FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Save Point: The Springer Verlag

Somewhere Under WhitePoint Cove

"Well hello Sethkill, its about time you finally got here.... what the Wolfmother is that thing you're wearing?" demands Keselt, sly archness turned to fashion outrage.

Sethkill doesn't bother to comment, he just leaps out into empty space and turns a strangely slow somersault as he falls a distance that should ruin both sets of knees, then somehow hits a ledge directly below him in a decelerated whoosh of air that saves him from any damage. He jumps again, a shorter distance this time, then several small hops, skips and jumps later he is standing beside her again and she envelopes him in a hug.

"This is something I found in one of the rooms upstairs," he explains as her arms encounter light steel framing matching the joints of his arms and legs. "It's some sort of primitive power armour, I think. Whatever hydraulic fluid made it go is long gone, but the shocks are air-filled and precision machined, no corroded flanges or anything, so they still work just fine. I had to jump up and down about twenty times to shake things loose and get it moving again, which was pretty damn tiring."

Keselt pauses a moment to get a better look at it. The design seems to involve a sort of half-suit of relatively thin plate, unsuitable as actual armour because its economies of weight make it nowhere near heavy enough, which only covers the underside of each limb, behind the thighs and elbows. Simple mechanical pistons, currently only able to act as air-filled shocks, run from the front of each upper knee to the sides of the greaves, and around the backs of the feet, adding just over a foot or so to Sethkills total height. For the upper body, a similar design is repeated from the bracers beneath the lower arms to a pair of ludicrously large pauldrons, each seemingly intended to be capable of fully independent movement to avoid limiting the possible range of motion.

The main shell of the suit around the central torso is semi-rigid, with a fold-down cross-bar to hold the user inside that looks just like the safety bar on an amusement ride. The metal bells out oddly at the crotch, which for a moment she thinks must be some sort of historical ego thing, only to realize that it is in fact a design feature intended to keep whoever's wearing it from slamming their crotch into solid metal whenever they land after jumping off something. The unknown designer has tried to minimize the potential embarrassment by stenciling some symbols across this bit, probably the parts number in some dead script.

Because the safety bar folds down and over from the back, it incorporates a sort of light face plate that folds down into position over the wearers muzzle when everything is in place, possibly as a sort of guide to help them stray in the correct posture and position to avoid hurting themselves. The face plate is something Keselt can identify, because it was a standard-issue component mass-produced during the Kith-Rhiannon war. This one has been improved a little by dropping in a pair of ancient bluish-purple welders lenses, of a sort dating from shortly after the war that no-one has used for centuries. There are a few tiny metal flecks and imperfections on their surface, where molten metal has sparked and annealed during close up work, suggesting this was the old pair and the anonymous maker then got himself some new ones.

The whole thing is wonderfully absurd and looks like it would be enormously fun to run around in. It even changes Sethkills gait, making him look taller, more springy and bouncy. Any sethura can gain a little height by straightening up and unfolding both knees, at least for a few tens of seconds until they get tired from the unnatural position, but Sethkill looks like he could sprint that way. She wonders exactly when it is from - it can't be as old as the war, despite the materials, because it's far too advanced, but all the components are smelted from the same black War Steel that was first blast-furnaced in bulk for the combat effort. There's even a short half-cloak hanging from the back of it over the shoulders, purely for coolness and scary intimidation, that matches the leather battle-coats that were the affectation of some of the more experienced and field-worn officers. It sweeps about in an awesome manner, following Sethkills bouncy movements.

The surface must have been treated with something, because its not even rusty. It's all bare black metal, with occasional markings in white paint indicating range of motion and safety warnings. It must have looked very futuristic, back when it was made.

"Well don't just stand there, tell me what else you found up there," she encourages him. "It must've been pretty interesting if that's a representative sample."

"Well, after we went into that side room - you know, the one where the wall just dropped out from under you - I kept going straight, through the main corridors and completely away from that side, because obviously very dangerous and risk of collapse. Anyway, there's enough stuff up there for an entire small underground community, say ten or twenty sethura. Most of it was just the sort of thing you'd expect, small individual apartments with pillow-beds gone to dust and disintegrating clothes and hangings, desks and chairs, that sort of thing. There was a small dining hall for them to have food in, and in one place there was a sort of underground garden that looked like it had been lit with mirrors, once upon a time, but they were brass or maybe bronze and they'd tarnished long ago, which might be why no-one ever noticed the opening where they let the light in."

"It sounds kind of beautiful but sad. I wish I'd gotten a chance to look at it."

"Oh, that reminds me, I found a little present for you," exclaims Sethkill, and dug around in the interstices of the armour for some sort of small object, finally producing it from an inside pocket. "Tell no-one, on account of this is probably some sort of historic site, and they'd be miffed if they knew I'd gone all finders-keepers on them without a good excuse."

Keselt looks at the object in amazement. "Do you know what this is?"

"No, I have no idea," exclaims Sethkill cheerfully. "I just saw it and immediately thought that it kind of looked like something you might like."

"This is a Fifth Dynasty astrological disc," Keselt explains, astounded. "There are only a couple of hundred left in world. Each one is a flat disc with a hole in the center, polished from a single piece of green nephrite jade and then inset with smaller circles of other types of stone to create a unique astrological marker representing the birth date or ascension to power of the owner. They're so very accurate, you can estimate the date to within a couple of days, despite the fact that they are all, on average, about five thousand years old."

"Okay, so definitely don't tell anyone," Sethkill concludes.

"Where exactly did you find this?" she presses.

"Well, that would be jumping ahead to the good part. You see, this little underground community was built entirely around a sort of alchemists or artists workshop. It was absolutely fascinating, the whole thing clearly couldn't decide whether it was a lab or a machine shop or what exactly. There were miniature forges, welding and cutting equipment, murals painted on plaster all across the walls with a surprising degree of skill, plans and work schedules, you name it. This armour I'm wearing right now was just one of a whole bunch of finished projects, stood in a handily accessible corner and covered in dust. The last thing the owner was working on looked like some sort of automaton, a kind of rolling drinks trolley on wheels designed to pull a small trailer full of wine glasses around the room behind it in a semi-random way that would eventually cover the entire room - I think, that is, if I understood the plans for it. He'd left it up on a work-bench in the middle of the room, with a bunch of expendable thin clay drinking vessels in it rather than actual glasses."

"You seem to be very certain it was a him."

"This guy was clearly some sort of individualist mad genius. Everything in there screamed ultimate sethura cave. The toys, the gadgets, the weapons and models. I think the entire community existed just as infrastructure so this guy could get up in the morning and create stuff no-one had ever seen before without having to worry about annoying details like food, supplies or money. The paintings alone were amazing, even if you forget about all the technical plans and writings."

"So why'd they just leave it all behind then?" she points out.

"He was the one component they couldn't replace, I guess," says Sethkill sadly. "Probably no-one else even understood most of what he'd made at the time, or what it was for. I think this guy was some sort of intellectual resource, maybe at the time of the Kith-Rhiannon war or thereabouts. He must've been centuries ahead of his time."

"Yes, but where did you find the disc?"

"The alchemist or whatever he was had his own apartments off the main workshop, sized for two. He had a collection of things that were probably historical artifacts even in his time, ancient clay shards, carved faience amulets, curse bones and apotropaic wands, small plump sethuresses carved out of soapstone to soak up dangerous influences, you name it. The disc was just the cleanest thing there. Don't worry, I wiped the dust off an entire section of shelf so no-one will know it's missing."

"You just have no idea how valuable half the things you just described are, do you?"

Sethkill is just amusing himself by playing dumb.

"You're the one who studied the entire cultural history of the world, not me. I prefer to take a more pragmatic approach. Besides, whoever we pass this site onto will have so much other stuff to play with that I doubt they'll even care."

"They might be a bit upset that you just climbed into a valuable historical artifact and then leapt off a cliff with it," disagrees Keselt.

"That I have a very good excuse for," justifies Sethkill. "When I saw that the suit had air-filled shocks, I figured out what I could do with it and so I opened it up and got in. It's a little small for me but it fits, which is what mattered. I'd seen several places where I might have been able to climb down, but all of them were sheer overhangs and way too far down to jump. I couldn't risk getting hurt in case both of use were trapped down here, but the suit was the answer. So, several cycles of dropping down and wandering about and climbing stairs and then jumping off them again later, here I am at great long last. Any thoughts on how we're going to get out of here?"

"Actually, about that..." says Keselt, somewhat evasively. Surely she is hiding something. "I, uh, kind of made a friend while I was down here. Someone who can, um, literally help us out. But just promise you won't overreact when you see him, okay? Because he's kind of, well, unusual."