AN: Note that all of my beautiful italics are missing. Stupid text editors messed it up. I'll fix it later. Right now I just wanted to get the bulk up on here, finally. I posted my first pathetic attempt at this story on here over two years ago, you know. And now it finally has some substance! :D

Chapter 4: The Clock Keeper's Daughter

It was already late in the day as it was, but with the appearance of the storm, the streets were fading quickly, and soon filled with their glow of gas lamps and doorpost lanterns. Wooden business signs suspended from chains over the many curio shops creaked in cold breeze, audible only as the two walked directly underneath them. Soft, warm light could be seen in every house, every where, though slits in their drawn curtains as people withdrew indoors for the unexpectedly early night.

The castle stood atop a motte surrounded by a dam, such that the fortress was not unlike its own island sitting in a giant bucket of water, with a dense mass of evergreen trees growing around the immediate area and even up the sides of the earthy mound. Unlike this great fountain, the castle itself was taller vertically than wider horizontally, with straight, white spires by the dozens arranged symmetrically when seen from approaching the front gate. Two particularly fat towers stood for the castle's too front left and right corners, with flat tops each, and in between them, on the centerline, stood the castle's tallest tower, with a pointed top and a widening base connected to a large white dome.

The only building more beautiful than it, at least which Ansem had ever seen, was the ancient stone cathedral at the other end of the city. In fact, as he had seen from the balcony at Sorceress Edea's orphanage, the two actually made quite the duo; The cathedral, though one-third the size of the castle, was made of a dark blue-gray granite solid through, every brick was hand polished, and both its interior and exterior had literally hundreds of granite or white marble sculptures, of every ranging scale, stacked upon its walls all the way to the ceiling. Then of course there were stained glass windows, which both buildings had, but the royal castle had been made of more plainly cut white stone, in complete color contrast, and featured several outdoor terraces tiled with huge slabs of an unknown dusty-red material. An enormous clock with a face shaped like the royal family's seal decorated the front of the castle in between the dome and the top of the entrance gate; The seal itself was a fusion of a basic heart and an upside-down fleur-de-lis, with a stylized compass-rose inside.

But the storm sat so low upon the land that the castle's uppermost towers were lost in the clouds. The mote swelled, and the trees everywhere shivered together like orphans crowding around a stove, their branches made heavy by the retention and downward pounding of the rainwater. Alleyways along the way filled with mud, gutters overflowed, and the prince walked without cover beneath it all. The guard proposed stopping somewhere and waiting for the downpour to lighten, but Ansem insisted that he'd rather just get home quickly and be done with it. Fortunately, he had fought off the urge to pretend like he was flattered and poke fun at his escort for wanting to spend more time with him.

They climbed the stone steps that ascended the outer rim of the castle's mote, where at the top there was an elegant, square marble frame that housed a gigantic metal gateway that controlled access to the bridge over the mote, which then in turn lead to another stairway up to the castle itself. A bit of a hike for anyone who minded, but really an excellent source of exercise if one was young; Even more so if one was elderly, and especially of one lived there. The gate itself was unlocked early each morning and left open until the late afterhours. Being mindful not to slip, the two finally made it to the top, and some more guards opened the heavy, over sized wooden doors into the warm firelight. Ansem's escort summoned a pageboy and asked him to inform the king and queen not to worry, the prince had returned.

"Yessir, right away," he said, and scurried off, while Ansem headed off to his room to get changed and dry off. As many of the bedrooms did throughout the castle, his room even had its own small fireplace, which he discovered upon arriving to be already lit and crackling heartily.

"Great," he said to himself with a smile.

It was funny, he had noticed in the past, that the real discomfort wasn't itself in being so cold, but more so the sensation of 'thawing'. It was only the transition from warm to colder, and even from cold to warmer, that was the real bother; Like how he hadn't minded being cold in the rain, but definitely minded it now that he was in an atmosphere that was far warmer than he was. It was like he involuntarily wanted to close the gap between the temperature of his surroundings, and that of his skin. Ansem wasn't sure exactly why he thought this way about it, but at least it seemed to make a little bit of sense whenever the idea kept reoccurring to him. Not like the observation had any effect on the way he went about warming or cooling himself, so what did it matter?
It was funny, he had noticed in the past, that the real discomfort wasn't itself in being so cold, but more so the sensation of 'thawing'. It was only the transition from warm to colder, and even from cold to warmer, that was the real bother; Like how he hadn't minded being cold in the rain, but definitely minded it now that he was in an atmosphere that was far warmer than he was. It was like he involuntarily wanted to close the gap between the temperature of his surroundings and that of his skin no matter which was which. Ansem wasn't sure exactly why he thought this way about it, but at least it seemed to make a little bit of sense whenever the idea kept reoccurring to him. Not like it had any effect on the way he went about warming or cooling himself,

So what does it matter? he thought, shrugging the idea off. He was already long aware that sometimes he'd think too hard about something only to realize, after all, that the long journey had been completely meaningless, and the hard-won conclusion was, not just ineffectual, but often self canceling! Maybe the paths of rationale that he'd taken themselves could have a smidgen of value as "knowledge for knowledge's sake". But still, whenever it happened again, his deep drive for efficiency would suddenly present itself and want to smack him for thinking in circles.

The sun had not actually set yet, though it was close by now, yet the storm conjured the impression that it was already ten o'clock at night! All the windows in the castle's upper stories were shut tight, otherwise it might even have rained indoors. Certainly, the ambient moisture alone would ruin the carpets, tapestries, and old furniture if left unprevented.

Ansem pulled on some new clothes and toweled his head off with a cotton shirt he never wore because he just didn't care enough to walk halfway down the hall to the shower room. Then, dressing his cold feet in two pairs of dry socks because his shoes were waterlogged, he headed down to the dining hall for dinner.

The hallways were teeming with people tonight, Ansem found as he walked. Groundskeepers, guards, and young soldiers who had all been caught outside when the downpour started were invited in for the night, in addition to which there were maids and servers running around getting towels and refreshments for everyone, and keeping a true count of nearly 100 separate fireplaces lit all over the castle. Some newer architecture throughout the capitol city had central heating systems built in, but unfortunately Ansem's parents were a far cry from about to tear apart this relic of their heritage with such a huge, destructive, and costly renovation project. They had, however, given into installing a few small gas-heaters in individual rooms, like the library.

Speaking of which, a visit to the library sounded like a good idea to Ansem. His mind wandered, dreaming of everything and nothing, but mostly of what he would ask Noctis when they caught up with each other again.

I hope he didn't get struck by lightning, because then I'll /never/ know what really happened today, he joked in mental privacy.

The population in the hallways became more and more numbered the closer Ansem got to where food was being served, until at last he reached what could have easily been called a kind of epicenter: the dinner line. Fortunately, Ansem knew that he was allowed to go straight into the kitchens and ask for a plate, which he did, and then set off to find someplace in the castle less crowded and more quiet where he could eat it.

First stop was the library, but that too was surprisingly packed. Must have been because there were all these stranded people who tonight had nothing but time on their hands. That being the issue, his next inclination would have been to try a broom closet for want of solitude, except that was nuts.

Ansem just hoped he could find a place before his meal got cold. And just having it under his nose was making him impatient. He came up with a strategy. For some reason, most people hated stairs, so that's what he targeted. And, right on the money, the more stairways he ascended, the more drastically the halls emptied.

Thats...kind of weird, he told himself when his guess turned out to be right, But I'll take it!

He had only reached the castle's fourth-floor level, but already the scene was nearly desolate. Wandering around in search of a good place to finally sit, he eventually found a small meeting room adjacent to the castle Chapel. In here, he was surprised to find that he could faintly hear the rain hammering on the dome of the Chapel. It was that quiet in there, which was kind of nice.

There were six red-seated chairs pulled up neatly around an oval table made of walnut that was polished to a high gloss but had dulled over a generation of use. There were no windows, so the room was made to appear larger by having a long mirror on one wall, and a large painting of an open landscape fill the wall that face the doorway. Mounted on the wall that was opposite the mirror, there were two elegant oil lamps with snowdrop-shaped frosted glass shades, only one of which Ansem turned on. The carpet was a bright green, as in many, many other rooms in the castle, but so also was the wallpaper a dark green, with diagonal gold lines in it crisscrossing each other to form a simple diamond pattern which, was enhanced by tiny swirling designs in dark blue. The whole room definitely had a strong vintage appeal, make no mistake, but it wasn't ghastly looking. In fact, it had strange charm that started to grow on Ansem after a while, in exactly the same way as Bert's chalk drawing of the old willow.

The food had cooled a good deal, but he was still perfectly happy to eat it.

Hay, wait a minute, he thought, pausing suddenly with the fork still to his mouth. He chewed extremely slowly, contemplating the bite carefully, then swallowed. Yep. He was starving alright. But I at so much, and not even all that long ago. Does this mean I imagined the whole day after all? He ran his left hand through his hair and scratched the back of his scalp, still holding the fork with his right.

However, before Ansem could brood a single notion further, a soft pair of voices caught his attention from the hallway. They were coming this way, and in absolutely no hurry. Ansem, being still in a solitary mood, got up and extinguished the lamp, set his plate on the seat of his chair and pushed it under the table, and hid behind the open door, hoping they'd pass. Ansem waited here several minutes, taking only slow and calculated breaths. There a man's voice, and possibly a young girl's voice, and the two sounded like they were carrying something heavy together. Ansem just took it for granted that the castle was full of people he didn't know, who worked there, at any given hour. Technically this was his home and so, yeah, definitely that was a little bit strange, but decidedly he just always left it up to his parents to worry about it. And, the truth was, he personally found that he had to be introduced to someone at least three or four times before he could significantly remember them.

The voices were close now. He'd deduced that the two had a father-daughter relationship from how they referred to each other. They passed the door, he could see through the crack in which its hinges hung it by, casting a fleeting shadow across his hidden eye as they blocked a few of the lamps which illuminated the hallway.

"Watch your fingers," said the man, gently. He had streaky, short blond hair and some well manicured beard stubble. His irises were a light, airy blue, and stood out starkly from the rest of his face almost like two floating blue dots. He was short and skinny with a slim-fitting blue vest on over a white collared shirt with its sleeves rolled up to his elbows, black elastic bands around the sleeves above his elbows, and a solid green tie tucked into his vest. His daughter appeared to be about 12 years old, but was only a head shorter than him. She had light russet hair down to just past her shoulders, parted very far to one side, and pulled back in a ponytail at the base of her neck. Her eyes, very much unlike her father's, were a pepper-mix of blue and hazel-gold that created an illusion of green. She wore white shoes, a plaid, dark blue skort, and a solid black black, formfitting hooded jacket that was unzipped halfway to show a pale yellow top underneath; Her appearance was girly enough, but clearly her color preferences were not. The girl and her father were carrying between them a very wide, very flat, wooden shipping crate as big as a tabletop.
"Come on. Come on," Ansem whispered, anxious to get back to his meal. Sure, he wondered what was inside the box. Wouldn't anybody? But not enough to bother him. "Oh, dangit," he breathed, for the two incidentally reached their intended destination at the door right across the hallway from his hiding place, where he would have been in the direct line of sight. In other words, he was trapped here in the shadows until they finished whatever their business was.

The man shifted the crate to free one hand so that he could withdraw a key from his pocket and open the door. They carried the box inside, then switched about a dozen lights on, from what Ansem could see. He actually had a pretty good view. In that room, there were no carpets, just a bare cement floor, and it was incredibly large. Clearly, it wasn't a living space. Or maybe it was being renovated? Or, perhaps, dare he suggest it, was anybody even supposed to be in there at all? Ansem doubted the likelihood of undercover operations, but now that it had occurred to him, he became all that much more interested.

Cold air poured out of the room and filled the hall as well as the small green meeting room. The more lights the two turned on, the more Ansem's eyes began to widen. Just barely visible from his vantage point, being mostly hidden around the corner of the second door frame on the farthest wall, was a huge, whirring, silver mechanical device set into a cutout of the stone wall that was not even sealed to the outdoors.

It's the back of the castle timepiece, Ansem realize in breathless awe. He'd never been allowed in there before, but as they say, out of sight out of mind. Well, it was definitely in his sight now, and he didn't think there could possibly be a way of ever unseeing it.

"Cooool," he whispered, with a shudder due both to the draft and the awesomeness before him.

"I'll be right back," he heard the young girl say to her father, whipping around and walking briskly back towards the door.

"Oh snnn-" Ansem hissed. She was looking right at him. but still, he hoped that somehow...

"Hello," she said with a cheeky smile, standing on her toes to look him in the eye through the space in the wood. "I know you're in there," she confirmed, and moved to turn the lamp back on. A dim glow returned to the room, and Ansem stepped from his hiding place, just praying that he didn't look as embarrassed as he felt. His forehead was already growing quite hot.

"What gave me away?" Ansem asked, trying to make it sound like it was no big deal, and scratching the back of his head.

"I saw the light go off and no one leave," she stated simply. Then shrugged, "I've been caught that very same way, myself, on many an occasion."

Ah, a fellow 'loof, Ansem thought. "Ya don't say," he stated. Funny, she didn't seem shy at all. Or, maybe that had something to do with immediately empathizing with his awkward situation?

"My name's Savannah, but everyone calls me Sai," she told him, sounding like she was becoming distracted.

"Uh, nice to meet you," Ansem said, still feeling awkward. Was it just him, or was the room getting smaller by any chance? "Do...you wanna step outside?" he asked her.

"Sure," she shrugged, taking the lead, and then, speaking over her shoulder, asked him, "What were you doing in here, anyway?"

Ansem really didn't want to go into detail, so he just answered, "Um, just hangin' out."

"Here, I'll introduce you to my dad," she said, beckoning him to follow her into the barren workshop. "He's the official clockkeeper for the whole castle. Pretty cool huh? All he does is wind them, grease them, and fix 'em, all day long; May not sound like it at first, but there are so many clocks in this place that it's actually a full time job, and some of them (like the big one outside) are really cool."

"Seriously?" Ansem asked. He'd never actually thought about it. Clocks existed, sat there, and did nothing but give different answers to the same old question repeated all day long. "How many?" he asked.

"Over two-hundred-and-eighty-something," she answered, confidently.

Her dad was squatted down on one knee with his back to them, undoing the nails of the packing crate.

"Hay dad!" she called, "I'd like you to meet a new friend of mine." She stood back a ways and turned to face halfway between them, then introduced her father as Rutherford Monteleone, known by most as "Monty". The blond man got up and turned around just as she happened to say this. Suddenly his eyes popped out of his head and he nearly stepped backward and tripped over the crate.

Ansem was really getting tired of people reacting to him that way.

"And, uh, your name?" Sai asked him. Apparently she hadn't yet seen her father's face.

"Uh, um," Ansem stammered, then looking the older man straight in the eyes, told them the first tolerable name he could think of, "Terrance." It came from a character in a novel he'd just finished a few days ago; The book was ok, he'd decided, but still held that the character assortment in its own right was pretty cool. That of Terrance had been a rogue tournament fighter who traveled between small regions, which he competed in in order to earn his livelihood while in search of philosophical truth.

The man, Monty, had indeed gotten the prince's secret messages, but when his daughter wasn't looking, squinted one strange blue eye at him as if to say "Shame on you."

Ansem just squinted an azure eye right back at him as if to say "You better not give me away."

Conceding, Savannah's father swiftly launched into explaining to him exactly what it was they were doing-replacing a corroded wheel-right down to the very strengths and weaknesses of several different manufacturers, that he had worked with in the past, who made the needed part, which was what had come in the crate. He had brought Savannah along with him to work today because she liked to help whenever she could, and he would need an extra pair of hands for this particular job. Unfortunately, like had happened to everyone else, the rain came as a complete surprise to the two of them and now the project would have to wait until tomorrow, since the scaffolding was wet. All they could do tonight was carry the part in and do some light prep work on it.

Ansem mostly watched while Sai and Monty carried this task out, but there were a couple of times that they let him get his hands dirty, so to speak. It was definitely cold work, as now that the sun was down the temperature outside plummeted like a rock, the mist spraying in through the spaces between the enormous cogs just made it even worse, and not to mention the three often had to sit right on the bare cement floor.

There were nearly a dozen paired lamps that encircled the room, or what was available of it since they were bolted to the wall; They had a similar configuration as the oil lamp back in the meeting room, but Ansem could tell from the pewter design that these instead ran on gas, for they were detailed after the lamplights displayed along the stone stairway to the castle's entrance.

Maybe these were all extras from when the castle was first built, and the workmen just stuck 'em in here so they wouldn't go to waste, Ansem conjectured.

With the addition of all the explanations, they finished their prep work within an hour-and-a-half or more. These people were really nice, and Ansem really liked them a lot. Monty had a gift for wording everything so simply and straight-forwardly, and thus Ansem had had no difficulty whatsoever understanding all the precision weirdness that is machinery. In fact, the man might even have made a fine lector on the subject. And, for this Ansem was insurpassibly grateful, Sai actually turned out to be quite tomboyish just an inch under the surface. Though, not like that was surprising for a girl who palled around with a dad like that all day. Monty was so, so patient with them.

In fact, Ansem even found that he enjoyed act of tinkering itself; It was "kind of rugged, kind of shiny," he decided.

It was getting pretty late now, so they decided it was about time they headed home, before Sai's mother could start worrying. They invited Ansem to drop by at any time the next day if he wanted to help them actually install the part. Monty promised it would be worth it, with a wink. And always lending a heavy inflection whenever he said the name Terrance, which to Ansem just made it feel he was getting hit with an invisible elbow in the ribs, every single time; And he knew that Monty could tell this.

"See you tomorrow, Terrance! Good job tonight! Tell your father I said 'hello', for me, will ya please, Terrance?"

The man definitely had ways of getting his points across, as slyly as they were concise!

Yeesh, was Ansem's final thought before they left. Afterward, he wondered just how long he was going to be stuck with this alias. Or, in the worst case scenario, if he would ever be able to shake it should she learn his real identity and still opt to call him that, teasing him like her father was doing.

Watch out for duos, concluded, shaking his head with a tiny, involuntary smirk, then went back to his room to warm up again and finally get some decent, normal shuteye for once.

When he got there, the fire had died to embers, so there was little warmth to be had. This sort of thing was exactly why a small stack of logs was kept in his room beside the fireplace; He wouldn't have to go downstairs and find a maid to restore it for him. Ansem dug out a pair of pajamas that wasn't his usually preferred, silk blue ones, mainly because these were warmer.

And gosh darn it if warmer is not what I really want out of life, he told himself, referring to to his thoughts from earlier.

The next morning it was Ansem's turn to be busy with torturing, though he had been able to catch up with the renegade Noctis at breakfast. He had to be careful with his wording, just in case something truly was amiss and Noctis hear out his whole story and decide he'd just gone mad.

"Hay, Noct, remember that guy who played a one-man-band two days ago?"

"Yeah."

"Didn't we see him again yesterday and wasn't he drawing art on the sidewalk?"

"Yeah."

Ok, so at least that much is confirmed, Ansem thought.

"And, didn't a lady come up to us carrying a black umbrella with a parrot's head for a handle?"

"Uh, yeah," Noctis said, munching on a buttered biscuit.

"And then, uh, she took us all someplace..." Ansem paused. Finding the right words was difficult, words that would both say exactly what he meant and yet still not. "...With a lot of grass," he finished, immediately aware of how stupid that came out sounding. "Er, where there was a small carnival," he added.

"Yeah," Noctis said, not even looking at him, but focusing solely on his plate, which was practically spilling over the sides with a huge, towering mound of eggs, ham, and double side of jam filled danishes.

Ansem, now, was starting to not be convinced by the boy's answers; Just something about the lack of heart behind his every "yeah".

"And, then we all fell in a sinkhole and tunnel our way out?" he asked, as a test.

"That's right," Noctis said.

Ansem gave him a stern frown. "You're no help at all," he said. "Seriously, I need to know what you remember from yesterday."

"Why? You don't remember?" Noctis asked, demolishing his towering breakfast before Ansem's very eyes.

Ansem answered truthfully, "I fell asleep on a bench and just need to sort out what I dreamed from what really happened, that's all."

"Oooohhhhh," Noctis said, obtaining a devious glint in his catlike eyes. Ansem could just see the thoughts being spelled out in his mind that the boy was planning to give him trouble. "In that case," he said, "you lost a bet and still owe me six dollars. Fess up," and stuck his hand out.

Ansem just handed him an extra roll off of his own plate, instead.

"Here."

"Hmmmm," Noctis said, and then pretending like he was a banker testing to see if a coin was real gold or not, bit a small piece off of its corner, and exaggerated the motion like he was actually bending it. "That'll do. That'll do," he said.

Ansem gave up and, giving a snort of breath and shaking his head in tolerant frustration, returned thoughtfully to his own breakfast.

After finishing with all his classes for the day, Ansem eagerly set off in the direction of the Chapel again to see if it wasn't already too late to help Sai and Monty with the repairs. When he got there, however, he found a small note written on a piece of paper that was tucked in between the door and its frame, which read.

"Gone to check on Sai. Be back in half-hour. - Monty, 1:10pm"

"Huh?" Ansem said, "What does that mean?" Was Sai okay? he wondered.

Casually, he walked a few more rooms down the hallway to find one of them regular, boring, small clocks to check. The time now was 1:43, so Ansem just went back to the green meeting room to hang out and wait for Monty to return. He turned one of the oil lamps on again, and went to sit down. Had Ansem not been paying attention, he would have sat down right on his leftover plate from last night.

"Um, ew," he said aloud, wrinkling his nose at the sight of the withered, dry food. He couldn't even bring himself to pick it up to set it on the table, so he just pulled the chair out and put it with its back against the wall where the plate would be seen by someone, Hopefully this week, and just pulled out a second of the six chairs for himself to sit in.

While waiting in there, he took to examining the huge painting. It showed a scene of rolling, golden hillsides in an open, wild country. In the distance there was a rustic wooden construct of some sort beside a towering metal windmill, with a deteriorating fence running a malformed ring around the surrounding property. He really didn't like the predominantly dried-up look of the landscape, though the sky in the picture was at least a magnificent, deep, yawning blue, and came to think that switching it out for a painting of an underwater scene would be much nicer in here. Like a painting of a whale sticking its big nose in the viewer's face, or something; He didn't know where he got that idea, maybe simply from wanting to rebel against the overwhelming yellow and green color scheme.

Monty arrived just a few minutes later and unlocked the clock-room door without first seeing Ansem.

"Hay," said the prince, getting up and waiving a hand once. Monty turned around and smiled at him as Ansem switched the lamp off again and walked out.

"Oh, hay Terrance," he said.

Ansem narrowed both his eyes at him with a bemused half-frown-half-smirk, as if to say "You know, that's getting old".

"Where's Sai?" he asked.

Monty sighed heavily. "She's sick today," he said. "Must have caught a cold last night. It's all my fault," he groaned. "I knew it would be cold. I should have made her wear something warmer."

"Oh, sorry about that," Ansem told him. He wasn't sure how to console him, because in that case, it kinda was his fault. "Tell her 'get better soon' for me," he said. "Tell her 'Terrance' said that," he joked.
"Don't worry, I will," Monty said, suddenly grinning a little deviously. "I hope you don't mind being my only help today," he added. "We have a lot of work to do, and this can't wait, as you know; All the clocks in the kingdom are lost without their leader."

"Sure beans," Ansem confirmed, "That's why I'm here."

"Great," said the mechanic. "First, we need to dismantle that whole mess." He pointed to a large, black, boxlike machine that had fat, round beams coming out of it that connected to the back of the face of the heart-clock. "And lay all the parts out carefully so we can inspect the rest of them, since we have to take them out anyway in order to put the new piece in."

"Cool," Ansem said, eager to get started.

That task alone ended up taking them over an hour. They laid all of the various pieces out on the floor systematically, which took up approximately a whole one-quarter of the room. Now Ansem finally understood why the designers hadn't even put tile in here, like there was on all of the balconies, terraces, and other outdoor platforms.

Some of the parts were solid iron and weighed hundreds of pounds. For these, Monty had a rolling device with a thick steel arm that had all manner of vices attached to it, which could be fastened around certain prescribed parts of only certain clock pieces, that they used. Taking the clock part on and off of the arm was dangerous, so Monty only let Ansem tighten some of the vices before he unbolted it, and then help him push it across the floor, but not to take the part off again; He showed Ansem where the break was on the rolling arm, and then had him stand way back while he lowered the chunk of iron to the ground.

Later on Ansem learned that the arm was Monty's own personal invention, and that historically it had taken more than six grown men to do this same job, at least safely, and that Ansem's father was reluctant at first to pay for the the tool's pricey creation, which required multiple, huge, custom dies to be created for the casting of the steel.

The prince was amazed, because he had never known before that one could have their own designs professionally manufactured like that. He supposed that he'd always assumed one had to be an elite member of some large company who produced other things, and had a lot of funky resources. To be absolutely sure that he did in fact understand what the man meant, he posed the hypothetical question,

"So, suppose I designed a ninja star or something. I could have someone carve a mold of my design, and then make as many copies of the star as I wanted?"

"You got it," Monty said.

"Sweet," Ansem said, envisioning a million new and shining possibilities that now laid open before him.

When they were through with the inspection, Ansem helped Monty carry the unpacked wheel-thing over to the boxlike machine, and at last to put it in. And finally, after that, to reassemble all the parts they'd taken out, for they were all proved to be in passably acceptable condition. Most of them were as old as the castle itself, which apparently was a sign that the clock had been well taken care of since its creation; If a major piece breaks, normally it would break several of the smaller pieces if left neglected. And a similar case with rust, since it holds the moisture longer and causes the rust to worsen faster, often even dripping rust onto parts that before then would have been fine, and hastening them to start degrading.

It was possible, these days, Monty explained, to spray a protective laminate over the metal to help prevent all that, but this clock was an antique and a proud landmark, and King Freyr just wasn't ready yet to do too much tampering with it; He had heard rumors that the laminate Monty recommends sometimes causes cogs to become too slippery, and so loose some of their precision, which was critical above all in timepieces.

They finished the job in four and half hours, and then parted ways. Ansem had invited Monty to stay for dinner as a thank you, but he said he just wanted to get back home and see how Savannah was doing, and maybe pick up some kind of treat for her on the way since she didn't get to help.

Ansem himself went back to his room to change his clothes again since the ones he'd had on had gotten filthy from the dust, dirt, grease, and who knows what else had been in there-probably bird poop. He scrubbed his face and hands, but still couldn't get all of the black grease off. Hopefully his mother, Zoe, wouldn't notice, and embarrass him by trying to clean his face in public just like moms are stereotyped for. Yeah, he could definitely see that happening tonight.

"Hmm, I must proceed with extreme caution," he mumbled to himself, quietly, folding his arms and stroking his chin for exaggerated theatrical effect, momentarily pretending that he was a character in a movie and that this was one of those high tension 'do or die' circumstances. Which it would actually become, if Noctis happened to be watching. Ansem physically shuddered as the thought occurred to him.

Unfortunately, the Caelums would be leaving in two days. It was never foreseeable when he and Noctis would get to visit again, even though their fathers met frequently on business. Ansem didn't actually like the archduke much, surprisingly. He found the man to be... 'Sour' and 'dark' were the first words he could think of, and they actually hit the nail right on its head, so to speak. That was his own opinion. He'd mentioned once to his own father that Mort Caelum gave him the creeps sometimes, weather it was the way he was sitting, or the look in his eyes when he stared off into space, or something grim that he would say so completely stoically that it gave Ansem chills.

"The man's jaded," Freyr had assured him. "His region has the second highest crime rate in the whole kingdom. I know for a fact that he's personally seen more stuff than most serial killers do."

"Justifying the reason still doesn't make him a nicer guy," Ansem complained. "No matter what, you shouldn't let bad things like that get to you. (Obviously, in his case) it'll ruin who you are, and keep you, and everyone around you, miserable even when times are brighter. That is," he glowered bitterly, "if Mort was ever more congenial to begin with."

After Ansem's speech, Freyr just smiled and ruffled his son's hair. "You are most wise, Young One," he lovingly teased, "But that's not as easy as you make it sound. My only hope is that you never change."

"I just can't figure out how Noctis can deal with him all the time," Ansem ranted. "That would bum me out, and Noctis is like, half crazy, or something." His father's answer was simple.

"It's easy when you're family," he shrugged, with a vague smile that was clearly tinged with nostalgic sadness. However, then his countenance morphed completely as he chuckled, "But Noctis is pretty tough."