Rani picked up her swords and marched toward Tinker's head. "Step aside! Let me take his head now!"

Jenny stood up and blocked Rani with her arms out. "Wait! We need him to show us where the time stone is!"

Rani growled. "I am losing patience already!"

“I will decide after we question him. Please wait!”

The panther woman snarled and sheathed her swords.

Jenny turned around and approached the Tinker’s exposed head in the machine. She kneeled toward him, shadowing his face. “My companion over there is itching to remove your head. If you want to keep your head, show us where you are keeping the time stone.”

The Tinker snorted through his little round red nose. “Okay. Let me get out first.”

His head lowered back into the machine’s body. The machine hissed as the chest opened where the mole rat climbed out.

He was short, chubby with long arms, and his belly nearly covered his short legs. The goggles appeared to be the only items he wore on his narrow peach face. If he has a loincloth beneath his round gut, nobody will notice it.

He fixed his goggles and rubbed the sweat off his brown, smooth fur. "Follow me."

The Tinker led the way through the dark tunnel. As Jenny and the others followed him, the air grew warmer and warmer. Mechanical noises soon reached Jenny’s ears from the end of the tunnel.

"Are you a sorcerer?" Zena asked, holding her battle staff in case the mole rat tries to run.

The Tinker chuckled. "You can call me a sorcerer. I don't use magic. My inventions are my magic."

Huntar arched his eyebrows. "I don’t understand. Inventions have no magic."

The mole rat clanked his two chopstick teeth. "What is magic? A power to influence the course of events by using mysterious forces? Or a method you can use to create fantastic marvels? Building something is like magic. Magic is required to be created from your body. Engineering is required to be created from your hands, which are part of your body. HAHAHAHA!"

The Tinker stepped over a metal pipe on the ground. “I was a sorcerer until I discovered how to rebuild ancient relics into functional machines. Building new things became my new power. That is why I lived here alone, so no one else could ever steal my work.”

Zena glared at him. “Machines still have their own limits, and magic will always stand greater than the natural order.”

The mole rat glanced at her and laughed. “We’ll see.”

Further into the mountain, they reached a massive cavern with noisy contraptions. Pipes connected to furnaces spread across the stone walls to the circular top, and spider-like robots crawled everywhere, carrying rocks. Other can-shaped machines clipped the stone wall and handed the pieces to the spider robots. Gears turned high above as steam burst from the pipes. In the center, a giant metal spiral pipe turned on a rotating balance wheel on the ground. Jenny wasn’t sure if the cave was a robot factory or a mining excavation chamber. But it was amazing a primal creature could build so many machines inside his hideout.

Rani widened her eyes in wonder at the contraptions. “You built all this?”

The Tinker approached a metal door past the spiral rotating pillar. “Yes, but I used a little magic to finish my construction quicker. This entire mountain is my workshop. I build whatever I want while my machines maintained my lair. They are better than slaves.”

He pulled a lever down, which opened the metal door. He glanced at Jenny with a malicious smirk. “It’s in there.”