2019-10-18 - Bronze, Gold, and Silver

Today the weather is beautiful, clear and crisp with autumn-bright blue skies. The foliage is on fire with golds and scarlets, cutting fractal shapes against that intense blue. A fall day like this is one of the hidden treasures of the Pacific Northwest.

As August walks along Main Street, something is happening to the trees and buildings around him. They get bigger. A lot bigger. With every step everything looms larger and larger around him. The sidewalk becomes like sand. Then gravel. Then the gravel becomes boulders. Then the boulders become mountains and then...

And then he's on Main Street again, but a different Main Street. This Main Street is made of oxidized copper. The buildings are machines. The trees are machines with beaten metal leaves of bronze and new copper.

When Main Street starts changing, August's heart leaps in his throat. Change in a city only means one thing to him (danger, we're under attack, everything is about to go sideways and)--

No.

Sure enough, instead of the danger his hindbrain has been trained to expect (snipers, shells, death), the world seems to balloon in size, or he shrinks, and then he's in a different version of it. A...metal version. A machine version.

He swallows, feels about this his Spirit sense. This isn't life the way he's come to know it. He wonders, briefly, if this is how Itzhak might see things, moves closer to one of the building-machines to inspect it.

Not only are there trees and building. A person pops out of the building that in the sane version of Main Street would be Chef Vyv's place. This person is tall and spindly, a lot like Itzhak himself might have been as a fifteen-year old. Too much arm and leg, not enough of anything else. They seem to be made of mostly bronze. And there is something wrong with them. Something wrong in the clockwork gears of their head. They seem to move jerky, weird, wide twitchy motions for little actual result.

The bronze person stumbles out of the building, spots August, and freezes. Mechanical eyes go wide. The irises are made of agate.

"Oh, filings," they say, voice terrified.

August looks up from examining the building and blinks, first at the sight of the mechanical person, then at them speaking to him. The wrongness of their movements is third on his list of concerns.

He holds up his hands to show they're empty, backs up a step. "It's okay, I'm not--I'm just looking around." At them, of course; he's got the look of a scientist faced with a new species that he doesn't want to harass but desparately would like to know about. Working on the assumption a banal question might distract them from their terror, he asks, "Where exactly am I?"

The bronze person shakes their head fervently. "Nu uh. Not today! I'm not doing this!" But their head audibly whirrrrrs like a broken hard drive, and they can't, it seems, move. They flail in place crazily.

Two more mechanical people show up. One is silver, the other gold. Silver can barely drag themself along, half of their body a crumpled mess. They have one operational leg and one, well, whatever that situation is. Gold makes the air shimmer as they come closer. They're boiling hot, like an engine without coolant, which becomes very obvious as they come nearer.

Gold pats at Silver urgently. "Look! Do you see that?"

Silver winces, faceplates reconfiguring, and tries to oonch out of scorching range, not very successfully. "I see Bronze dug up a Maestro," they say. "Put it back, Bronze!"

August continues eyeing Bronze as they struggle with, well, whatever they're struggling with. Bronze's panicked response puts him in mind of the miniature version of himself in the Veil city hall, and he grimaces, setting that thought aside.

Pretty obviously some kind of internal configuration is wrong. It puts him in mind of himself, just after Bosnia: unable to move reliably, and a good year and change sorting it out. Some nerves (or a system like nerves) weren't interfacing with Bronze's equivalent of muscles.

He blinks at Silver and Gold, edges a little further away from Gold to prevent any contact, accidental or otherwise. "Dug up a what? A 'Maestro'?"

"I heard they've been showing up," Gold says, staring at August with that exact same kind of scientific curiosity. Science waits for no man or nongendered machine! "Ones from," they try to whisper, "Over There." They begin to spout chemically brilliant little flames from various places in their gears as they get excited. Bronze and Silver get alarmed, but Bronze is stuck in place still. Silver slowly, painfully gimps over to Bronze and leans against them to physically shove Bronze along. The sound this makes is a horrific metal on metal squeal.

"I hate it when you do this!" Bronze yells at Silver.

"I hate it when your wiring is melted more than it already is," Silver says, in an exhausted tone. "I hate mine melted worse." They look wearily at August. "You have the Song, Maestro. Nobody here does. You'd better leave."

"No," Gold says, "stay! I've never met a Maestro before. We could talk. About things." They look pathetically eager.

The more time August spends standing on this mechanical street with its mechanical trees, in the company of mechanical people, the more obvious it is that not just these three are terribly broken. The trees are, too, lumpy with corrosion cankers. The buildings are falling down. The sense of other mechanical people in the buildings or further along the street is that they too are broken.

"Maestro," August echos, looking around himself. Well, Itzhak thought of it as a song, didn't he? It would make sense people who wove it would be Maestros.

He stares at the trees for some time, coming back to himself only when Silver says that. He frowns, realizing he can't stand around watching these machines flail like this. "Do you need help? I mean, you know," he looks from the eager Gold to the (slowly) retreating Silver and Bronze, "healing?" He wonders if that word will make sense to them. Would a machine think of it as healing? He tries, "Or, repairs?"

Gold gets so excited that they blast out a huge gout of searing green flame. Silver and Bronze wince, but neither of them are in shape to run.

"Could you?" Gold says. Their flames hiss out, but it's obvious now that there's always that threat of chemical fire. "I learned, of course, that the Song can do that, but I've never seen it. Could you fix me so," they gesture at their slender little body out of which comes such danger, "so I can control the fire? Could you fix them?" They point at their friends. "We've been like this so long."

"Stop it, Gold, the Maestro has more important things to do," Bronze says, mortified by Gold's forwardness. Silver just leans on Bronze, utterly worn out by the effort to move them.

"I think I can," August says, uncertain. He's repaired mechanical things, of course, but he's not particularly familiar with mechanical beings. He has to assume there's at least some difference. "I haven't healed anything like you before. I'm not sure I'd do it right. I might have to try a few times." He makes a face, glances from Gold to Silver and Bronze, back to Gold. "If I can fix you, can you tell me what's going on here? What happened to make it like this?"

"It just happens," Silver says in their hoarse, tired voice. "We run down. We get into accidents, or fights. Some of us are built this way to start off."

"I heard organic beings have mechanisms that repair themselves over time, but we don't," Gold says, very happy to contribute to the study. "Fix Bronze first? Please? They've been like that since they were assembled."

Bronze cringes twitchily in place, long fingers and arms spasming. "It's okay if you don't want to," they try to reassure August, hastily.

August starts to ask who, exactly, is making them without a way to repair themselves, but figures that can wait. "Okay. Bronze first." He shifts a little closer to Bronze, stepping clear of Gold (because if Gold has an outburst and burns him, that's not going to go well for anyone).

He takes a second to center himself like he always does, and realizes something: the usual nausea and pain from injuries isn't there. He feels the damage, of course; he can't not. Yet it doesn't translate the same: their illnesses and infirmaties don't dig their claws into him like a person's would. It's more like when he's healing an animal.

A slow breath in, and out. He needs to find a spot somewhere between repair and heal. It's a tricky line to walk, so he tries to use the life energy itself as a guide. It's still here, after all. Not as he's grown up knowing it, but he also didn't grow up knowing he could even do this.

Poor Bronze is messed up. Like August suspected, most of their wiring is wrong. The wrong impulses fire and generate this spastic jerky motion. When August touches them with his power, the wiring changes, the impulses reroute. Bronze's long, narrow face configures into a stunned expression. They lift their arms, and their arms obey them. They take a step, and it just happens.

They look at August with open, raw wonder. Silver mutters something surprised and reverent sounding. Gold--of course--suddenly blasts out fire way too far for anybody's comfort.

"YOU DID IT!" they scream in delight. "It's TRUE!"

Bronze twitches away from them and surprises the hell out of themself by managing to actually move. "Maestro," they say, overwhelmed.

"Look at you," Silver says. They might be a little overwhelmed too and trying not to show it. Then they look at August, and there's real fear in their period eyes. "You really have to leave now."

August, for his part, is just relieved he didn't make things worse. "Let me take care of you two first, at least." He looks around at the damage he's starting to sense everywhere. "I guess I don't understand--why haven't you built places to repair yourselves? That's what we do, when our bodies won't heal. We have people who learn how to do it. I mean, not like I do, with the--Song. They do it by hand." He looks between the three of them, but doesn't wait for an answer. He gets to healing up Silver.

Success with Bronze not-withstanding, he takes the same careful approach on Silver. A steady breath in and out, a second or two to assess how to hit the right balance of 'healing' and 'repairing'.

Silver has a lot more plain damage than Bronze, crumpled like foil. Something ran into or fell on them and crushed them. August's strength pops out dents, straightens struts, seals fractures. Silver isn't entirely repaired, but they're a good deal better off than they were. They straighten up, looking down at their body, and then look up at August with that fear. "Thank you. Thank you--but--"

"Please help Gold," Bronze cuts in, outright pleading. "We'll tell you everything, just, please!"

Then someone else shouts from up the street. Another person is limping towards them. Above them, someone is looking out the window, gesticulating back inside the room while pointing down at August. Mechanical people are beginning to come out of buildings, hurry down the street. There's cries of 'Maestro'.

"Right," August says under his breath. He's starting to get an idea of where this is going. "Sure hope you can all run fast, looks like we might need to." He can feel the hairs rising on the back of his neck. How many times had people begged for help, but triage dictated others should be tended to first?

Focus, Roen. Triage.

He's feeling a little more familiar with this business, but Gold seems a unique case. Their damage might be more esoteric, more programming related. He can try, though.

Nowhere near as successful this time. Gold's problem is chemical and failures of regulation. They cool off some, so they're at least no longer rippling the air around them with their scorching heat, but that seems to be as good as that attempt got. Gold doesn't seem to think this is bad at all, bouncing in place while gouts of flame burst from inside them. "I can feel it! It's different!" They're oblivious to the crowd that's rapidly forming. People pour out of the buildings now. The street is alive with them, rushing to the site of the miracle healer.

It's a big crowd. A big crowd of broken clockwork people with eyes of all manner of precious stone, all each bearing their own disfigurement and injuries.

"Help my friend!" comes a cry.

"Help my relative!"

"HELP ME!" Someone finally says it, and then people are jostling close in whirrs and clanks. Glinting metal people everywhere.

"They fixed you," someone is saying to Bronze in a furious tone. "What did you do to deserve that, you useless scrap heap?"

They grab Bronze and yank them aside. Bronze yelps, struggling. Silver's trying to talk to the crowd, raising their voice, but nobody's listening. People crowd closer, shouting for healing, begging, pleading, demanding. Gold realizes what's going on. They look at their friends, then at August, then at the growing, seething crowd of people.

Everything is broken here. Everyone is broken here. A whole world of broken, disabled people.

August winces when Gold doesn't heal up nearly as well as Bronze or Silver. It shouldn't hurt as much as it does; after all, he's never done anything like this before.

Then, the crowds come. He takes a shaking breath, sets his teeth. One of his hands forms into a fist. He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. He has to calm them down, if he can.

"Hey, hang on--hurting one another's not the answer." He manages to keep his voice steady. Somehow. He reaches out with the Mind Gift, not sure if it'll even work. It's gonna be okay, he thinks, tries not to remember where he learned this particular trick. You're gonna be okay. But we have to stay calm. We have to keep our heads. "We need to figure out a way to make sure everyone can get help, but this isn't it."

It doesn't work. The calming August tries to project on the crowd is just eaten up by dread and anxiety and desperation. His strength falls into a devouring black hole of need.

"You have to go!" Silver shouts at him. They're fighting to push back the press of people who reach for August with crippled or missing hands. Gold is screaming at people to leave the Maestro alone, fire gouting from their belly, and Bronze is getting into an altercation. The three of them are defending him and they will not win.

"You're keeping them for yourself!" "Maestro why didn't you come sooner?!" "PLEASE HELP ME, HELP ME, HELP ME"

Help me. Help my friend. Help my beloved. Help us. Heal us. Fix us.

And that's when things start getting larger again.

August digs his fingernails into his hand, drawing blood. He wants to help all of them, it'd be a lie to say he doesn't. It's on his fingertips to just start fixing them. But he sees Silver and Bronze and Gold trying to buy him time to get away. Are they going to survive this? Has he inadvertently doomed them?

Things start getting bigger. "Shit," he hisses under his breath, scrambles for something he can do.

Well. Maybe he can help them out before he gets yanked away. "Run!" he shouts to Gold, Bronze, and Silver, and tries to give them a bit of a boost, some help so they can--a bit more power than those closing in on them.

The three of them, Bronze, Gold, and Silver, find themselves able to handle this situation better, even as it's careened wildly out of control. They have more strength, more speed, and luck just turns their way. Also it doesn't hurt that the crowd's made of people who are moderately to severely crippled. These three are now in the best shape of anyone. The Maestro's touch has revitalized them. Bronze looks over their shoulder at August like it's a thing they've done all their existence. "Go on!" they yell at him.

Everything leaps to hugeness around August. He can barely catch a glimpse of the three mechanical friends breaking away and running, something neither Bronze nor Silver could do half an hour ago. Gold's flames are the last thing August can see of them before he is falling through the molecules of copper. Then everything once again becomes its usual size, transformed back into the usual Main Street.

August keeps his eyes locked on the three as they run, wanting to make sure (how, exactly? just because he's watching?) that they get clear, make it to safety. Who did this? Who left you like this? Questions he won't get answers to. Not right now.

He staggers as he finds himself on Main Street, almost collides with a woman out walking her dog. The terrier barks at him, surprised, and the woman lets out a startled yelp. August holds up his hands and makes his apologies, makes his way to a bench to sit down.

I have to go back, he thinks. Sympathy follows swiftly behind that, for Eleanor and Itzhak, who both wanted to go back too. To find out more. To help more.

"God, not me too," he says under his breath.

Gold, silver, bronze. He narrows his eyes, gets out his phone, swipes out a text to Itzhak. Then he heads back to his car. He'll run that errand later.