11. Collecting Fuel

A monster and a robot stalk the nighttime streets of downtown. What crimes shall we commit?

I’m making mental bets. It’s an interesting enough way to pass the time, and I can even kind of convince myself that it counts as learning how to better anticipate the desires of my master, which somehow makes the whole thing a little less stressful to do. I guess that’s just what happens when your brain runs on robotic servant architecture. I’m trying not to worry about it, which is to say I’m burning the parts of me that are worried about it for fuel and feeling a lot better about myself as a consequence. I might be trapped in a torture chamber, but damn does it come with incredible antidepressants.

What was I thinking about? Oh, right. Crimes. I’m far too gay to have a particularly high opinion of the American justice system, so being a criminal in and of itself is hardly a dealbreaker for me. I’m less sure how I feel about apparently being a member of the magical black market mafia that uses their earnings from selling illegal alien technology to bribe or otherwise coerce politicians into… something? I guess my entire opinion about this whole thing depends on what that something is. I don’t exactly have high hopes about it being good, though.

Nanaya stops by another gas station and buys another rotisserie chicken, throwing it up towards the rooftops once we’re outside. It doesn’t fall back down. From there, we start moving out of the business district into a more residential area, a nicer part of town where the lawns are green, the trees are trimmed, and the gardens are meticulously managed by people who are probably receiving less than minimum wage. It is onto one of these beautiful lawns that Nanaya casually leads me, walking up to a hedge of bushes and shoving her arms inside, down near the roots.

I peer over her shoulder, and spot a device that looks almost identical to that caged glass tube Nanaya showed me earlier. It’s planted firmly in the earth, hidden entirely by the hedge so that it can sit on the ground directly outside a fancy two-story house. Other than being quite dirty, the only difference between this device and the one Nanaya showed me earlier is that this tube is full of swirling purple mist.

Nanaya unlatches the tube from the cage, collecting it and spiriting it away into her robes before replacing it with an empty one. Then she latches it all back together, ensures the bush is once again hiding it, and walks away.

Well! That’s a bit suspicious and weird. We wander around the neighborhood for a little longer, Nanaya seeming to be on the lookout for something. I wonder what? I suppose the sensible assumption to make is that it has to do with the second cage/tube thing she’s been carrying around in her robes. Maybe she’s looking for somewhere to plant it. Considering that it apparently fills up with waste magic, it’s probably collecting magical residue somehow. Logically, it would perform better somewhere there is more of that.

Of course, my immediate question to that line of thought is ‘why the heck would she put it on Earth, then?’ Earth is a distinctly not very magical place. Although… hmm. Magic comes from emotions, and magical or not, Earth is absolutely an emotional place. The magic might not be floating around freely in the air as much, but presumably all humans have the potential to create magic. They have the fuel, they just don’t know how to burn it.

So is Nanaya collecting fuel, then?

I decide to take a gamble on that idea, out of boredom if nothing else. Paying attention to my magical energy sensors, I look for a direction that seems more heavily concentrated, even if only slightly. My equipment is pretty damn sensitive, so it’s easy to do. I pat Nanaya on the shoulder to get her attention, and then point. Her whole body tenses up at the touch, her head whipping around to glare at me.

“What is it?” she demands. I can’t answer her, of course, so I point again and start to walk. She frowns, but follows me.

It’s a good thing Nanaya is a curious person, because I have absolutely no idea if going this direction will actually help her. It think it might, though, and Nanaya seems to be walking around more or less aimlessly so I can reasonably believe that my best guess has the potential to be helpful for her. When we reach the apparent source of the energy, however, I can’t help but feel like I’d rather not have.

Unlike most of its neighbors, this house has quite a few lights still on despite it being only a couple hours after midnight. The house is relatively quiet, as houses tend to be, but I have a much more sensitive auditory system than humans and that lets me make out at least a little bit of what’s going on. Two people are arguing inside, and at least one person is crying.

Nanaya frowns, bounding silently ahead of me and sneaking up to the house while keeping low enough to avoid the windows. Being somewhat less sneaky, I follow her at a much slower pace as she puts her big, pointy ear up to the wall of the house and listens in. As I get closer, I start to be able to make out exactly what’s being said, but I decide to move that information directly into my archives without ever letting myself be conscious of the memory. Listening in just seems rude and very unlikely to do anything but make me feel bad.

“…What thoroughly unpleasant people,” Nanaya mutters to herself. “This is a good spot. Artifact, come here.”

She pulls out that newer, empty copy of the cage-and-tube device she showed me before and quickly finds a way to hide it within the landscaping.

“Do you know what this is?” she asks me as I squat down next to her. I answer with a shake of my head. “Hmm. Then how did you… no. Questions you can answer. Is this device similar to something you are familiar with?”

I shake my head.

“Did you intuit this device’s function in some other way?”

I wiggle back and forth a little. I still don’t exactly know what it does, I only really had a guess about what Nanaya needed in order to use it.

“Are you unaware of what this device does?”

I nod.

“Hmm. It collects magic. You must have known this, or you would not have brought me here. …No, that is discernible through observation and context. You are referring to other elements when you express your ignorance.”

I nod.

“To be more specific, this device forcibly converts a certain degree of emotional potential within its range into magical energy. This is part of the function of a transformation stone, and I imagine part of the function of your body. The people here are very angry, angry enough to be hateful, disgusted, and upset about fundamentally very stupid things. Taking those emotions and using them for power likely does them more good than letting them simply continue to use them for vitriol, but there is always the possibility it will take too much and leave them dangerously devoid of feeling. This is a good place because if that unfortunate case occurs, I do not believe I will particularly care.”

She installs the device into the ground, planting it firmly in the dirt as if it, too, would grow roots like the bush hiding it.

“I know you have been ordered to obey me,” Nanaya says, rubbing her hands together to brush off the dirt. “But I did not order you to find this place. Was this recommendation of your own free will?”

Uh. I guess it was, yeah. I nod.

“There is much residual magic within the Dark World, but the black mists are highly volatile and extremely unsafe. Thea builds these devices so that we may extract purer, more specifically directed emotions to power artifacts less self-sufficient than you. There is only so much power that we can generate by ourselves, after all. Come.”

I follow her as she slinks back out of the yard. The explanation makes a certain kind of sense, though I can’t help but suspect it’s far from the most effective or efficient way to harvest emotions. Well, any method of harvesting emotions nonconsensually is kind of fucked up, so efficiency might not have been their goal here. I guess that’s a good thing, if it’s true.

“Do you want to kill Melpomene?” Nanaya asks.

I hesitate, staring at her and not really knowing how to answer. Because like, kind of, yeah? Supporters of slavery morally deserve it, and she’s definitely supporting my continued enslavement. But I’m not really furious with her like I was the first time that question was asked, and consequently I don’t think I could work myself up to actually wanting to kill anybody, no matter how awful. I decide to answer with a noncommittal back-and-forth movement.

“That is a different answer than you gave before,” Nanaya says. And I guess that’s not really a question, but I manage to nod anyway. It is reasonable to interpret that statement as a request for confirmation.

“I will never allow you to hurt her,” Nanaya says, “and I do not particularly care about your comfort or happiness. But similarly, I bear you no particular ill will. It is clear that you have a will, and both Anath and Thea have informed me in their own ways that they dislike your suffering. So long as you continue to be cooperative, I will support the efforts to improve your situation. Melpomene will capitulate if the three of us are in agreement.”

I’m speechless, and not just for the usual reason. That’s… I mean, that’s wonderful! I don’t know the degree to which she intends to ‘improve my situation,’ but I’ll take anything at this point. I emphatically give her three consecutive nods, my hands slightly flapping the sleeves of my hoodie in approval.

“Do not fill yourself with undue hope,” Nanaya says flatly. “I consider you a tool. It is merely basic wisdom to take care of one’s tools.”

…Oh. Well, that certainly takes the flap from my sleeves. I should have known that hoping for actual freedom would be too much to ask for. Still, I’m burning enough sadness right now to take the win, however limited. As long as we reach a point that allows me to actually communicate with people, I can start taking steps towards getting real help. One step at a time, one foot in front of the other. It’s like writing an essay, or composing a song. Easy, as long as you break it down into chunks.

My power reserves have increased to 28%. But hey, at least I’m not having a panic attack.

Nanaya and I creep through a few other neighborhoods, changing out full jars of magic with empty ones and not really much else. It’s almost comical in contrast to the literal billions of dollars she was moving around earlier tonight. Can they not just hire a guy to do this? I feel like my evil villainess organization needs someone with a bit more planning skills. Though I guess that might be difficult since anyone they hire to mess with these things could probably earn many orders of magnitude more by stealing and selling them.

The locations we are placing these seem so haphazard and arbitrary in the context of their likely value. Nothing stops a gardener from stumbling onto one and taking it other than the fact that they don’t look particularly magical if they aren’t filled with colored mist. Even then, the average person probably wouldn’t assume they’re some kind of artifact simply because most people don’t know what artifacts look like. I guess the power they collect is more valuable to my captors than the amount of money they could earn from them, but the way Nanaya is treating this whole thing is just off. It’s like we’re doing chores to clean our apartment more so than devouring the emotions of a family Nanaya has decided she doesn’t care about. It’s startlingly casual, like it’s something they just started doing on a whim until it became routine enough that they don’t question it.

Maybe I’m completely off-base, though. I barely know these people, I’m just stewing in my own thoughts because I have nothing else to do while we commit what might be simultaneously the most boring and most fucked-up acts of trespassing I’ve ever heard of. Eventually, the work is done and Nanaya finds us a mostly abandoned warehouse to spend the rest of the night in. I say mostly abandoned because there are other people sleeping here: a small group of two homeless women and a homeless man are curled up asleep behind some crates near the exit. Nanaya stares at them for a while with a frown on her face, but when Anath drops to the ground behind us she looks away and heads deeper into the warehouse, letting them sleep.

“We will wait here until our home fragment converges or we need to leave,” she declares. “Artifact, hide yourself until then. I do not wish for you to do anything until I call for you again.”

Oh, okay. The warehouse has more than a few dusty, empty crates strewn about, so I find the one closest to where Nanaya seems to be settling down that’s still big enough to hold me and get inside. It turns out that when I don’t need to worry about stretching or sitting comfortably, ‘big enough to hold me’ is actually quite compact. Heh. If I fits, I sits.

I activate sleep mode, and one hundred and ninety-two thousand, six hundred and sixty-two seconds later (that’s two days, five hours, thirty-one minutes, and two seconds), I wake up.

Oh. That… that’s a lot of time.

I stand up, an uncomfortable itchy feeling in my joints from all the dust that settled on me in my rest. I open all my outer platings and force a burst of air through my systems, removing most but nowhere near all of the unwanted irritants. Ignoring the discomfort as best I can, I turn towards Anath and Nanaya, who appear to be packing up the last of whatever things they had apparently gathered. I once again woke up because Nanaya called out the word ‘artifact’ in my general direction. I guess we’re leaving.

The morning sun shines through the door out of the warehouse. The morning sun of two days later. I have officially been in sleep mode for more than half the time I’ve been a robot, but it all just feels like one continuous day. I don’t fall asleep and rest, I just pause and resume, skipping through time like I’m watching late-night videos on the internet when I know I should be in bed.

“Come,” Nanaya orders. “We are returning to the castle.”

Castle? Castle. Right. Yeah. The evil ladies and their evil castle that literally sits inside of a storm of dark energy. I guess it’s overlapping with Earth enough that we can return there. I have simply been kept in a box until there was somewhere better to store me. I wonder how much time will pass the next time I’m ordered to sleep. A week? A month? A year? I follow behind in a daze, barely registering the early morning streets as we walk towards what is presumably the convergence. Though faint, the magical energy in the air flows in the same direction that we travel, the breach between worlds trying to inhale every last crumb of power.

I honestly expect us to be attacked somewhere along the way. My disguise isn’t exactly top quality and there were probably at least a few witnesses to my fight with Anath and Fulgora. But somehow, the sky gets darker, the crowds disperse to nothing, and we walk past the makeshift warning barricade without ever being accosted. The eerie familiarity of the liminal space is utterly silent, neither man nor monster anywhere to be seen in its seemingly infinite alleyways. Before I know it, we’ve reached the wall of darkness and stepped through into another world, surrounded on all sides by swirling black mist.

Nanaya leads us swiftly through it, and I make sure to flag the data logs as important so I can figure out how she’s navigating. We are not alone here in this darkness, the occasional sounds of screeching monsters ringing out around us, but no one seems to pay them any mind. I suppose monsters are just something you have to get used to when you live in the Dark World. I’m so distracted by the walk that I almost don’t notice when Nanaya throws the doors to the castle open, stomping inside and forcing Anath and me to quickly follow or get hit by the doors as they swing back closed.

“Finally,” Nanaya grumbles.

“…Sorry,” Anath whispers miserably. The quiet, almost pathetic tone of voice she uses startles me, my first instinct being that someone other than her must have been the one to say it. It’s so utterly unlike the boisterous, hyperactive Anath I’m used to that it takes a moment for me to make the connection.

“It’s fine, Anath,” Nanaya says, not doing a particularly good job of sounding like she means it. “We did do that supply run, at least. Let’s get you somewhere that you can relax.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“Yeah, okay,” Anath answers, her tail swishing nervously behind her.

We head up the stairs of the fancy entry hall, my eyes drifting up to look at the ceiling sculpture again. That feeling of emotion, meaning, intent behind the piece still lingers in the back of my mind much like the strange familiarity I experienced towards the Antipathy artifacts. It remains ephemeral, though, failing to manifest as any particular understanding.

Though my mind may be the one moving it, my body was crafted by Antipathy hands, and the housing of my soul contains some secondhand nostalgia for their culture that I am not sure how to indulge. It is simultaneously disquieting and intriguing; though these alterations to the core of who I am are objectively horrific, there is something bittersweet about being the last vestige of a dead culture that I cannot simply reject out of hand. Everyone seems to agree that the Antipathy were monsters beyond words, but they are dead now, and if I could speak I may be the only thing in any world that could still speak their language. There is something solemn in that which I do not dare to disrespect.

“MELPOMENE! THEA! WE’RE BACK!” Nanaya bellows down the hall, announcing our arrival to the entire castle. The noise startles me from my thoughts, but I suppose this place is so large and so empty there aren’t many other ways to be heard. We head through a few more vacant rooms and hallways before emerging in the furnished part of the house where I initially met everyone other than Melpomene. This time, the room is empty except for Melpomene, although Thea hurries in from another door shortly after we arrive.

“Anath! Nanaya! Goodness, dears, you had me so worried!” Melpomene says, rushing forward with her arms outstretched for a hug.

“Oh, thank goodness you’re both alright!” Thea sighs. “I mean, I didn’t expect you to not be alright or anything, but I was still really worried!”

“Mmphf,” Nanaya grunts as Melpomene gives her a big squeeze and then moves on to Anath. “Apologies for taking so long. Anath significantly overexerted herself, and though the situation was tenuous we managed to pull through. I of course took the time to manage our various chores on Earth.”

“Thank you so much, Nanaya, you’re a blessing as always,” Melpomene says. “Though when you say things were ‘tenuous…'”

“I almost died,” Anath admits as Melpomene pulls away from the hug. “Nanaya says I would have died, or at least been captured.”

Melpomene’s eyes instantly flick towards me.

“Was it because…?”

“No,” Nanaya says. “Outside of bringing Anath to Earth in the first place—which it doubtlessly did under Anath’s direct orders—the artifact did not cause any problems. It was useful and unerringly obedient. However, Melpomene, I believe your theory is false. My observations of it indicate that it possesses some semblance of a human mind, if not an entire human soul.”

Melpomene’s lips purse tightly together.

“…What is it exactly that you observed?” she asks.

Nanaya pulls out the cellphone we stole on the first day, opens the Wikipedia app, and tosses the phone to Thea. She awkwardly juggles it for a moment before catching it, staring at the phone with curiosity.

“Check the recent history for that application, Thea,” Nanaya says. “The artifact was reading as much as it could, navigating quite deftly. As if it knew exactly what it was doing.”

“This is… oh. Oh! Nanaya, you’re a genius!” Thea grins.

“Yes, but do explain how,” Nanaya says flatly.

“These are radio transmission protocols! Frequency assignments, packet compositions, all sorts of stuff that you’d need to access the internet or other wireless communications. You know, assuming you have a radio transceiver.”

“I see,” Nanaya says. “And what does this tell you?”