Chapter 66: Rune Crafting

"How?" he asked, looking back at the housing. "How do you make the materials work with the inscription?"

A smug expression appeared on Yasmine’s face.

The tired frown didn’t disappear, her eyes brightening inexplicably.

"Well," she began, placing the housing down, "that depends on what you’re trying to make."

She pulled a stool closer with her foot, sat down, and gestured towards another for Frost.

"Living beings aren’t the only things that can make use of inscriptions. Under the right conditions, with suitable materials and the proper arrangement, you can create an object that holds a rune and allows someone to use its effect."

Frost sat almost without noticing.

"Like the information plates?"

"Exactly. Though those are relatively simple compared to some of the things we work on here. You also have to account for how the device receives essence, how much it can handle, and what happens when someone tries to make it do something it wasn’t designed for."

She gave Deadlock a pointed look.

The machine stared back.

"Your tone suggests criticism," it announced.

"My words usually do."

Frost barely registered the exchange. He was looking at the inscriptions, imagining them fitted into different parts, connected to mechanisms, producing controlled movements instead of bursts of power in a fight.

Mechanics and engineering had always interested him back on Earth. He hadn’t possessed the money or equipment to do much beyond reading, watching demonstrations, and trying to understand how things worked, but it had been something he enjoyed.

Now, sitting in this untidy room, he felt that same interest blooming in his mind.

"So you could use a rune to produce the movement," he said slowly, "then have the mechanism control how that movement is transferred?"

Yasmine nodded. "Among other things. This field is called rune crafting, and it’s a recognized profession in the wider verse."

He raised a brow in interest.

"Really now? And different sections could do different jobs?"

"Of course. Putting everything into one inscription isn’t always practical. Sometimes, separate components are easier to maintain or replace."

Frost looked around the workshop. Very little of it looked like junk now.

Yasmine grinned, very pleased with the change in his expression, and reached for a set of notes.

"Master thinks the possibilities go much further than equipment. His work with life runes is particularly interesting. Under the right conditions, he believes it might be possible to create an actual living, sentient being."

Frost turned towards her.

"Create life?"

"That’s the idea."

His gaze shifted slowly towards Deadlock.

Yasmine followed it and nodded.

"He’s one of the results of that research. Though the work is nowhere near complete, and whether he counts as alive is still something Master argues about."

"I am fully operational," Deadlock said.

"You nearly purged a recruit."

"An unauthorised recruit."

"He’s deeply flawed," Yasmine continued, ignoring it. "Master keeps saying the next revision will solve the behavioural problems. Then he finds something more interesting to work on and leaves me dealing with this one."

Frost stared at the machine, then at her notes.

"Wow."

It was a rather inadequate response, but he couldn’t think of a better one.

For so long, becoming an evolver had meant learning how to fight, survive, and grow strong enough to travel beyond Linden. He had barely considered what else he might do with runes if he could understand them.

Yasmine began explaining another device, and Frost found himself asking questions almost before she finished. One led to another, and soon she had pulled several components out of the clutter to show him how they fitted together.

When he recognised a system of gears within one casing, his excitement grew.

"We used those too," he said, leaning closer. "Though usually with something like an electric motor."

"Electric?"

Frost hesitated, then tried to explain.

It took longer than he expected, partly because Yasmine kept interrupting and partly because he quickly reached the limits of what he actually knew.

He could describe the general idea of electricity producing motion through magnetism, but explaining exactly how to build a motor was another matter.

Still, Yasmine listened. She reached for a pencil.

"Hold on. Start again."

Frost blinked. "From where?"

"The part about the magnetic field."

He did his best, admitting where his understanding became vague. She didn’t seem particularly disappointed by that. Instead, she asked more questions, scribbling notes and occasionally turning towards a component on the table as though comparing it to what he was describing.

Somewhere in the middle of explaining why Earth had relied so heavily on machines, he finally mentioned that Earth was another world.

Yasmine stopped writing.

"Another world?"

Frost looked at her.

"You haven’t heard about the Earthlings?"

"No?"

He gave her a brief explanation, watching her expression shift from confusion to disbelief.

"And no one told you?"

She gestured around the room.

"I rarely leave this place. When I do, it’s usually to eat or sleep, and neither lasts long enough; even then, I usually do it in here."

That was probably the most convincing explanation he had heard all day.

By the time an hour had passed, the tour had been abandoned. They were seated beside the same crowded table, talking with the enthusiasm of children who had discovered someone else interested in the same things.

Frost explained what he knew about hydraulics, pressure moving through a confined liquid, and the ways Earth machines used mechanical systems to perform jobs that people here could accomplish with runes.

Some of it was already familiar to Yasmine, though she kept returning to the fact that they had made it work without inscriptions.

"Your people really built all of that without runes?" she asked, looking up from her notes. "Vehicles, lifting machines, things that could fly?"

"Yeah. I couldn’t tell you how to build most of them, but they existed."

Yasmine shook her head slowly.

"That’s amazing."

Frost smiled, glancing around the workshop. He had spent the past hour thinking exactly the same thing about her world.

What seemed normal to him or her was not exactly normal to someone who had never known about it.

Normalcy was all about routine and things you did every day, after all.