literature

Mad Engineer's Gearbox

Deviation Actions

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Literature Text

Thomas gazed over the landscape from his vantage point: the maintenance door of an old clock tower standing tall over the city. The hands of the tower pointed to the time of quarter past eleven in the flashing light of the eternal storm. The city itself was a dark, Victorian metropolis that stretched as far as the eye could see with modified Tesla towers, looking like thorns growing from tree bark scattered across the landscape. Above, the sky was filled with black clouds and lightning: a side effect of the wireless electricity the towers produced.

Thomas hadn't been in the clock tower for the view though. He was searching for his target, a power amplification facility. After finding the squat, three story building looking like an electrified hedgehog with its domed, spiked roof with arcs of electricity darting across it. After identifying his goal, he then studied the path towards it through the labyrinthine streets and alleyways below. After memorizing the trail he would take, he stepped out the door, falling to the street below.

As he fell feet first, he turned on a flashlight, pointing it at the ground. The light displayed a symbol on the pavement below him and immediately he began slowing down, as if gravity had weakened. When Thomas was about three feet from the earth, a particularly bright flash of lightning washed over the symbol, smothering it in light, and Thomas fell the rest of the way, landing hard, but not gracelessly.

"And people wonder why I distrust those teleportation spells," he mumbled to himself as he began running towards the power amplification building. He ran left into an alleyway that was blocked by a fence and a mugger. In one quick motion, he flipped two switches on the sides of his boots, not missing a pace, lighting up two identical symbols, protected by thick, scratched glass on the undersides of his boots, and ran up the wall as if gravity simply changed its mind on where it wanted to originate from. The mugger glanced up, but decided it wasn't worth the effort to rob a guy who was already running up a wall. A minute later, he grabbed some other guy in a suit walking down the street.

When Thomas reached the building, he walked to the ground and stopped. Now having a close look at the building, he wanted to figure out the best way in. He spotted a simple fire escape on the side between it and another building, but the bottom layer appeared to have fallen down some time ago, as all that was left was a jumble of rusty steel. He didn't want to walk up the wall with that below him because he feared the lightning might wash out the light from the symbols at an inopportune time, causing him to fall to his death. "Wouldn't that be something. 'Underground mercenary killed falling off wall impaled onto rusty fire escape: is safety dangerous?' the headlines would read. I would rather die blowing up; at least that end would have a fanfare." Thomas thought to himself.

Looking around, he had an idea: he could climb up the building next door onto the roof, and then jump onto the third floor fire escape. At least with the flashlight, in the worst case scenario, he might land a bit hard, but he would be uninjured at least. Finding a drainage pipe, Thomas ran up the side of the building, making sure to keep one hand on the pipe in case the symbols failed, but the light from the lightning stayed low, and he made it up the building without a problem. From the roof though, looking down with about four stories difference between the two buildings, he was hit with a bit of vertigo, unsure of his plan all of a sudden. "What?" he asked himself, "You have no problem jumping from a twenty story clock tower, but a four story drop is too much? Get a hold of yourself. You did the math in your head, you'll be fine," he argued in his head before taking a deep breath and jumping.

Even with his fall-slowing flashlight, he fell fairly hard, not having enough time to decelerate properly, but even though the fire escape shook from the impact, it held on strong. Finally getting a good look at the door, Thomas noticed an electric lock on it. It used electromagnets and the wireless electricity to hold the door to the frame. Out of his coat, Thomas took a flexible pad that had the appearance of rubber, but had several lights running over it with a box on one side. Placing the pad over the estimated point where the magnet itself would be, Thomas pressed a button on the box, and faint light could be seen from the edges of the pad. With the light still visible, the door opened freely, and Thomas removed the pad from the door, keeping the door wide open lest the magnets slam it shut over his arm.

Once inside, the first thing Thomas noticed was the arcing electricity from the Tesla coils around the room.  He was on a catwalk above a skeleton crew of workers maintaining the coils and recording the readouts. The two floors above them were deserted, because they were built more in case something with the upper parts of the coils went wrong. The second thing he noticed was the loud noise of electricity in the air, explaining why nobody heard the clatter outside. Thomas still tried to move along the rickety metal catwalks as quietly as he could, though he had no idea how quiet he was, as he could barely here himself think. One thought he did manage though was "Looks like my spells are going be short distance only, the light will drown anything beyond a centimeter."

When he reached the bottom, he slid behind one of the large instrument panels and waited, because one of the workers noticed an odd shadow dance against the wall for a moment and decided to investigate. Looking around the corner, a hand reached out, grabbing him over the mouth and pulling him into the space as well before a flashlight was placed over his eyes. The bright, yellow light was the last thing he saw before he slipped into his dreams.

Johnny was reading one of the smaller instrument panels, writing the data down on his clipboard, when he heard a clinking noise that was out of place with the usual zapping and sparking noises. Glancing over, he saw smoke rising from behind a transformer. Fearing an electrical fire, he signaled a coworker near the switch to cut power before running to the fire extinguisher: a flashlight with a symbol that creates a vacuum, and had a cone over the end with mirrors lining the inside to amplify the power. As he dashed to the smoke, he saw that its origins wasn't the transformer, but a metal ball made from several small triangles that had a hole in the side. As he noticed this, he heard a muffled cry from behind and saw one of his coworkers having a light flashed in his eyes by a man wearing a bowler hat, a long, black trench coat that appeared to be made of both leather and rubber, black jean pants, black gloves with steel around parts of the fingers and covering the palm, and a pair of black boots that climbed halfway up the calf and were made from leather, steel, and rubber.

As Johnny's coworker slumped to the floor, the man grabbed the next, nearest worker and with light visible from his palms, threw the man into another worker with enough force to knock them both out. He then ran up a worker opposite of Johnny, and launched himself off of the workers face with a kick that struck him unconscious, and as the man in the bowler hat flew at Johnny, he reacted by hiding behind the extinguisher he was holding and flashed it at the man. As the symbols from the extinguisher hit, and combined with the symbols on the attackers palms, an implosion was created, sucking them both into each other and breaking the cone off of the extinguisher flashlight.

Both of them dazed on the floor, Thomas was the first to recover, running past Johnny to get his own flashlight and the mirrored cone. Johnny, still fairly dazed, grabbed Thomas's ankle, tripping him to the ground. Thomas then wrenched his foot free from Johnny with a twist of his own body, then grabbed the nearby light and cone, combining them and flashing it into Johnny's face, forcing him into sleep.

With all of the workers unconscious, Thomas tied them up and gagged them before dragging them outside. Inside, he got to work setting up a contraption that had been hidden in his coat in several parts. The first part was a rectangular rod with a light bulb on the end. Just below the light bulb were five panels, one panel on a hinge connected to the top of another. The panels themselves had symbols carved through them, and had springs that when activated, would make the panels close into a box around the bulb. The next few parts were panels of small triangles with mirrors on one side, and painted black on the other. When assembled, they made a roughly spherical shape. The final part, attached to the other end of the rod, was an old, clockwork timer. It was set to time when the boxes would close around the bulb, because due to the electricity in the air, the bulb would glow until it was destroyed, making it very inconvenient for this type of use. After assembling the device, Thomas set the timer and ran.

Outside, one of the workers woke up early, just in time to glimpse the man who beat him up run from the power amplification building. As he started wondering what happened, he was answered with an explosion that made him wonder where he was going to work tomorrow.
The first chapter of a story set in an alternate universe where the technology Tesla designed became commonplace, and where magic, in the form of symbols cast with light were discovered.
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