***Serena Lovelace, Unambitious Lab Technician***

“Why are they doing this to us!?” Serena cried, huddled behind a desk, shivering violently. The supply of pure oxygen she clutched to her face was the only reason she hadn’t passed out with the rest of the technicians when they started pumping gas into the labs.

Her ‘boss’ gave her a raised eyebrow and a scoff as she held her back against the heavy steel door, which was beginning to bend under the inhuman assault from outside.

“Why is an easy one: Because they don’t like to share. Must have been copying us somehow.” Carol said, pointing. “Hand me that desk.”

Serena stared for a moment at the steel desk riveted to the ground. “Ah, I forget how weak you humans are.” Carol lunged away from the door and grabbing the desk’s metal frame.

With a screech of tortured metal, Carol yanked the desk out of the ground and slammed it up against the door, reinforcing the rapidly degrading steel.

“That should buy us some time,” Carol said, dusting off her hands before snagging a pistol off the ground and racking the slide.

A single unspent bullet ejected from the weapon, and Carol caught it between thumb and forefinger.

Serena felt a brief flicker of the sensation she’d learned to recognize as a soul pulse, before Carol swallowed the bullet.

“My get-out-of-jail free card,” Carol explained with a wide smile. Carol walked past and grabbed Serena’s wrist, dragging the technician past dozens of her sleeping co-workers.

Serena tried to pry the inhuman creature off of her, but it was hopeless. The tattooed arms had the strength of solid steel.

I should’ve left when I had the chance! Serena lamented as Carol dragged her to the ritual circle, which Big Bertha dominated.

“Pardon me,” Carol said, almost tenderly stretching out one of Serena’s fingers.

Serena whimpered quietly as a spark of pain flared across her finger. A moment later Carol reached out and flipped the switch that initiate contact between Big Bertha and the intricate pattern dominating the floor.

In the background, the steel door began to buckle, revealing a demonic row of jagged teeth and eyes glinting with malice. Then a hint of recognition flickered in his baleful eyes.

“Ah, shit.” It glanced back at the other monsters piled in behind it and spoke. “It’s Kar’el.” A murmur of hushed demonic whispers rippled through the hall outside the lab.

“Kar’el, could you do us a favor and ditch your meatsuit?” The nightmare fuel asked. “If you spare us the trouble we could put in a good word for you with O.R., maybe drop a few of the charges against you.”

“You’re gonna have to work for your pay like everybody else!” Carol shouted back, cackling madly.

“Damn. I’m not getting paid enough for this.” The monster sighed before he put a massive claw through the open section of door and began to slowly carve his way through.

In front of Serena, the flash of light resolved into a twisted amalgum of animal parts that seemed to somehow be operating a keyboard.

Tremble, mortal, for you have contacted…Oh. Kar’el…playing fast and loose with the rules again, I see.”

“Hi, two seventy-four!” The hellish voice called from where the creature was clawing its way through the door.

The holographic creature’s gaze landed on the folding steel door. “Alpha twelve sixty-two.” It nodded.

“Do you all…know each other?” Serena whispered.

Its gaze scanned the room before landing on Serena.

“You’re obviously the summoner. How can the Outsider Communications Center direct your conjuration?”

Serena flinched away from the thing’s attention. She hadn’t been one of the technicians who had made deals with these creatures because she didn’t wanna go to hell, obviously.

“You’ve got two choices: Repeat after me, or I snap your neck.” Carol said, taking a firm grip on the back of Serena’s neck.

Suddenly, hell was low priority.

“Okay.”

“Budget soul pulses from the Engine for a teleportation to Orsoth.”

Serena repeated the words, and the creature on the hologram nodded.

“Use the remaining soul pulses to hire sweepers for these clowns.”

Serena repeated the words exactly.

“Oh, come on, Kar’ell, you don’t have to be an asshole about this!” the demons said as it squeezed through the hole in the door.

“No one opposes me and doesn’t regret it!” Carol shot back, cackling wildly.

Serena repeated the words exactly.

The holograph’s eyes gleamed with mischief.

“Understood, summoner, sending a general aid request to Ma’traxia.”

Serena realized she’d messed up even as the creature spoke and Carol’s eyes went wide with alarm.

“Oh, you bitch!” Carol shouted at the screen as a brilliant red circle opened on the floor. A clawed hand reached up and grasped the edge of the portal, hoisting a muscle-covered visage into the laboratory.

“Tell him to send Kar’el to Orsoth, right now!” Carol said.

“Send Kar’el to-Urk!”

A force beyond Serena’s comprehension smashed into the two of them, somehow catapulting Carol away, slamming her violently into the drab concrete wall while simultaneously detaching her from Serena’s spine, lowering her gently down onto the ground.

Oh, my god.

Serena found herself in the arms of a man.

It was hard to see from this close-up, but the jaw was chiseled, his body was warm and just the right amount of hard. And totally naked.

“Are you injured?” he rumbled.

“No,” Serena said lamely. But I feel a little weak in the knees.

“Give me a moment.” He turned his blazing golden eyes to Carol. “Kar’el, so good to see you again. I’ve been waiting to see you again ever since you lost your body.”

Carol rose to her feet, her body battered, a bloody grin on her face. “Well, you’re gonna have to keep waiting,” She said, giving the him the finger.

A moment later Carol’s chest exploded outward, and she collapsed to the ground as a pile of burnt flesh, drawing a squeak of surprise out of Serena.

“Hmm.” The adonis scowled for a moment before returning his gaze to her.

“Greetings summoner. Apologies for the rough treatment by my sister. I take it I’m speaking to the ruler of Earth?”

Serena shivered. “I’m just lab technician.”

The man-shaped…thing frowned rubbing his chin with a hum for a moment before seemingly coming to a decision. “Well, I suppose we’ll have to fix that. It’s beneath me to work for anyone less than the ruler of a continent. Does your country have formalized trial-by-combat, or is it more by right of conquest?”

“Umm…” Serena passed out from the sleeping gas.

***Tom Graves***

“Behold!” Tom said, motioning to his creation. It was an ugly pile of rocks with a crappy chimney and a little opening for him to put his crushed seashells in. there was a pile of tinder in the center, just waiting for him to light the fire. The base had the truck’s exhaust tube leading into it, while Tom had taken apart the engine and hooked one of the internal fans up to the alternator/battery setup, allowing Mr. fluffybottom to power the fan by spinning a handle really fast.

The furnace Mk. II.

According to his research, the temperature required to melt the blood-knights armor was higher than the temperature required to make quick-lime. All he needed to do was heat it until it was a bit above cherry red, let it set for a couple hours, before crushing it into a powder and mixing it with crushed bauxite, ash, and some puffed up stone to make hobo-refractory cement.

“So?” Nema asked the hard questions.

“So it’s step one of fifty towards making a better soul engine!” Tom said, wiping sweat off his forehead and spotting a long streak of engine grease on his arm.

Nema raised an eyebrow.

Nema just didn’t understand that working with liquid metals and forging in general was what the Japanese liked to call ‘a man’s romance’, which was a euphemism for ‘dumb shit guys liked to fixate on’.

“Alright, let’s do this,” Tom said, carefully carrying a bit of flaming wood from the camp stove over to his furnace and lighting the tinder.

Mr. Fluffybottom began to rapidly wind the handle, cranking the alternator up and supplying juice back to the battery and fan.

An electric hum filled the air, and the fire began to burn more and more energetically.

“Slow it down a little bit,” Tom said to Mr. fluffybottom. “Let’s give it time to get up to temp. I don’t want it to explode from shock again.”

Mr. Fluffybottom obliged and Tom spend the rest of the night slowly feeding more and more fuel into the furnace, thankful for the change in terrain that had given them so much wood to work with.

Gonna need to make some charcoal too.

Once the rock covering the opening was too hot to handle, and the heat blasted him in the face every time he moved the covering out of the way, Tom put the pauldron full of crushed seashells in the orange-hot bed of coals.

He watched as the pauldrons took on the same orange color, a little warmer than they needed. In order to mitigate this, Tom had Mr. Fluffybottom slow the fan down a bit as he fed more wood into the fire.

The furnace was belching smoke at an alarming level for hours until Tom finally saw the shells gradually begin to shift color as the heat worked its magic.

When the crushed shells were fully baked, Tom put them in the ‘processed’ pot then put another pauldron full into the furnace. It was slow going, but over a period of three days, he managed to create about a man’s weight in baked shells.

Then came the crushed bauxite.

Bauxite was a lot harder to get than the shells, as Tom had to stop every day during the evening break and dig a six-foot deep pit in the ground during their travels, like in holes. Mr. Fluffybottom was helpful at digging out the first three feet or so, but he was simply too wide to dig a very narrow hole which would allow Tom to check for bauxite under the surface.

It took him twelve tries before he found the stone that ranged from reddish brown to red, pebbly to chunky, with a rough, crumbly texture.

The reason he wanted bauxite was because it was riddled with hard-to-melt components, namely aluminum.

In its pure form, aluminum is easy to melt, but mix aluminum with something else and it immediately gets way harder to melt. Aluminum oxide being a good case in point.

So once he found a source, he loaded up a large portion of the back seat with red rocks from little pebbles to chunks big enough too give him some trouble lifting. The big chunks had gone into the production of the Mk. II. The villagers watched him chuckling evilly as he struggled under the weight red rocks like he was possessed.

While he did this, they all collectively met each other’s gaze and nodded, as if to say ‘this is the kind of crazy we expect from a shaman’.

While the proto-cement cooked, Tom whiled away most of his time crushing bauxite into a fine powder so he could combine it with the shell-powder, ash and aggregate.

Proper drying is going to be an issue, Tom thought, staring into the distance as he pounded bauxite with the steel handle of a craftsman tool form Jacob’s toolbox, the only thing he had that could reliably crush the stone.

I shouldn’t make the new furnace all one piece. That would make it so one piece cracking would ruin the entire construction. Maybe…interlocking hexagons?

Tom tried to imagine a hexagonal dome shape for his finished product that would fit together easily.

No, that’s modern boy thinking, isn’t it? If that were the easiest way to put together a furnace, we would’ve seen it several times already. Hexagons must be a nightmare to get them to line up perfectly. Simpler is better.

Tom instead designed the furnace in three interlocking parts: The base, the furnace, and the chimney, each of which could be poured into moulds dug out of the ground, using the frame that held the engine together as a template that would allow their joints to line up with each other.

Jacob’s truck was well and truly gutted now. So many parts had been removed and repurposed, that Tom was fairly sure it would never run again.

Still, it was a pair of wheels on a frame with good storage capacity, and Mr. Fluffybottom was able to pull it, so it continued to serve its function.

Shortly after the village settled in their new digs, Tom began work on creating the moulds for the new furnace.

He dug the outer shape into the sand of the beach and carved the inner shape out of wood covered with a mixture of sand and fat.

Tom likened it to greasing a pan before baking a cake.

He was only going to get one shot at making a new furnace each month, so he wanted to be absolutely sure he got it right the first time.

Much to his surprise, the cement actually worked, and in a matter of days, Tom had a new, permanent furnace that had more than five times the capacity of the old, one, better tolerance to heat, and didn’t freakin’ collapse because Nendor the village idiot thought it was funny to lean on it!

Tom patiently waited another three weeks for the ugly sand-covered furnace to finish drying, all the while diligently working on his soul-pulse production. Tom had some absolutely cheaty ideas for things he could dupe with his powers, but he still needed to save up before he could pull them off.

While he jacked soul-iron, he collected materials of interest, such as fluxes to coat his tools, native orsothian wildlife parts valuable to Soulmongers, and made as much charcoal as he possibly could for when it was time to dive into smelting iron and gold for the new engine.

Making charcoal was…well, it was trial and error. It was described to Tom by Luz as putting a layer of clay or thick mud overtop a huge pile of wood, lighting the interior on fire, then letting it burn incredibly slowly until the entire pile was charcoal, which would burn clean and hot, which was what he needed for the furnace Mk-III.

Only problem was, it was easier said than done. Either the fire got out of control, making a regular bonfire, or it died an ignoble death, wasting away from lack of air.

It became a balancing game that Tom grew to hate, watching carefully for the signs that the pile was going out, then allowing just enough air to get in at just the right place to keep the gradual reaction going, priming the wood and turning it into valuable charcoal.

It was these constant fires that drew the first attack to them.