Fabricated Ch 19

 The six of them are sitting around Bigly’s dining room table, the prototypes in the middle. They’re two black gauntlets, with metal prongs coming off each side, with adjustable straps. It slides onto the arm and sits just about the wrist, and and there’s a switch on the rim that activates the Elerium core, turning the device on. 

At least, it’s supposed to. 

PC picks one up, slides it on, does the same for the other, admires how they looks on his arms.

Davey speaks up: “How long until you think they’re ready for testing? 

Bigly drums his fingers against the table. “Honestly, can’t say,” he says. “Could be a month, could be half a year; we’ve not got any idea how manipulate the Elerium’s Psionic output. We need time to draw up concepts, do material tests, make trial versions of the internals—“

“We don’t have that kind of time,” interrupts Tulip.

PC rubs his right thumb up against the mock switch of the right protojack. He feels heat pulse at the core of his being. Alice’s voice echos from it, faintly: Awakening provides.

“I think I can fix that,” he says, and before anyone can say anything, he flicks both protojacks on. 

The prongs jump with green light, crackling. Bigly and Alex jump in their seats, the latter clean out onto the floor. Davey helps them back up as he stares wide eyed.

Lizard, coming back into the dining room with a beer from Bigly’s fridge, drops their drink at the sound and comes running over. “How are you doing that?” they demand. “There’s no connections yet, no mechanism to conduit the energy—“

“What can I say?” says PC. “Looks like I’m magic.” 

Bigly squints at him. “I have a theory,” he says finally. “Turn them off, take them off.” 

PC complies; Bigly puts them on and flicks the switches. 

Nothing.

He passes them to Tulip. “Try them,” he says. She does, and like before, nothing happens. Bigly takes them back, looks them over with narrowed eyes. “Doesn’t seem to be any trick here, that I can see...”

“How did you do that?” asks Lizard again, taking the protojacks from Bigly and turning them over in their hands. “There’s no way you should be able to!”

“Dude already told you,” Tulip says, leaning back in her chair as she takes a drink of her beer. “He’s magic.”

“I don’t believe it,” says Lizard. “You get something when you went to White House? Something up your sleeve?” They reach for PC’s arm; he jerks away, and only after realizes that won’t quell any suspicion.

Alex comes to his rescue: “Hey, he’s touch adverse, leave him alone!”

Lizard looks away. “Sorry,” they say.

“No hard feelings,” says PC. He pretends to yawn behind his hand. “I’m pretty tired, I’m gonna head on to bed.”

A chorus of ‘good nights!’ follow him out of the dining room, across the living room, and up the stairs. When he reaches the top, he finds Espeon, who grins up at his shocked face.

“What are you doing?” he whispers. 

“Listening,” she says. “How did you make the protojacks work?”

“Psionics, I think, but also Awakening? I think more the latter, actually,” he says, picking her up and carrying her with him to the guest room, where he sits down on his sleeping bag next to the bed. 

Alice, gently tucked in, sits up. “How did it go? Are they coming along?” she asks.

“I think I figured out how to shortcut the production time,” PC says. 

Espeon wriggles free of his hands. “Awakening provides,” she says, in a mockery of Alice’s voice. 

Alice blinks. “What happened?”

“The protojacks aren’t able to turn on yet, but I was able to make something happen very similar to what we want,” he says. “I - I think it was due to Awakening magic. I just- I picked them up and I thought, ‘I want these to work’, and they did.”

“Awakening is often like that of a child’s mind,” says Alice. “Belief is action and action belief.”

“So it seems,” he says quietly. 

“Now all we gotta do is find some aliens and zap!” Espeon pounces at PC’s shoelaces. “One Outsider Shard, please!”

“I really hope that works,” he says. “We really don’t want to wait around and let them get to Codex Brains.”

“I’m sure it will be fine,” says Alice. “If not innately, your belief will provide instead.”

PC isn’t sure that’s how this works, but he’s too tired to really care. He stretches out against the sleeping bag and pulls his blanket up from its crumpled heap at his feet; Espeon curls against his chest.

He’s just about to nod off when there’s a thundering up the stairs, and a cacophony of yelling above him to ‘wake up, cmon, there’s reports of a crashed UFO nearby, cmon!’ 

He struggles to his feet, nearly tripping. Alex steadies him; the rest of the humans have already raced back down the stairs. Espeon and Alice stand up, looking up at him expectantly; he scoops them into his arms and follows Alex back down through the living room, past the bewildered and amused faces of the engineers to the back door.

They push a flashlight into his hands as the two of them jog to the car, scrambling into the back seat. Once they’re in, Davey starts driving, car bouncing slightly from rocketing over speed bumps.

“I’m not sure this is a great idea,” says PC.

“What do you mean, not a great idea? It’s fucking aliens,” says Espeon, who is peeking out from his hoodie pocket. Alice, on the other side of the pocket, sighs.

“I think that is exactly the issue,” she says. Louder, she asks, “do any of you have a weapon?”

“We brought the protojack,” says Tulip, patting the case on her lap.

Alice squints. “I suppose if it is only you and Espeon it will be okay,” she says.

“I don’t know, Alice,” says PC, but Tulip cuts him off.

“You’re pretty sure we need this to get through the alien’s front door, right? To even find that door? Then put away your doubts because this is the best shot we got,” she says. 

He sees she has her phone open to a picture of a Outsider; she shows this to him. “You’re looking for this, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says. “It’ll be in the UFO itself...”

“We’ll make a distraction of some kind for you,” says Alex.

“Oh, no we will not,” says Davey.

“Oh yes we will!” Tulip grins wickedly. “Oh yes we will!”