By the time the ferrex reached flat land, Pike had almost gotten used to the odd, sideways buck of its six legs all kicking off from tree after tree. Almost. His face was covered in cold sweat, his fingers starting to ache from gripping the straps.

They raced across a field of tall, yellow grass, towards the distant stubs of grey watchtowers. He was reassessing how technologically advanced this place was. Giant metal statues lay in the fields, grass and vines winding up their bodies. They looked strangely peaceful, with flowers sprouting from their eye sockets, trees growing upon their bent backs, but he saw the scorched and melted edges of ancient blastmarks, long-ago battles.

If this place was medieval these days, once upon a time it had been something more.

They were watchtowers now, he realized. Swaying wooden poles had been built atop the giants, providing a high point to build tall, bare-bones nests and look out over the plains.

At the center of the town was an enormous titan, twice the size of the others, standing tall on four legs. Instead of a humanoid shape, it was built like a walking tank, with grasping clamp-arms that made it look like an enormous metal crustacean. Patterns of rust the size of small lakes dotted its sides, huge holes torn by gunfire into the right flank. If he wasn’t completely off the mark, it was a mobile factory - legions of smaller arms clustered around a drop bay in its underbelly.

Or. It had been.

Now a village rose up around it on wooden stilts, the huts made of some finely woven, wicker-like material. They looked like enormous birdnests. Climbing up the sides of the mega-titan, they almost concealed its original shape, making it into an enormous, shapeless mass of rickety wooden scaffolding, tiny lights visible from the doorways and windows.

In the night it must have been possible to faintly see the shadow of the titan that once was from all across the plains, illuminated by countless distant fires.

They stopped by the first of the watchtowers, his guide calling up to the distant figure in the crow’s nest. Down the ladder came shimmying a girl as small as a human child, but clearly not human. For one thing, she had great, floppy ears, and for another she was green. Too-large eyes, gold-colored and split by vertical pupils, stared curiously at him.

She pointed a finger his way, and the two of them exchanged words. His knife was briefly displayed, and the goblin - it had to be a goblin - turned it over in her hands, exclaiming excitedly as she tapped her finger against it to release tiny bursts of sparks.

Scrambling the rest of the way down, she hopped onto the ferrex’s back, landing crouched on the edge of the passenger bed with those big curious eyes staring right at him. A four-fingered hand was thrust towards him.

He tried shaking it, but she just slapped his hand away.

Ah.

He was being asked for a bribe. With a grimace, he pulled the miniature computer off his wrist, toggling the holo-pop on and off. With the actual core fried to hell all that came up was garbled nonsense, twisted fragments of light interspersed with multicolored static, but oh boy, it was shiny.

And the miniature bandit liked shiny.

Snatching it out of his hands, she quickly started punching buttons, watching the display shift through different patterns.

And then for an instant, one of the functions came up perfectly clear.

“Hey hold up-” Pike reached for it, and got his hand slapped again, the green bandit holding the armcomp out of reach with a feral grin. “Goddamnit I need to see that.”

It had been the message function. One he hadn’t even bothered to test, considering he was well outside of linkspace, but sure enough, in the brief glimpse he’d caught there’d been a flashing yellow alert of a new message waiting for him.

Considering all the fuckery he’d been through today, that message was like a promise from a past life. And now it was in the hands of a miniature menace.

She called back to the elf, happily waving the wristcom around as it streamed out random bits of warped and distorted holographics.

Then she grabbed his hand. Having to bend over not to pull her off his feet, Pike allowed himself to be led down from the ferrex’s back, waving the growling beast goodbye, and to a short ladder that vanished into the titan’s chest cavity through an open wound of gunfire. She gestured upwards.

He climbed.

Scraped-out hull and the empty sockets for machinery surrounded him. Somebody had gone through here for anything not corroded to crap and stripped it clean. What remained was a giant, hollow cavity, and it looked like the goblin had pretty much made herself at home here- at the end of the ladder was a cozy burrow. A hammock was strung from the ceiling, bundles of herbs were tied to a pipeline running overhead, and a few bits of sparse furniture were scattered along the uneven floor, a tilted bookshelf nearly spillings it contents as it leaned over crookedly. The whole thing was lit by a tiny floating orb that glowed with a soft blue radiance.

And that was the most interesting thing about it.

Ignoring the second ladder that led higher, he examined the orb, prodding it - the color flickered, and changed to a dull grey that made the cozy den significantly less cozy, bringing out the weird, semiorganic shapes of the rusted background machinery.

Try as he might, he couldn’t figure out how it was suspended in the air. His visor’s scans brought up no readings at all. Not magnetic, not no-grav, not even any energy scattering that would point to some kind of carefully hidden ion-jet.

Conclusion?

Well this was fantasy-land. Time to just say it.

“Magic.” Pike admitted, and then grinned. Magic was real. Magic was mother-fuckin’ real