Thanks to
@Always Late for improvements/corrections any additional errors in this expanded version are my own.
20 leagues from the sea
It was ugly, blocky, and somewhat dorky looking. A brass coloured orb set on the workbench. It had a large, gold-tinted plate glass window cut into the front, with a brim bolted above.
Well, none of that really made it ugly or dorky. No, it was the large "flashlight" on top of the steampunk dive helmet that turned retro into weirdo.
It didn't fit. It didn't fit the look of the rest of the helmet. It didn't fit the look of the oversized dive suit on the nearby frame that went along with it. It just didn't fit! With the tubular addition, the whole suit spoke to some underwater steampunk theme, but then without it the whole suit was just a fancy costume.
The workbench rattled as his fist impacted the unfairly abused surface. He felt like kicking himself. What sort of Tinker forgets to put a power source on a suit of power armour? Well, he'd need only look in a mirror to see one.
At least no one knew about it, his hidden little side project, now his secret shame. Maybe he could work something out later, something better than bolting a magical battery to the top of the helmet. How hard could it be, right?
Inspiration failed to strike, the awkward helmet remained the "best" solution he could think of.
Well, at least he knew what not to do next time, Tim mulled as he stuffed the various components of the flawed power armour in a box. Lesson 1: Never build without a blueprint.
****
He'd been busy building again, using his cobbled together tools to make better tools that would eventually make even better tools. But now he needed a break, something to give his aching fingers a rest from fiddly tinkering.
The TV flicked off. Nothing worth watching this late, maybe he should just call it a night and get going again bright and early tomorrow. But sleep did not come. Tim tossed and turned, half formed ideas humming in his imagination, daydreams of awesome devices built by his own two hands.
Cursing in true dockworker style (despite being more office bound than not) he propped himself up in bed and pulled his old work laptop out from its hiding place behind the bedside table.
He opened a well used browser tab, a guilty pleaure of his slowly loaded onto the screen. Full colour rather than shades of green, for the moment. A magical tinker he might be, but he still couldn't work out why it did that. Uber and L33t's Lets Play archive list filled the screen, no new updates since the Simurgh had paid the bay a visit. Damn.
What to look at, what to look at? Hmm, not Princess Maker. Too many Alph references. Bioshock? Undersea city, that had some promise. He clicked it. A stuttering video loaded at a snail's pace, but the duo's antics wasn't what he was actually here for. Tim scrolled down to an illustrated block of text. Uber almost always wrote up a silly story to go with each of the let's plays the villanous duo put out, and they were almost always good for a laugh.
He was chuckling along when one of the drawings caught his eye. An oversized diving suit, with a large tank on it's back and a drill replacing one arm.
"Tank... on the back...."
His hand met his face immediately. It was so simple, so
stupidly simple and he hadn't thought of it! Tim felt the urge to rush back to his workshop and start right away. But he stopped after pulling on only a single sock.
Lesson 1: Never build without a blueprint.
No, no, no. Building without a blueprint had caused this little wrinkle. Doing so again, that just sounded like a recipe for another round of feeling foolish.
Sextant thrumed as he opened up a design program. He'd do it right this time, design then build, design then build.
Tim the Shipwright smiled as he rebuilt his first power armor on a virtual schematic. This... this wasn't tinkering. No, this was
engineering.
