109
“Fedwina!” Milo had to snatch her arm as she stumbled, nearly dropping the pad in her hand.
“Eep!” She bumped into him and had to lean to keep her balance. Her long white coat flapped like a pair of angel wings. “Sorry, Milo!”
“I didn’t give you two left feet when I built you, did I?”
Fedwina giggled and gave him a pat on the cheek. “I don’t know. Maybe you can check them for me later.”
“You’re almost as bad as Tania,” he growled, letting her stand on her own.
“Then I need to work harder,” she said. “Now, I’ve been trying to make things easier for you.
I’ve scheduled your Orientation Course, and set up a few others for after that.
But we really need to get you up to speed on how to use the Fortress Infrastructure.
Especially Room Deployment and Management. ”
“Right,” he said, already feeling overwhelmed. “What’s the rush?”
“Your Tinkers are very annoying,” Fedwina whined.
“They keep playing with things they don’t understand.
One of them severed a Guide Cable while trying to fix a door last week and now that room has dropped out of sync.
We can’t move it. I’ve asked one of the Clicks to go and see if there’s any chance we can do something with it, but until you build some Maintenance Golems, there’s not much we can do. ”
“Maintenance Golems?”
“Yes.” She gave him a pointed look. “Not all of us are here to look pretty, you know.”
He scowled back at her. “Is it going to flirt with me, too?”
“Why? Do you want it to?”
“No. I think I’ve already got my hands full.”
Fedwina glanced down at his hands. “They don’t look full to me. Do you need something to fill them with?”
“I meant it metaphorically.”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “Well, they’re just a more advanced version of a spider golem. Their Machine Intelligence Core is Unseated, so they should be fine.”
“Unseated?” He frowned. “What’s that mean?”
“It means it’s not seated,” she said, moving along with a breezy smile. “Now, if those rooms can’t move, they might clog the line. Some rooms need to eject waste into the Waste Disposal Units, and others transfer collected rainwater to the tanks below.”
“Huh?” He blinked. “They do that much?”
“It takes a lot to manage a fortress this size, sweetie,” Fedwina said.
“Most of it’s automated, but that automation’s slowly failing thanks to your Tinkers and other things.
Wear and tear. And since the Manufacturing Wing has come online, it’s putting stress and strain on things which ain’t been used in years.
If you don’t want the place to fall down around your ears in a few months, you gotta do something now! ”
“Alright,” he said, understanding it was at least a bit urgent. “Where do I start?”
“Follow me,” she said, reaching out and taking hold of his collar. She started leading him to the Security Room. “I wanna show ya something.”
In the Security Room, she pushed him into his chair and started tapping the screen of her pad. “I want you to look at this,” she said, climbing onto his lap.
“Umm… Fedwina?”
She paused, looking over her shoulder at him. “Hmm?”
“What are you doing?”
“Well, I’ve consolidated all the pads into a special PA Pad just for me.
It’s a bit messy, but I can use it to show you what I’m talking about,” she said.
“I mean, I don’t really need it. It’s more just a visual aid to show you what we can do.
Mostly, you just need to tell me what you want to do and I can sort it out remotely. ”
“Right,” he said. “I’m talking about why you’re in my lap.”
“Because it’s easier to show you this way than lean all over you.” She gave him a calm look. “Don’t make this unprofessional, Milo. And don’t get any ideas neither.”
He could argue.
Or he could save time.
He saved time. “Alright. Go ahead.”
“Thank you, Milo,” Fedwina said.
She pushed her hair out of her eyes again. And it fell back. He noticed she’d pulled most of it up into a bun, but it didn’t like to stay tied up.
It always wanted to spill loose.
One hair tickled his nose, and he moved his head to get it out of the way.
“Right. Look here,” she said, showing the pad. “This is the main Room Controls. We’ll start with the Workshop itself. As you can see, we have a map…”
He tried to keep his eyes entirely on the pad as she went through all the options.
And there were a lot of them.
He couldn’t just move rooms around. He could make some of them larger or smaller. He could adjust ambient temperature and lighting. He could send it to a special facility for cleaning, where high pressure water hoses would clean the room entirely.
This would, of course, ruin all the furniture.
Fedwina advised dumping the furniture in the Waste Disposal Units first.
Some walls were longer than the room itself and could slide to alter the location of the window or door. The room could also be sent to a maintenance bay.
Apparently that was just a sneaky way of saying it would slide into place in the Workshop where he could work on it.
“Traditionally, there was an entire team of engineers here,” she told him. “Have you thought of taking on an apprentice?”
Apprentice?
He blinked at that.
“No, I haven’t.”
“You should,” she said.
“And where would I get one of those?”
“I’d suggest the same place you came from. A clockmaker seems like a good place to start.”
“Huh,” he said. “I’ll think about it.”
She pushed some hair out of her face again and nodded. Then she showed him the pad again. “As you can see, there’s a lot more to the Fortress than just simple things. You can activate room defenses here, too.”
“The saws?”
“Yes.” Fedwina gave him a serious look. “You can also trigger them from here.”
Basically, murder someone.
He shuddered at the thought. Not a nice way to go, though. He wasn’t sure he could do that even to Padrick.
“Can you also manage the dungeon controls?”
“The Game system, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes, I can. Did you want to make changes to it?”
“Not yet. I’m just trying to get a feel for what you can do.”
“Put your arms around me and you might,” she murmured.
“What?”
“I said there’s lots of things I can do if you ask me right.”
“Right.”
“I’ve also looked into the Mining Facility,” she said, bringing up a screen. It was all flashing red. “As you can see, it’s borked.”
“Borked?”
“Busted? Broken? Dead?”
“In need of fixing?”
“Yeah, that.” She nodded. “From what I can see, the golems down there are no longer responding. I think they’re offline. The remote station down there is also offline.”
“Remote station?”
“Every section of the fortress has a remote station which links to a pad,” she told him. “So, the Room Management Facility has a remote station, which is how we can adjust it. The Mining Facility’s isn’t responding.”
“Do you think that should be a priority?”
“It should be a priority,” she allowed. “But I think your main priority should be Room Management for now. Fixing the issues the Tinkers have caused. There’s some connections we really need to repair or else the traps won’t be able to be remotely triggered.”
“Is that a bad thing?” He winced. “I hate those things.”
“Well, it’s only bad if you prefer getting killed by some mean old wizards,” she said. “Because Tania was saying there’s a big possibility of the Paddstone family coming here. Or the Mage Court. And if they do, how are you going to defend yourself from that many of them?”
“Can’t the mages just break the traps?”
“Sure, I guess,” she said. “But it’s not easy. They tried before. But dwarven bronze ain’t easy to melt with their feeble mana capacities. The most they could do was break a few and sever the connection cables. If we can use golems to fix those when they get broken, they’ll give up real quick.”
He gave that some thought.
“Would it be enough to actually drive them out?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not an expert on mages. But, if you had some more golems like Tania and Selma, then I think you could drive them out easy.”
That surprised him. “Even with their magic?”
“Milo, human magic isn’t all that special,” she said. “I know it is to you. But your average mage can only cast a few spells before he has to regenerate his mana. That takes time. A golem on the other hand can keep going.”
“Didn’t the mages beat golems, though?”
“Sure,” she said. “If we’re talking about maintenance golems.”
He frowned. “But what about all the others?”
“What others?”
“Like Tania and you?”
“Sorry, sweetie,” she said. “You’ll have to unlock a bit more for that.”
He grunted and leaned back in his seat.
“Milo?”
“Yeah?”
“This might be a strange question, but am I sitting on something hard?”
“No.” He tightened his lips. “Did Tania put you up to this?”
“Up to what?”
“Sitting in my lap like this?”
“Oh, no,” Fedwina said. “This was my idea.”
“Why?”
“Because if I can get you to seduce me before the end of the week, I will get an achievement.” She paused. “Are you going to seduce me now?”
Milo stared at the ceiling.
“Why are you all like this?”
“Because you’re our engineer,” she said softly. “Are you comfortable with me sitting like this?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, why don’t you put your arms around me and see if that makes you sure?”
He looked down at her.
He was so tired of arguing with golems.
His arms snaked around her waist.