A Communion of Iron
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Commissioned by @Strypgia
To most people, the auto shop would have looked long abandoned. Decrepit vines crawled over it, while the insides were filled with a soft gaslight. Four magical girls were sitting around inside, two asleep and two awake by the fire. Some small sound filtered out, the hum of the old treadle sewing machine and a crackle of the heater and light.
"Do you think it'll rain soon?" the one on the sewing machine said, sweeping back her cyan hair. "It always rains before trouble starts here."
Lying by the heater, her friend sighed. "Ramiel, I don't think we're going to have more trouble than usual right now. It's the quiet time of the year, after all."
"You always say that, Fate. I can't take you seriously."
The sewing machine kept humming, and the gas-lamp kept flickering. In the back of the garage, four carefully-tended motorcycles sat without moving, until they weren't and one fell over. Sighing, Fate got up from her spot by the heater, brushing off her catsuit and staring at Ramiel with a stink-eye.
"Could it kill you to make a skirt sometime?" Fate asked, sighing.
"Yes." Ramiel replied, pulling another pin out of her work and putting it in the pincushion wrapped around the old Singer's neck. "I know how to make stuff skintight, so skintight is what your costumes are."
Moving towards the bikes, Fate groaned. "Yeah, but they're too hot, and I end up unbuttoning it to my naval, and there's no support. C'mon, can't you at least make something I can put a bra under?"
"Since I'd have to make the bra for it to integrate right, no." Ramiel grumbled. "I'll think about something nice for you once I'm done with the one for Lisa, though. Fair?"
"Sure."
As Fate got to the motorbikes, she found a large calico cat sitting on one of them, licking it's paw and glaring.
"Well good to see you too, Elise." Fate said, picking up the large cat. Meowing softly, the cat stared at Fate until they got by the heater and she started to transform back into a girl.
"God, it's been a long week." Elise groaned. "Y'all got a spare bathrobe or something?"
Tossing one at the naked ex-cat, Ramiel grinned softly. "Find a new squat, or just coming to bother us for another can of tuna?"
"Believe it or not, no." Elise replied, grinning. "I found another item-crafter."
"No shit?"
"No shit. Medicine Boy's good." The shapeshifter stressed, sketching an amulet in the air. "He figured out how to stop time on a dime, and judging by what his proxies carry that wasn't the result of some fey mood."
"A guy." Ramiel mouthed. "Is he single?"
"Worse, he's thirteen and crippled." Elise sighed. "Don't you try and get your claws into him too deep now; you know the curse of the draw as well as I do."
"Yeah, I know, don't cross the streams or you'll eat each other alive." Ramiel sighed. "Eiren and I only get along so well because we can alternate crafting times so we don't intersect, and even then I can't operate at my fullest potential with her around."
"Is it really worth it then?" Fate interjected. "I mean, I know I'm the youngest of us all, but…"
"Safety in numbers trumps good gear every day." Ramiel said decisively. "It takes minutes for me to change my combat applications, and I'm helpless when I do that. No spell or sorcery will save me then."
"Anyway." Elise said, coughing. "You can probably trade stuff with him, and he does medical work too in case something happens."
"Great." Ramiel muttered. Checking a watch, she sighed. "Fate, time for shift change."
"I'll get Eiren and Lisa up." Fate said calmly, as Elise settled down by the heater. Soon, Ramiel was asleep in her bedroll, and the other two were up and about fixing breakfast on a hot plate.
"Morning, Elise." Eiren said, smiling slightly. Lisa just went over to their bikes, presumably to do her magic on them. "Fate will tell me the news later; any signs of good hunting recently?"
"I got nothing." Elise sighed. "Whole city's locking down, and I had to panhandle to make rent this week."
"I should note I've only ever seen you pay rent all of twice." Eiren noted dryly while getting out a skillet to make breakfast in. "Lisa, how do the wards look?"
"We'll need to juice 'em in a few hours, but they'll hold. Do we still have eggs?"
"We got spam, and… beans." Eiren said, sighing. "Damn."
Going over to pat her friend on the shoulder of her red and blue quartered catsuit, Elise took one sniff and lost her apatite.
"Girl. Get a fucking shower." She said, without heat in her voice. "You smell like a dumpster."
"I would if I could…" she muttered. "but…"
"Fucking hell, I will turn into a bird and lead you to Medicine Boy's joint to get you showered if that's what it takes. You know how much I hate turning into a bird." Elise griped.
"After today's hunting." Eiren said, sighing. "Speaking of which, the bikes are set up, right?"
"Just finished gassing them up." Lisa said, sighing. As the other magical girl came back to the light of the heater, the grease stains in her denim coverall became apparent, and she pushed her blonde hair up and back out of the way. "Can I just say it's a bitch making a Kawasaki work when all you have are shitty Mercedes parts though? Because it really is."
"At least you get to use your abilities without a janktastic workaround." Eiren grumbled. "I was supposed to become a doctor. Healing. Medicine. Now I figure out better fucking gunpowder and know all sorts of sweet spots to shoot people in."
"Well either you picked up a gun or I did, and I know more formal sorcery." Lisa replied, going over to ruffle Eiren's snow-white locks. Dodging the greasy hand, things quickly devolved into a scuffle on the floor while Elise subtly moved in on the pan and tinned beans to start breakfast. Once the scuffle was decisively concluded with Lisa in a joint lock and Lisa covered in oil, the shapeshifter served them all equal portions of breakfast.
"What are you even hunting for, anyway?" Elise asked.
"Machines." Lisa said, eyes sparkling. "There's tons of old abandoned tools, and if I can get a decent air compressor I can start working on something bigger than these bikes. Or maybe a welder, so I can do a permanent warding. Maybe a sandblaster, oh, I've always wanted one of those…"
"Lisa talks to machines." Eiren explained. "She's only been like us for two months, but she's got talent and doesn't mind the living conditions that much."
"I can tell." Elise said. Sighing, she took off her bathrobe, and went back behind a curtain towards the toilet. "I'm going to transform now; don't look."
Sitting by the fire, Lisa and Eiren started going over their map. They'd need to head north a fair bit today, before hitting up some abandoned tooling shops and a warehouse district on the way back south. Before long, a large bobcat padded out behind one of the curtains, and curled up next to Eiren.
"Glad to have you with us." The medic said, smiling. It took a few minutes to get Elise's combat cat form situated onto a motorcycle, but after that the two girls took off. As the wind flickered past her ears from where she was draped across the gauges and the handlebars, she watched buildings go whizzing by in a haze of blight with islands of hope spaced between them.
It wasn't long before the group stopped, and the weapons came out. Lisa's choice of a chalk stick and a flashlight may not have been normal next to
Eiren's pistol and the bobcat that was Elise, but she was the most dangerous one there with her sorcery. Moving through the workshop, it didn't seem like much was going to happen- aside from the dark and dead tools, there was nothing moving. Then, outside, there was a crash.
"Man, I told you." One voice muttered. "The boss-man wanted glassware, so why the fuck we breaking into a paint shop?"
"Because he said Pyrex, you dumbass." Another voice replied. "If we get the wrong stuff, it'll explode."
"This is just as dumb as the time he wanted us to steal a truck of cough drops." The first muttered.
Looking at each other, Lisa and Eiren raised eyebrows. "Do we want to engage?" Eiren asked. "I mean, no loot."
"They have a car though." Lisa replied. "I always wanted a car."
Moving through the workshop, they got to the back alley and the Corolla that sat there idling. As far as getaway cars went, it was kind of terrible: rusty, with one flattening tire and the windows locked down. Still, Lisa's eyes lit up at it.
"What about the motorbikes?" Eiren asked, waving her hand in front of the mechanical girl's face.
"What about them?" Lisa asked back.
"Give me, like, five minutes." Eiren sighed. "I'm gonna hide the bikes across the street."
Looking at the car, Lisa nodded. She never really noticed one partner in crime gone as she knelt down to sketch some circles on the concrete.
"Did you hear that?" one of the men called. "Sounded like scratching."
Eyes snapping up, Lisa gulped as one of the stooges across the street played his flashlight out, before cussing.
"Jaysus, that was one hell of a cat! Damn near looked like he'd eat me alive!"
Relax, Lisa. She told herself. They didn't see you.
"I'm gonna check on the car, that thing could have finished fucking the tires or something."
Ah shit.
Moving quickly, Lisa started scrawling circles of invisibility. One for her, one for Elise, one for Eiren, one for the other cat here in case Elise wasn't a bobcat… no. She had to calm down, now. Panic was bad. Fear would kill you. Pulling out her flashlight, chalk quickly filled pre-scrawled runes on the outside as Lisa got ready to fight. Coming out of the building, the mook started moving towards her car purposefully, and she snapped.
Charging out of invisibility, Lisa yelled and flicked on her flashlight. Normally, this would produce a beam of light, but now it produced a discrete brick of light that flew out at the thug.
The fact it missed was incidental. The first thing Ramiel had taught Lisa about fighting people was that the word of the day was closer. Get closer, and clobber the shit out of them. A homemade flashlight built into a gas pipe would work wonders for the job. Thus, the skull-reverberating thonk following the brick was nothing more than guerre d' course for Lisa, followed by the man falling backwards and gibbering.
What was not guerre d' course was the man standing back up with a visible dent in his skull, pull out a Glock, and start garbling at her.
"I'ma kill you!" he yelled, pulling the trigger. Much like Lisa's light brick, it went wide. Unlike her magical attack, though, it was followed by another one, forcing Lisa to duck behind the car. Screaming, he kept shooting, until Eiren finally got a line of sight on him and pulled her own trigger.
Most Alchemists disdained regular bullets, and in this neck of the woods the perfered enhancer was enchanted radium. As such, when it hit the dumbass who'd taken pay in kind from the wrong masters, it exploded. Violently.
As chunks of man-turned-monster fell, Eiren cocked her revolver again and ran forward to Lisa. "Are you okay?" she yelled.
"ughble" Lisa muttered.
"Fucking fuckit." Eiren muttered, before shoving her gun in her belt and throwing Lisa into the car. Once in contact with the mechanical device, she straightened up immediately, grabbing the wheel with one hand and the shifter with the other.
"Hey!" yelled a voice from inside. "That's our car- shit! Jim? Jim!"
Moving around the car, Eiren pulled the gun back out and threw a shot at the other mook. Something in the building opposite was enough to arm it, and the explosion shattered something glass as she got into the passenger's seat.
"Get us home." Eiren yelled, before the car peeled rubber in a desperate attempt to escape. A few minutes of driving later, and the pair finally found themselves free of pursuit.
"So… good haul?" Lisa asked, trying not to flinch.
Eiren's eye twitched. "I have no idea yet. It depends on this junker's value, because you better believe we're not keeping it."
"Yeah, I thought so."
"You're not sad we're scrapping it?"
Lisa sighed, and patted the dashboard. "She's an old girl, late eighties model. Too much is going in her guts. Better I put her to sleep instead of some monster who leaves her to rot."
"Great." Eiren sighed. "You wanna stop for some McDonalds?"
"We have cash for that?"
Banging open the dashboard, Eiren pulled out a stack of dodgy bills. "We got… sixty dollars. We can eat on that."
"How'd you find that!" Lisa asked, gasping. "We could use that more!"
"Tell you the truth, I smelled the cocaine on it first." Eiren said, grinning abashedly.
"Oh. Which McDonald's do you want to go to?"
"The one on Hall is pretty decent."
It was about twenty minutes later that they got their food, and soon it was time to head back to the base. Cruising southbound, things were going smooth as silk as the rest of the money went into some groceries while Lisa kept the poor old thing going through a touch of magic and a deft foot on the pedal. When they finally got home, the noise was enough to wake Fate and Ramiel.
"Holy shit! You got a car!" were Fate's first words, and it wasn't hard to blame her for it. Cars were hard to find, and just jacking one would be prone to developing problems like gang attention.
"They were homonuculi, so this is spoils of war." Eiren said, going over to take the groceries out of the back. "Don't celebrate too hard, either- we had to leave the bikes hidden on Seven Mile Road, and this thing's gonna get parts'd up."
"Do we have to?"
"If you can fix two cracked cylinder heads, I never knew." Lisa replied from inside the car. "Most of the suspension is shot, and the trans is gone too. It can barely leave first gear, and fourth gear is just fucking gone."
"Crap." Ramiel said quietly. "Well, I'll let you get up to that. I need to sleep."
Flopping back into her bedroll, Ramiel put words to deeds as she crashed out. Fate followed suit shortly after, and Eiren just muttered and got out he medical pestles.
Tonight had scared her. She wasn't a fighter at her core, but a pharmacist who had traded her fate for a chance to save her sister. It had worked, for a time, but when that man came into her life and stole her away, it boiled the blood in her veins and driven her to such a rage. Eiren had nearly died that night, and in a fit of pique swore off the medical vow that had been the crux that saved her soul.
Now, there was no more protection as she danced with the dead, and as the conglomerate in the pestle came together she sighed. One day, one dark day, she would let herself die and be judged for what she had done. Today wasn't that day, though- and as she scraped the paste up into a ball to swallow, her actions made sure tomorrow wouldn't be that day either.
Meanwhile, over at the car, Lisa was preparing the Last Rites. Writing out the description of the car, she slowly walked around it, catalouging damage. What would take an experienced mechanic hours of work took her minutes, the speech of the car and the pained sounds it made as the parts continued to fail in slow motion saying volumes about the quality of it's care.
Once that was done, it was time to extract the fluids. A pan under the car was set to capture the oil, while a siphon pump was taken to the gas tank. Once that was done, the battery was disconnected and removed, and the radiator drained. There were still a few more things Lisa could disassemble, but they were minor in comparison. The car was now hibernating- the rest would be painless.
Jacks and blocks held the car up as wheels were pulled to the side, and the bad tire removed for use in other projects later. Brake calipers were pulled, lines taken off, and slowly the suspension became parts in the wind. Going over to the cabinet of supplies, Lisa took a sprig of holly and some holy water, blessing the corpse-to-be.
Taking the engine out properly could wait for another day, though. So much work to do for Lisa, but for now she needed to eat. A cup of tea and a biscut would suffice, as Eiren looked on in bored amusement.
"Do you think the car cares about what you're doing to it?" Eiren asked calmly, sipping her own tea. "Do you think it knows what this really means? An end to it's life?"
"Machines aren't like people." Lisa said, blowing on her tea carefully. "They age more gracefully, don't fight and swear the winds of fate, understand that time on this Earth is limited to the care of their component friends. But, for them, there is no concept of death. Only rest."
"Then that is the question for all of us, I suppose." Eiren said. "Is death the rest at the end of life?"
"Only a life well-lived, though." Lisa corrected, nibbling the sweet biscuit happily.
"Did we have one, then?"
"I don't know."
To most people, the auto shop would have looked long abandoned. Decrepit vines crawled over it, while the insides were filled with a soft gaslight. Four magical girls were sitting around inside, two asleep and two awake by the fire. Some small sound filtered out, the hum of the old treadle sewing machine and a crackle of the heater and light.
"Do you think it'll rain soon?" the one on the sewing machine said, sweeping back her cyan hair. "It always rains before trouble starts here."
Lying by the heater, her friend sighed. "Ramiel, I don't think we're going to have more trouble than usual right now. It's the quiet time of the year, after all."
"You always say that, Fate. I can't take you seriously."
The sewing machine kept humming, and the gas-lamp kept flickering. In the back of the garage, four carefully-tended motorcycles sat without moving, until they weren't and one fell over. Sighing, Fate got up from her spot by the heater, brushing off her catsuit and staring at Ramiel with a stink-eye.
"Could it kill you to make a skirt sometime?" Fate asked, sighing.
"Yes." Ramiel replied, pulling another pin out of her work and putting it in the pincushion wrapped around the old Singer's neck. "I know how to make stuff skintight, so skintight is what your costumes are."
Moving towards the bikes, Fate groaned. "Yeah, but they're too hot, and I end up unbuttoning it to my naval, and there's no support. C'mon, can't you at least make something I can put a bra under?"
"Since I'd have to make the bra for it to integrate right, no." Ramiel grumbled. "I'll think about something nice for you once I'm done with the one for Lisa, though. Fair?"
"Sure."
As Fate got to the motorbikes, she found a large calico cat sitting on one of them, licking it's paw and glaring.
"Well good to see you too, Elise." Fate said, picking up the large cat. Meowing softly, the cat stared at Fate until they got by the heater and she started to transform back into a girl.
"God, it's been a long week." Elise groaned. "Y'all got a spare bathrobe or something?"
Tossing one at the naked ex-cat, Ramiel grinned softly. "Find a new squat, or just coming to bother us for another can of tuna?"
"Believe it or not, no." Elise replied, grinning. "I found another item-crafter."
"No shit?"
"No shit. Medicine Boy's good." The shapeshifter stressed, sketching an amulet in the air. "He figured out how to stop time on a dime, and judging by what his proxies carry that wasn't the result of some fey mood."
"A guy." Ramiel mouthed. "Is he single?"
"Worse, he's thirteen and crippled." Elise sighed. "Don't you try and get your claws into him too deep now; you know the curse of the draw as well as I do."
"Yeah, I know, don't cross the streams or you'll eat each other alive." Ramiel sighed. "Eiren and I only get along so well because we can alternate crafting times so we don't intersect, and even then I can't operate at my fullest potential with her around."
"Is it really worth it then?" Fate interjected. "I mean, I know I'm the youngest of us all, but…"
"Safety in numbers trumps good gear every day." Ramiel said decisively. "It takes minutes for me to change my combat applications, and I'm helpless when I do that. No spell or sorcery will save me then."
"Anyway." Elise said, coughing. "You can probably trade stuff with him, and he does medical work too in case something happens."
"Great." Ramiel muttered. Checking a watch, she sighed. "Fate, time for shift change."
"I'll get Eiren and Lisa up." Fate said calmly, as Elise settled down by the heater. Soon, Ramiel was asleep in her bedroll, and the other two were up and about fixing breakfast on a hot plate.
"Morning, Elise." Eiren said, smiling slightly. Lisa just went over to their bikes, presumably to do her magic on them. "Fate will tell me the news later; any signs of good hunting recently?"
"I got nothing." Elise sighed. "Whole city's locking down, and I had to panhandle to make rent this week."
"I should note I've only ever seen you pay rent all of twice." Eiren noted dryly while getting out a skillet to make breakfast in. "Lisa, how do the wards look?"
"We'll need to juice 'em in a few hours, but they'll hold. Do we still have eggs?"
"We got spam, and… beans." Eiren said, sighing. "Damn."
Going over to pat her friend on the shoulder of her red and blue quartered catsuit, Elise took one sniff and lost her apatite.
"Girl. Get a fucking shower." She said, without heat in her voice. "You smell like a dumpster."
"I would if I could…" she muttered. "but…"
"Fucking hell, I will turn into a bird and lead you to Medicine Boy's joint to get you showered if that's what it takes. You know how much I hate turning into a bird." Elise griped.
"After today's hunting." Eiren said, sighing. "Speaking of which, the bikes are set up, right?"
"Just finished gassing them up." Lisa said, sighing. As the other magical girl came back to the light of the heater, the grease stains in her denim coverall became apparent, and she pushed her blonde hair up and back out of the way. "Can I just say it's a bitch making a Kawasaki work when all you have are shitty Mercedes parts though? Because it really is."
"At least you get to use your abilities without a janktastic workaround." Eiren grumbled. "I was supposed to become a doctor. Healing. Medicine. Now I figure out better fucking gunpowder and know all sorts of sweet spots to shoot people in."
"Well either you picked up a gun or I did, and I know more formal sorcery." Lisa replied, going over to ruffle Eiren's snow-white locks. Dodging the greasy hand, things quickly devolved into a scuffle on the floor while Elise subtly moved in on the pan and tinned beans to start breakfast. Once the scuffle was decisively concluded with Lisa in a joint lock and Lisa covered in oil, the shapeshifter served them all equal portions of breakfast.
"What are you even hunting for, anyway?" Elise asked.
"Machines." Lisa said, eyes sparkling. "There's tons of old abandoned tools, and if I can get a decent air compressor I can start working on something bigger than these bikes. Or maybe a welder, so I can do a permanent warding. Maybe a sandblaster, oh, I've always wanted one of those…"
"Lisa talks to machines." Eiren explained. "She's only been like us for two months, but she's got talent and doesn't mind the living conditions that much."
"I can tell." Elise said. Sighing, she took off her bathrobe, and went back behind a curtain towards the toilet. "I'm going to transform now; don't look."
Sitting by the fire, Lisa and Eiren started going over their map. They'd need to head north a fair bit today, before hitting up some abandoned tooling shops and a warehouse district on the way back south. Before long, a large bobcat padded out behind one of the curtains, and curled up next to Eiren.
"Glad to have you with us." The medic said, smiling. It took a few minutes to get Elise's combat cat form situated onto a motorcycle, but after that the two girls took off. As the wind flickered past her ears from where she was draped across the gauges and the handlebars, she watched buildings go whizzing by in a haze of blight with islands of hope spaced between them.
It wasn't long before the group stopped, and the weapons came out. Lisa's choice of a chalk stick and a flashlight may not have been normal next to
Eiren's pistol and the bobcat that was Elise, but she was the most dangerous one there with her sorcery. Moving through the workshop, it didn't seem like much was going to happen- aside from the dark and dead tools, there was nothing moving. Then, outside, there was a crash.
"Man, I told you." One voice muttered. "The boss-man wanted glassware, so why the fuck we breaking into a paint shop?"
"Because he said Pyrex, you dumbass." Another voice replied. "If we get the wrong stuff, it'll explode."
"This is just as dumb as the time he wanted us to steal a truck of cough drops." The first muttered.
Looking at each other, Lisa and Eiren raised eyebrows. "Do we want to engage?" Eiren asked. "I mean, no loot."
"They have a car though." Lisa replied. "I always wanted a car."
Moving through the workshop, they got to the back alley and the Corolla that sat there idling. As far as getaway cars went, it was kind of terrible: rusty, with one flattening tire and the windows locked down. Still, Lisa's eyes lit up at it.
"What about the motorbikes?" Eiren asked, waving her hand in front of the mechanical girl's face.
"What about them?" Lisa asked back.
"Give me, like, five minutes." Eiren sighed. "I'm gonna hide the bikes across the street."
Looking at the car, Lisa nodded. She never really noticed one partner in crime gone as she knelt down to sketch some circles on the concrete.
"Did you hear that?" one of the men called. "Sounded like scratching."
Eyes snapping up, Lisa gulped as one of the stooges across the street played his flashlight out, before cussing.
"Jaysus, that was one hell of a cat! Damn near looked like he'd eat me alive!"
Relax, Lisa. She told herself. They didn't see you.
"I'm gonna check on the car, that thing could have finished fucking the tires or something."
Ah shit.
Moving quickly, Lisa started scrawling circles of invisibility. One for her, one for Elise, one for Eiren, one for the other cat here in case Elise wasn't a bobcat… no. She had to calm down, now. Panic was bad. Fear would kill you. Pulling out her flashlight, chalk quickly filled pre-scrawled runes on the outside as Lisa got ready to fight. Coming out of the building, the mook started moving towards her car purposefully, and she snapped.
Charging out of invisibility, Lisa yelled and flicked on her flashlight. Normally, this would produce a beam of light, but now it produced a discrete brick of light that flew out at the thug.
The fact it missed was incidental. The first thing Ramiel had taught Lisa about fighting people was that the word of the day was closer. Get closer, and clobber the shit out of them. A homemade flashlight built into a gas pipe would work wonders for the job. Thus, the skull-reverberating thonk following the brick was nothing more than guerre d' course for Lisa, followed by the man falling backwards and gibbering.
What was not guerre d' course was the man standing back up with a visible dent in his skull, pull out a Glock, and start garbling at her.
"I'ma kill you!" he yelled, pulling the trigger. Much like Lisa's light brick, it went wide. Unlike her magical attack, though, it was followed by another one, forcing Lisa to duck behind the car. Screaming, he kept shooting, until Eiren finally got a line of sight on him and pulled her own trigger.
Most Alchemists disdained regular bullets, and in this neck of the woods the perfered enhancer was enchanted radium. As such, when it hit the dumbass who'd taken pay in kind from the wrong masters, it exploded. Violently.
As chunks of man-turned-monster fell, Eiren cocked her revolver again and ran forward to Lisa. "Are you okay?" she yelled.
"ughble" Lisa muttered.
"Fucking fuckit." Eiren muttered, before shoving her gun in her belt and throwing Lisa into the car. Once in contact with the mechanical device, she straightened up immediately, grabbing the wheel with one hand and the shifter with the other.
"Hey!" yelled a voice from inside. "That's our car- shit! Jim? Jim!"
Moving around the car, Eiren pulled the gun back out and threw a shot at the other mook. Something in the building opposite was enough to arm it, and the explosion shattered something glass as she got into the passenger's seat.
"Get us home." Eiren yelled, before the car peeled rubber in a desperate attempt to escape. A few minutes of driving later, and the pair finally found themselves free of pursuit.
"So… good haul?" Lisa asked, trying not to flinch.
Eiren's eye twitched. "I have no idea yet. It depends on this junker's value, because you better believe we're not keeping it."
"Yeah, I thought so."
"You're not sad we're scrapping it?"
Lisa sighed, and patted the dashboard. "She's an old girl, late eighties model. Too much is going in her guts. Better I put her to sleep instead of some monster who leaves her to rot."
"Great." Eiren sighed. "You wanna stop for some McDonalds?"
"We have cash for that?"
Banging open the dashboard, Eiren pulled out a stack of dodgy bills. "We got… sixty dollars. We can eat on that."
"How'd you find that!" Lisa asked, gasping. "We could use that more!"
"Tell you the truth, I smelled the cocaine on it first." Eiren said, grinning abashedly.
"Oh. Which McDonald's do you want to go to?"
"The one on Hall is pretty decent."
It was about twenty minutes later that they got their food, and soon it was time to head back to the base. Cruising southbound, things were going smooth as silk as the rest of the money went into some groceries while Lisa kept the poor old thing going through a touch of magic and a deft foot on the pedal. When they finally got home, the noise was enough to wake Fate and Ramiel.
"Holy shit! You got a car!" were Fate's first words, and it wasn't hard to blame her for it. Cars were hard to find, and just jacking one would be prone to developing problems like gang attention.
"They were homonuculi, so this is spoils of war." Eiren said, going over to take the groceries out of the back. "Don't celebrate too hard, either- we had to leave the bikes hidden on Seven Mile Road, and this thing's gonna get parts'd up."
"Do we have to?"
"If you can fix two cracked cylinder heads, I never knew." Lisa replied from inside the car. "Most of the suspension is shot, and the trans is gone too. It can barely leave first gear, and fourth gear is just fucking gone."
"Crap." Ramiel said quietly. "Well, I'll let you get up to that. I need to sleep."
Flopping back into her bedroll, Ramiel put words to deeds as she crashed out. Fate followed suit shortly after, and Eiren just muttered and got out he medical pestles.
Tonight had scared her. She wasn't a fighter at her core, but a pharmacist who had traded her fate for a chance to save her sister. It had worked, for a time, but when that man came into her life and stole her away, it boiled the blood in her veins and driven her to such a rage. Eiren had nearly died that night, and in a fit of pique swore off the medical vow that had been the crux that saved her soul.
Now, there was no more protection as she danced with the dead, and as the conglomerate in the pestle came together she sighed. One day, one dark day, she would let herself die and be judged for what she had done. Today wasn't that day, though- and as she scraped the paste up into a ball to swallow, her actions made sure tomorrow wouldn't be that day either.
Meanwhile, over at the car, Lisa was preparing the Last Rites. Writing out the description of the car, she slowly walked around it, catalouging damage. What would take an experienced mechanic hours of work took her minutes, the speech of the car and the pained sounds it made as the parts continued to fail in slow motion saying volumes about the quality of it's care.
Once that was done, it was time to extract the fluids. A pan under the car was set to capture the oil, while a siphon pump was taken to the gas tank. Once that was done, the battery was disconnected and removed, and the radiator drained. There were still a few more things Lisa could disassemble, but they were minor in comparison. The car was now hibernating- the rest would be painless.
Jacks and blocks held the car up as wheels were pulled to the side, and the bad tire removed for use in other projects later. Brake calipers were pulled, lines taken off, and slowly the suspension became parts in the wind. Going over to the cabinet of supplies, Lisa took a sprig of holly and some holy water, blessing the corpse-to-be.
Taking the engine out properly could wait for another day, though. So much work to do for Lisa, but for now she needed to eat. A cup of tea and a biscut would suffice, as Eiren looked on in bored amusement.
"Do you think the car cares about what you're doing to it?" Eiren asked calmly, sipping her own tea. "Do you think it knows what this really means? An end to it's life?"
"Machines aren't like people." Lisa said, blowing on her tea carefully. "They age more gracefully, don't fight and swear the winds of fate, understand that time on this Earth is limited to the care of their component friends. But, for them, there is no concept of death. Only rest."
"Then that is the question for all of us, I suppose." Eiren said. "Is death the rest at the end of life?"
"Only a life well-lived, though." Lisa corrected, nibbling the sweet biscuit happily.
"Did we have one, then?"
"I don't know."
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