- Chapter 072 -

  Complex and Expensive

  The dining table had become a semi-organised dumping ground. On the left, the expanding library of Clyde’s stolen knowledge, now consisting of nine notebooks filled with maddeningly complex ritual schematics that Mark could copy but barely comprehend. On the right, numerous sketches, the half-formed ideas for his Guardian.

  He had drawn knights in armor, peaceful monks, to strange abstract geometric shapes. He had sketched the USS Enterprise, Gandalf. In a moment of sleep-deprived inspiration, a particularly stern-looking badger with a mushroom, and almost a snake. None of them felt right. They were images, nothing that could be a gatekeeper.

  The center of the table was reserved for the immediate project, the grand distraction that was allowing him to build back his center and personal sanity. The laser.

  He picked up the final schematic. It was simp,e. A series of focusing lenses leading to a final, variable aperture. He rolled the paper, tucked it into his jacket, and grabbed his cane before heading out the door.

  The walk to the Artisans’ quarter was becoming easier. His hip becoming more of a reminder rather than a scream. He arrived at Carl’s workshop just as the afternoon sun hit the dusty windows.

  He didn't knock. He just pushed the heavy door open and limped inside.

  The workshop was a mess of a different kind. Trays of gems were pushed aside, replaced by clamps, polishing wheels, and a scattering of brass fittings. Carl was hunched over his workbench, muttering to a piece of quartz.

  "Are you far enough along to run a test?" Mark asked, closing the door against the noise of the street.

  Carl spun on his stool, his goggles pushed up on his forehead. He looked tired, but his eyes were bright with the manic energy of an inspired craftsman.

  "I have the components," Carl grunted, gesturing to a tray of meticulously cut, water-clear crystals. "Lenses. Mirrors. Polished to within a fraction of their lives. And the brass housing is ready."

  He pointed to a disassembled brass tube on the bench.

  "But I have a box of parts and no idea how you want them arranged. You said the spacing was going to be critical."

  Mark unrolled his schematic and smoothed it out on the bench. "Critical is an understatement. If the focal length is off, we don't get a cutting beam. We get a very expensive flashlight."

  He pointed to the diagram.

  "We need to align the primary lens here. The collimator here. And the final focusing element..." He tapped the end of the drawing. "Here. It all needs to be adjustable."

  Carl leaned in, his eyes tracing the lines. He nodded slowly, the logic of the assembly clicking into place in his mind.

  "It's a funnel," Carl murmured. "You're taking the light and squeezing it until it screams."

  "That’s the plan," Mark said. "Can you assemble it?"

  "Give me ten minutes," Carl said, already reaching for a screwdriver. "And don't touch anything."

  Ten minutes became thirty, filled with the click of brass on brass and the soft swearing of a man trying to fit tiny screws into place with fingers used to a different set of tools. But finally, it was done.

  The prototype sat clamped in a heavy iron vice above a test sheet of scrap metal. It looked like a brass telescope that had been compressed, its lens pointed menacingly downward. A thick cable of spun copper ran from the back of the housing to a hacked-together power source he used for testing.

  "It looks... quaint," Carl observed, wiping grease from his hands. "Are you sure about this primitive idea? Light is soft, Mark. Stone and iron are hard."

  "Light is energy," Mark corrected. "Concentrate enough energy in a small enough space, and hardness becomes irrelevant."

  He checked the alignment one last time. "Can you control the intensity? We need to start low and ramp up. If we dump full power into it immediately, the lenses might shatter from shock."

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  Carl scoffed, tapping the spell-gem array. "I'm an Artisan Gemsith! not an apprentice. I can feed it a trickle or a flood. Just say the word."

  "Start at ten percent," Mark said. "Let's see if it holds."

  Carl placed his hand on the control gem. A faint hum filled the air.

  A beam of light shot from the brass nozzle. It was a clean, steady red, about the width of a pencil lead. It hit the iron sheet... and did absolutely nothing. It just sat there, a harmless red dot, like a laser pointer for a giant cat.

  Carl leaned in, squinting at the dot. He waved his hand through the beam.

  "It's warm," he noted dryly. "If we leave it here for a week, it might give the metal a mild sunburn." He looked at Mark, eyebrows raised. "Is this the devastating weapon of industry you promised?"

  Mark frowned. "The focus is wrong. The beam is too wide. We need a point, not a circle."

  He reached for the adjustment ring on the housing. "Turn it up to twenty percent. And keep your hand out of the beam."

  An hour later, the workshop smelled of mild ozone and endless frustration.

  "This is a fool's errand," Carl muttered, adjusting the clamp for the twelfth time. "We're wasting my mana supply and patience. I could have chiseled something functional by now with a rusty spoon."

  Mark ignored him, his eyes fixed on the dot. It was smaller now, sharper. He made a microscopic adjustment to the final lens. "Just a little more. We need convergence."

  "I'm bored," Carl announced. "And boredom is bad for business."

  He placed his hand on the array. His tattoo flared, the Heart of the Gemstone pulsing with impatient power.

  "Let's see what it can actually do."

  He didn't ramp it up to thirty percent. He flooded the array.

  The hum turned into a high-pitched whine. The brass housing vibrated. And the red dot... vanished.

  It was replaced by a needle of blinding white light.

  There was a sharp hiss-crack sound, like water hitting hot oil. A plume of acrid smoke shot up from the iron sheet.

  "Turn it off!" Mark shouted, shielding his eyes.

  Carl jerked his hand back. The light died instantly.

  They stood in the silence, blinking away the spots in their vision. Mark leaned over the test bed.

  There was a hole in the iron sheet. Not a dent or even a pool of melted metal. Just a perfect, pin-prick hole, punched clean through, difficult to see, but obvious once the small trail of smoke passed.

  He looked under the sheet. There was a matching hole in the heavy wood of Carl's workbench.

  He knelt down. There was a tiny, smoking crater in the floorboard beneath the bench.

  Mark looked up at Carl. The gemsmith's mouth was open, his grumbling forgotten.

  "Well," Mark said, a slow grin spreading across his face. "I think the optics held."

  "You've ruined it," Carl said, his voice thick with theatrical grief. He ran a finger along the scorched hole in the table. "My prized workbench. Crafted from Ironwood seasoned for a decade. A legacy of my grandfather's workshop. Desecrated by your infernal light-drill."

  Mark leaned on his cane, unimpressed. "It's pine, Carl. I can see the grain. And you told me last week you bought it from a salvage yard for cheap."

  Carl paused. A grin split his face. "Aye. Cheapest table I own. But the principle stands! You're a menace to property."

  He looked at the tiny, perfect hole in the iron sheet, his craftsman's eye already calculating the possibilities. "So," he said, tapping the brass housing. "It punches holes. Very expensive, very tiny holes. What use is your little toy now that we know it works? We can't sell a machine that just makes things... holy."

  Mark smiled. "It's not for punching holes. It's for drawing."

  He pulled his notebook closer, flipping to a fresh page. "The beam cuts. If we move the beam, or even the material under it, with absolute precision, we can etch. We can draw ritual circles into stone or metal with a level of accuracy no human hand can match."

  He began to sketch rapidly. "We need a gantry system. Rails on an X and Y axis. Stepper motors, or whatever the magical equivalent is. To drive the laser head... sorry, the laser housing. We need to control the speed and the intensity simultaneously. It's going to be complex. The gearing alone..."

  "Stop," Carl interrupted. He reached out and placed a heavy hand over Mark's sketch.

  Mark looked up. "What?"

  "You're doing it again," Carl said, shaking his head with a look of pity. "Thinking like a primitive. Gears? Rails? Motors?" He scoffed. "Leave the movement to me, before you embarrass us both."

  He gestured to the brass housing.

  "We don't need a complex and expensive machine to move it, Mark. We have simple magic. I can enchant a lodestone array to float the housing and guide it with a thought. Or we can use a simple mimic-link to trace a drawing and have the laser duplicate the motion. It's basic Artifice."

  He picked up the notebook and tapped Mark's complex diagram of gears and belts.

  "This," he said, "is engineering for people who don't have better options, or far too much time on their hands. We have the better options."

  Mark stared at the drawing, then at the glowing gem array. He felt a sudden, sharp laugh bubble up in his chest. He was trying to build a CNC machine with gears when he could apparently just... magic it.

  "Right," Mark said, closing the notebook. "Of course. Why use physics when you can just cheat?"

  "Exactly," Carl said, already reaching for a tray of uncut lodestones. "Now, get out of my way. I have real work to do."