@Plank Sinatra @Kaithas @NarayanKChatsworth had been easier to get permission from than he’d thought. The professor had been a little skeptical of a student asking to use the Armory workshop overnight, even if he was a team leader, especially when that student wasn’t even in the Armory class. His suspicions began to abate the longer Ben talked, though, as he explained to the teacher both his project and his background in weaponsmithing. Chatsworth listened attentively and politely, examining the designs that Ben was explaining and asking questions here and there to make sure he understood the design. Ben was pretty sure they were meant to satisfy the professor’s skepticism of his skill, too. Anyone could present a concept sketch and pretend they knew what they were doing but
actually knowing what you were doing was very, very different.
About twenty minutes into the conversation was when the tone shifted a little; Chatsworth seemed to be spending less effort making sure Ben was legitimate, and more effort asking about the design. He seemed genuinely interested behind his polite professionalism, and Ben was more than happy to talk about it. He showed the Armory teacher his current weapons, pointing to the diagram here and there to indicate how they would be integrated into the new system, and felt himself becoming more animate too. It was refreshing to talk with someone who knew weapons better than he did again.
By the end of the conversation, Chatsworth was willing to let him work overnight. Not without conditions, though; the workshop had to be exactly as clean when he arrived in the morning as when he left, and Ben wasn’t to go advertising that he’d been allowed. Chatsworth didn’t want everyone making requests for off-hours use of the workshop.
That was fine with Ben. And as enjoyable as the conversation was, he was happiest when the professor went back to his desk and let Ben get to work.
Some people preferred to work in a team, delegating tasks to speed up the process. The Lloyds had never worked that way. There were never more than two people in the workshop at once, and in later years seldom more than one. Too many cooks and all that, but Ben had come to enjoy working in peace. Fewer distractions meant fewer complications in the process. He hummed a little to himself as he began gathering the tools he would need, clearing a large workbench for his use and setting his own toolbox down on it. Artorius and Gwenhwyfar went up on the table next. The latter had only been finished the day before, while Ben taught Lauren how to properly maintain Lawnslot. Lawnslot’s replacement was virtually indistinguishable from the original, but there was a little more sentimental value behind it. Lauren was a lot better in the workshop than he might have expected. She caught on quick, and it was easy to see how she’d come up with the BaSTEELs.
A quick grin crossed his face while he unpacked the more sensitive components of his project, carefully setting them aside in a corner.
Those took much longer to finish and required much more finesse than anything else he was doing tonight, so he had programmed the mechanisms beforehand. Lauren had been a help there, too, since he’d had her work on some of them while he demonstrated the technology behind the Aura batteries.
The first few steps in this process, though, were going to be a little rougher.
”Making a weapon now is a little different from when my father started,” Daniel began, while his son listened carefully. He gestured to an anvil in its own, isolated corner of the shop. “Before modern tools were widespread, blades would be made the old fashioned way. You didn’t machine them out of a sheet of metal, they were one piece that you heated and hammered into shape. Refinement came later.”
“Why don’t we do that anymore?”
“We don’t need to. Classical pieces are still made the old way, but they’re not meant to be practical. Not usually. Nowadays we use stock removal, especially for complicated weapons.”
Daniel pointed to a large machine near the center of the room and a sheet of metal next to it.
“It’s quicker for us to cut the general shape, then refine from there. The way we refine is still pretty much the same but with a new wrinkle; weapons these days change shape. If you were making an ax that turned into a gun, which shape would you focus on making first?”
“Um…” Ben wrinkled his nose, trying to stand on tip-toes to better see the machine across the room. This was his first real lesson, he wanted to get it right. “The ax? Because that’s what’ll need to be stronger?”
“Half right. What about a shield becoming a scimitar?” Daniel paused a moment to wait until his son, whose brow was now truly furrowed, to shrug in confusion. “They both need to be strong, don’t they? But in different ways. The shield has to be strong to forces coming at it one way, the sword needs to be able to handle stresses to its edge and spine. So how do you strengthen it?”
“You temper each piece.” The weaponsmith gestured at a collection of geometric pieces of metal on the table, his current commission. “When each piece is as strong as it can be, that is how you keep the whole strong. You can’t think in terms of an ax, or a shield, or a sword. You think about what it’smade
of.”Ben grunted as he lifted another component off of the laser cutter, bringing it back to his workbench and studying it for flaws. Even this small piece was heavy; albinium, the name for the metal he was working with, was very dense. It was technically a steel alloy, one made with Gravity Dust. The Dust increased its density, and along with it made several key improvements to the material’s strength. Albinium was a name a metallurgist up in Atlas had come up with years ago, owing to the pale pearlescent flecks the Dust left visible when the metal was polished. It wasn’t too complicated to make, but easy to mess up; the precision necessary was what kept the price high, especially since it had taken until after the Great War to figure out how to create it in any bulk quantities. Right now he had to check each piece as it was finished, both to make sure it was the proper shape and to ensure that the stress of cutting hadn’t induced any grievous flaws.
This particular step was going to take the longest, as he had to go piece by piece. Even if there were no abnormalities, the shape still wouldn’t be exactly right. Here the older techniques came back into place. Each component was carefully grinded to remove excess material at the edges, and create the proper shape. Once that was done he had to sort them into two piles; pieces that would be on the edge of the sword, and pieces that would be towards the spine. Ben would need to temper them different ways.
”Does a blade need to be hard or flexible, Ben?”
”Hard?”
“It needs to be both.” Daniel held up a sword for his son to inspect, tapping the edge before moving his finger to the spine. “The edge has to be hard, otherwise it’ll deform when you use it. But the spine needs to be flexible, because if it’s too brittle the blade will break. Swords need to be strong enough to keep their shape, but flexible enough to handle shock.”
”What if I swung it?”
“What?”
”I swing pretty hard. If I used a sword, wouldn’t it be hard to keep it from breaking?” Ben made a swinging motion with his arm, as if to demonstrate. ”Would it be hard to make one for me?”
“Good thing we don’t have to worry about it.” His father said, tone suddenly brittle. “We make the weapons, other people use them. That arm of yours will be great at the forge, but you don’t need to worry about using a sword.”Ben was finding his rhythm at last, hefting each piece with a large pair of tongs and heating it red-hot only to set it aside. For the first pile, at least; they needed only to be normalized, something best accomplished by an even heat and cooling on their own. The edges, on the other hand, were dunked in a trough of cool oil to quench. Exposed to such extremes of heat and the exertion of lifting such heavy pieces of metal he had worked up a sweat quickly but he couldn’t have been calmer. At the end of the day, the workshop was something he knew. Working on a project was familiar, and it was soothing.
And this was
his project.
There was no micromanaging, there was no one to judge his work but himself. He knew what he had to do, and he was happy just doing it. There was a satisfaction in seeing the picture in his mind slowly taking shape, piece by piece. He had been in the Armory for five hours, now, but the time just flew.
Now he needed to pause, though, while the pieces cooled. He took a seat at his workbench and chugged at his water bottle, leaning back to catch his breath. He was burning through energy quick, but he was enjoying it. It was good to get back into the groove. Deinamig was useful for moving things by himself back home, and this was no different. His break wasn’t just going to be idle time, though; the mechanisms everything would be connected to still needed to be fine-tuned.
It kept his mind busy, too. Making a weapon, if you did it right, was a personal experience. There were plenty of engineers that could put together a gun, or design something for a soldier. Smithing a weapon for a hunter was something else entirely. The techniques were older than Ben, they were older than his Dad, they were even older than his grandfather. His family had been making weapons since Redwood was settled and the methods had been passed down just as long. They were tied inextricably to the memory of their teaching, of the father that taught them to his son. The heat of the forge would always bring a Lloyd back to Redwood, and that shop. It wasn’t just the methods that bridged past and present.
He’d gotten an email from the town newspaper Saturday afternoon. Word had made it back that Ben Lloyd, a Redwood native, had lead one of the teams that rescued the workers of the Manticore refinery. One of the teams that had fought and killed an actual Manticore. Rustic though they were, they weren’t going to pass that story up. One of their reporters even managed to get a photograph from one of the workers, apparently one of them had taken documented what he was seeing, of the beast’s defeat. People he hadn’t spoken to since he left were contacting him to congratulate him, wish him well. But Daniel Lloyd had declined comment when they contacted him, so they were looking for something from
him. Ben had given them something, something simple, but that wasn’t why it stuck with him.
It was Family Day, as of a few minutes ago, and he knew his father wasn’t coming. He had hoped, hoped that maybe his father would come to bury the hatchet, but it wasn’t happening. The anger was still there over Ben’s choice, so much that he wouldn’t even comment for the town paper.
So he picked tonight to work. The workshop was the last place they’d ever connected, so maybe Ben would find some peace here.
”We make them, why can’t I learn to use them?”
“I told you no, Benjamin,” Daniel snapped, not looking up from his project. “There’s no reason for you to fight.”
”There are Grimm out there!”
“Which is why we live in here
, where there aren’t Grimm. The guards take care of it, Benjamin, and there hasn’t been a large attack since your grandfather was young.” He sounded more irritated with every word, still not looking over at his son. “Even if it was something you needed to know, you’re barely in high school.”
“But I am in high school, Dad. Kids are already headed off to Signal, and some are already looking at Beacon in a few yea-”
“You are not
going to Beacon, so don’t even think about it Benjamin Lloyd.” The weaponsmith looked up, now, his glare laced with red hot steel. “If they want to throw their lives away, fine. But no son of mine will ever set foot
in that building. We are not warriors, Benjamin, and we are not soldiers.”
”Your Dad was.”
“And he watched his friends die, and walked with a limp for the rest of his life. If he wasn’t dead, you could ask him about it. Go to your room. Now.”Ben had gone tense without realizing, and forced himself to take a deep breath. He let go of the drill for a minute to take a long draught from his water. The pieces had all cooled, and now he was securing them to the framework. Even the supports, unusually, were steel; they had to be in order to support the weight of the weapon. Some points were welded, others were bolted, but bit by bit it was coming together. It wasn’t just abstract anymore, he could
see it.
The last piece was welded on just past two in the morning, and he wiped sweat off his brow while he surveyed his work. Everything looked sound, and if it was then the rough construction was done. He’d just need to refine it. But there was only one way to be sure…
Ben carefully depressed a button near the handle and was rewarded instantly with a weighty click, two portions of the rectangular slab swinging out and telescoping, corners becoming a pointed tip while the remainder formed an edge just behind it. Each piece moved like the well-oiled mechanism it was, gliding and clicking smoothly and seamlessly. The process took mere moments but Ben’s eyes tracked each step, and tracked them again when he triggered the reverse process. Everything was spaced properly, including where Artorius and Gwenhwyfar would fit. He made it stop halfway, checking the tertiary configuration; he didn’t have all the parts to make it work, not yet, but the structure was there. Everything was working properly.
Which meant it was time for both the most important and most tedious part. He had already blued the exposed steel where it would need to be resistant to the elements, but now he had to refine the rest.
Settling the shield on the table in front of him, he set about carefully grinding away any rough patches remaining on its smooth surface and polishing the surface. The process revealed the flecks in the metal that gave albinium its name, lending the gray steel a regal appearance even before the polish. The raised panels that formed Ben’s Emblem received a bronze-like finish to pick out the detail, while the other raised surfaced had already been turned almost black by the weather-proofing process. Once the surface was done, he had to focus on leather-wrapping the handles; the padding helped protect his hands when he blocked a particularly hefty blow, and gave it a more finished appearance. In the old days such wrappings might have been done by another craftsman, but the weaponsmith did all the work from start to finish now.
Even then he wasn’t done. Setting aside the finishing tools he picked up a whetstone and triggered its transformation, turning his attention to dedicatedly sharpening its edges. The sun was already beginning to come up over the horizon but he knew he couldn’t rush it. Each stroke had to be careful and measured, as too sharp an edge was as bad as too dull. Chatsworth walked in a little before five to begin preparing for his classes, but he said little; the professor stopped for a few minutes to watch Ben work, but turned his attention to his own work before long.
It was just after six o’clock when he set aside the stone and installed the last sensor in the hollow space left for it.
This was the integral piece. Gripping the hilt he lifted hard, trying to raise it off of the workbench. His muscles shook with the strain, but it scarcely moved. It certainly didn’t rise.
That was as he had expected.
Using a screwdriver to complete the circuit between two contacts, something the compartment’s cover would do when he was done, he watched to make sure the light on the sensor ticked on. Once it did he wrapped a hand around the hilt again, took a deep breath, and lifted.
The weapon rose from the bench without effort, as though it were weightless. Which, technically, it just about was. It was proof the sensor worked. It detected his Aura, and his Aura alone, and sent a small current into the weapon; current enough to activate the Gravity Dust in the alloy and reduce its weight to almost zero.
Bastille’s leader grinned to himself and set it down on the bench again, picking up the compartment’s cover. Inscribed carefully on the inside, where most would never see it, were the words;
B. Lloyd, L. N. #8/7
It secured with a few deft motions and he picked up his tonfa, sliding them into the rack on the shield’s back.
Now it was time for the final test.
The shield split, rotating and telescoping out to form a tip from its corners and a blade from its edges. Artorius and Gwenhwyfar went with it, beginning their transformation to Caletfwlch with a twist. The handle extended down, but this time the shield added further to the grip. Its hilt was extended by a new addition to the middle, and rather than form a blade of its own their edges telescoped into position on Joyous Guard’s superstructure.
Its weightlessness was unbelievable when he beheld the mass of the completed whole, giving it a few test swings. The immense blade, more than six feet in length, responded like an extension of his body. He could move it with a flick of his wrist and stop it with the same. It reverted to a shield with the flick of a switch, his tonfa still stored securely in their rack on its back.
It was as good as he had hoped, and just in time.
He lipped it onto his back, packed up his tools, and tidied his workstation quickly. He nodded to Chatsworth on his way out, almost thinking he had caught a note of approval in the returned nod, and departed the Armory.
It was time to see what everyone else was up to this morning.
