The Conquerors Bloodline - Chapter 257: Hangar Bay

Ruby had awoken quite abruptly. More so than usual, that is. Normally she’d wake up over the span of an hour, generally being startled by her first alarm—which she turned off—only to be buzzed by her second—which she also turned off—finally awakening fully around the fourth, sometimes even sixth.

Weiss had given her no small amount of naggings because of this, so she’d taken to hiding her scroll beneath her pillow at night. Except today, they still went off, or at least, they were going to go off once wake up time came around but that was still at least an hour or two away.

What had sent her eyes blaring wide was a simple, subtle noise. ‘Thunk, cling, thunk, cling.’ A noise she’d heard many times back on Patch when she was working on Crescent Rose at Signal Academy. It was the sound of a hammer clashing with metal.

In the seconds her unconscious mind had to process the noise, she was already sitting upright, head swung to the hallway leading to the toilets with pupils dilating, almost absorbing all of her silver irises in one as if to make sure she was really hearing that noise.

‘Thunk, cling, thunk, cling.’ It continued that musical melody of metal on metal. It sent her mind racing with excitement and anticipation to what it could mean. A weapon? Armour? Or just hitting something for fun? Either way, to her it was an almost magnetic force.

She twisted on her makeshift bed, brought her feet to the ground and looked to the rest of her team to make sure they were still sound asleep. Raising when she saw they were. It took her less than a few seconds to cross past the majority of the lounge and to the doorway. Pausing slightly with a flinch when Yang grumbled a snore.

Holding her breath she passed into the hall and followed her ears deeper. Past the toilets, past her mother’s bedroom and even little Khione’s until she arrived at the side and dark doorway held wide open that lead into a stairwell leading down even deeper into the earth than she already was.

It was an ominous sight, but it was just as exciting. Like this mysterious pathway leading to a treasure, she could only imagine in her dreams. Nibbling her lip excitably she looked over her shoulder and back to the stairwell and began to descend it step by step.

It was a straight staircase, at least, if there was a curve to it she just couldn’t see it, and it even went deeper than she could imagine as when she looked back the doorway looked minuscule in the distance. But that was by far the least of her interest. The heavy hammer raps knocked and reverberated around the stairwell rising in her a giddiness to what it may be and sent her descending even faster.

Closer now, she began to focus on the noises and tried to discern their purpose. They were heavy and came down hard, each just a few seconds after the other. Plenty of time to hammer a billot into shape before the metal cooled and needed to be reheated in the furnace. Sometimes she could also hear lower thunks, more rapid ones like they were focused on one area trying to deal less of an impact as they focused on shaping it.

If anything it sounded like something she’d do when trying to taper an edge onto a blank before heading to the grinder to get the meat of the metal off and give a true edge to something. ‘Then again,’ she bobbed her head contemplatively, ‘I don’t really do anything but make weapons. Could be making art… I guess.’ It was a boring notion to her. Art. Such a dull thingymajig. Weapons are art! Beautiful babies with elegant curves and exquisite abilities crafted through the blood and tears of their smith. Given the choice, she’d rather have a gallery of weapons than a gallery of banana peels glued to the wall like what was so popular nowadays.

The stairs quickly opened up at the bottom, in place of a doorframe and a door, the stairs instead opened wide into a gargantuan cavern lit brightly with floodlamps baring down from above and various shades of lightbulbs dotting the walls and floors.

She came to pause just before the steps gaping as she looked up over the hangar-sized room. On one side taking up a vast majority of the space was the skeleton of an airship. She could see beams and rivets and circuitry but they all blurred together into these rusty conglomerations. On the other end barely taking up a tenth of the total space she could see workshops and heavy-duty crafting equipment she could only ever dream about having. A CNC machine, a drill press, even a pneumatic hammer in one corned painted the most beautiful shade of blue she’d ever seen.

Stood behind one of the workshops, a large anvil, she could see professor Evans stood with chest bare and glossed in sweat as a large gas operated furnace spewed with furious orange flames out the front and back. A Bezil Forge, she recognized the design as being. One of the more expensive types and the go-to for any professionals seeking reliability and a ten-second steak cooking time.

She drooled at the sight of the machine but drooled even more as she drew closer to the professor and saw what he was hammering into shape atop his anvil. It was a sword, more a lump of iron if anything, its size was too great and too thick to truly cut through anything with ease. If anything, a ‘slice’ was more likely to crush a Grimm’s bones to dust.

As she came nearer, professor Evans lifted his head and smirked at her dishevelled head of hair and almost sloppily wrinkled pyjamas. He lifted the blade with his tongs, arms trembling from its weight and set it back into the furnace then turned back to her. “Up a little early, aren’t you?” he laughed.

“What’s that?” her voice trembled as she stared with intent at the furnace.

Parc looked back, chuckled then shook his head, “a big ass sword.” She had noticed, but she wanted more. She wanted to know about its design, its origin, his thought process when he designed it and even if she could hold his sword for a bit. Maybe play with it a bit longer. Except, it didn’t quite come out like that.

“Can I have it?” it didn’t take her long to realize her fub for words and instantly sucked in her lips. “I mean. Can I hold it when it’s done?”

He turned to her, eyed her with intrigue and saw her practically drooling. “Maybe.” He replied simply, “it’s a big piece of metal Ruby. It’s probably a little too dangerous for a petite little munchkin like you.”

Ruby gasped, “I made Crescent Rose and she’s nearly twenty-three kilos! That small sword is nothing to me!” crossing her arms she seemed confident in her abilities. Though Parc knew just the unrefined thing to be a minimum of thirty. Maybe, even more, he hadn’t had the ability bar his own arms to weigh it.

Setting one hand atop his anvil, he felt its warmth radiating up his palm and leaned over halfways towards Ruby. “Really now?” he laughed under his breath, “quite the weight for a small girl like you.”

She puffed her chest and curled up the sleeve on her right shoulder and gave him a pose to show off her muscles. He eyed her arm and saw a stick. There wasn’t even the smallest of bulges to show she even had any biceps. “I can lift twenty-seven kilos with ease.” She boasted.

“Uh-huh,” Parc’s expression melted fondly at her overconfidence. “And I can control the grimm.”

Ruby paused, sparkled and looked at him, “Really!?”

He blinked a few times and almost recoiled from her excitement that brought her almost crashing into his anvil, knocking it over. At first, he kept silent, he’d put it out as a joke but Ruby, he should have expected her to take it seriously. Were she any of the other three—possibly not including Yang—he might have affirmed her idea. She was Ruby after all, and Ruby he expected had a big mouth. He couldn’t let that little trump of his leak to the wider world just yet.

“No Ruby. I was joking.” Pushing off the anvil he looked to his furnace then over the shrinking Ruby’s shoulder to the rusty old airship he’d been working on. It was far from a usable state now. For the better part of two months, he’d been stripping down the outer cladding of rust and taking measurements of every little nook and cranny whilst simultaneously logging wires and where they went. It was a hell path he’d taken with the machine, one that would take him months, even till mid-point of the next year to finish. Not even taking into account the many other things he was busy with on the daily.

Then an idea came to him. He locked onto Ruby and skirted around his anvil to meet her with no breaks between them. “Tell you what,” he crossed his arms, “you help me with a little project of mine and I’ll let you play with my sword for as long as you want.” He couldn’t help but snort.

Ruby bubbled back to life, though hunched was her body as she clasped her hands together and trembled excitedly. “Anything! Can I also look at your other swords? I saw you had this really cool green one that looked like it had a bunch of spikes on it that looked like the thorns on a rose plant oh-oh-oh and that weird shark gun mini-gun thingy you shot Cardin with last week!”

She kept on blathering, almost insanely much until Parc sighed and lifted a hand to stop her. “Ruby. Calm down. That’s a little much for right now. So how about we focus on one thing right now okay?” Ruby nodded slowly, dejectedly. “Great, well,” he turned to face the airship. “See, I bought myself this old airship a while back. Old thing, rusty everywhere you looked and was still working for some inexplicable reason.” He began to move, Ruby just on his heels, head tilting higher as they came closer to the skeletal airship, “now, I’m doing a little refurbishing on this big bastard and my two hands just aren’t going to cut it. So I’m needing another pair, yours if you’re up to i-”

“I’m in!” she screamed.

Parc winced away from her bellow. The reaction was somewhat as expected but still, this girl could be scarily loud. “That was quick. But that’s fine, perfectly fine.” He looked up, past the ballasts and rib of the ship, crossed over the beams leading to the wings and the faint outline of the cockpit and the hall compartment where storage and people could sit around as they travelled and nodded.

About to turn to say something else to Ruby, he was interrupted by the dulcet growl of the girl’s belly. A flush took to her cheeks and her hands crossed over her stomach as she hunched just a little over. Tossing out a light, “eh-heh.” As she met his raised brow.

“Haa…” Parc sighed, “honestly, I don’t know what’s louder. A pissed off Beowolf or a hungry girls stomach. Come on,” he threw his head towards a bare-bones kitchenette not far from his workspace, “I should have something down here for you to snack on until Summer gets up and makes breakfast.”

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So, long story short I am now figuring out how to basically create a interactive text based game. Why am I doing this to myself? I don’t know how to code. and I mean, Twine is handy and all but holy shit. Kill me now.