Ooh, screams of the damned? That's a new background noise. I mean, I won't lie, it's kind of hard to hear things over the factory's immense rumbling, but when I do it's something I just didn't think would exist in Hell.
For example, the whistling winds, or the smaller ghostly yet harmless endemic "life" such as birds. I have no idea if fairies count, but before the factory really grew to this level I could occasionally hear humming or singing. Even quiet laughter. Considering it sounded like a little girl doing so, I can only wonder if it was them.
But now, since the factory is at that kind of enormity, I'm really going to have to stay near the edges or even go outside of the protective walls if I want to, say, talk to anyone.
Hrmm. I hope there's a noise suppression module somewhere because there's going to be a lot more noise from now on.
The reason is, quite simply, because my robots are finally online and expanding outwards.
This is a very complicated part of the factory, relying on several differing elements to make sure all parts of it work, from the trains to the robots to the logic system that determines what exactly needs to be built.
…I'll be honest, there's no way this sort of thing could have been decided and done in the, what, 5 hours now that I've been here?
No, it's because it's been my life's work. Really. The only reason why I was ever with such a shady company which led to the first incident was because they had the Engineering Suits I needed to even begin it.
They're common, yes, but not for people like me. Like I once was. I was not always an Engineer. For a solid amount of my life, I used to just stargaze and map out the positions of the stars by hand…until I got bored and decided I wanted to have a larger physical impact on the society I lived as a part of.
Earth and Moon? A popular style of Planet Terraform, patterned after the lost ancestral home-planet of humans after it exploded sometime in 4000 A.D.
Oh, yes. I used to live on a planet known as "Earth" and stare up at a celestial body known as the "Moon" at night. Just not the original ones.
Swarms of robots fly by in patterns of dotted lines, the sight almost bringing me back to my stargazing days where I could look up and see constellations. Except, well, they're robots now.
One modular square section at a time do my robots build, the logic system I designed to eat entire planets forcefully condensed into something that can barely handle a single continent with enough time.
Months, maybe, but I wasn't exactly given a time limit to 'Conquer Hell'. Not that I needed to be given one, as without a Nuclear Reactor, I will not be able to keep up with providing power for each and every section of new factory as it gets built anyway.
Any signs of that green radioactive metal anywhere on the radar? No? Damn it.
Oh well. Here's to hoping the system finds it by the time I complete that Research.
…Huh. I've got everything being done for me now. I guess I can take the time to see about that jetpack.
I think that means I won't have to contact home, but we'll see how things work out first.
—-
After checking up on Chiyari at the blood pools and taking a moment to consume some of said blood, Yuuma and Flandre return to the Scarlet Devil Mansion, miserable.
One bath and some food later, they reconvene in the basement, Flandre's room.
There was something to be said about simply shrieking out in the middle of nowhere to relieve stress, not that either would admit to it, especially not having stood next to and trying to one-up each other while doing so.
Nope. No way, no how.
Anyway, the flight back (and most certainly nothing else) had cooled tempers enough that the two could, at minimum, reason with each other why some things didn't work out.
"—that damn birdbrain."
For a while, Yuuma's non-sequitur went uncommented on and they just sat in silence, sipping the tea Sakuya had prepared.
At the very minimum, Flandre wasn't screaming at Yuuma for involving her in her harebrained plans—not that she was going to in the first place, as Flandre had invited herself because it sounded fun.
Eventually, after her second cup of tea was drained, the Vampire broke the silence.
"...Say, if I hadn't come along, what would you have done?"
Yuuma looks up, about five seconds away from taking a bite out of the irreplaceable porcelain tea cup she had been drinking out of.
"Hmm. I think I would have gone for that diviner mouse girl."
"Ah. Nazrin from the Buddhist Temple?"
Yuuma snaps her fingers, nodding enthusiastically.
"That's her name! Yup, her."
The blond Vampire takes a moment to rub at her chin, an inquisitive look appearing in her eyes.
"...You don't suppose that would have worked the first time?"
The Taotie shrugs.
"Honestly? I have no clue."
That could be said about many things regarding this whole affair, such as, what does uranium even look like, why does he need it, and what exactly are you trading it for?
Admittedly, Flandre was only a little bit curious about the answers, but, well, curiosity was curiosity, and she was something of an unkillable cat—er, bat.
She asked only the questions, leaving out the snark and sarcasm her thoughts and personality had added.
Yuuma awkwardly scratches her face, clearly having forgotten to ask some things to the Engineer, consumed by greed as she was.
"Mmh, again, no clue about the first two. But what I want out of it in trade is simple: I want those machines of his. Remember how I told you about how he st—found some apparently natural oil wells connected to the Abandoned Hell of Blood Pools? Well, he was doing something with it. Now, I don't know exactly what, but I think I want it."
"And I just went out because I was bored and you said something interesting was happening."
Flandre snorts in agreement. There was no need to justify putting in work to obtain desires. She stands up, continuing her thought.
"Well then. It seems as if there are some questions that must be asked to this Jeremiah of Neos. I will join you for this if only to see him and this fantastical creation of his as well."
The lamb-girl smiles and laughs.
"Keh-heh-heh."
Then they are off again, back to the Underground, but this time to see the person who had kickstarted their adventure.
—-
Time continues on.
A duo returns to Hell to visit someone.
A trio of the same Goddess, still confused, misses literal world-shattering monologues.
An automated tide of steel and electricity unknowingly approaches the Beast Metropolis looming far, far in the distance.
A lone Engineer completes further and further research, ever slowly descending into some nerve-wracking emotion or another, wondering about his situation and how he will get home.
Because he surely will.
Right?
—-
The jetpack is successful. Perhaps even too successful?
I've gotten several things to float now, the first of which is, well, me, via a module I attached to the Suit's modular power system.
The second? A second car that isn't the first one, because I hold sentiment to the very first of anything I do.
The third thing?
A tank.
The blueprint for this one actually came from Research and was not part of the default suite of blueprints installed into the Engineering Suit…and then I made it fly.
No idea why I would ever use it given how versatile and non-energy consuming the default treads are, but I've got one now.
I guess the only thing that is better than the default tank would be the Spidertron, but that's near the rocket in terms of research, and a few steps sideways from the artillery cannons.
…That being said.
I am approaching that level of Research very rapidly.
Hell is so bountiful in resources that it almost feels like…I dunno, cheating? Yeah, cheating, with the way that the ore drills just do not have to stop, and therefore I do not have to constantly be searching for more and more materials to fuel my Research.
Er, well, the eater system does that part automatically anyway, thankfully.
And then the rocket will be done and I will let my current boss know, after which…I don't know.
I go home? Hopefully.
Though, uh, literally speaking, that's not the contract's requirement of 'Conquering Hell', which is a little bit concerning.
Oh dear. This is almost as bad as the contract which got me the Engineering Suit in the first place, except I could actually get out of that one.
I have no idea what 'Conquering Hell' entails.
Does that mean I actually need to do some actual not-proper-noun research?
Ugh. What a pain. Because that implies I would need to find out what exactly constitutes as part of Hell, and that may or may not include other people which thus implies that they have somewhere to live and thus society and thus and therefore and so forth and—
Ugh.
I hope this is just a weird way to have gotten me to do a pre-settlement colonization project and nothing else, because all this thinking has made me realize I may be running out of patience, which would be bad for anything or anyone that could find themselves in my way.
…Assuming they aren't immediately hostile or threatening me or whatnot.
I won't lie, I'm still a bit peeved from those Alliance people from earlier.
Given how quickly they backed down and began peacefully talking instead, I'm glad I didn't have to activate the turrets or use my emergency gun. Having to clean up afterwards isn't very fun.
Not that the biters' dead bodies from back then really had to be cleaned up, given that they were made from absorbed polluted air and naturally decomposed insanely quickly.
Though there is something to be said about dragging around the mangled corpse of some group's leader to send a message. That's how gangs did it in the stories, right? Or…no, wait, I saw it in the news.
Some vigilante found some serial-killer-gang's leader, Harl the Hacker, then after a fight the vigilante won, dragged the killer's dead body through the city of Dorilopolis, which proceeded to not have any murders for the next year.
…Not that it mattered to me. I was stargazing around that time four solar systems over and only saw it after leaving the planet for the first time. I think they were having some day of remembrance on the anniversary, and a news station was doing a vanity piece.
Beep-boop!
Hm? Er, speak of the devil? No, Harl hasn't returned from the dead. It's Yuuma and…not Chiyari…way at the edge of all my radars' cumulative range. Once they get to the outer range of my turrets I'll meet them, and not a moment before.
Ah, according to the radars, their name is [Entity_Flandre_Scarlet]…which means their name is Flandre Scarlet.
Is it racist that I think they're a vampire simply based on their last name?
…Probably. What's going on now?
Hush, you.
—-
From the skies below the ceiling of Hell, the Vampire and the Taotie stare down, down at the dizzying rainbow carpeting the ground and the moving dots above it—
The Factory of the Engineer.
"...Huh. It got bigger."
"Did it, now."
A dry statement, rather than a question, to make Yuuma scoff and fractionally narrow her eyes. Flandre had never seen it before, so this first impression…mattered?
Already, she had felt the heated cloud of pollution and smog near Hell's ceiling, which was a funny thing to think about.
Yuuma had just taken a deep breath of it and moaned, but ultimately, for the sake of not delaying the inevitable (and making Flandre any more uncomfortable), had decided not to fly into that dark sooty thing.
This was just a social visit, after all. No need to get your clothing dirty just to say hi, maybe ask a thing or two without fighting, cough, Utsuho, cough.
Finally, when they arrived in silence at a wall littered with turrets staring from above, the man of the hour was there to meet them this time.
"I saw something sparkling from far off. Nice wings. What can I help you two with?"
—was what he said in his deep voice, nodding at Flandre, after introductions were given.
Yuuma, as the self-imposed spokesperson for talking to the guy she eventually wanted to join her gang, got right to it.
"I'll be frank. Do you have any small bits of uranium? I need it for a magic diviner to find more of it. You are still looking for it, yeah?"
Jeremiah cocks his head left, then right, hmm-ing.
Finally, he sighs.
"...Yes, I'm still looking for it, and yes, I do have a tiny bit. Divining, huh?"
Atop the wall, he reaches for his right pocket, the seam denoting it near invisible due to his armor being entirely black, and pulls out a—
Flandre tenses at the handgun that appears—a revolver, if her memories of all those Wild West stories served her correctly—then relaxes as he simply unloads a bullet, placing the gun back in that invisible pocket.
"Here. A single bullet made of uranium should suffice."
The Engineer held it out, and from his back, something appeared.
"Bwooorp."
It was like a long tube with a claw along the bottom edge, and it grabs the deep gray casing of the green-tipped bullet. Because apparently green was the color of uranium.
As the clawed tube hovered closer, a strange twinge of discomfort appeared on her skin, similar to what she felt in sunlight, or during her fights with Utsuho Reiuji.
Yeah, that was definitely uranium.
It drops off into the Taotie's hand and her eyebrows raise as she feels the weight of the metal nearly as thick as—if not more so than—her fingers.
The flying thing returns to the man with a 'Bweedeedeet' where it inserts itself into…oh, a backpack.
"Now, was that all, or…?"
The discomfort vanished once Yuuma had placed the bullet into her pocket, presumably muffling the aura of sunlight radiation that nuclear materials produced.
"Nope, I've got a couple things to ask. First, though, I'm gonna need a place to sit. I ain't standing here all day."
For a moment, Jeremiah does not react, and they stare as the blue lines on his helmet seem to dim for a moment—
Then, he waves his hands and there is light.
Logs of wood pop into existence, floating above his head, lines of light appearing from his fingers and connecting to them.
They watch as the pieces morph into each other, expanding and stretching to make shapes—
And the rustic but very nice looking wooden table and chairs set themselves on the ground, followed by the Engineer who flies over, a set of extra tubes on the backpack flaring to life, jets of flame propelling him to land perfectly in the closest seat.
He crosses his arms, making the closest thing he can to eye contact with a completely enclosed helmet.
Now that they are up close to each other and not separated by sheer empty space, even sitting down in a slightly slouched position, he is as tall as Yuuma standing at her full height, not to mention Flandre who is half a head shorter—then they take a seat and are still having to direct their eyes up.
Jeremiah directs his helmet's own blank blue lined gaze at the two and shrugs.
"I'm afraid I have no food or refreshments here, unless you'd like raw river water, industrial chemical liquids, or still-flopping fish?"
Flandre wasn't sure what to expect with that last one, but he did indeed pull a strangely colored fish out of his pocket, still alive and desperately flicking and flopping in an attempt to escape his grasp. But for what reason? To make a point that, yes, he indeed had a fish? No, it was something else.
Neither she nor Yuuma say anything about it, just stare at the somehow non-ghostly and completely living fish, so he simply puts it back in that pocket, no further comment.
The Gouyoku matriarch actually blinks after a moment, then points her thumb to one of the buildings with the large towers in the distance with a flame spewing out the top.
"I'll take whatever's getting made from that. I've gotta sample what I'm trading this uranium for, y'know?"
Not that Flandre knew, but Yuuma had motioned to the original spots of oil from earlier in the day, that same area where the flow of oil had ended up leading towards and causing the discovery of the factory.
Jeremiah nods as a star from the lines of constellations comes down from the air—another one of those clawed flying tubes. It rocks forward in a facsimile of a nod, then heads to the flame towers, several other stars following from above.
"Alright. It'll be a minute, then; these 'bots don't fly all that fast."
He directs his helmet down at the table, then back at the two.
"...Something tells me that wasn't all, though."
Yuuma chuckles, then pulls out the uranium bullet and holds it up, that awful prickling sensation returning to Flandre's skin.
"Keh-heh. Nope. If I'm gonna be going through the effort of getting you more of this stuff, I wanna know what you're using it for."
At that, the Engineer sits up, putting his hands on the table and lacing his fingers together, head slightly tilted. A classic negotiation pose.
"Hm. If you really must know, my factory needs a larger and more sustainable power source, as solar power doesn't work here and the output of steam power is far too little for its input. Therefore, I will be using the uranium to fuel a small, personal, nuclear reactor."
A personal reactor…?
With each word, Yuuma's eyes widen in shock. Flandre doesn't particularly care. Sure, that sun-crow was incredibly powerful and ran a furnace of her own, but that was at a much, much, larger scale than a personal one.
Whatever the difference was between a reactor made from an entire Hell and ran off of the dead corpses of an entire pocket dimension's population used to power the faith abilities of the gods—and whatever this guy was going to make.
Flandre shrugs, and for the first time since she introduced herself, says something.
"Seems reasonable enough."
"Thank you. Ah, here's the oil products from the refinery."
Three whole industrial sized steel barrels of oil are dropped off by the robots from the fire-tower—an oil refinery, apparently—and then they return to the constellation lines as stars.
From Yuuma's open mouthed surprise, to Flandre's surprising nonchalant reasonability, to the timing of the delivery, Jeremiah finds a moment to interject with a fairly innocent question of his own.
"By the way, I don't suppose there's any sort of civilization here? I won't lie, I'm a bit lonely and I think I can leave this whole thing alone for just a moment."
The Taotie takes a breath, eyes on the colored barrels, absently nodding, her nose twitching at the acrid scents which suddenly fill the air.
"...Yeah, there is. Off in that direction, a big city. The Beast Metropolis. Can't miss it."
He hums appreciatively with another nod, relief in his voice.
"Good to know. Thank you."
