Delvers LLC: Adventure Capital

by Blaise Corvin

  ***

  Henry ushered his audience forward into the large, open air room he’d constructed for that purpose. “Okay, folks. Here it is, the Delvers LLC, PMSing Mosquito!” He turned to gauge the reactions of this audience where they all stood in the double doorway.

  His majordomo Ellen and her husband Gavra, the captain of the guard, looked confused. Volleyball pursed her lips, appearing thoughtful. Tony leaned on his spear, eyeing the contraption skeptically, and the two goblin siblings’ eyes were huge with awe. Rekkla was the first to speak. She asked, “Can I ride it? It moves, yes?”

  Trask cleared his throat and pushed his fake glasses up his long nose. “I believe it is a vehicle, but what does it do?”

  Henry grinned. “I’m glad you asked!” He couldn’t help it; he was enjoying himself. The EMT-turned-mage had worked his ass off underground for weeks, but damn did he have something to show for it.

  As Henry moved towards his contraption, Tony muttered, “It’s so big.” Henry smiled even wider.

  “That’s what she said!” he chuckled. Of course, nobody else understood the joke. When he looked back, they were all just staring at him. He shrugged and took the last few steps towards his beautiful new vehicle.

  This is going to be fun.

  As he climbed up the ladder on the side of the Delvers LLC Mosquito, Henry began talking over his shoulder. “Over the last couple weeks, there have been a few times where I got stuck, or I wasn’t sure which direction to go with something, but I had a secret weapon! I just had Tony use his magic while I asked questions. I don’t know if that’s how it works, but man did this thing come together fast!”

  “How is Aodh’s magic relevant to this at all? He controls darkness, yes?” Tanushree asked. Tony looked sheepish and made a noncommittal gesture. Apparently, he was keeping his actual abilities close to the chest. Probably smart.

  “Don’t worry about it, Princess,” said Henry. “Just try to follow along. The Mosquito is an airship. Well, it’s actually more a gunship, or even just a really high flying hovercraft...sorta.”

  Ellen goggled. “But nobody can make airships!”

  Henry reached the deck of his new invention and pointed. “That’s what everyone thought, but that’s because they were thinking about it all wrong. They didn’t know how to make it fun for the components!”

  Blank stares met that pronouncement and Henry decided on a different direction. Maybe he should have taken a nap before actually talking to anyone, too. “Most vehicles on Ludus push off of something. I figured this out on my own a while back when I made the Battlewagon. I’ve heard that there is a transportation system to and from the Tostey and Berber capitals that utilizes this type of magic technology, too.

  “If anyone tried to use this type of tech to make something fly, it would effectively just be floating really high up, and it would require a ton of power. But the Dolos high priestesses, or whoever made the official airships, cheated, and I figured it out. I noticed!”

  Henry placed his hands on the wall around the Mosquito’s main deck. “What do the big, Ludus airships do when they are not actually moving? They hover over the cities, right? What happens when they run out of power? They don’t crash, do they? Nope, they hover. So as a storage and a safety mechanism, those huge ships can hover without any real energy. Why doesn’t anyone ever ask how they can do this? Well, I did, and I figured it out.

  “It doesn’t actually work that much differently than the pushing action I built before. You just have to convince the magic circuits to stay a certain distance away from whatever they are resonating with. Gold is still all over on Ludus, so the Mosquito resonates with it just like the Battlewagon.”

  Henry clapped his hand and asked, “Is everyone understanding this?” The group shook their heads. “Fine, what you need to know is that this airship will go up to about twelve hundred feet, maybe fifteen if you really push it, and down to ground level. It probably won’t work well over water past a depth of about five hundred feet. Ascending and descending is a little slow. For propulsion, I have some standard, pushing mechanisms in the fore and aft, and a couple high powered propellers. They use air magic stones and run damn near silently.

  “It takes a while to get up to speed, but I took it out for a spin last night and I think it hit about forty miles per hour. That’s not only faster than the Battlewagon, you wouldn’t have to deal with terrain or monsters anymore.

  “It’s super power efficient, and—”

  ***

  Aodh barely listened to Henry drone on about the vehicle’s specifications. The young adventurer just kept looking at the contraption, taking it all in.

  The Mosquito was at least twice as long as the Battlewagon. It shared a few similarities, but not many. For one, Henry had apparently figured out how to craft glass, and the forward section, what Henry called a cockpit, had thick glass windows in a bubble shape to the front, the sides, and downwards.

  Sticking out of the front of the cockpit, attached some way Aodh wasn’t familiar with, was an obvious cluster of weapons. One long pipe and two smaller pipes all came out of a leather cone. The smallest pipe had a large glass orb attached to it, glittering in the noonday sun.

  The tail of the craft jutted up, holding a propeller inside that faced horizontally. A small platform with a safety railing rose above the walls of the craft, offering a sniping platform for someone at the rear of the gunship.

  The entire vehicle rested on four support struts, each one sported a tube on top. The purpose of the tubes was a mystery to Aodh. The struts were kind of tall, the bottom of the craft was higher than Aodh’s waist.

  Extending behind the cockpit for about half the craft’s length were a pair of aluminum racks, standing a bit higher than a tall person would. Aodh couldn’t figure out what they were for either. Two thick, stubby wings stuck out the air machine’s sides, with a smaller set at the rear. Behind the rear wings, near the tail, yet another pair of supports protruded, these ones mounted with propellers.

  On top of the midline, second set of wings, a little door led into the main portion of the aircraft, serving as an easy entrance and exit. An aluminum, waist-high fence ringed the platform, obviously built so that a person could stand there. A boxy contraption sat on top of the fence on both sides of the vehicle.

  Aodh looked closer, and realized he’d seen the boxy thing before. In fact, it was the first weapons arrays that Henry had created in his laboratory over a week ago. The manic Delvers leader had asked Aodh a bunch of weird yes-or-no questions while he’d been working on them.

  Henry had attached several different weapons together and integrated the entire thing into the top of the rail. The goateed, orb-Bonded man was currently standing behind one, busily explaining its features. Aodh focused back on Henry’s excited, non-stop technical explanation again.

  “See, these rear emplacements are for a gunner on either side of the Mosquito. The weapon cluster can be adjusted for elevation, windspeed, and the gunner can fully traverse it.” Henry demonstrated by moving the weapon cluster around. “You can also unlock its position on the rail and move the whole damn thing!” Henry pulled a lever, then slid the entire weapon emplacement around the top of the rail, moving it to the rear position.

  “Each emplacement has three weapons. The first is a magazine-fed air rifle. It holds seven gold slugs in the underbarrel magazine. It’s bolt action, and is attached to the centralized air system for each platform that runs on an air magic stone. And yes, I already know that none of you can tell the difference between magic stones, which is why each platform has a spare, too.

  “These airguns have a lot of power. Magic lets me cheat a little bit, so these guns will nearly match a fucking hunting rifle back on earth for kinetic energy. The gold slugs all have a copper gas check so they won’t come apart when you fire them. They can break the sound barrier.”

  “What is a sound barrier?” asked Gavra. The swarthy man was covered in swords, obviously interested in weapons,
so his rapt attention as Henry explained his new death machine made sense.

  “It is the maximum speed that sound travels, my heart,” Ellen answered her husband. “I have never seen it, but there is a crack if anything goes faster than this speed.”

  “Is it fast?” Gavra asked.

  “Very fast.”

  Aodh had already respected Ellen, but now regarded her even more highly. He wondered if people in Berber were just more educated in general than people in Tolstey. Aodh sure as hell hadn’t known what a sound barrier was.

  “That’s right!” crowed Henry. “These things pack a punch, and they’re easy to aim! They also use the same targeting system as this sunlight weapon. I’m calling it a day laser, or ‘daysler.’”

  “Daysler?” asked Tansushree, her mouth forming awkwardly around the unfamiliar word.

  “Yeah. I actually have an easy time messing with light stuff now because of the new magic mojo, and this was surprisingly easy to make. Being able to create glass helped a lot. These weapons charge as slow as hell, but they fire real daylight in a super thin, concentrated beam for about a second or two. They will straight up light shit on fire and burn through flesh without a problem. They’re more effective if you aim at one spot, though.

  “During daylight, they charge a lot faster. Maybe one shot per ten seconds. They don’t use much power then, either. At night, they use magic stones to power up, maybe thirty seconds per charge, and the glass balls to the side will start shining like a flashlight. That’s why I put some shiny tin, pretty much a mirror between the ball and the gunner. They’ll work like a spotlight and not blind any of us while the weapon is ready to fire. When it’s fired, the ball stops shining.

  “Each weapon cluster has a simple spotlight, too.” Henry demonstrated the light, but during the day, it wasn’t very impressive. Then he continued, “Last but not least is the Angry Honeycomb.”

  Aodh blinked. Angry Honeycomb? The young adventurer wished Jason was there. Without the other Delvers leader around, there wasn’t anyone to tell Henry how terrible his naming sense was. Plus, if this weapon was the same one Aodh had seen Henry testing before, ‘Angry Honeycomb’ was an even worse name than anything the Asian man had come up with before.

  “Angry Honeycomb?” asked Tanushree, skeptical.

  “Yeah, I got the idea from the air guns here in Berber and from a Chinese fireworks weapon I saw on a TV show once. See, there are bronze magazines on the hull of the Mosquito here,” said Henry, pointing to the hexagonal devices. “The weapon itself was a lot easier to figure out than I thought it could be, mainly because magic systems make setting up the air resistors easy. Each tube gets the same amount of air.

  “The way it works is once the magazine is slotted into the launcher,” Henry said, sliding the magazine into the weapon and clicking it into place, “firing releases a burst of massively compressed air. It hits every tube in the launcher.” Henry pointed at the end of the box where there were many holes.

  The excited man fished around on the ground for a moment, coming up with something in his hand. Aodh nodded. Henry was showing off the weapon he’d seen before. The rest of the audience was going to get quite a show.

  “This is what the Angry Honeycomb shoots,” Henry said. The projectile he held was a heavy bronze spike, almost a hand long. At its base, it flared into a tin cone, and within the cone was a canvas skirt that stuck out farther than the metal did. Henry smiled. “These are basically giant darts. When they come out of this thing, they have a fuck ton of power, and each dart blade is reinforced. I put small iron cores in some of them, too.”

  “Iron?” asked Ellen’s husband, Gavra.

  Henry ignored the question. He pointed to the opposite, hastily constructed wall of the building they stood in. The open topped structure had only existed for a few days, built for the sole purpose of putting together Henry’s new vehicle. Even with his strength and magic, the driven man had had to assemble it in pieces.

  On the far wall, Henry had placed a few dummies made of clay. “That wall is over ten feet thick,” the ‘Bonded Terran said in a matter of fact tone. Then without warning, Henry fired the Angry Honeycomb.

  The sound was like a furious god blowing a raspberry. A cloud of air and small particles mushroomed out from the deadly weapon, and a hail bronze darts slammed into the clay targets, blowing them apart and perforating the backstop wall.

  Henry stepped away from the weapon cluster and stretched, smiling. He said, “I’m pretty fucking proud of this thing. I needed to make a weapon that could take down air targets or ground targets, one that could still hit something while in motion or the target was moving. This thing is basically a fucking dagger shotgun.”

  Gavra whistled and Trask looked faint. Tanushree’s eyes shined as she asked, “What about the tubes coming out the front?”

  Henry answered, “That is the weapon emplacement for the pilot. It’s the same as the gunnery platforms, except instead of an Angry Honeycomb, it has a big, thick barrel for me to use with my special ammo. See, I will be the one driving this thing most of the time. In fact, the weapon platform on the back is for more mobile fighters to use, like my teleporting, dickhead, dorky-ass friend.”

  Aodh nodded. That made sense. It seemed he was not the only one who had been doing a lot of thinking about the battle where they’d been separated from the rest of the group. He didn’t want to lose any more friends. It was bad enough that Rark-han had left them. If Henry or Jason was killed...Aodh didn’t want to think about it.

  Pointing at the grinning Tanushree, Henry said, “I didn’t forget about you, Princess. The V-Death can be mounted to the bottom of the Mosquito. I tried to keep the weight down as much as possible since we will accelerate and decelerate more slowly the heavier we are, but I figured that packing your mecha was a good idea.”

  “Why would you do such a thing?”

  “Because you are coming with us, Lady Volleyball. This is our ride to school. It’s also how you or your family is going to make shit tons of money and owe me a lifetime of favors.”

  Tanushree kept grinning. Ellen shook her head, her hand on her chin. Rekkla was bouncing on her toes, and Trask’s mouth moved, forming half words with no sound coming out. Henry’s new guard captain, Gavra, folded his arms and respectfully asked, “This is very, very impressive, Sir Henry. But how much have you tested it? Wouldn’t it be bad if this vehicle fell apart in midair? Can it truly withstand combat?”

  “Good question! I’ve done some basic flying around for the last couple nights. Hell, I put some of this shit together in midair last night. That’s how I got the height this fucker wants to stop at.

  “As for combat…” Henry smiled, the expression predatory. “See, I happen to know of a nearby ruined city with a really huge monster that lives there. I think it might be a good test for Delvers LLC’s PMSing Mosquito.”

  Even as Aodh imagined again what Jason would say about Henry’s terrible naming sense, his heart sank. The giant monster they had gotten lucky enough to avoid before, a monster powerful enough to leave gouges in solid stone, a monster that all the surrounding area had been terrified of for generations...Of course it figured that Henry wanted to hunt it.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  Waking Up

  Aodh nervously stood on the deck of the Delvers LLC Mosquito. He avoided channeling magic, just to be safe, but only with an effort of will. He wasn’t sure exactly how his power worked yet, but he still thought it would be a good idea to save his magic for the coming conflict.

  At least Lady Tanushree had convinced Henry to change the PMSing Mosquito’s name to just Mosquito.

  Tanushree was an enigma. She’d been acting cold towards Aodh for a while, and he didn’t understand why. She’d surprised him the previous day by stiffly asking what PMSing meant. After he’d explained what acronyms were and what PMS meant, she’d whirled around to confront the vehicle’s inventor.

  The blonde noblewoman had pointedly asked Henry
what his wife would think about the name. When Henry had finally officially made the name change, Aodh personally thought the combination of Henry running out of coffee plus finally getting some sleep had done more than Tanushree’s words.

  The Mosquito really didn’t make much noise as it glided through the air. The propellers on the back of the craft were very powerful, but since they were blowing the air behind them, Henry had said that they wouldn’t be as noisy on deck. The vehicle wasn’t up to full speed yet, but it wouldn’t take long to get to the old ruins of Veritasholm. Not long at all.

  Aodh glanced around at everyone else on the deck and didn’t understand why they weren’t all visibly showing dread like he was. The goblin siblings actually looked excited. Well, Rekkla did. Henry had taught them both how to use the weapons in the gunnery emplacements, and even Trask had perked up. He’d liked the dayslers in particular.

  Henry piloted the Mosquito from the cockpit. Honey sat on his lap, looking at the ground through the thick glass with obvious curiosity.

  Gavra, Majordomo Ellen’s husband, had joined them on their mission, too. He seemed to have taken a liking to Henry, and also appeared to have the same terrible level of survival instinct. He’d actually asked to come along for the hunt!

  That’s what they were calling it too, a hunt. Aodh hid his eyes with his hand and shook his head. It was all madness. But he definitely had to go. Without him there, who would watch out for Henry and Tanushree?

  Lady Tanushree was with the hunting group too, of course. She was armed with a high-end air rifle she had borrowed from one of her guards. The sleek weapon looked formidable in her very capable hands.

  From where he stood near the front of the craft, Gavra seemed to be studying the two propellers to the rear. Suddenly he gasped. “Sir Henry,” he said, “are the propellers made of blessed steel?

  Aodh knew without having to look that every person on the Mosquito was listening in to the conversation. Henry responded, “Yeah, I kind of had to do that. The props have a lot of stress on them, and blessed steel actually repairs itself if it’s damaged up to a certain limit. It’s cool as hell.”