she was smiling because it sounded like I was giving the okay on the baby dragon idea, or if she was on the same page as me. Something about the glint in her emerald eyes had me leaning toward the former, though. It was a classic “let me have a dragon” look.

  “Um, to be clear, ” I managed. “Don’t bring home a bunch of baby dragons. That’s not what I’m saying.”

  Aurora smiled even wider as she leaned over to peck me on the cheek, and then she nudged the open book toward me.

  “Prototype,” she reminded me in an unaffected tone.

  I quickly summoned my metal magic while I scrambled to get back on track, but I ended up turning the steel into a puddle on the table. Then I cleared my throat, restored the metal, and willed my mind to regroup rather than tailspin over the topic of babies, dragon or not.

  My brows were stuck in a deep furrow from the amount of confusion I was warring with, but I managed to muscle through despite Aurora’s suddenly cheery mood. The half-elf hummed to herself while she laid out my various dragon designs side by side, and when she noticed me watching her, she giggled and sent me a wink.

  Yeah. I’d have metal dragon babies running around here within the week.

  I cursed internally while I took a deep breath, and I decided the next time babies of any species came up, I wouldn’t end up walking on eggshells about it. I was a fucking baron now, and any decent baron would speak up and demand some fucking heirs. Plain and simple.

  Although, that probably wasn’t the reasoning I should use with my women, because it would only land me in the same position as Haragh where they were concerned.

  So, I nodded to myself as I pulled the book closer, and with my mind made up on the matter, I was finally able to turn my attention to the image of the dragon on the page. I looked closely at every detail while I let the steel in my palm slowly change shape, and as I took note of every miniscule detail, like the precise angle of the dragon’s hock where it met with the knee, I kept true to the scale of the image for now. I would probably have to adjust a few things given the ratios Alfred had recommended, but the detailed drawing was a lot more realistic than my own attempts, so I worked from this until I had a miniature dragon sculpture sitting in my palm.

  Then I carefully siphoned the interior metal out so he would be hollow, and I considered the alterations I’d had to make to Stan when I first created him and learned he walked like a stick figure without the proper joints. I began working my way from top to bottom as I altered the neck, shoulders, ankles, and wrists of the dragon, and once this was done, I wrote down his dimensions and made a few calculations.

  According to Alfred’s explanation, the wings were disproportionate to his body length, so I altered this issue by cutting down his wings by a few centimeters and lengthening his tail. Once this was done, I compared him to the image to double check the overall shape of his back and the thickness of his legs, and I nodded before turning to Aurora.

  “What do you think?” I asked, and the half-elf abandoned the sketches she was studying to come over.

  “It’s adorable!” Aurora whimpered as she patted the tiny steel head. “I want twenty just like it.”

  “Well, hopefully the end product is closer to terrifying than adorable,” I chuckled, “but I’ll take it. Could you hand me that sack of channeling gems? I need to find one small enough to test him out.”

  Aurora dragged the satchel over and dumped it onto the table, and we rifled through the stash while we looked for a gem that wouldn’t add too much weight to the final product. Most of the gems the Elders sent me were on the larger side, but eventually, Aurora found a diamond about the size of my fingernail.

  “That’s the smallest one I see here,” the half-elf said.

  I nodded. “Then it’ll have to do.”

  I summoned my magic to embed the gem at the center of the dragon’s chest, and then I placed it on the table while Aurora and I waited.

  I didn’t give the dragon a face, so I couldn’t tell as easily when it was fully awake, but after the gem pulsed for a few seconds, the head tilted up toward me.

  “Hey, little guy,” I chuckled, and I tried to sound welcoming so I wouldn’t frighten him. “I’m Mason, and I made you. Do you think you could try to fly for me? I’m still working out how to get you to function properly.”

  The dragon crouched just like Deya did whenever she was about to take flight, but when it flapped its wings, the metal just clanged against the table.

  “That doesn’t look right,” Aurora muttered. “Wings don’t move like that.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, and I picked up the dragon to get a closer look.

  “Are the wings too long?” the half-elf asked.

  “They shouldn’t be. I followed Alfred’s ratios, but you’re right, they just don’t move properly. Give it another flap, little guy.”

  The dragon did as I asked while I held him in my palm, but the motion looked so unnatural, I was sure I’d gotten something wrong. Then a video I’d seen of an owl flying in slow-motion came to mind, and I remembered replaying it at least a dozen times as I watched the way its wings tipped angularly with every beat. After considering the way Deya’s wings shifted when she flew me over the foothills, I decided to replace the hinged joint with something closer to a condyloid joint instead, and this way, any nuance required to stabilize the dragon’s flight could at least be possible.

  Once I made this slight alteration to both points where the wings met with the dragon’s back, I set the dragon down on the table once more.

  “Okay, try that,” I suggested.

  This time, the wings moved more naturally, but the dragon still didn’t take off. He
just hopped up and down and clanged his wingtips against the table, and I furrowed my brow.

  “Okay, we’re gonna have to rethink this,” I decided. “Little guy, we’re taking your gem out, but we’ll bring you back to life for round two, alright?”

  The dragon nodded, and as I removed the gem from his chest, he suddenly froze and was only a sculpture again.

  “I feel like we just killed him,” Aurora whimpered.

  “Don’t worry, he’ll be right back,” I assured her. “I felt the same way when I rebuilt Bobbie, but as you saw, she was the same old girl she always had been when I installed her gem into the Mustang.”

  This eased Aurora’s concerns as she picked up the gem and cupped it in her palm for safe keeping, and I flipped through the pages of the book until I found an anatomical diagram of a similar dragon.

  “I think we should start from the bones,” I decided, and Aurora nodded in agreement as I picked up the metal dragon. Then I repeated my process of studying the image while reforming the metal in my hand, but I had to get creative on a few of them since the wrist and ankle bones were so tiny it was hard to tell how they all connected. I had a pretty decent idea of what I was aiming for, though, based on the designs I’d built so far, but by the time I finished, I was already shaking my head as I considered the skeletal dragon.

  “This isn’t going to work,” I sighed. “The bones are too stiff like this. I can’t have the vertebrae all fused into one piece of metal and expect it to fly. Deya’s back rolls when she beats her wings, so it needs more range of motion. Without tendons holding it all together, I can’t connect the bones realistically enough for that to be possible.”

  “What if you soften the steel?” Aurora suggested.

  “You mean use my malleable steel?” I clarified.

  “Yes, it works well for your bearings, doesn’t it? That seems similar.”

  “It’s sort of similar,” I allowed. “Worth a try at the very least.”

  So, I altered the state of the steel where the bones fused together, and I did this with every joint on the entire dragon before I filled in the webbing of its wings with the same material. Then Aurora handed me the channeling gem.