Chapter 6

Maisie sighed and looked up from the piles of parts in front of her, she hadn't spoken in hours, save for some mutterings as she'd slowly and methodically figured out how best to deconstruct the throne, Xander was suprised, yes everything he'd made in the last five years was designed to be easily taken apart, but that was assuming you knew the tech first.

"Impressive, not good enough for me to make you a throne, but if i get a spare, it's yours."

Maisie gave him a tired look, causing him to stumble over his words as he attempted to salvage the situation, she gave a tired smile.

"Don't worry Xan, just been a long day is all, can you get back to the inn yourself?"

"Ah, yes you go get some rest, I'm fine."

Maisie pushed herself to her feet and left the lab with a mumbled 'See you tomorrow. Now alone, Xander picked up the blue core and carefully connected the wires trailing from it to his neural pad, the screen flashed and went blank. Having no choice but to wait for it to reboot he placed the jury-rigged detector to one side and looked over the tangle of wires, circuitboards, emitters, and sensors, that Maisie had left, and collected what he needed, placing the components beside the metal box that had been the heart of the throne, he got to work.

Xander was brought out of his focus by a loud beeping from the neural pad, placing the green core he had been about to attach to one side., he turned his attention to the screen, a list of thousands of Xander's devices, most of which were greyed out, filled the display, attaching the sensor of the neural pad to his temple Xander started searching the list, first he filtered out the magnitude of items that weren't connected, then he hid anything in storage mode, the list was reduced to just four items, Xander accessed the first item, the stasis pod, that was a concern, Xander had hoped it had made it to the new base, he probably had about a month before the pod would deactivate and open, the safety measure had seemed smart when he built it; if he couldn't access it then it wouldn't become an accidental tomb, and if the pod were back in Touchstone City it would have been, but here...

Xander was shaking, he needed to find it, soon. Taking a deep breath to calm himself, he moved on to the next item on the list, one of his shielded supply crates, now this was good news, with that he would have access to resources that would be almost impossible to replicate in any reasonable timespan, and if he were lucky there might be some of the basic crates too.

Next was C.R.I.S, the drone was fine, with its current task, so he moved on to the last item, a string of symbols flickering through different iterations, not exactly helpful but it was something.

Xander yawned, he wasn't going to be able to solve any of those tonight, he disconnected the neural pad, now that it had been wired to the Network core once it should be quick enough to reconnect it when needed, then set a few jobs for C.R.I.S to complete during the night. Xander began to make his way back to the inn. As he passed through the large spherical chamber, he found it eerily quiet, his eyes drifted over the stone tablet, with a slight start Xander saw that standing in front of it with his head bowed in seeming respect, stood a tall man in a suit, holding a bowler hat to his chest, Xander's vision swam.

Xander awoke to find himself back in his room at the inn, still half asleep, he was startled by a loud thump on the door, he dragged himself off the bed, and stumbled to the door while dressing himself in his new clothes.

Opening the door revealed Ol' Sid holding a large sack. Giving an annoyed look he pushed the bag into Xander's arms.

"Eda ask me to deliver these."

He sighed and shook his head.

"Just keep me and my inn out of whatever your doing, right?"

Xander nodded, he couldn't understand why Ol' Sid was worried, but he would endeavour to avoid involving him.

"Of course, I wouldn't dream of causing you problems, now if it's okay I need to finish getting ready."

Ol' Sid gave a sharp nod before turning away.

Closing the door Xander put down the sack, grabbed the neural pad and shield drones from his combat suit and jammed them into his pockets.

Returning to the sack, he found an envelope and a large bundle of clear silk. As he picked up the envelope, he noticed his name written in neat handwriting before opening it and sliding out the short letter inside.

"Crank asked me to make these to help his food deliveries, I can improve them if needed, but I think they came out well. Eda"

Grabbing one of the pieces of fabric Xander examined it, a soft scarf emblazoned with; what Xander guessed was meant to be a combination of his emblem and the Tunnel Carvers motifs, resulting in an ornate purple symbol that if examined closely revealed an intricate clockwork, despite it's near flawless design, something felt off about it, but not wanting to waste any more time, Xander placed it back in the bag and set off to the lab.