Chapter 38 - A Gorgeous Design

During the next two days, I did exactly the same as I had done previously: I built a reactor.

Doing it once was fun, twice not so much. At least, the better quality of the metal I was using made the task way easier, as I hadn’t to care that much about impurities and the like.

At home, the atmosphere had changed a bit.

For one, The kids came back sooner, helping Dad cook to relax from the tiring day of hard work.

I must say it was a true delight to look at my siblings and Cris follow Dad’s lead. Noa was lovely taking care of the potatoes or vegetables, and Cris really looked happy to learn how to cook meat properly, all the while Vi was supported by everyone to get useful tasks to do, following Dad around to learn about spices and the like.

The amount of effort Dad put in making Vi useful, for others and for herself, was really… it just was awesome!

This really had a positive impact on the children. They were even more cheerful than usual, and less tired, not physical, but mentaly. After all, for those as young as them, they were crushing themselves under insane goals and expectations.

Charlotte ate one more time with us and, by Crisnée’s demand, Lord Valince had authorised the not-so-old maid to come and eat twice a week with us.

She was as remarkable the second time I saw her as the first and, finally, I recognised the gentle flame burning in her eyes.

In fact, I felt very dumb to not have directly understood it. It was the flame of the one that survived, the flame burning in those to which life threw a cubic ton of shit, and that went through.

Another thing changed home, and that was that the children had cranked down to try and do everything with Shi.

Oh, the thing they were proficient with and were very useful to do, like the Shi snowshoes, they kept using them, but they were no longer stubbornly trying to, for example, move their blanket with Shi.

And so, in this new, revigored atmosphere, the day came that I had finished the second reactor, the one that would be used for Vivianne.

The Mana Reactor in itself was the same, but I had added two or three things with its future usage in mind.

For starters, using the big green log, I had created a case in which to put the reactor, for whom I had created a harness with leather straps, courtesy of Ophelia (or Elody, I wasn’t very sure. I had asked Ophelia, that’s all I knew).

Vi had been very curious about the case and, in particular, she started bombarding me with questions once I asked her help to adjust the harness to her frame.

The Reactor case was made to be worn over a shirt and under a jacket or a sweater, the whole thing weighing around 3 or 4 kg with everything else.

I was a bit apprehensive because, normally, a Reactor worn directly on your body should be lined with Thaumium to avoid Mana Overexposure, a very nasty way to die, about the same as heavy radiation poisoning, but the actual scale of this reactor was so tiny that it should be very far from a true problem.

In particular, since mana was already so rare in the air, even augmenting its concentration wouldn’t really do anything.

To give a comparison, even in space the Mana Density wasn’t high enough to kill you under months, and the density was 12.6 so there’s that.

So, all in all, it was an apprehension born more from habits than actual risk, but old habits die hard, as they say.

The case was a circular ovoid (a bit like a frisbee) made in two parts that could hold each other, and be opened by turning one clockwise. The only tiny peculiarity was a hole in the structure, on the side, made to let a cable pass through.

There were two ways a reactor could be used. Either you built a spell and you made the Reactor feed it, which was quite inefficient, or you created another device holding a spell, and you used a wire to take the mana from the reactor to the device, which was the normal way to do thing when you had time to spare, as it was highly efficient.

The first method was more flexible, the second was used to build long-lasting hardware like, for example, power armours, weapons, vehicles and the like.

So, yeah. A hole for a wire.

I put the last touch to this part and, for now, stored it on the highest shelf of the warehouse.

Now started another fun part.

Vi?

“Yes?” She answered as I started floating, looking at me with curiosity.

Hand…

I used a blue arrow to point at her hand.

“My hand, yes. What for?”

Extend.

“Okay.”

She sat on the chair and, putting her right elbow on the table, did what I asked of her

Stay…

“Stay like that?”

I nodded.

“Okay!” It was fun to see roughly half her eyes focused on me, and the rest focused on her hand.

I quickly made an overlapping copy of her remaining hand, making Vi’s eyebrows shot upward when she saw her fingers starting to glow blue and, even more, when I made the three-dimensional picture move away and float in front of her.

“...P-pretty…” She was once again entranced by my magic and, moved by a sense of wonder, she tried to touch the blue copy, her hand naturally going through.

“What is it for?”

You…

…

Will…

…

See.

“Meh that’s unfair! You’ve been keeping me in the dark since a week ago!”

Surprise…

“....M-okay.”

You could see that she already had an idea of what was going on, and that she asked only to be sure, for her expectation to not be betrayed, to let herself hope.

I couldn’t just let her in this half-assed state of may-hope…

I inversed the hand picture and made it float over her stump.

Clue.

“...Oh.” She turned all her eyes toward me. “T-thanks.” Her voice was shaking, tiny tears starting to appear.

I floated in her arms.

Don’t…

…

Cry…

Hearing this, she started crying for real.

Yeah, I wasn’t really the best therapist in existence. Blowing mountains and mending holes in someone’s mind wasn’t really the same job.

Here…

…

Forever.

I added, trying to reassure or comfort her, but it only made her cry more

P-psaï!

Don’t ask me, I’m bad at this too. Maybe she’s crying of joy or something? Remember, it’s a thing, crying because of joy.

Ah! Yes, indeed, I hope it’s that!

Short version: it was that.

“Thanks.” Vi suddenly said. “Thanks. Thanks. Thanks-thanks-thanks-..” She added, hugging me a bit too hard but, using magic to compensate, I let her hug me as hard as she needed.

I was here for that after all.

If I couldn’t bear the complete brunt of my siblings’ sadness, happiness, hope, despair, anger and jealousy, I wasn’t fit to be a sister.

From there on Vi’s eagerness to look at me working was mixed with something else.

Hope. It was hope, and in such intensity I hadn’t seen it for a long time.

More precisely, since I stood rampart alone between a whole city and an Entropic surprise attack.

Well, not exactly alone, but the garrison wasn’t big enough to stop the assault, where I alone was sufficient.

Strangely, it made me feel bad. This kind of hope was most of the time born from desperation, and I disliked reveling in this kind of emotions.

***

A hand inner working wasn’t that complex. You had muscle in your arms that, if flexed, would contract or relax a series of sinews. Depending on which muscle you used, you could adjust which sinew was stretched and how much, and that’s more or less how you could grasp things.

It’s when I explained things like that I understood the romanticist’s position of wanting not to explain things to keep their mysterious aura.

Hands were an interesting symbol and something we used every day but, once they were explained, they lost a part of their symbolism.

It’s fun isn’t it?

Yes. In particular since, most of the time, explaining things actually make them even better in my opinion.

Exactly. Hands, they’re a strange thing.

Of course, this was highly inefficient to try and emulate such inner working, so what I was going to do, born from a long reflexion with Psaï, was to create tiny spherical servo-motors and through a web of tiny spells, link those servo-motors together and with another spell whose goal was to, how to say it… to detect Vi’s muscular contraction in her left arm and answer those with realistic actions from the hand I was building.

Yup, I was making her a wooden bionic hand connected to a backpack reactor.

This wouldn’t give her sense of touch back but, if I remembered well, prosthetics often helped maimed people a lot, in particular when those prosthetics were actually working.

That was the nice part.

The not-nice part was that the prosthetic I was building needed to stay in place permanently to not create any accident with the Mana Reactor, meaning I was going to need a… an anchor directly in Vi’s body.

The good side was that, since Vi’s UIna and Radius bone were still in perfect shape, as Meredith knew how to make amputation, I had a pretty clear anchoring spot, which was the base of those two bones.

The bad side was that I needed to drill into those and actually anchor the thing into them, which was bad because the steel I had wasn’t alloyed with Niobium, which was the only biotolerant steel alloy out there.

That meant iron poisoning and that was bad, so I needed to include a spell that actively held the iron together to avoid it’s slow yet dangerous dissolution in Vi’s bloodstream.

And, of course, the operation was going to be, if not dangerous, quite exhausting, and I would need a proper anesthetic, very likely an unhealthy dose of alcohol or, if Ophelia could help me, Mom would be able to tinker something.

Heck, maybe she already had, after all she knocked me out with one of her potions the other day.

I started by the simplest part: The hand in itself.

The first part I was creating was a hollow sphere with a diameter of around 2cm.

This was going to be the servo-motor joining the anchor and the rest of the hand. If I had to create an adult equivalent, this part would have been around 4 to 6cm depending on the size of the subject.

Next would be the palm, made in two parts: The main part, holding the four fingers, and the secondary triangular support, made to hold the thumb.

This was important because the thumb did not exactly move like the other fingers and needed to be able to fold on the main piece of the palm to hold things.

Those two parts would be carved in green wood, as to avoid making the hand too heavy (and because it was gorgeous, frankly), and connected by a long cylindrical servo-motor that would make the triangular part autonomous in its motions.

Finally came the fingers, the thumb made of two sticks of wood and two spherical, 5mm wide servo-motors, and the four other fingers, each made of three spherical servo-motors and three sticks of green wood.

Of course, I said sticks and all, but I was naturally going to carve the whole thing to be an extremely gorgeous version of Vivianne’s right hand.

After all, my little sister deserved the best, so I created the best.

All those that were looking at her with disgusted eyes, I was going to blind them with my prosthetic! So what if she lacks a hand? Now she has a badass bionic gorgeous prosthetic powered by a Mana Reactor!

Calm down. We need to be peaceful to create the best things.

...Indeed. Sorry, I got carried away.

Understandably. We will show them how great our big sister is. But first we need to be calm. Let’s feast after we actually do it.

Yes. Thanks Psaï.

You’re welcome, mom.

I smiled a bit. PsaÏ had started calling me ‘mom’ a lot more than ‘mother’ lately. This life really was relaxing for us.