Tybalt came through the with the carbine.

  The exchange is brief. Torn between fear and his strange unease, he overcompensates to handle one and leaves himself frayed by the other. He re-settles only once he reaches an alley just down the street where he stuffs the weapon into a duffle bag then rushes cross the street and rings the doorbell.

  Stupid, he could have just come in. No one would have seen him and I would have activated the silencer array. He probably was just being too lazy to leave the same way.

  The bat opens the door with a look of surprise that quickly transmutes to pleasure then worry. “Oh Tybalt! Did you forget something?”

  “Um… yeah. I thought I’d drop it off on the way back.” He lifts the duffle in gesture.

  “Well you’d better be quick. They just announced over the chatterbox that there’s a curfew in a few hours.”

  “Um… yeah. Don’t worry. I can make it back.” He moves to go inside but she stops him, reaching out to grab his shoulder.

  “Are you doing okay? You don’t look too good.”

  He shrugs her off, a little more forcefully then he perhaps intended, from the apologetic look he gives after breaking contact. “It’s fine. I was just rushing to get here is all.”

  The bat’s face shifts from surprise to her usual expression of approval that she has towards him. “Well, it’s good of you to take care of her. Just don’t push yourself too much. If you don’t think you can make it back, you can always stay the night here. I wouldn’t want you to get arrested and I have a free couch.”

  Tybalt smiles in gratitude but politely declines. “Thank you, Paige, but I’ll be fine. Promise.”

  “Oh, well, I shouldn’t keep you any longer then…Oh! I still have a couple of cookies left from before. Feel free to take them and a glass of milk on the way up.”

  “Sure, I think I’ll need that. Thanks.”

  I tap my foot impatiently as I sit on the bed and wait for him, wrapping myself in my blanket though it’s not cold enough to warrant it.

  He looks awful when he walks through the door… more than usual. A sheen of sweat is on his face and his normally spikey hair is collapses into a scraggy mop too short to be seen as anything but decay.

  “Well,” I say, arms crossed after he closes the door and activates the silencer, “let’s see it.”

  He rolls his eyes. “And hello to you too. Why yes, I am fine. Hardly felt myself being torn apart for the last hour at all. Thanks for asking. No no. There was no trouble at all. Nobody from work noticed me being weird at all.” He complains, but he does zip open the bag and pull out the prize.

  My hands zip out and snatch it from him. I flick on the light and eagerly examine it. It has a surprising heft to it, but that shouldn’t be a problem. In fact, it makes the smooth, silvery-grey metal feel better to run my hands over. I glance up at him, unable to supress the smile from my face.

  “If you’re going to complain so much about it, why did you wait so long to re-settle? You could have come back at any point from the school and stashed it then. Even if you came across some tin, you could have just phased back and gone past.”

  He glares at me as I critique his technique. “You don’t know what it’s like. It’s harder to go back after I just left it. I feel like I lose more of myself that way.”

  I shrug. “Well, I suppose it worked out…” He looks at me expectantly and I look back until I realize what he wants… Whatever. Might as well. It won’t hurt anything I guess. “Well done. You did good.”

  He can’t help but beam at the praise, though he tries not to, struggling for an unbothered look. “Oh, um… I think Paige wanted me to share these with you.” He lifts up the cookies.

  I laugh. “I’m pretty sure she very much wanted you to do exactly not that. Eat them. Let her see how little her petty punishment is worth.”

  He stares at me, but takes a bite as commanded. Washing it down with a gulp of milk, he asks, “Why do you hate her so much anyways?”

  I roll my eyes at the question. “I don’t hate her. She’s just annoying.”

  “She’s only worried about you. If you explained…”

  I cut him off with a harsh laugh. “Explain? She’d be obligated to report me.”

  “She wouldn’t.” He protests. “You’re not hurting anyone. She’d never betray one of her tenants unless they were.”

  I raise a questioning eyebrow. “And if she thinks I’m wasting away here when I might be vital to monster defence?” He hesitates so I press. “You’ve been hoping again, haven’t you? Oscillating between the two extreme possibilities of vivisection and force normalcy if I got found out. But trust me, it’ll be the former.”

  “…I’m not so sure. I mean, what would you know of how the world would treat us when you never go out into it?”

  I glare at him icily causing him to wince and step back. “You best be going. Wouldn’t want you to have to de-phase again just to get around curfew. It’d be too funny.”

  “Heh, maybe I wouldn’t even bother,” he says, but complies after cramming the last cookie into his mouth and washing it down with the last of the milk. “Though I do hope it wouldn’t inconvenience you too much if I get arrested. Maybe I should, just to make you buy your own snacks.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  He slams the door on the way out and scuttles away, thanking the bat on the way out and closing the front door much more gently.

  …Whatever, I got what I wanted tonight anyways. I look down at the carbine in my hand and can’t help but smile at the puzzle it represents. I turn off the light and go to my work desk and use its more focused lamp. Still wrapped in my blanket, I take a moment just to admire the intact form, running my hands over the polished metal. It’s simple on the surface – just a metal tube, a sight, a stock, two handles jutting out at a 70 degree angle and a single shoulder strap (destroyed). Yet I know the simple exterior belies and wonderfully contrasts what’s hidden inside.

  I gesture at the weapon, cutting cleanly in half along the barrel and am delighted with the sight of the complexity within. So many competing and contrasting concepts all working in harmony to amplify the power and, most importantly, the accumulation rate. It’s not just a scaled up pistol, but something with its own unique intricacies.

  I can’t just copy it either. Every symbol needs to have a proper relation with everything else – just mimicking the placement will cause it to fail… likely explosively. Moreover, I’m not interested in replicating the whole structure, just the effect. I need to simplify the design. So, where to even start unravelling this?

  Well, I won’t be needing the safeties. Let’s start there. There’s 6 of them, all requiring constant pressure except for a toggle on the side. 2 in each handle, requiring a proper grip with both hands to disengage. The final one is in the stock, forcing one to use at least a semblance of proper shooting form for it to work. Though I understand that the army uses fewer safeties in their versions, meaning it must be possible to remove some of them.

  Unfortunately, rather than the safeties just interrupting the process like I hoped, half of them are actually part of the accelerator chain. Meaning they need to present for the weapon to work. Still, I can simplify them to only include the part in the chain, which will also make it always active. The rest of them I can just simply remove.

  Okay, I think that took me about 20% there by itself. Let’s see… there’s a couple of redundancies that I won’t be needing…

  After a few hours of work, I lean back and stare at my diagrams. Is that all? I thought it’d be harder to figure out. I hoped for at least a few days of distraction, not hours. I guess it looked harder than I thought.

  Well, I suppose my disappointment is just hubris until I actually test it. I quickly create my simplified replica and erect a reinforced target against the wall. Then I chant a repair spell and fuse the original carbine back together. Finally, after activating the silencer array (and sound dampeners over my ears), I aim both of them at the target, and shoot a burst side by side.

  Both flare to life with blue bursts of light form the barrels, impacting the solidified plate covering the wall. It dutifully registers nearly identical impacts from the weapons. Mine’s actually a bit more powerful, maybe 10%, though at least some of that is from the dismantling and (admittedly lazy) repair of the original. Still, even accounting for that, I think I have a fully functional one beat by a few percent.

  Then I test for continuous fire and find that once again mine outperforms the original. Again, I can’t tell how it would compare to a fully functional one, but it at least seems to be comparable to what I’ve seen and heard.

  Staring at the weapons, I sigh both in satisfaction and disappointment. The puzzle was done so quickly! Nothing like the other puzzle I have, though of course that one is disheartening for the opposite reason. Feeling listless again, I wrap my blanket tighter around me and amble over to the window.

  Everything is quiet… but then I remember that I still have the silencer activated. Undoing that, I return and find that not much has changed. There’s no dull hums and whooshes of passing skiffs. No cheerful drunks passing by with out of tune songs. No music from the restaurant a block down… Well, it’s probably not that much quitter really, but it feels like it is.

  Perhaps it’s the lack of lights. All the street lamps are off, as are most of the houses. Everything is being directed towards the flickering massive dome overhead. My eyes are drawn to it – the power of an entire city directed to a single task. Not even fully active, just on standby to make full activation quicker if needed.

  Part of me is awed by the display. The rest of me finds the inefficiency of the hundred year old relic hilarious. It should have been melted down and reworked into a new model decades ago, but of course, that’s about when it stopped having to be used, so there was no need to replace it.

  I mean, just a simple dome going thousands of feet into the air! How absurd! A more modern generator could be shaped to match the contours of the land, making it far more efficient. No, actually, a modern solution would be to decentralize the defence. Make it more like a fleet of warships. Multiple overlapping generators protecting individual sections in communication by chatterbox and shield projectors covering any disrupted sections.

  I suppose the super sturdy centralized dome makes a little more sense when dealing with krakens, or rather their wake. Since even the waves they produce can destroy cities, and a centralized dome can withstand the pressure better, and the slow moving titans give enough warning to fully activate the defences. But still, when’s the last time a kraken even got close to a city the size of Newflor? Decades at least. And besides being better at repelling naval bombardment, the decentralized system would also be better for attacks by smaller monsters which do still happen irregularly.

  But of course, such system would be expensive, and nobody wants to pay for it when the attacks that do happen are so quickly suppressed by the MDC. Moreover, despite the army’s blustering about imminent invasion from the mainland, they clearly haven’t considered how to actually defend the cities. Making it clear that they don’t really believe their own rhetoric and only want more tools to launch their own invasion.

  I start laughing quietly at how absurd it all is, but am interrupted by similar sounds below. I look down and don’t see anything at first, but then am greeted by the sight of a pair of teenage lovers emerging from an alley.

  In their hands are open cans of spray paint, and they’re giggling to each other as they create an obscene picture on the wall – their own bodies mirroring the depicted scene as they amorously rub, fondle and caress each other in the midst of their act of crude creation. No doubt they find the act of breaking the emergency curfew to commit their crime to be extra exciting. Disgusting.

  Suddenly, their giggling suddenly stops as one of them catches sight of my looking down on them and directs their partner’s attention to me. Several seconds pass in silence as we stare at each other, some connection maybe… As one, they point at me and laugh – giggling at some element of my being.

  My cheeks flushed at their mockery, I turn and walk away from the window, increasing their laughter. I return a moment later with the carbine and level it at them.

  They had moved from giggling to a deep passionate kiss in my absence, so it takes them a few seconds to spot my return. Their eyes go wide in fear at the sight of the weapon, and they bolt a moment later. Yet they can’t help but keep on laughing as they run down the street.

  I stare at their fleeing backs, only slightly tempted to shoot. It’d be stupid, of course. The sound would be investigated… and I suppose killing them would have been an overaction.

  Yet they were laughing at me? When they’re the absurd ones? Anger flashes through me. Anger and… what if they were right to laugh? What did they see in me?

  My eyes goes to the incomplete crude painting portraying the obscene, disgusting act. I wonder how long it’ll be before that gets cleaned up. I suppose I can just no look out my window until then. Pity, I somewhat enjoyed that.

  Suddenly, a series of loud cracking-popping sounds draws my attention up to see the flickering rate of the shield dome begin to decrease over the course of minutes. As the sound starts to abate, the sirens sound briefly followed by an ‘all clear’ announcement.

  Well, isn’t that nice. They won’t be punished after all.