I had to wonder what protections they had against such effects on their homeworld. Causality sinks that could vent the distortions away? Flux anchors stabilizing the waves and channeling them away from protected areas? Energy sinks to direct such waves down into hardened matter instead of along the dimensional Veil?
Well, whatever, there was no way I was repeating such a mistake.
Powering up a Construct wasn’t actually all that much different from powering up a magic item. In the case of the Gold Primus, all the mechanical pulleys, pistons, and gears were all present, save for the core ‘engine’ that would get it all working. Using mechanical means was actually more energy-efficient than straight animation, like a golem would use, and actually required far less money once we got the processes in place. There would be some up-front costs for making the parts, but once we got them in place, it was much easier than bespoke custom designs for each Gearknight.
The only thing we had to worry about was Axiomatic resonance growing with parts production, but that simply involved adjusting the parts randomly with combinations or customizing just enough to break up absolute repetition. Without identical parts and forms, Axiomatic resonance wouldn’t form.
As long as the parts differentiated in non-essential ornamentation and didn’t follow a purely logical or arithmetic progression, it was okay to do such a thing.
It was why Gear Knight parts were so interchangeable between them. Superficial coding and inlays of the parts differentiated between them, enough that you could probably trace them all the way back to the original Knight they belonged to… but you could salvage such pieces and use them to repair or rebuild another one.
How much of a Gearknight’s spirit was bound up in its parts and which one might return to the body was another question, Ship of Theseus and all that. It was also possible that all the parts were personality aspects for the animating spirit and would change if rebuilt with the parts of others.
Who knew, except the Gearknights themselves, who had no real replies to such questions about their origins. They didn’t even know who had first constructed them, grandiose claims of the Divine Assembler aside and all.
So, what I was doing was a combination of Gearknight energy management and true Construct reliability. For the Gold Primus here, I had melted down four Gold Golem Hearts and reforged them into a single central heart that would operate as both spiritual housing and a power core to motivate the Gear Engine that powered the Gearknight’s metallic body.
The alloy it was made of was similar to pyreal for the foundation parts, being tough and lightweight, acting as a secondary conductor and attractor of magical energies to supplement their core, generating kinetic fields that greased movement and acted as a sense of touch to the immobile portions of their mechanisms.
Over those were plated the armor of the Gearknights, which could be of variable hardness and weight depending on the preferences and power systems of the Gearknight involved. Too much weight and their Engine couldn’t move them. Lots of power meant lots of strength, and meant two absolutely identical Gearknights from the outside could have very different capabilities within, depending on total amount of energy available and their allocation of it.
A Golum Heart gave the Gearknight an absolutely reliable internal energy supply, which would keep it mobile and active even if there was another flux wave blowing out its aetherium. Indeed, the aetherium was more like a luxury item, condensing down the required amount of metal while accepting greater risk. Alternating aspects of its Core Formation with mithral and pyreal gave it much greater resilience, although giving up some of its ability to be mended by standard Cures and Healing spells for the more Construct-specific Repair spells, given a Gearknight had no organic components.
With the reliance on an external power supply alleviated, this would mean the beginning of a whole new breed/design of the Construct race.
Pyreal Burned as goldweight, summoning and binding arcane energy into Rune Patterns that were precise down to the molecular level. Golden energy swirled as I accented it all with the Sublime Chord, imparting a unique melody to the new Gearheart, a heartbeat all of its own, and Holy energy came in on spent Valences with the equivalent of a Resurrection spell, making sure the spirit appropriate to the shell was returning.
There was a crink and a crackle of lightning and power, and the Rune Formations innate to every cog and gear on the massive form of the Primus lit up one by one as new power flowed into them. There was a quiet hum as Atamarr’s Gear Engine started up, cogs and shafts began to spin, and delicate internal mechanisms began to churn, measure, and test out tolerances and functions.
They didn’t find anything wrong. The best artificers and gearmages of the Alliance had been working on him, a few of them for the second time, and they knew what they were doing. They’d been helped by the excavations that had begun at the Gearknight Assembly Area southwest of Al-Arqas, making sure that we had multiple samples of the relevant parts and specifications for them.
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The reboot process went through most of the body before proceeding back up to the head. I could feel the magic drawing in… something, a unique spirit of a type and classification I wasn’t familiar with, less being pulled from another place than gathering itself together and returning to a place made just for it.
Hmm, techno-elemental, maybe? Who knew…
Glowing eyes finally lit up like diodes, but came from emerald crystals instead of normal lenses. There was a distinct sound, like crystalline notes going off and announcing…
“
Breaths released all around as gears whirred, and the upper body of the great Gearknight slowly lifted from the table, his flat domed head spinning left, then right, surveying all the Isparians and lugians gathered around him silently.
His head tilted forward and down, letting him look at the open plastrons of his chest cavity, the armor plates levered away and the inner workings of his torso exposed and visible to the eye. Delicate gears, cogs, pistons, and other mechanisms whirred, spun, cycled, pumped, and rotated for perusal.
In the middle of it, his new Golden Gearheart hummed and pulsed steadily with a unique note, sending power into his systems. Aetherium glittered about it, channeling planar flux energy, but silvery mithral and pale green pyreal accented it and spread out into his systems, conducting that energy to the rest of his body.
Analyze Construct also informed me that with the return of his spirit, conductivity of energy had increased by 129%. It appeared that more efficient use of existing energy was a side-effect of the spirit of the Construct, meaning higher Levels gave the Gearknights more power to use.
Logical.
“My last memory was of my comrade Gearknights exploding all around me. I felt a surge of power going through me, and then… I have woken up here.” Atamarr’s Isparian was deep, commanding, and flawless. “What has befallen us?”
Gears clicked, and panels began to slide, plates to close, and his chest plastrons swung shut, hiding his vulnerable mechanisms from sight, while light plates and metal mesh of armor snapped down into place to protect the seams and joints. They were considerably lighter than something a Gearknight would wear for combat, but enough for casual environmental protection, like wearing a set of light leathers.
King Borelean stepped forward with a welcoming smile. “Primus Atamarr, it is good to see that you have returned to the activated. Welcome back. It has been a long time since any Gearknight has been active in these lands.”
“King Borelean of Osteth,” the noble Gearknight identified him immediately, swinging his armored legs sideways and off the table with a precise movement, his waist pivoting with a range of motion non-mechanicals didn’t have as he got to his steel feet with speed and surety.
Standing up, he was easily a full head taller than Briggs and definitely heavier… and that was without combat armor equipped, built very solid and obviously designed for combat, the size of a tall Lugian, head and shoulders above most of his kind, nearly twelve feet tall.
Benefits of being the Primus, I assumed.
“You have aged, as organics do,” the Gearknight observed of the king. “But there is inconsistency, for is this not your daughter by her eyes? She came barely to my knee when I last saw you, and the noble Queen Mother… you look younger than I remember you. This is not a logical progression of Isparians that I have witnessed in the past.”’
“Seventeen solar cycles have passed since the events of what have come to be known as the Fall, Primus Atamarr,” I spoke up, stepping forward and earning the rotation of his eye-slots towards me. “I am the Lady Magos Ryin. I have been leading the effort to build a Gearheart for you that would not be susceptible to the same circumstances as claimed you and all your brethren. A planar flux surge of extraordinary power overloaded your aetherium systems and destroyed your Cores en masse. Not a single Gearknight survived the Fall intact, and it has taken this long to gather the necessary resources and manpower to reconstruct you. I apologize for the delay.” I bowed low to him.
“I see. So, I am the only Gearknight now active?” he asked sadly, but with iron determination.
“That is correct, Primus Atamarr,” King Borelean replied.
“Do we know who is responsible for this event, if anyone?” the Gearknight went on with repressed ire.
“If we were to guess the source, it would be the leaders of the undead messing about with the ley line configurations underscoring the entire island of Dereth,” I answered for everyone. “But we do not know that for a fact. It could have been a confluence of inter-dimensional conjunctions formed by the virindi, a massive display of power by one of numerous Entities served by the shades or other factions of the undead, such as T’Thuun, or it could have been a completely natural event that happened in some great cosmic joke to bedevil us all.”
“I see. And what plans do you have for me, seeing that you have reassembled me first?” he asked after pondering on all those possibilities for a moment.
“Primus, we would have leave to seek your counsel and your wisdom, and we would have you take over leadership of the efforts to return animation to your brethren,” King Borelean responded promptly.
The great golden Gearknight leader paused only a moment before bowing slightly in return. “A fair and honorable reply, King Borelean. I will be happy to give freely of what I can to such efforts for yourselves and my people.”
Cheers erupted spontaneously from all around, and old friends of the Primus moved forward to greet him and congratulate him on his return. The living Construct accepted all of their welcomes with deft diplomacy and thankful words, truly grateful that he’d found such friends willing to go to such efforts to bring him and his people back.
I just nodded to myself. The schematics and details of what I had done and how I had done it were encoded in crystal and available to the Primus, and if he had to master a completely new set of magic to get the job done, well, he was likely the most intelligent member of his people we could have revived, so it would not be too difficult to get him started on Matrix Levels.
He had a lot of work to do and a lot of Gearknights to rebuild and restore, and it wasn’t going to be done quickly.
But it was one more obligation discharged, and hopefully what it built to in the future would be something magnificent.
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