Flying through the air above Urd, I startled a messenger harpy with an unexpected “On your left” as I whizzed past. I spotted a few flight capable dragonoids but otherwise the sky was pretty clear. No one below seemed to notice though, which was clearly for the best.

I dropped down onto the Guild’s roof and put the armor away as I hopped off the edge. My fall was cut short as I landed in the waiting arms of Carnivac. Carefully, he pulled me in through the second story window he’d been leaning out of. The room was the Guild Master’s office and I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the same window I’d destroyed when I escaped from Ryoma.

I installed one of my “shipping” plates in an inconspicuous corner of the office and brought Alfred out of [Inventory]. In my overly dramatic flex with Ryoma, I’d summoned all of my proxies by putting them into [Storage] via the shipping plates back at AutomaTown. I hadn’t tried going the other way yet, but it should be fine, in theory.

“Sorry to use you as the guinea pig, Aflred,” I said, folding my arms and looking up at the mustachioed robot.

“Quite all right sir, expected even,” he replied, pinching at the ends of the metal ‘stache.

Given that I had a tunnel in place between my [Inventory] and the temporary [Storage] that the plates used, I should be able to push items directly from [Inventory] to plate, but these things needed proper testing. Alfred touched the plate and a dialogue prompt popped up in front of him. With his other hand, he touched the prompt and selected “Shiro’s Inn” from the drop down.

As he tapped the confirmation button, he turned to me and gave me a wink before evaporating into the pixelated chunks that came with going into [Storage]. There was a small delay, but in a matter of moments Alfred was ejected from the [Storage] via the shipping plate in the inn. He came back online and looked around, confirming the successful transfer.

I pumped my fist in triumph, and let out a woop! I’d built a functional teleporter! Granted it only worked for my proxies, since they lacked a soul, and they disconnected during the process, but still I was excited for it.

I tested sending Ratchet back to the shop directly from the [Inventory] but he ended up getting stuck for a bit in the [Storage] space since the destination plate ID wasn’t set via the dialogue prompt of the starting plate. After a few minutes, I had conjured up Sentinel, Ram, and Rom and sent them back to the shop. Carnivac would be staying in Urd to learn the Guild Master trade while smuggling Automata out of the city. That left me with Cyclone, IronHide, and the insecticon mini-bot team.

With my “home team” returned, I wanted to set right off and get back on the road, even though it was getting to be late evening but apparently we were going to be having Captain Sunni’s company of royal guards traveling with us and they didn’t look kindly on night travel. I wanted to punch Ryoma again for further delaying us.

The royal guards, save Sunni, stayed the night in the Knight Watch barracks while Lena, Sunni, and I hung out in the guild offices.

“That was exhausting!” Lena complained.

“You did good,” I praised, “keeping the [Cloak] running for most of the day.”

“I’m nearly out of mana, another half hour at best and I would have been exposed,” she huffed, flopping onto a couch.

Captain Sunni had crashed on another couch in the office, her armor neatly arranged in well-practiced and compact bundles. Her sword, however, was within easy reach should it be required. She wanted to station a guard to watch through the night, but I convinced her that Carnivac could handle it. For his part, Carnivac was busy going through books of policy and such, but being in the same room, he could respond instantly. Besides, it wasn’t like the princess would be sleeping.

Now that everyone else had gone home, Carnivac was finally able to properly, fully, de[cloak]. The ripple of illusion magic dispersed started at the tips of his ears and flowed down his body, down his legs, and to the tip of his tail. When it finished, instead of the shaggy, black wolfkin, covered in the dieing skins of a shadow wolf, stood an entirely chrome and silver, mecha-looking version of my Adventurer proxy.

He had fine steel threads covering his body in place of the fur, using the same technique that I’d developed for Lena’s hair. His face also used the mesh technique to better simulate facial expressions and his green, glowing, Automata eyes were unmasked. The basic design of the leather armor from the previous model had been retained as well as the black pants, wakizashi, and kunai holsters on each thigh. The less that actually needed to be covered by an illusion, the better.

It was this new illusion system that allowed for the “Predator” cloak in the fight against Ryoma. It was fairly costly, mana wise, and could only be done if I had other proxies watching, to provide visual input for the illusion, so it’s uses were limited. Maybe I could develop drones for him like Sentinel had, in order to solve that limitation.

Carnivac drones could wait, I had another idea that needed attention. I pulled out a small workbench and started tinkering with a new toy idea when the princess patted her lap and then held out her arms.

“Prime. Come here,” she demanded.

I glanced up at her. If I had eyebrows, I’d raise one. She just retracted her arms slightly and thrust them back out again. I looked down and set my project aside and walked over to her. As soon as I was in range, she grabbed me and crushed my head to her chest.

“Um... your highness?” I queried.

“Shush. I said I was exhausted. I’m recharging.”

“But, I—”

“Shush.”

I just went limp, somewhat resigned to my fate. After a few minutes, she started lightly tracing the panel lines of my head and quietly humming to herself. If I moved slightly, her grip tightened.

“You mustn’t see my face right now my dear Prime, and I mustn’t see yours. You’ll just have to deal with it.”

I nodded slightly and she patted my head. Eventually, she let me go and I was able to resume work on my little side project. We chatted through the night about the sorts of things she wanted to experience when she returned to the castle and things she was excited to share with me.

Unfortunately, I imagined that most of the things she was looking forward to weren't available to Automata. I kept my opinions to myself though. By morning, I had half of my project done, which was basically an 8 inch action figure of myself. It shared a lot of the same sort of internal components as the insecticon mini-bots and I could probably connect to it as a proxy if I wanted to. The idea was a little weird though, even for me.

Once Captain Sunni was awake and dressed, I tossed my figure into my [Inventory] for later and we met up with the rest of the guards. Shea, Sparky, and Devin met us in the guild reception area, but Shea said that they wouldn’t be going on with us.

I wasn’t surprised when Shea said her farewells. Once Devin was registered, the two of them formed a party and picked up a quest near Shea’s hometown of Heartstone. It would seem that a nearby ore mine had been infested by blood bats and would need to be cleaned out before the miners could get back to work.

Sparky was officially registered as Shea’s familiar and would be sticking with her. I was sad to see the little guy go since he’d been my first friend in this world, but I was sure it was for the best. As a parting gift, I upgraded Sparky with a new spell called [FireGhost] that would combine the [Growth] spell and the [FlameAura] spells to give him something like a fire elemental version of himself that was the size of a mastiff without changing his actual body size. It wouldn’t be cheap, mana wise, but it should give him a heavy offensive spell without increasing his hit zone since attacks would just pass through the flames.

For Shea, I wanted to give her something defensive so I boosted the magic that “solidifies water” in order to give her [WaterShield]. The spell basically took the gathered water and formed a centimeter thick dome with a two meter radius around her hand. The more water she had, the more of the “sphere” would be filled in. The solidity of the shield was entirely dependent on how much mana she’d shove into it. At minimum, it would probably block bugs flying at her... I left it to her to figure out how to use it properly.

For Devin, I gave him a salute and hearty handclasp. His parting gift was me not killing him for trying to murder my dear friend Shiro or attacking me twice. Was it petty, given that Shiro had worked him to the bone and totally reformed him in the inn? Absolutely. Did I care? Not even a little bit. One might forgive, but when one has a robot brain, one does not easily forget.

I say that, but I forget stuff all the time... less events that happened and more I was supposed to do X. Hmm... So what does that say about having a “robot brain”...

I converted to IronHide in truck mode and Lena and Marshoo claimed the front seats. Captain Sunni preferred to stick with her war horse, which was just as well given her size. IronHide’s back seat gained a friendly goblin lieutenant named Toadwart and a surely griphonoid sergeant named Atsa. Sergeant Atsa was still nursing a wing that had been crippled by the former Knight Automata, Koji, during the battle for AutomaTown and was still sore about it.

I didn’t know the names of the other soldiers that were mounted on various running beasts or similarly equipped themselves. I was a bit miffed that we had to travel with them though since I was certain that none of them would be able to keep up with IronHide for speed or endurance. Lena assured me that it was the way of things when traveling with royalty so I had best get used to it.

The road we set out on was narrower and less maintained than the road I was used to. It wasn’t as well traveled but it was a straighter shot to the capital. Bushes and tall grass constantly scraped against IronHide’s sides while overgrown weeds tickled his undercarriage. Still with the size of his tires and the depth of his tread he would still have been able to get up to 30 or 40 miles per hour if he were careful.

Traveling with horses, reptiles that reminded me of dewbacks, and centaurs meant traveling at a speed that amounted to taking your foot off the brake and never using the gas pedal. I clearly needed to build a trailer of some sort. My mind drifted to thoughts of large scale air travel again. I was getting increasingly annoyed by travel with organics.

“Hey Marshoo,” IronHide ventured. “Just how far is it to the capital? I’ve never been there but it’s going take forEVER at this speed, right?”

“I guess about four days? Maybe a bit faster if we can get a boat when we meet up with the river,” she answered, looking bored.

“Four... DAYS?? That puts us WAY behind the prince’s schedule doesn’t it?” IronHide shouted.

“Can’t be helped, IronHide,” Lena coaxed. “My brother was completely unreasonable in his demands.”

Hey IronHide, I said internally, [Inspect Search] says it’s about 210 miles from Urd to the capital.

“Aww come on!” IronHide complained. “If I wasn’t crawling, I could be there in about six hours.”

“Such speeds!” Lena praised. “Alas and alack, it’s too bad. It doesn’t help that we had to go to Urd first instead of straight to the imperial capital. I think that would have been just under five days total, but my position dictates that I visit with certain nobles when I travel. Usually, we would be accommodated by them, of course.”

“I would have thought a six hour trip from Urd to Capital City was limited to dragon back if we hadn’t crossed the northern pass in that same amount of time,” Marshoo mused. “Still, I don’t think even you could make it to Capital City in that amount of time, big guy. At least not looking at those clouds.”

“Uuuuggghhhh,” IronHide groaned. “Now you slow pokes are going to go even SLOWER if it starts raining...”

“Ha!” Toadwart laughed, “I like this guy. This coach blows my mind, but its complaining is very amusing!”