zenderael_rl | [Mal/Travis] - steampunk revolution

Mal's grin was so wide it threatened to split his face. He was a smug bastard when someone complimented his work, and to have a friend think this shit was as awesome as he did was pretty fucking cool.

"Yeah, what can I say? I'm an animal lover. Always thought up ideas for makin' robot animals in my comic. Now I can do it for real." It was pretty fucking amazing, in all honesty. Of course, the ideas from his comic wouldn't have worked with alchemy. Probably wouldn't work at all, actually, but they were fiction, so that didn't matter.

"Think the horse'll be the biggest challenge. You know, aside from the airship. That one's probably gonna take months just to get all the part it needs." It would take less time if he had his inheritance, but... That wasn't something he'd told Travis about, his father's death, and he didn't want to bring it up. "Gives me somethin' to work towards, though.

"Oh!" Mal glanced around, stepped to the door of the office, and peered out towards the living room. "Hey, Six! C'mere!" he called, glancing back to Travis to say, "You gotta see this."

A small... creature scurried out from under the couch and into the hall, stopping as it found itself in front of Mal. It was a completed construct - a six-inch clockwork scorpion, tail curled up so the stinger hovered over its back, a stinger that seemed to have some sort of altered welding tool in it.

Tyrus decided to let the improvements go. He saw no way to propose them without giving his cover away or at least having to introduce a new series of lies to make it work. It was how these things spun out of control.

It left him with a nagging sense of guilt, though.

The appearance of Six proved a ready distraction from those thoughts. He turns and looked at the little construct. As he looked over it, he knelt down to get a closer look. "Damn," he murmured softly. "This thing is off the hook!" He squinted at it. He took more detailed notes than he really could ever make as Travis. "What's this thing on its tail?"

More smug grinning. "Laser welder," Mal answered. "Kinda upgraded it a bit. You don't wanna piss him off or he might cut yer foot off." He might've been joking. It was hard to tell, sometimes.

"He's Six 'cause I made five others and didn't wanna give 'em all names til I could figure out what sort of naming scheme to go with. Three spiders, three scorpions, each with a different task, though they can all tidy up." Sometimes things fell off the table and rolled under the desk, or got lost in the corner. Having a little critter able to fetch them for him was rather useful.

"No shit," Tyrus said. He pulled his foot back a hair.

Then he looked up at Mal and nodded his head. "Makes sense. I thought maybe you were naming them after frakking Cylons," he said, with a chortle. He looked sideways at Mal, before he nodded. "What kind of constructs are they? Earth?"

It made the most sense, he thought. Letting them recharge in dirt would be simple enough.

"Shadow, actually. They recharge under the couch." Or wherever they could get under cover. Convenient, especially since it meant they kept out of the way much of the time.

He looked at the scorpion and made a 'shoo' gesture, telling it, "Thanks, that's all I need." Yes, he actually thanked the little laser-bot. It couldn't hurt.

When he looked back to Travis, he grinned. "Wanna hit the bottles, now?" he asked, starting for the kitchen.

"No shit! That's a good idea." Tyrus was impressed. He usually wrote off shadow constructs, but most of the ones he made were slightly too large for that purpose. He found keeping light off them was hard when they got bigger; he had never stopped to think about the naturally dark places, like underneath furniture. He would have to make a note for his business.

He grinned and started off after Mal. "Yeah, let's."

It was easier to be Travis with drunk people. Part of it involved taking an endurance potion before he got here, to make it harder for him to get drunk. It was a trick he learned with Upas.

The little scorpion scurried its way back across the living room and under the couch, tucking its tail down as it vanished back into the shadows. Mal grinned after it. That would never get old.

He went to the cupboard beside the fridge, where he stored his booze, and pulled out a bottle of spiced rum. "You tried any Zenderael booze, yet?" he asked, while pulling out two glasses from the upper cupboard. "Tried some of their ales. Weren't that great. 'Course it's only Everea stuff." He glanced to Travis and made his way to the living room. "Got a lead who might be able to get me some better stuff, if dmail ever starts up again." Or if the merge finishes, if that happened first, he supposed.

"A little, in one of the taverns. How could I not go to one, y'know? The opportunity was too rich to pass up." Tyrus grinned, then he stopped and leaned against the wall near the entrance to the kitchen. He crossed his arms. "It wasn't quite to my taste, though."

Travis's taste in liquor was awful, though. Tyrus still liked Earth booze better -- it was exotic and interesting, damn it. Of course, Zenderean alcohol reminded him of home.

Mal snickered, setting the glasses down to fill them. "Not cheap enough for ya?" he teased. College kids and their cheep beer. Mal could never understand it. "Last time I went to try one'a their ales, my instructor gave me Dragon's Breath." He snickered, lifting the glasses and holding one out towards Travis. "Shoulda seen the flames comin' outta that one!"

"Hey, you know me. Gotta save money somewhere, right?" he asked, laughing again. He shook his head, before he took his glass and clinked it against the other one. Tyrus looked down at the glass, then lifted it and took a long drink of it. "Not bad. Dragon's Breath, huh? Did you rename yourself Puff after it happened?"

He grinned. He could have asked if Malachai was okay, but it looked he was fine.

"You kidding? 'Captain Puff' just ain't got the same ring to it." He drank back some of his own, then went to sit on the couch.

"That was when I set up the potion lab, though," he continued, thumbing towards the lab setup on the table not far from the couch. "Grabbed a bunch of supplies, came back home and ordered what I couldn't get quick. Was able to mix up a bunch of fire resist potions, and some heals in case I needed 'em."

He gave Travis a wide grin. "You got any idea how surreal it is to have all this shit be real? Before, you just knew it was talk about some game. Not it's like... shit, man. You'll never know if what someone says is referrin' to a game or not, now."

Tyrus took a seat on the chair, taking another drink of the rum. He never liked to take shots of rum; he preferred to drink his liquor slowly. It also made it easier to control his intake of liquor and keep him sober for longer. He swirled the drink around, before he looked back up and peered over at Mal. He nodded to him. "That sounds like the good thing to do. It's..."

He looked around. He learned to fake this sentiment. It made it almost real in his head; to become truly amazed at Zenderael. He had to channel the amazement he felt at Earth to do that, but the end result was similar. He smiled, over the rim of his glass, and nodded his head. "Yeah," he said. "It's a big change to get used to. Makes you look at the world differently, too, you know? Seeing how people lived on the other world."

"Yeah," Mal agreed. "We ain't had sword fighting in ages, an' now we got people who've used swords on a daily basis for years." That was just a small part of it, but a part he could easily connect with, with his own fascination with swords, and the historic significance of swordsmanship. A lot of the rest was just mindblowing.

"But it's more than that, too. Monsters- I mean, people went huntin' and came up against bears or wild boar, but that's nothing." He went quiet a moment, looking into his glass, and then shook his head before continuing. "When I got attacked by the cracklecat- I don't remember if I told you about that- I was scared. Never seen anything like it. But people from there're used to these things."

It made sense to Tyrus. He remembered when he was out with Harriet and saw the sea monster up the river; it hadn't frightened him the same way it frightened most of the people from Earth. His expression grew distant for a moment, as he thought about it, and then he threw back his glass and drank the remaining rum down. He looked at Malachai and nodded his head. "Yeah," he agreed. "We're scared of things that they're used to. I'd bet even a soldier or whatever, they'd be scared of a monster."

He lowered the glass, cupping it in both hands. "There's just nothing like monsters over here, you know?" he asked. "It makes Earth... I guess peaceful, in some ways. Not so much in others, though, probably."

"Hah, yeah. They never had traffic before." Mal snickered at himself. Traffic could be pretty fucking noisy. He could only imagine how Zendereans felt when first seeing a car, or a whole street of the things.

He nodded to the bottle on the table. "Help yerself," he invited. "There's a couple more bottles in the kitchen, plus some other stuff. Just don't touch the vodka." He only had the vodka on hand for Duncan- he never touched the stuff himself, it was nasty- but wanted to hold onto it for whenever it was Duncan decided to fill him in on what was up.

He finished off his own glass while waiting to let Travis get a refill first.

"No shit." He laughed again at that. "We don't want traffic either. Too bad they gotta deal with it, too."

Tyrus decided to stick with the rum. It was good stuff; he wanted a bit more of it, before he switched to a different liquor. He filled up his glass and took a sip of it, before he looked back to Malachai. He grinned over the glass's rim again. "I'll leave your vodka alone," he said. "I'm not the biggest fan, anyways. You like the stuff too much to share?"

Mal made a face that clearly said 'gross', before saying, "Yeah, that's it," with a sarcastic tone, assuming Travis was just fucking around. As he leaned to refill his own glass, he clarified, "Savin' it for Chief."

He wasn't sure for how long, but it wasn't like vodka went bad.

"What've you been up to, anyway? Aside from crashin' into shit."

Oops.

It was easy enough for Tyrus to brush it aside, like he was just fucking around. He knew who "Chief" was, too, thankfully. He nodded at Mal, grinning at him, and then shrugged his shoulders. Part of making a convincing lie, he found, was basing it in truths. Half-truths let him use his emotions normally, kept him from constructing a entirely fabricated life. It was better that way.

"I was in Instructor Kahil's class," he said. Travis signed up for that before Tyrus got here. "That was the big one. And trying to keep from growing broke before the fall semester starts, y'know?"

He didn't know, because he'd never had to worry about going broke before, and now that he had his alchemy business going, it was easy enough to make what he needed off of selling whatever concoctions he could make to help ward off illness or treat symptoms. He hadn't even gone through his savings, yet.

But he'd heard enough of his friends talk about money problems, so Mal nodded understandingly. "Shoulda become an alchemist when ya had the chance," he said, grinning. "Already got a few patents pending."

He sipped at his rum and leaned back. "What was Kahil teaching, again?" he inquired. "I was taking swordsmanship and monster tracking before the instructors got sick."

"It was basically about butchering monsters. Finding the right parts. Kind of gruesome." Kind of boring. Tyrus knew everything about that; he learned some from Nadir, but the basics were things he practiced a lot. He looked at Malachai and grinned at that, lifting up his rum, and took a long drink of it.

"Yeah," he said. "I should have." Except it would have given him away to Harriet. "I even got along with Nyx pretty well. Too bad, you know?" He shrugged again. "How were you at swordsmanship?"

"Maybe I shoulda taken that one," Mal said, musing. Might have been more useful than tracking. Well, maybe... He'd still have to find the things before he could kill them and then butcher them. "Should start looking into harvesting my own parts, though. Costs less that way." Which meant bigger profit margin.

"Pretty good, actually. More of a defensive fighter, but the dancing experience meant I picked up on the footwork pretty easily, and swords don't need a whole lotta strength behind 'em." Which was good, because he wasn't all that strong. "Could probably hold my own against some'a the less deadly beasties."

He snickered, then. "I actually told the instructor off- Anais Vallinar, a paladin- for sayin' that the kids who weren't learning so well were refusing to. She tried to punish me by makin' me her partner for defensive demos."

"I ought to learn some day. I'm an okay with a gun, but..." It wasn't quite the truth. Tyrus was a very good shot with a pistol; he used a pistol and a short sword in combat, fighting something akin to a pirate, but he mostly used his sword for defense. Special made bullets and offensive potions were his method of choice.

"You got balls for doing that, though," he said. He grinned. "I saw her walking around the halls. She could kick both of our asses at the same time."

Mal had to laugh at that. A lot of the students were afraid of her, but he just found it amusing. Sure, she was kind of standoffish, intimidating, and probably could kick both their asses at the same time, but she was also disciplined, and he didn't think she would unless they did something truly terrible.

"Dunno if it was ballsy or foolish, but she deserved it," he said, once he stopped laughing.

"I know how to use a shotgun. Keep thinkin' I should learn another gun, though. Shotguns ain't always useful, y'know?" Maybe a pistol. That would probably be easier to handle in tight situations, more maneuverability and only needing one hand. Though, that did get him thinking about ammo... He hadn't even thought to make his own since becoming an alchemist, more interested in constructs than anything.

"Yeah. Plus those things that nature goddess made." Tyrus frowned at that, looking at Mal again. He sipped a little bit more of his rum. "These seeds that were apparently getting in every Earth gun they could find. If they get over to this side, we're gonna be stuck with those really old school Zenner guns. I played a little with one once, in Bastantown's market."

He frowned. He did not like the difference between them; he had gotten used to the Earth firearms and learned to use them. It felt a little like switching to a peashooter. "It's pretty different."

Mal frowned, as well. "Yeah, I'd heard about that." He'd almost forgotten about it, actually. "Guess I should look into a flintlock, then, huh? 'less I can put something together myself, but I don't really have the parts." And he didn't have the machinery to make the parts. Course, Zen alchemists probably made their own and didn't have Earth machinery...

He'd have to think on that further. But not while drinking.

He drank back some of his rum, thoughtful. "Mm, I was workin' on somethin' else, though. Medena's here and all, an' Earth's got a lotta pollution. So I was looking into upgrading the city's water filtration, see if I could make it run cleaner, you know?"

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