It took several more days to work their way through the major cities of the moon.
It was an odd thing to see the sun and the slowly growing sliver of earth change location in the sky not over time, but over distance. Even the Deep Kingdoms had something like a normal day length, but on the moon there was no such thing and it made Isaac lose his sense of time. If it weren’t for the watch he’d bought, he wouldn’t have known whether they’d been flying around for twenty hours or a hundred.
Most of the moonie cities had the reality-altering runes, but not all of them. Isaac had no idea what to think about that, except maybe that there just hadn’t been a need before. The cities without them seemed to be, from his naïve perspective, mostly one side or the other, even if he didn’t know which was which without consulting Lia.
At each he leaned into the peace, and sometimes a few more things depending on the mood of the city and what was going on there. One city was industrial, in a rune-technology sort of way, large blocks of stone and coral being quarried from the nearby ocean and floated into enormous halls with scribing armatures and other things that Isaac couldn’t readily identify. For that sort of place, he added to the busyness of it, the focus on the industry and productive nature. His hope was that as things shifted, people would reorient to their businesses over whatever personal grievance they had.
“I think I understand tinkers a bit now,” Isaac said, as they took a break in a ridiculous island resort town, somewhere in the middle of a stormy ocean. Someday he would like to come back, when they weren’t on a mission. It really looked like a vacation spot, and it was probably the most peaceful place he’d run into that wasn’t Muiraton. Though judging by Lia’s discomfort, that was due to it being almost entirely royalist, if the palace didn’t give that away.
“Yeah, what brought that on?” Sarah asked, working away at a bowl of shaved ice that, thanks to the oddness of maer, was more like ice cream.
“Just the thought of what I’m doing, all these changes everywhere. They say tinkers are limited only by imagination and time, and in a way that’s true of me, too. Since what I do is permanent, I can just stack things up.” He waved away the limitations of metaphysical concepts being more slippery, more prone to change in the first place and able to throw off his alterations. “I can’t feel things that I’ve altered and left, but by my estimation there’s still a lot building up over the moon.”
“There were some discussions back in Justice for Hire whether you qualified as sovereign,” Lia volunteered. “Star Central has you as tentatively strategic, but civilian.”
“Oh, I’m nowhere near sovereign,” Isaac said, shaking his head. “I had a taste of that with Mechaniacal, and you have no idea what my power looks like at sovereign. Not something I want to deal with.” Even if the memories of the Tyrant’s Throne remained unclear, a half-forgotten dream, the feeling of that perspective was something that stayed with him. “I bet you any strategic super could do big things if you let them work unopposed for a week.”
“Possibly,” Lia said, though she didn’t sound convinced. Of course, the trick was working unopposed. On Earth there would have been a response to what he was doing, for certain, but on the moon it seemed that nobody really noticed the use of superpowers, and for those that might have, the existing runes masked his efforts. If Moonblast or someone similar decided to take him to task for it, there wasn’t much he could do, which was why his group was remaining so circumspect.
There were still a few locations left on the map for them to visit, mostly on the far side of the moon. But there was one important stop on the near side, one that they’d bypassed in favor of the populated cities. It had taken Lia talking to her grandfather directly, taking advantage of his powerful scrying network, but they’d found where Mechaniacal was living. Not that it was necessarily a secret, but the moon was big and asking random bystanders was unlikely to turn out well.
“Are we ready to go?” Isaac said, adding his wooden dessert spoon and bowl to the stand’s discard tray, as Sarah finished the last of hers. There was no plastic on the moon, so all the food carts had flatware and cutlery carved out of the near-black moon wood that were meant for reuse. A lot different than fast food joints in Star City.
“Yeah, I think so,” she said, following his example. Unfortunately they couldn’t share the treat with the raptors, given the undercover nature of the glamours, but Isaac had stored a couple gallon-equivalents in the saddlebags for later. Isaac climbed back on Shay, and with a flick of crystal-panel wings, the three of them took to the air.
The travel runes had, if anything, gotten more efficient over time. Lia said it was just because she understood them better, which showed that the translator went only so far, because even if he could read some of what the runes conveyed it was a far cry from being able to empower them. Despite Lia’s assurances that it was possible for humans to learn rune magic, he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be adding the skill to his repertoire any time soon.
They darted out over the ocean, accelerating to effectively supersonic speed. The effects of rune and the crystaltech shielding cut out the inevitable issues with that velocity, but it still was hard for the eye to parse sometimes. The three of them went past a big storm brewing over the maer, skirting around purple and green lightning, and off into the highlands outside of the Ocean of Storms. There were only a few scattered settlements there, village clusters of a dozen buildings among stretches of wilderness and scattered spots of crop fields and ranches.
Their target didn’t stand out among all the rest, although Isaac felt it should have. A large manor house on a hill above one of those small towns, with attached gardens and vineyard. The relative obscurity and ordinary look of the place was a sharp contrast to the massive tower that Mechaniacal kept in Star City, but that was probably the point.
Isaac nudged Shay to bring them down near the front gate. Wandering on to anyone’s yard without permission was a bad idea, and that went double for super-genius tinker villains. It was almost a certainty that Mechaniacal knew they were there, and probably had defenses trained on the three of them even if nothing was obvious.
Landing at the gate, he found that there was a very earth-technology styled intercom – a hand crank and a bell microphone, built into a little wooden alcove next to the iron bars of the gate –that would fit in more with a noire novel than the gatehouse thing at the Humbert Building. Which was, now that he thought of it, the first metal he’d actually seen on the moon and very obviously Mechaniacal’s touch. Sarah dismissed their disguises as he slid off Shay’s back, so all there was left to do was the turn the crank and ring the bell.
“Mister Hartson!” Mechaniacal’s characteristic baritone came from the little speaker set next to the microphone bell. “You’re far from home.”
“Don’t I know it,” Isaac said. “But I was doing some work in the area and figured I’d stop by as a courtesy.”
“Ah, were you indeed? Well, well, come in and be welcome,” the cheerful voice said, and with a click the metal gates opened. “I suppose I can spare a little time for guests.” The microphone clicked as Mechaniacal rang off, and Isaac nodded to Sarah and Lia as he led Shay onto the manor grounds.
Mechaniacal himself came out to greet them, wearing a three-piece suit of dark grey and a top hat to frame his thin face and pointed beard. He strolled easily despite his obvious age, vanity cane tapping the stone walk. Isaac couldn’t help but think that the man would be a big hit among cosplayers; for all the simplicity of his outfit there was a quality to it that was impossible to find outside of enthusiasts or the really high end shops.
“My sensors noticed something a few days ago,” the supervillain said, stopping and regarding the three – or six – of them. “But, magic being what it is, I was wasn’t particularly worried. Perhaps I should have been!”
“I certainly hope not,” Isaac disagreed, still not entirely certain what to make of Mechaniacal’s friendly tone. He had seen the teeth that lay behind it, not to mention the unbelievable arrogance to conceive of seizing the fundamental mechanisms of creation. “But I am here to do something about the war.”
“Ah? That seems like a weighty subject,” Mechaniacal said, tapping his fingers on the cane. “Come in, sit and we can discuss it.” He waved his cane in the direction of the manor, which opened of its own accord. A whirring and ticking of gear on gear heralded an alteration of the outer grounds, to one side of the main door. Paving stones and fountains swiveled away, flipping around and sinking into the ground as a small rest area for the three raptors was assembled in the blink of an eye, complete with a water trough – actual water, not maer – and a mounted bristle brush for them to scratch themselves.
Shay nosed Isaac and then trotted off, knowing a good deal when she saw one, the other two raptors peeling off to their rest stop while everyone else followed Mechaniacal inside. The sitting room had some familiar furnishings, clearly taken from Point Archimedes, including the bar with bartender-bot. As they entered, it was already pouring out four wineglasses from a bottle with a hand-lettered label.
“Most humans do not involve themselves with the politics of the lunar civil war,” Mechaniacal said, as a mechanical trolley loaded the wineglasses and trundled over to where seats and couches waited for them. “Please, be seated,” he invited them, and Isaac sank into a sinfully comfortable couch, with Sarah next to him. Lia perched on a moonie-scaled armchair, looking the same as she always did but projecting doubtfulness through the rune.
“I’m not sure I am, actually,” Isaac said, accepting the glass the mechanical trolley offered him. The stuff inside was pale lavender, faintly sparkling, and smelled a little bit herbal and a touch alcoholic. Wine, which was something he’d only ever had during dinners at Sarah’s house. “I still can’t tell the difference between runes and I don’t know much of anything about the sides. But even I can see how bad things are under the surface.”
“That sounds like hero talk,” Mechaniacal said, clearly amused.
“To be fair, I was hired for it,” Isaac said, tilting his glass in Lia’s direction before taking a sip of the wine. It was faintly fizzy and fruity, and had a lot more kick than earth wine was supposed to. Dangerous stuff; he definitely didn’t want to be getting tipsy around Mechaniacal. The demuto clicked a few times as he absently reinforced his own sobriety, resisting a change toward drunkenness, then did the same for Sarah using the metaphysical link he kept with her. “But really I have an advantage, because I don’t have to pick a side or understand it. I just have to make it easier for the war to resolve itself. And, by preference, harder for it to become violent.”
“Oho?” Mechaniacal took a moment to contemplate that, then nodded. The villain clearly understood what Isaac’s talent could do — after all, he was the one who had provided the demuto in Isaac’s pocket, the only thing he’d run into that could recognize when reality was being bent. It had been provided offhand, after some casual work, but Isaac was beginning to think it would have been classified as a major artifact by Star Central. “Encompassing the entire moon is dramatic, I must say.”
“We’d like to avoid dramatic,” Sarah muttered, kicking her heels in a way that Isaac recognized as discomfort, even if her smoke kept her face serene. “We’re sneaky, but I don’t think any of us would fare well in an actual fight.”
“No, I would imagine not. Orthogonal approaches have the advantage of striking where there is no strength — but you are not powerful enough to stand up to even some of the sorcerers here,” Mechaniacal said, eyeing the three of them. “Is that why you are here? Some shelter as you perform?”
“Not really,” Isaac said, shaking his head despite the temptation. If it was on offer, it might make their lives easier — but it’d probably also immediately disconnect him from the moon, not to mention it’d be hard to go and find trouble spots to deal with. Or see and understand what was happening so he could alter his approach. Blindly shoving until something broke seemed like a good way for it all to end badly. “It’s more so that if things get weird, you’ll know why. Since you’re not part of the civil war, I really don’t know what would happen if you interfered.”
“Interesting.” Mechaniacal took a sip of his own wine, eyes regarding them curiously. Isaac could swear he could hear the faintest of ticking and clicking from the man, as of a mechanical calculator. “Most people bring threats when they want me to stay out of something.”
“What good would that do?” Sarah asked. “I mean, even Blacktime is more likely to mess with someone if they try that.”
“You would be surprised!” Mechaniacal said, some of his intensity falling away. “When it comes to villainy, there are the elites, the sovereigns — and then there are those who are villains because they make poor decisions, not because they have the strength and will to operate outside the bounds of society. That type is by far the more common, and when it comes to their behavior, there are no depths of idiocy that they are not willing to plumb.”
“…that sounds about right,” Sarah said after a moment, obviously thinking about the gang. Even though Isaac had only interacted with them for a short time, he would put everyone but Crash, Sarah, and Columbuzz into the latter category.
“I honestly don’t know what you could or would do,” Isaac continued after a moment, getting back on track. “But it’s not something I want to spring on you. It’s something I kind of have to spring on the rest of the moon. They’re inside it, part of it.”
“True,” Mechaniacal allowed, tapping his fingers on his cane as he regarded them. “But at the same time, it is a risk. What if I oppose what you’re doing?” A sudden tension suffused the room, as without changing posture or expression the old, well-dressed tinker went from affable to threatening.
“Then we’ll figure something out,” Isaac sighed. He wasn’t capable of contesting Mechaniacal directly, but at the same time, he was already set on his course and it’d take more than a hypothetical to dissuade him. In fact, it wasn’t clear to Isaac if anyone could actually stop him, not without serious violence. His influence was too indirect, and metaphysical involvement was weird and wobbly. Actively trying to stop Isaac might ensure that the connection stayed when simply ignoring him would have let it lapse.
“Well, then it is good that it’s none of my business,” Mechaniacal said, letting the implicit threat go. “The civil war has never much interested me, and if you can actually resolve it then that is one more potential problem gone. But that is a tremendous if. In no reality I have visited has it been solved, and there lies a shadow outside time and space where the moon is shattered into pieces, rent asunder by the schism.”
“No one has solved this?” Isaac felt suddenly out of his depth, though he hadn’t even given serious thought to alternate realities before Mechaniacal had brought it up. It was one thing to do a difficult task; it was another to do an impossible one.
“Oh, it is not as dire as you might think,” Mechaniacal reassured them. “For one, there are few realities, compared to the shadows of never-was and cannot-be. For another, all realities are different, sometimes with unique problems and other times with unique solutions.” He shook his head with resignation. “I rarely discuss what I know of different universes — if for no other reason than because understanding what has a bearing on this reality, and what does not, is a tricky business. Too many read too much into too little.”
“That does make me feel better, then,” Isaac said, since it was pretty easy to draw the conclusion that he was one of the unique thing in question. The supervillain had obviously not been familiar with Isaac’s talent, and from the way he phrased things it seemed like Mechaniacal had less foreknowledge than it might have seemed.
“I will issue a warning, however,” Mechaniacal said, his voice sharpening ever so slightly. “If things get too out of hand, I will act. I will not abide threats to Earth or the Orrery. And if I am forced to act, I do not think anyone will like the outcome. There is no finesse for me to use here, only force.”
“You have enough force to cow the entire moon?” Lia asked, half-curious and half-disbelieving, by what the translator rune said.
“Let us hope I don’t have to find out,” Mechaniacal said with a sort of menacing cheer. Isaac could easily believe it; even if the moon had its own sovereigns, there was an order even with them. People like Moonblast and Glorybeam were powerful, there was no doubt about that, but compared to the stories of Teraton they still fell short. The man had been, in all seriousness, described as a god barely constrained by human flesh, a power so great that the ordinary world was so much dense fog to him.
He had been the one to beat Mechaniacal all those years ago, and while Isaac doubted the tinker was quite at that level, absolutely nobody else had managed to come even close.
“Well, the goal is to resolve things without exterminating one side or the other,” Isaac said. “If—" He closed his mouth before he said something silly about things going to plan. It was part of super culture – a culture that he was only slowly picking up – never to tempt fate that way. “Anyway, that was all we stopped by for. Being a good neighbor, I guess.”
“It certainly saved me time in tracking down the locus of the reality alteration my sensors registered,” Mechaniacal said, which was likely as close to agreement as they were going to get. “I wish you luck, but I have no special insight to give you.”
“Fair enough,” Isaac said, not having expected anything in particular from Mechaniacal to begin with. If anything, his greatest worry had been that the villain would feel like meddling. He’d actually lobbed the question over to Sarah, relying on her familiarity with supers and villains. Something she hadn’t thanked him for, but she had clearly made the right decision.
“If there’s nothing else you need to know or want to tell us, I guess that’s it,” he concluded. “Got to get back to work if I’m to do this thing.”
“But of course,” Mechaniacal said. “Before you go, do tell me — how was the wine? I made it myself and haven’t been able to peddle it to human palates yet. The good Director is too suspicious to try anything I’ve offered, sadly.”
“It’s dangerous!” Sarah said with a laugh, before Isaac could assemble an opinion on such an unforeseen question. “Really though, it’s good, but doesn’t take like a normal rosé. More a cocktail or liqueur, and it’s got a lot of punch. I think people would get really drunk on this stuff.” Mechaniacal beamed and then looked at Isaac, who was forced to shrug.
“I don’t drink much, so I don’t really have anything to compare it to,” he admitted. “It’s tasty, but I couldn’t tell you anything more than that.”
“It’s tasty,” Mechaniacal repeated. “I’ll take it. You can have a bottle to go,” he said, waving his cane at the trolley, which extracted a bottle from an interior compartment and held it out to Sarah. She took it with some bemusement, and Mechaniacal stood up. The rest of them followed, since it was clearly time to leave.
Isaac kept expecting some last-minute note, some stinger that would leave them unsettled and wondering what the old tinker was up to — but he just politely bid them good day and let them leave. Which was, overall, more disturbing. It couldn’t be that easy.
“Did I miss something?” He sent over the barding, as Shay winged her way back across the landscape. “That just seemed far too simple for Mechaniacal.”
“Mind games?” Sarah guessed. “Or maybe he really doesn’t care. It’s not like the guy is fighting to take over territory or the like.”
“I find myself worried about his confidence in fending off the combined sorcery of the moon,” Lia said worriedly. “He is not a practitioner of the arcane arts, so if he believes he can credibly threaten people like Princess Liesta or Grand Invoker Messhan, there is something terrible hiding in the machinery he has under that mansion.”
“If he can do that, why hasn’t he?” Sarah asked. “He’s a self-proclaimed villain, definitely not a hero, so what’s stopping him?”
“I think…” Isaac said slowly, chewing over the problem. “I think if he were that type he would have been stopped earlier in life.” Like Greg had been, reaching too far and too quickly. “People change slowly if at all, so the aggressive, conquering sort get caught before they have the time and knowledge to be that level of menace. Though in a way, it’s scarier, since you can’t necessarily predict when someone like him will just decide to blow up the moon or whatever.”
“I hope he doesn’t blow up the moon,” Lia said stiffly, clearly not appreciating the joke. Not that Isaac was sure he was joking.
“Well, we won’t have to worry about that just yet either way. Have to see what results from our preparations first,” Isaac said. “Speaking of which, I think it’s time to apply the levers again.”
He definitely wanted to try pushing again while he was sure all the major cities were still affected by his power. The churn of people and events would probably eventually cycle out his changes, but the permanency of his power meant they held for now and he’d run out of excuses to stall. Whatever changes happened were up to the people involved.
He reached out with his power, still connected to the civil war thanks to his ongoing efforts. Keeping himself metaphysically connected was still a bit weird to him, but in this case the civil war was so all-encompassing that it was a simple enough task. Every time he made an alteration, it was enough to involve him.
Once again he threw himself against the civil war, reducing its resistance to change. Pulling out all the pegs that kept it at a stalemate, and letting people and things move more freely. All the difficulties he’d put in place to keep that change from immediately turning into all-out violence meant that people would, he hoped, start changing minds or at least changing leadership.
So long as there was change.
***
Professor Mechaniacal hummed the theme song to VillainS – really, it was far catchier than it should have been – to himself as his sensors tracked Hartson, Miller, and their pet lunarian. He wasn’t sure where they were headed to next, but it really wasn’t his problem. Which was nice, for once.
Villains and heroes often came to him to demand something. For different reasons and in different framings, but it was still a demand. That was the inevitable result of power; it drew those who wanted to wield it, even if they hadn’t earned the right. Heroes wanted that power wielded on behalf of their vision for the future, whether or not they had properly thought it through. Villains wanted it wielded for their own personal benefit, or for some insane delusion.
There was a reason he considered himself a villain. There was no such thing as the greater good, only what people wanted. Sometimes those things worked in the long run, sometimes they didn’t, and distinguishing between the two was far more difficult than most could imagine. Even as a time-traveler, Mechaniacal found it hard to predict the outcomes of certain actions, as all the complexity of reality made even his best modeling mechanisms vague estimates.
In the end, he’d found his own gut instinct to be more accurate.
“Independence wins again,” he said to himself as he pedaled and chorded buttons and levers, rotated dials, and pulled stops as he shifted the focus of his sensor network. Being simply informed that something was going on was a very rare treat, with no demands upon his time or energy. For that alone he was tempted to give Hartson some assistance, but sadly he had none to offer.
Mechaniacal had not been lying when he said that he was indifferent to the civil war. He didn’t understand the difference between the two sides, and he wasn’t even all that interested in them. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t aware of the import of their clash, or of the consequences of trying to resolve it.
Once again he brought up the reality display, the great mining-machine of present day, present time burrowing its way into the future. He expected it to shift trajectories toward the shadow-reality of the moon’s destruction fairly sharply, but now he knew that was not likely to be an actual danger. When someone was meddling, that kind of jostling was to be expected.
What he was interested in was the results of his prodding Hartson, specifically. Whether there had been any joggle toward the shadow reality he had spawned, one that Mechaniacal had only briefly surveilled with remotes. It was difficult to do so, since he had to employ reality anchors for his mechanisms to even function there. If he hadn’t had the opportunity to study the boy’s power beforehand, it would have been a long and irksome task to isolate the effects well enough to counter them without ejecting his probe from the pocket reality entirely.
Surprisingly, there hadn’t been even a jiggle in the direction of that shadow. To be fair, even to his most sensitive instruments, the general gyrations of reality’s froth eating away at probability made short-lived movement hard to notice, but when he needled people like Glorybeam or the Director there was usually a bit of a bump.
“I do wonder what you did to yourself in there,” Mechanical muttered to himself as he studied the graphs and charts, then shrugged. There would always be mysteries to plumb, and this particular one wasn’t exactly urgent. The boy’s lack of antipathy toward him meant that it was entirely possible they could have fruitful discussions in the future. If nothing else, Mechaniacal really should commission inertially altered material for his own use. Or even better, conceptually altered.
Leaving the sensors aside, he descended another subbasement, and another, cane clicking against the metal lift as he emerged into one of his laboratories. It was often said that forewarned was forearmed, but only if one actually went to the effort of actually being forearmed. While Mechaniacal was never defenseless, there was a difference between securing his own power and being in a position to wield influence over the entire moon.
Waldos rolled out a sheet of steel from his stockpile, blank, flat, and gleaming. For all the esoteric materials Mechaniacal had access to, steel remained his favored medium. It was nearly a perfect metal; tough, elastic, strong, malleable, capable of being hardened enough to crush diamonds, or the recipe altered so it became stronger as temperatures dropped.
He cut off a strip of the metal, hand-winding a mainspring as Mechaniacal preferred to work with his hands when it came to the heart of his creations. The most fruitful negotiation with reality occurred when man met the universe in its rawest form. Not that he disparaged tools, but the understanding needed to use tools properly started at a far deeper level.
Mainspring and gear, axle and pinion. He always began with those, writing the nature of the device into their creation long before he built to phlogiston projectors or aether resonators. He could not directly counter the work of runic magic, for he could not peer into those mysteries himself, but he could at least plan for the effects and match force with force. Perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary, but he doubted that nothing would jostle loose with the sheer scale of probability manipulation at play.
If there was anything Mechaniacal hated, it was being unprepared.