Chapter CXXVI – Behold, how great a difference a little steel maketh!

88th of Autumn 5859
Libertycave, Mount Curry

Winter was coming, as evidenced by yet another flurry of snow coming down to Libertycave. The trees had shed all their leaves and no brown was left save for Brown. Now it was all white: the buildings, the trees, even the sky covered in clouds overwatching the small world of men scurrying to get their business done, and the few lazy ones who were not worrying about business at that moment.

“Ayomide, you’re supposed to roll it, gently.” Shinasi, famous idler and twiddler of thumbs, was rolling a snowball in service for greater snow-related plans.

“Give me a break, this is the first time I get to play in snow! I’m not an expert ball roller like you.” Ayomide rubbed her hands together, blowing some hot hair into them. “This snow stuff looks all soft and fluffy like cotton, I thought it’d be warmer.”

“I mean, it’s like frozen water that descends from the heavens. That doesn’t sound warm to me.” Shinasi groaned, struggling to push the ever-largening ball of snow.

Ayomide looked up to said heavens. It really looked like there was snow above them too. “Are clouds just flying snow then?”

All Shinasi could do in reply was pause, straighten himself, and give a shrug before promptly attempting to return back to his job of idling. He was rudely interrupted by a man passing by and hailing him.

“Oh, are you two making a snowman?” Watanabe, on his morning walk before getting to work as Rabanowicz’s assistant, approached the pair. He looked comedic in his winterwear, his modern suit clashing with the fur he had covered himself with.

“You know about snowmen, Mr. Watanabe?” asked Shinasi.

“Of course, you don’t pass by winter without making at least one. I am surprised that snowmen are a thing here too.” Not like Watanabe recently had chance to make much in the big city as a white-collar worker, but now he found himself wanting to join in the idling. “Let me lend a hand.”

The trio spent the next few minutes rolling up snow until they each had a big ball of snow. The result was a snowman with three segments, a lanky fellow that was about a meter in length.

“Hmm…” Shinasi planted his hands on the head of the snowman.

“What are you doing, Shinasi?” Ayomide wondered if he had somehow gotten drunk off-screen.

“One sec, and ta-da! It’s a snowcatgirl!” Shinasi stepped aside to proudly present his masterpiece: a snowman with two cat ears on top.

“Sheesh, do I look that ugly to you?” Ayomide added with a chuckle.

The snowman was suddenly assaulted viciously, as in it was stabbed six times with sticks by Watanabe right on its face. “There. Whiskers! Cats have whiskers, no?”

Ayomide patted her own face to check. “No, cats don’t have whiskers Watanabe. I’ve only seen whiskers on, like, rats.”

“Of course, you’re a cat… girl…” Watanabe’s voice trailed off. He searched his memories, searching for the thing that the Internet was invented to contain. But no, he had not seen any of them. Not one. “Now that I think about it, I haven’t seen any cats. Like, those furry little animals? They go meow and stuff.”

“Uhm… Are you calling me a furry animal? Because I’ll let you know that I am neither furry or an animal.”

“And I’ve never heard Ayomide go ‘knee-yaw’.”

“Oh…” Watanabe silently lamented for the late feline race of Gemeinplatz. “Never mind. It’s just an earthling matter. I got confused there for a sec.”

“Yeah, imagine if I was a furry little animal. That’d be horrifying. Meow.” The meow at the end was the oddest meow that Watanabe had heard, probably because it had come from someone who had never heard a cat meow. “‘Meow.’ What sort of sound even is that.”

“I don’t have much time to ponder on that, I’ve got to go. Gotta do my job as a living human computer for the doctor, and Rabanowicz is not happy when I’m late.” Watanabe bowed a farewell and continued his merry way, cats occupying his mind while on the way. The heavy snow made walking annoying. His boots sunk first into snow, then into mud, then he had to exert great effort to pull them out in every step. Thankfully much of Libertycave had acquired roads, but Rabanowicz’s lab was a bit of a way off of from the city center. Not that it was much of a “lab”, it was an abandoned shepherd’s shack that she had discovered while doing miscellaneous research around Mount Curry.

Watanabe stopped and knocked on the door, which he then was promptly greeted by the countenance of Rabanowicz. “Good morning. You are late, Mister ‘Hero’.”

“It was… the snow. I had a hard time finding my way around with the snowstorm outside.” No need to tell her that he had been making snowmen.

“You better get used to it. Come in, I have the tea ready, it should still be hot.” Rabanowicz entered the room, and Watanabe followed by closing the door behind him. Thankfully there was a stove inside, convenient both for heating and teamaking. Despite the dismal condition of the abandoned shack, it still managed to feel quite cozy to stay in.

Watanabe, squeezing by the prototype printing press that was taking up half the space inside the shack, poured himself a cup and dragged a seat right by the stove. “So, what are our plans for today?”

Rabanowicz meanwhile had sat at her desk, quite the wide one that had a mess of papers and books on it. “Not much, in all honesty. We’re still waiting for the steel mechanism of the press to be forged in the copperworks. Hopefully they’ll manage to endure this time, unlike the copper.” She was scribbling on some paper while talking, not raising her head up.

“I’ve had enough of fine-tuning gears for a lifetime…” added Watanabe, with a sip to drown the bad memories away. Copper just wasn’t good enough for something like a press, or much of any machinery really.

“Luckily for you, our next project is a little bit simpler. Here.” Rabanowicz held up the paper she had been scribbling.

“That’s…” something that’s like a long stick, with a metal tube on top, “…a shoujuu? Uhh… Hand cannon! Right, that’s what those are called here.” The oddest thing about being an otherworlder in Gemeinplatz was definitely the part where one instantly learned a whole language. Blanking out while trying to remember a concept or word that didn’t exist in the language had proved to be a common occurrence for Watanabe.

“Yes, though the… the…” Rabanowicz had trouble finding the word ‘arquebus’ and ‘matchlock’ “…the hand canon. Hand canon. Ahem, it’s a more improved version of the hand canon.”

“I can see that. It looks close to the… the… Oh, screw this, it looks close to the thingies of my world. The fire shooting armaments. Firearms!” Watanabe breathed a sigh of relief after finally finding the word he was looking for.

“Firearm, yes. It’s… you know the firearms that are fired with matches. Matchlocks, the hand canons are operated in the same way. A matchlock. This one has a flint… A flint-lock. I never had these back home. Monsieur Brown and I talked a bit about firearms from his world, and I think I’ve managed to figure out how one of these would practically work.”

“I…” Watanabe himself had no idea about firearms, so he just calmly nodded along.

“I see that you have no idea, monsieur. With this, we’d have better firearms than the rest of Gemeinplatz, or more importantly, we’d have firearms. I already know that Brown knows a woman, Ayda of Casamonu, who has provided the League with gunpowder before.”

Watanabe nodded, more genuinely this time “It does sound nice, to give the guys down in Casamonu a big scare when we come down the mountain with firearms.”

“Not only that, but… well, I have something that I think is even more devastating than the firearms themselves. Something that the captain made as a passing comment, but I think it’ll be quite the revolutionary little thing.” Before she explained anything further however, she tapped on the table with her finger “Well, that is a matter for when we have the firearms ready. For now, I need your help on calculating how wide and long we should make this thing.”

“Alright, doctor.” Watanabe gulped the last of his now lukewarm tea down and made his way to the table. For him, it was just another day of mundane number crunching.