Hi everybody! So...I'm sorry. I totally got distracted by Thanksgiving and stuff and...didn't update when I said I would. In addition, I'm still failing to chip away at the giant wall of writer's blocks in my brain, so I'm still making incredibly slow progress. But in any case, thank you so much for reading and putting up with my schedule slips.
Previously on The Nine Red Men Incident: Engineer Chapters
The Engineer, after landing in Gensokyou, awoke to find his robotic hand being investigated by Nitori. After reaching an agreement with her that she could take it apart in exchange for letting him use her workshop to fix his PDA, which had broken in the crash, they set off for her workshop. Upon reaching there, they found Hina waiting, who removed his misfortune, seemingly finding out that he had died multiple times. Before she could ask about it, Nitori sent him down an elevator to her workshop, asking him not to touch any prototypes, while she went to talk with Hina.
We now return you to The Nine Red Men Incident: Engineer Chapters
After a few minutes, the elevator reached the bottom floor and the doors opened onto a gigantic workshop and warehouse. Dell stepped out and saw large piles of metal all over the place. Looking carefully, he saw that they were, as Nitori had claimed, organized by type. The pile closest to him seemed to consist of iron, and, peering closer, he could see that it mostly consisted of shovel and hoe blades. A little to the right of that, he could see a large stack of copper, which contained a few doorknobs and some tea kettle parts, along with other objects he couldn't recognize. Briefly, he contemplated exaggerating the amount of metal he'd need so he could make a few hats, but couldn't bring himself to take advantage of Nitori's hospitality like that. As he walked through the workshop, mountains of different metals and parts towering over him, he saw a few areas roped off with a strange type of tape. Curious, he walked over to the closest one and found that the area had largely been cleared of metal, and in its place sat what looked like an ordinary cardboard box. Strewn around it were a variety of blowtorches and mallets, and he even saw a couple of wrenches. What she could possibly have been doing to the cardboard box with them escaped him, but he assumed it was one of the "prototypes" she'd warned him to stay away from. He couldn't deny he was curious, but he tore himself away. Fixing his PDA came first, after all.
Eventually, after a lot of wandering, he came upon the main area of her workshop. It was a large, clear area, with the largest variety of tools Dell had ever seen placed in a circle around a central table. Excited, he ran over to the tools and began looking them over one by one. He found wrenches of all types and sizes (he even found one that looked exactly like his own monkey wrench), drills, a few blowtorches (he could see the spaces that presumably were normally occupied by the ones next to the cardboard box), and even some tools he didn't recognize, which had symbols etched into the metal and seemed to constantly be warm to the touch, despite the chill of the room. He guessed they were generators of some kind, but he couldn't for the life of him figure out how they worked. In addition, a vehicle that reminded him of a boom lift was parked near the work area, presumably so that Nitori could get at parts that were near the tops of the stacks, though how she possibly operated it by herself he couldn't tell.
Once he'd examined all the tools, he began taking out the ones he thought he'd need. A screwdriver of course, a soldering iron in case the circuitry was damaged, a mallet to hammer out the casing correctly, and some glass cutting and polishing tools to get the glass cover correct. He carefully unscrewed the back of his PDA to reveal the tangled mess of wires and solder behind it. After examining it closely, he found that the majority of the circuitry was undamaged, there were a few disconnected wires here and there, but that could be easily fixed. It took him all of five minutes (most of which was spent figuring out what to plug the soldering iron into, as he couldn't find any outlets around, eventually he found it just heated up on its own somehow) to reconnect the wires. He then moved on to the casing, which had a large dent in the side that was crushing the buttons. He disconnected the wires from the display screen and all the selection buttons, then took all of the circuitry out so he could try and hammer the dent out, and see how many of the buttons needed to be replaced. Looking inside, he saw that some of the connectors on the bottom of the buttons had been broken, and the dent in the casing had warped a few of them into such a shape that they were useless. He pried the buttons out of their spots one by one and put them aside. While he was there, he checked the display, and saw with relief that only the glass covering the display had been broken, not the display itself. For that he was grateful, as wiring a new display would have taken a very long time. He pulled the broken pieces of glass out from the PDA and piled them on the workbench. He then checked the dented metal, to see if it could be bent back into shape or if it would be too brittle to continue working. Giving it a test tap with the mallet, he found it to be serviceable, so he began to search for something to heat up the metal and make it more malleable. After a bit of thought, he decided he might as well try one of the reactors he'd found, and held it against the warped metal until it was hot to the touch. Once it was hot enough, he used the mallet to hammer it back into shape, and then waited for it to cool. While he waited, he searched the workshop for some buttons. Eventually, after seeing a few other closed-off areas, he found a small pile, and, searching through it, took a handful of small rectangular buttons that he hoped would do. If necessary he could cut them down to fit, he mostly just hoped the connectors were the right size. While he was out looking, he also found a small glass pane a few piles away from the button pile, which he could use to cover the display.
He returned to the workbench, parts in hand, and began to test whether the replacement buttons could work. To his relief, he had at least one button of each size he needed, though some were a bit big, and he had to cut them slightly smaller so that they'd fit. After getting all the buttons into the appropriate shape, he snapped them into the frame (which had cooled down enough not to melt or warp the buttons themselves). Looking at it after he'd placed the buttons in, he let out a sad sigh. It would probably work, but it looked like a mess, some of the buttons were taller than the others, some had somewhat jagged edges where he'd had to cut them, and they were all completely random colors (he'd even been forced to use some blue ones). He supposed he could have spent more time trying to get buttons that matched, but it hadn't seemed that important at the time. Shaking his head, he began to work on getting the glass into the right shape. He used a marker to copy the correct shape onto the glass, and then, after spending some time finding a glass cutter and a straight edge, cut out the shape. He then found some sandpaper and sanded the edges, before placing it into the PDA frame and screwing it into place, the display behind it. Then, he soldered the wires and circuitry back into place and screwed the back on again.
"Phew," he said, wiping his brow. "Glad to have you back, buddy," he said, rubbing the screen with his finger. He put it back in his pocket, and began cleaning up the workbench area. After all, if it'd started out so neat, he figured Nitori would probably like it to be in the same shape when he finished. Thinking of Nitori, he realized she hadn't come down since he'd started. It must have taken him at least an hour and a half to fix the PDA, so had she been talking to Hina all that time? That seemed unlikely, but if they were friends, he supposed they could still be talking. Considering the amount of protectiveness Nitori showed for her inventions, however, he didn't understand why she wouldn't have come down to talk, so she could make sure he didn't do anything with them. He shook his head and tried to clear it from his mind, at least until he'd put away the tools.
As he put away the screwdriver, which was the last of the tools, he heard a loud clattering noise come from a bit further into the warehouse. He ran towards the noise, which seemed to come from a corridor created by towering piles of nuts and bolts on one side, and a few piles of rarer metals, a small pile of gold, and a slightly larger pile of silver. He nearly slipped on some bolts that had fallen and scattered on the floor, but managed to stop himself and work his way to the other side without injury. As he stepped on the other side of the bolts, the floor felt less solid, and he looked down to see his foot hovering in mid-air. "What the-" he said, before frowning. "Spy, is that you?" He felt a hand tap his foot, and, realizing he was probably stepping on their chest, he moved his foot back and waited for the person to catch their breath. Eventually, the person spoke up.
"Wh-who's 'Spy,'" said a voice Dell recognized.
"Nitori?" he said, shocked. "Why in the world are you invisible?"
"Ah heh heh heh," she said, removing her invisibility field. "I was, well, uh," she began to stammer, before she looked away, "I was testing an invention of mine."
"An invention?" Dell said, curious.
"It's an invisibility field," she said. "I'd only ever used it on natives to Gensokyou, so I kind of wanted to see if it would work on people from somewhere else." She continued not to look him in the eye.
Dell raised an eyebrow skeptically. "Really?" he said, offering a hand to help her up. "Why would it be any different?"
"Well, it works as a combination of magic and science, so I thought that if you were from the outside the magic it uses might not work on you, or have a different effect or something," she said, standing up on her own. "Though I guess that wasn't the case."
Dell let his hand drop to his side, frowning. "I suppose not. Though why'd you have to do it in secret like that?"
"Well, I'd be able to tell if it wasn't working pretty quickly, wouldn't I?" Nitori said, brushing herself off and beginning to clean up the spilled bolts.
"I guess that's true," Dell said, frowning at her and rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "But-"
"A-anyway," she said, seemingly ignoring his worries. "Who's this 'Spy' you thought I was? Can he go invisible too?"
"Ah? Oh, yeah." Dell said, distractedly. "Yeah, he's a teammate of mine. He's got these watches that can make him invisible. I wish he'd let me take a look at 'em, but he's very secretive with 'em. Guess he's worried I wouldn't be able to put it back together again or somethin'." He began picking up some bolts as well.
"Wait, so it's a purely science based personal cloaking system?" Nitori said, sounding interested. "That's incredible. Magic is the only way I could get mine to work properly. I'd love to see that."
Dell snorted. "Good luck. As I said, he won't let anyone near 'em."
Nitori grinned. "Well, I do know a pretty good thief, er, I mean 'borrower,'" she said, making air quotes, "who owes me a couple favors."
Dell smiled. "Well good luck to you then. If you get your hands on one I want to be there for the disassembly."
"Ah," Nitori said, grin slipping from her face, "right, yeah." She put the bolts she'd collected back on the pile. Dell followed suit.
"Hey Nitori," he said, looking worried, "What happened with Hina?"
"H-huh?" Nitori said, looking around uncomfortably. "W-what are you talking about?"
"Nitori, you've been jumpy and on-edge since talking with her," Dell said, frowning. "Something must have happened. Did you two get into a fight or somethin'?"
"What? Of course not." Nitori said, frowning.
"Then what happened? What's made you so," he paused, realization hitting him. "Oh. I see," he said sadly.
"H-huh? What do you mean?" Nitori said.
"That's why you were invisible too, wasn't it? Because Hina told you about what she saw in my 'misfortunes.'" Nitori was looking away and sweating nervously. "You're afraid of me, aren't you?" he said.
"N-no!" She looked back towards him, when she said this. "Not really, at least. I mean, to be honest, there's not much you could do to me even if you tried. I could take you," she said, grinning slightly, though Dell's expression didn't brighten. "I just wanted to, well," she said, trailing off.
"Wanted to what?" Dell asked.
"I wanted to find out about how you could survive being killed like that. I mean, she said you were blown up into actual pieces, after all, and somehow survived! Of course I'm gonna want to find out about that." She looked up at him, seeming excited, "I mean, if I could get my hands on that kind of technology, that'd be, like, the best day of my life. And disassembling it would be so interesting!" She went back to looking sheepish. "So I kinda thought that, well, maybe you'd talk about it a bit while you were fixing your PDA, since I sometimes do that sort of thing where I talk about other inventions I've made while fixing a different one. Or that, if you were really, really unlucky or careless, you could get hurt and I'd see it in action." Seeing the expression on Dell's face, she waved her hands defensively. "I didn't plan on sabotaging you or anything like that, I just thought that, since you probably weren't familiar with some of the stuff down here, and considering the protections I've set up around my prototypes, it could happen, so I thought there was a good chance of you getting hurt, but well, in retrospect, that was selfish of me, so I'm well, I'm sorry." She bowed.
Dell looked at her, and saw her still bowing. After a moment, he asked, "So you really don't find the fact that I kill people for a living scary?"
Nitori straightened up from her bow. "Well, not really scary, per se. It's certainly not what I would expect an engineer to be doing. But to be honest, it hasn't been that long since youkai and humans were killing each other all the time. I wasn't super involved with it then, but my parents told me a lot about it. I'd imagine in your case it's also about survival, to some extent. But also," she said, "I know that some of the best ideas for inventions I've ever had came from times when I was under intense pressure, and I can't imagine a more stressful situation than a battlefield."
Dell let out a mirthless laugh. "That obvious, huh?" He looked down. "Y'know, I was a combat engineer in the war. And I came up with the most fantastic ideas of my life there, my sentry, dispenser, even my teleporter technology were all developed due to situations I ended up in while fighting. So when the war ended, I couldn't really come up with anything. Too used to the rush I guess. So yeah, that's why I'm in this whole mercenary business." He sighed and shook his head. "I sometimes wish it wasn't the case, but it is." He faced towards Nitori again. "You were wondering how I could survive being blown up?" Nitori nodded. "It's due to respawn technology that I convinced the Medic to help me make. I," he paused. "I wanted to make it so that we could fight, get injured, even kill each other, keep that same tense life-or-death atmosphere, but it wouldn't result in any actual death. It's almost an atonement." Nitori didn't really know what to say, so she stayed silent. After a while, Dell looked over at her, and let out a sigh. "You don't really care about that though, do you? You just want to know how it works."
"Jeez, do you really have that low an opinion of me?" Nitori asked. "Of course I'm gonna care." She patted him on the back. "Though I will admit, I do still want to know how it works."
Dell chuckled. "Well, at least you're honest. But I can't tell you about it. It's not something that should be duplicated, not to mention the sheer amount of raw materials it required is pretty much impossible to obtain."
"Have you looked around this place?" Nitori said, throwing her arms wide. "I've got tons and tons of raw materials!"
Dell shook his head. "These aren't the kinds of raw materials I'm talking about."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Nitori said, annoyed.
"I'm not telling you any more," Dell said. "Let's just say you don't have the ones you need, and you wouldn't want to have them either."
"Oh come on, please?"
"Nope."
Nitori grumbled something about Dell being ungrateful but when Dell didn't react, she let out a long sigh. "Fine. Did you at least get your PDA fixed?" she said, pointing to the device in his hand.
"Ah, yes, I did, thanks for reminding me." Dell said. "Thanks for letting me use your equipment."
"Well, we did make a deal. So," she said, eyes glinting, "when do I get to take a look at your hand?"
Dell sighed. "That was the deal, wasn't it? Let me make sure that this is actually fixed first, alright? I'd hate to have to try and fix this with just one hand."
"Fair enough," Nitori said, nodding. "To be honest, I want to see how this works too."
"Here goes nothing," Dell said, pressing the switch to turn the PDA on. To his relief, the display lit up with the familiar selection options for the sentry, dispenser, and teleporter entrance and exit. After entering a special button combination, the screen displayed a holographic projection of teleporter signals, and their approximate locations compared to his own, though, since the area was unknown, all that could be seen was a few dots floating in space. Dell stared at the area and began to frown.
"Hold on, this can't be right," Dell said, frowning.
"Huh? What do you mean?" Nitori said.
"There's a tenth signature here. It's faint and it's not the same frequency as mine, but," he pointed at a dot that seemed to be fading in and out of existence randomly on the screen, "it's there."