Amity tapped her pencil rhythmically against her paper, eyes trained on the clock by the door. The runes teacher droned on in a monotone, but Amity had tuned it out a while before. She watched the minutes count down.
At last, the bell screamed, and she sighed in relief, gathering up her things. She glanced down at her sheet of notes for the class and noticed she'd only managed to fill up the page with doodles of Luz. She felt her face heat up and quickly shoved her things away into her bag, then hurried out of the classroom.
Winding through the school, she got to her locker, trading out her schoolbooks for a bag from home, then turned around and nearly walked into Luz.
"Augh!" she squeaked, stepping back. "Luz! You snuck up on me."
Luz shrunk back with a guilty smile. "Sorry, the shortcut comes out in a weird place." She gestured at the floor, where a large, glowing hatch stood open directly behind her. "Anyway, you got everything?"
She nodded and slung the bag over her shoulder. Luz backed up to the hatch and stepped onto the first rung. Amity turned around and followed her down the thick, wooden ladder into the Secret Room of Shortcuts. The thought crossed her mind that if Luz looked up, she'd get quite a view, and Amity felt her pulse jump into her ears. She glanced surreptitiously down at Luz, who was looking over her shoulder at where she was going. Amity felt a confusing mix of relief and disappointment that she decided to think about later.
She followed Luz through the maze of weird pathways and stairs, back to the same nondescript door that opened to the darkened hallway. Amity crossed the threshold and said, "One of these days you're going to have to show me how that room works."
"You think I know how it works?" Luz asked with a laugh. "I just wander through doors to see where they go until I get lost."
Amity shook her head with a grin, then stopped and unslung her bag. "Of course, I don't know what else I was thinking you do." She stooped down and fished a couple large everlasting candles out of her bag, then crossed over to the dusty lockers just opposite of the door back into the Secret room of Shortcuts. She wedged them into place like wall sconces, then spun her finger. The candles sputtered into life. She stepped back and looked around the hall.
"That's much better," Luz said. "Now it just feels like it's nighttime, and not like we're in a haunted insane asylum."
Amity giggled. "We don't have those here, but I can imagine what it would be. I'm probably really wrong, though, what's an inane asylum like in the human realm?"
"Think the Conformatorium crossed with a healer's office, except the walls are padded."
"Interesting." They ventured further down the hall, pausing to set up more candles every few dozen feet, before they got back to the door to the printing press. Amity turned and looked back down the hallway. The dim, green glow of the emergency beacons had been replaced with a warm orange. The foreboding energy had been completely replaced with an almost sleepy coziness. It really felt like the normal parts of the school, just at night, and her mind drifted over the few times she'd been in Hexside after dark, inevitably leading her back to Grom. She smiled faintly and glanced sidelong at Luz. "Thanks again for asking me to do this with you."
"Hey, thank you for actually doing it with me." Luz grinned and opened the door. She slipped inside and pulled the lever on the wall, spinning the press up and casting the room into brightness.
Unease settled over Amity again, but she pushed the feeling aside and stepped into the room. The press rattled and lurched faster by the moment, the shakes and wobbles evening out, until it hit an even idle. Amity slipped by the machine and headed off toward the side where there was enough floor space to maneuver. She set her bag down on the floor.
Luz followed, her eyes roving over the printing press. "So, uh, any clue how this thing works?"
"Not really," Amity said, stooping over her things. She slipped out a short stack of books and set them down on the empty bag. She thumbed through the top one. "It's kind of odd. I found this one at the library, which goes into a lot of detail about modern publishing, but that doesn't help us much." Luz squatted down next to Amity, brushing their shoulders together, and Amity's eyes widened.
"Why not?" Luz asked.
Pushing her blush away, Amity cleared her throat. "They don't use anything like this for modern printing." She flipped to a page with a diagram depicting two long tables set in parallel, lined with quills and needles floating just above the surface. In between the two tables on a stool sat a plump, toad-like demon. The diagram showed the demon smoking a cigar. "They use specially-enchanted quills to write out the words, and needles to sew the pages all together. The gunkloogie then glues the finished pages into the covers."
"The gunkloogie?" Luz asked, giggling. "Is that the bored dude in the middle?"
"Gunkloogies are a highly-regarded type of demon. Their mucus is the best adhesive on the Isles."
Luz covered her mouth, still shaking with laughter. "Well, that's definitely not how this thing works, because I don't see any gunkloogies anywhere."
"No," Amity agreed, giving Luz a confused look. She shook her head and shuffled the book to the bottom of the pile, opening the next one. "And this one talks about the history of publishing on the Isles. Before they settled on quills and needles, there were a lot of different methods that publishing houses experimented with. There are quite a few books written, sewn, and glued by hand, which are usually high-quality, but very expensive. There have also been attempts at producing duplicate books with spells, but … here, this book has a section that was made that way to show why it didn't work very well."
She flipped to a chunk of pages in the middle. She could feel the difference in the paper quality the moment she turned the page, the warm, soft sheets replaced with stiff, crumbly ones. The pulp of the page felt rough and unfinished, more like a bunch of wood chips stuck together and then shaved thin instead of actual paper. The words on the paper were a different story altogether. The text looked like it ought to be legible, maybe a little faded, but the letters ran into a jumbled-up string of nonsense that seemed to rearrange itself as you looked at it. "There's something weird about written language that doesn't like to be magically copied."
"Whoa," Luz said, going cross-eyed. "It's like a magic-eye. That's cool."
Amity furrowed her brow. "… How is it like a Magic Eye?"
Luz glanced at her for a moment, then back at the page. "Sorry, human realm thing, not whatever a Boiling Isles magic-eye would be."
"… Now I'm curious."
She chuckled and shook her head. "It isn't important, and I have no idea how to explain it. If I ever find one, I'll let you see." She touched the book, her hand slipping over Amity's for a moment, and she turned the page past the reproduced section. "Anyway, so far none of these ways use a machine or anything."
Amity cleared the sudden lump in her throat. "Well, machines aren't all that common here, at least compared to the human realm. I mean, at least compared to the impression I got from what you and Gus have said about it, anyway."
"Yeah, you're right. If you think about it, it makes sense, there isn't any magic over there, so humans need machines to do stuff that you can do with spells." She stopped on a page with a diagram. "Hey, this looks promising."
"Yeah, that was the next thing I was going to show you." She reached to turn back a page and hesitated for a moment, because she'd have to move Luz's hand out of the way first. She held her breath as she pushed against Luz's wrist. Luz moved her hand off the book and instead swung it around Amity's back, holding her around the shoulders. Amity felt heat rise to the tip of her ears. She turned back a page. "So, um—" She coughed and shook her head, her chest feeling tense with anxiety. "This was the Mad Witch Grumbleberg's Infernal Processor."
"That name is not the most promising."
Amity giggled and some of the anxiety went with the laughter. "Seems like that was kind of earned. Grumbleberg promised that it would be able to produce a hundred books a day and wouldn't require any magic, instead relying on an internal power source to make it run." She turned the page back to the diagram, which showed a small, streamlined contraption. The bottom portion resembled a potbelly stove with a squat table where the cooking surface should be, with a large loop that rose vertically, lined with strings like a harp. "When I say he promised it could produce that many books, what he actually said, according to this, was, They said I was mad, mad I say, but my Infernal Processor can make one hundred books per day, with no magic, no magic, I say, so who's mad now? And then they transcribed laughter for three pages." She flipped through the book to show Luz.
Luz stared at the page blankly. "They really did write out a bunch of hahahas, didn't they?" She shook her head. "When did this happen?"
Amity flipped back to the start of the article and checked the date. "A little over eight-hundred years ago, looks like."
"Huh. So what all happened to this Gutenberg guy?"
"Grumbleberg. And he disappeared. At the same time his workshop exploded."
"How mysterious." She eyed Amity sidelong. A beat of silence passed.
They both burst into laughter. Amity felt Luz squeeze her shoulder as they laughed, and she let herself be pressed into Luz's side. Any lingering discomfort with the closeness evaporated, and as they both calmed down and grinned at each other, huddling together with Luz on the floor felt perfectly natural, like they'd finally got around to starting that Azura Book Club they'd always talked about. Amity let out a long breath and returned to the book, shuffling further back. "There are a few other methods, some that required more magic than others, and it goes into the history of human realm books that have ended up here and then got … well … they say republished, but I guess it's more stolen than anything else. But that's really it."
"Huh." Luz stood up and walked over to the printing press, looking up as she slowly circled it. "That's really weird. If nobody here really makes big machines, where the heck did this thing come from, then?"
Amity pushed the thought of how cold her shoulder felt very far out of mind and slipped the next book to the top of the pile. The dusty old library books vanished beneath its shiny black cover, bound in slitherbeast leather. Its gilded pages flashed glints of light from the lightning tubes. "I don't really have an answer for that, but I did find some stuff about Boiling Isles machines in general. This is from my family's private library."
Luz crossed back over and squatted down next to Amity again. "Private library? Swanky."
Amity rolled her eyes. "You've seen my house. Anyway, this is sort of … I guess a technical manual about mechanical devices." She flipped through the pages carefully, trying to touch each sheet as little as possible. Most pages were covered with diagrams of different contraptions. Unlike the images in the library books, which were stamped ink, they were embossed into the paper with gold leaf, then hand painted. "How they're made, what their purposes are, and a brief history if there's any information available. A lot of them are, uh … well, torture devices."
"Whoa, neat."
Amity looked at Luz out of the corner of her eye. "You're weird." She smiled and giggled. "Anyway, it's stuff like this." She settled on a page with a large schematic made out in intricate detail. Two halves of cast-iron swung on a hinge, allowing it to open and close like a clamshell. A web of crisscrossing indentations in the metal filled the insides of both halves, with handles for positioning it. A glass tube ran along the base half. Lines pointing at the two halves led to indications for where it was safe to touch and how to use the locking mechanism, and an indication of lightning highlighted the tube. A temperature warning emblazoned the page. "A witch's hand is put inside these halves, then the device is closed and locked around it and the captured lightning is activated. The metal then starts to heat up, slowly burning the witch until they start tal—"
"That's a waffle iron."
Amity's jaw snapped shut. "What?"
"It's a waffle iron. You fill it up with, like, a fluffy pancake batter, and it heats up and cooks a waffle. The squares make little pockets in it, so it's all crispy and you can put a whole bunch of butter and syrup on it. They're really good." Luz looked at Amity, who could tell she was holding back laughter. "I guess you could use it to torture people, though."
Amity frowned down at the page and cocked her head to the side. "So … this is a … repurposed human machine?" She rubbed her chin. "I suppose that's more common than a lot of witches realize. Even without the Owl Lady bringing human items back through the portal, things have found their way here before, and they'll continue to now that she can't." Her eyes widened and she looked at Luz. "U-uh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to bring up—"
"It's okay," Luz said, cutting her off, though Amity could hear a hint of sadness in her tone. "Can't change it from being true. I'll figure out a way to get back home, Eda and I are working on it."
Amity frowned at Luz for a moment, then leaned over and gave her a hug. Luz returned it. Without another word, they turned back to the book. Amity flipped forward a few pages. "Anyway, this is supposed to be used for washing clothes. Is it a—?"
"Cotton candy maker."
"Interesting. This one is used for kneading a lot of bread dough all at once. That can't be a—"
"Clothes washing machine."
"Wait, really?" Amity flipped through the pages faster, with less care for not denting the gilding. "Are all of these machines just stolen from humans?"
Luz covered her mouth to giggle. "Maybe it's just that book. What's it called, anyway? A Thousand and One Hum—Err, Witch Devices, We Swear?"
Amity sighed and slapped the book shut. "I guess this is useless."
"Not totally. It looked like all of 'em had those glass tubes somewhere."
"Well, sure, that's really common with machines, unless they're powered by hand or a witch's own magic. They're captured lightning bolts, they can make stuff move or heat up, basically forever."
"Yeah, they're like batteries."
"… Batteries? You mean, like, the weapons on a castle?"
"What?" Luz knit her brow in confusion.
Amity cracked a smile and shook her head. "It's so weird talking to you sometimes. It's like we speak an entirely different language."
"Ah, bueno, es que hay muchas cosas distintas entre nuestros mundos, no podemos hacer nada al respecto."
Amity stared at her wide-eyed. Luz's smile widened.
"I'm … just going to pretend I know what's going on and go look at the printing press now." Amity stood up, with Luz following and snickering. "Stop laughing, Luz, I feel like you're making fun of me."
"Just a little."
Amity huffed as she stepped over to a lever on the side of the machine, the one Luz had used to start churning out the old newspaper the last time they'd been in the room. She poked it gently, a spot of ink coming away on her finger. "What is that language you use sometimes, anyway?"
Luz hunkered down over her bag by the door. "It's Spanish. There are a whole bunch of different languages in the human realm, Spanish is the second most common, I think. Or maybe that's Chinese. The most common is English, which is … uh … the language we're speaking now, dunno if you call it that or not, but it's exactly the same as human English, except that you don't know what a battery is."
"Islespeak. There are a couple of other languages here aside from ancient ones used for runes and things, but they're kind of regional and pretty much everyone can speak Islespeak, too." She sidled along the machine until she got to the opposite side from where the press spat out finished pages. The tub of ink ran the whole length of the base. Settled above it on the far end was what looked like a hatch. She leaned over to inspect it closely. "I know a couple words of Kneelish, thanks to my grandfather. So what's a battery, anyway, if not a military term?"
"It's something that stores energy, I guess. Also here." Amity turned toward Luz, who held out a huge, ratty cloak, its ends frayed and the original blue color faded to a blotchy gray. "Figured it'd be easier to mess with this thing without you needing to make a bunch of ink abominations if we could protect our uniforms."
"Good idea," Amity said, taking the cloak and draping it over her shoulders. She leaned back over the hatch, poking and prodding with less care to not get too close. "So a battery is like a palisman?"
"Not … really, I don't think? Batteries just store electricity, which … I have no idea how much detail I have to go into explaining anything here."
Amity giggled. "Assume anything related to human technology is an entirely new idea to me."
"Got it. Electricity is the main power source humans use for technology, it's … I … never paid enough attention in science class to be able to explain this." She sighed. "It's what lightning's made out of. That has to work the same both places, right?" Her eyes narrowed. "Unless lightning is alive here or something."
Amity frowned at Luz. "Uh, no? Lightning is what happens when the charge of magnetic magic moves from one place to another so fast that it lights the air on fire."
"Well, that's probably how it works in the human realm, too!" She pointed her fingers at Amity and clicked her tongue twice. "Minus the magic part, unless it is exactly the same and witches call it magic and humans call it, like, electrons or something. The important takeaway here is I am not smart enough for this conversation!"
Amity smiled and rolled her eyes. "I think I get the idea, though, and if I do, then captured lightning is literally just a Boiling Isles battery. You use them to harness the power of lightning and use that power to make machines work." She pushed and pulled at each knob and lump on the hatch, feeling for something that had any give. "Lightning's power is mostly heat, but you can use heat to do a lot of things aside from just make something warm. Did I misunderstand you?"
"Nah, that sounds about right," Luz said from around the back side of the press. "Wow, this thing is so dirty."
Amity looked at her hands, then wiped dark, greasy smears on her protective cloak. "It really is. So anyway, when you brought up captured lightning, it sounded like the machines all having it meant something to you, but wouldn't it make sense that everything here would just have our version of batteries? A machine needs power to work, whether it's on the Boiling Isles or not, so we'd just replace a human battery with one of ours." Her hand settled on a knob that turned in her grasp. It let out a solid clonk and the hatch ratcheted up with a series of slow clicks.
Luz circled back and watched the hatch rise with her. "Well, thing is that most human machines don't use batteries, most plug into the wall."
"The wall?"
"Walls all have places to plug stuff in, and you get electricity straight from the plug. Don't look at me like that, the whole human realm is covered in wires to get electricity everywhere. You just don't have to worry about moving power around like that when you power stuff with a sac attached to your heart. Point is, none of those human machine torture devices used batteries back in the human realm, they had plugs, and when witches remade them, they replaced the plugs with captured lightning."
The hatch caught halfway up, and Amity gave it a shove, wrenching it back to clicking open. "Okay, so what does that tell us exactly?"
"That witches use captured lightning to make human machines work here, and that this thing is also powered by captured lightning. That makes me think that this could just be a human machine, but I've seen what human printing presses look like, and this looks nothing like those." Her eyes trailed upward from the hatch, roving over the machine as it rose toward the ceiling. "Maybe I'm wrong about that and it's just, like, really old, or from some part of the human realm that I've never been to that uses different stuff, but I really don't think so."
Amity frowned in thought. "… Huh. Why not?"
Before Luz could answer, the hatch slipped all the way back into the machine and a tube of captured lightning flickered on, brightening the exposed compartment. Amity smiled. "Luz, look, I think we found how to change what it prints." They both craned over the opening.
A large, flat plate took up most of the compartment, filled with tiny metal cubes lined up in a grid. Each cube had an embossed, backwards letter raised on its surface. Amity picked up an L with its base facing the wrong way and looked at it closely, its surface still shiny with ink. As she held it, she felt it resist her grip, as if being pulled. She let it go and it zipped through the air, snapping back into its original place.
"Whoa, cool." Luz reached out and grabbed her own letter, pulling it away and letting it fly back into place. "I guess this gets covered in ink, then pressed into the paper over and over again to actually print stuff. How do you change what it says, do you have to move every letter by hand? Because that sounds like a huge amount of work."
"Especially if the letters all click into place like this." She grabbed two letters on opposite sides of the plate at the same time and tried to switch their place. The more she pushed, the harder the letters resisted, until they tore their way free and snapped back into their original places. She hissed out, feeling like a bug had pinched her, barely stopping herself from putting her fingers in her mouth to suck on them. She looked at the ink, then gingerly patted her hands on the cloak. "There must be some other way to change what it says, and then the machine rearranges itself for you."
"That's less awful sounding than switching every letter."
Amity felt around the edges of the plate, then smiled as she found a tiny latch. She turned it and the plate swung up. Pinned into the machine with small strips of metal, a sheet of paper sat directly underneath the plate of letters. She carefully moved the metal strips off and picked up the sheet. Her smile widened as she showed it to Luz. "This is it, look, it's the newspaper's draft."
Luz took it and looked it over. "Oh, cool, and it's all just written out by hand! They left the space for pictures and stuff, but other than that, it's just, like, someone's homework."
Amity brought the letter plate down and latched it shut. The letter cubes shimmered for a moment, then melted into the surface. "Oh wow, that's really interesting. They got around the limitation of trying to magically reproduce text on a page by having it magically reproduce letter blocks, then just used those for physically pressing ink onto paper."
Luz's smile faded to a thoughtful frown as she looked over the sheet, then the smooth metal printing bed. "Okay, so this is definitely not a human machine, or if it is, it's been changed so much that it might as well be something totally different now." She looked at the tubes of captured lightning lining the walls, then back at the sheet. "Well, I guess we don't have to have any idea where the heck this thing came from if we can still figure out how to use it. Here, scoot over."
"Huh?"
Luz bumped Amity out of the way and slapped the old sheet of news copy onto the surface upside down. She pulled a pencil out of her cloak. "Let's test it, go get ready to turn it on." Amity raised a brow, then shrugged and rounded the machine back to the main lever. After a moment, she heard the hatch ratcheting back into place, and then Luz called over to her. "Okay, turn it on!"
Amity grabbed the lever and tugged on it, but it wouldn't budge. She frowned, squared her shoulders, and put her knees into it. The lever swung down, nearly driving her to the floor, and the two main belts whipped into action. She jumped back as ink sloshed, then paper started shooting out in a ribbon. She grabbed the sheet, which proclaimed in gigantic, bold, and entirely capitalized letters over and over again, EXTRA, EXTRA, PRINCIPAL BUMP IS A BUTT.
As the paper spat out at an ever-growing rate, spilling out onto the floor around her, she snorted and slapped her mouth, shaking her head. She then straightened and looked at her grimy hand. "Oh no," she groaned, feeling ink drip down her cheeks.
"Did it work?" Luz called.
Amity sighed. "Yes, Luz, it worked." She spun her finger, pointing at her face and muttering, "Abomination rise," under her breath. The ink abomination leapt to its doom on the shoulder of her cloak. She grabbed the lever and wrenched it back into place. The ink sloshed again and she jumped away. "Now come help me clean up this paper so we can destroy it before Principal Bump has a chance to see it."
"Oh, c'mon, we have to keep one," Luz said through laughter. She came around and her eyes widened. "But definitely not that many copies. How many newspapers were they making, anyway? You'd only need the thing on for, like, five seconds!"
Amity nodded as she pulled the end of the paper ribbon free from the press. "There must be some knob or lever you can use to adjust the speed. I'd also be surprised if there isn't a way for it to automatically cut finished pages, too." She spun her finger, and the long, rumpled streamer began to disintegrate from one end like a lit fuse. With a small, mischievous smile, she stopped it short of the very first page printed, then handed it to Luz. "Here's your headline, weirdo."
Luz giggled at it, holding it up for Amity to see. "You have to admit, it's the scoop of the century."
"Journalism will never be the same now that you got your hands on it."
Luz folded the sheet up and tucked it into her cloak, then turned and prodded the handle of the lever. "I don't think this thing changes the speed at all, at least from how it's gone so far. Think there must be some other place where we can change it?"
Wiping the gunk from her hands, Amity rounded toward the back of the room. "There's only one way to find out, I guess." She started grabbing and yanking at things as they stuck out from the surface of the press, anything that wasn't already in motion, looking for something that moved, making her way slowly and meticulously from one end of the room to the other. As she worked, she glanced over at Luz. "… So what was it that you said to me in Spanish earlier?"
Luz grinned. "I said that there are a lot of differences between here and the human realm and that we can't really do anything about it."
Amity smiled and nodded. "I suppose that's true."
"I can teach you a little bit of Spanish if you'd like. You could teach me some Kneelish, too."
Her smile widened as she poked and prodded. "Okay, Luz. I'd love to."
