Chapter Four: A Minor Breakdown

Part 1

Leo’s finger tapped the rhythm in his head against his steering wheel. This car ride was proving just as exciting as the first one. It wasn’t the Native’s fault. Naira was a pleasant conversationalist. She also slowed her words when she spoke to tone down her Mnolf accent, perhaps a practice from working at the University.

The side of him trained by his mother said that he should be treating Naira as an honored guest. That he should be asking her questions about her and her life. The side of him trained at Police Academy said that he should be taking this opportunity to ask questions about the case. Maybe there was a way to do both?

“So, have you worked crime scenes before?”

The silence that followed was deafening. So much so, Leo could hear the slight output adjustments to his car’s Firum thrusters as he turned a corner. They made it almost a full block before his passenger finally responded.

“I’m trying to decide if this is another colloquialism of Snep, like Officer Grey is fond of. ‘Worked’ crime scenes? What exactly are you asking me?”

“Have you studied one before? Or seen one? Looked for evidence? Have you even worked with the Police before?”

Naira gave a slow nod, her face registering understanding. “I have, once before. But I was a child then. That was some thirty years ago.”

“Thirty years?” Curiosity was any Snepard’s downfall, especially one in Leo’s line of work. His next question came out with no regard to any life experience he had picked up from women. “How old are you?

Naira’s gaze traveled out the window. After a moment of thought, “As best I know, I turned 44 at the end of last Harvest Season.”

Leo looked at her again. If he’d been asked to estimate her age, he’d have guessed early thirties. Forty-four made her a few years younger than his mother, and Naira looked considerably healthier. Leo’s mother was a special case though.

Regardless, he hadn’t studied Mnolfan physical features since Academy. Ever since that awful Snow Season a few years back, he’d gone faceblind to Natives. He’d misread that time, acted on a misjudgment. He didn’t want to do that again. He couldn’t do that again.

Man, he really did have mothers on the brain.

“Did you mean to pass University Boulevard?” Naira’s question collided with Leo’s thoughts like a car crash.

He shook his head, growling under his breath at distracting himself. “No, sorry. I’ll turn around.”

At the next intersection, he caught the traffic signal already transitioning. The car leaned with the momentum as the thrusters whipped the vehicle into a U-turn. The hum of the Electrum repulsors grew under the strain of keeping the car level. Then, with a horrible popping sound, the passenger side gave out.

Naira’s head hit the roof as the car fell into a slant. Her side of the car scraped against the street as Leo brought them to a complete stop. Working the lever at the center, he shut down the repulsors, lowering his side of the vehicle until it was also making contact with the street. He cursed himself for being in such a hurry to rid himself of his passenger. Now they were grounded on the side of the road and blocking a lane of traffic. Perfect.

His claws dug into his steering wheel, and he had no doubt he was scowling as he turned to Naira. “You ok?”

She rubbed at her head, then nodded. “Maybe a little bruised. Nothing serious.”

“Good, that’s good.” He had to squeeze his eyes shut and focus on his breathing to drown out the calls of the Necral sticks in his pocket.

“Do cars often do this?”

Leo let out a sigh. “No, I’m just cheap. I never had it fixed, so this has been a long time in coming.”

One embarrassing payphone call later, and a tow truck was on its way.

“So, we are just supposed to wait until they get here?” Naira was polite as she asked, but it was pretty obvious from her tone that she didn’t like the idea any more than Leo did.

He shrugged. “Unless you know how to fix cars. I certainly don’t.”

Her hands were folded patiently in her lap, but the way her thumbs tapped together told a different story. “I don’t have experience with cars,” she admitted. “But do you know what went wrong?”

“Yeah, the Electrum repulsors on your side went out. Think I took the corner too fast, and it overloaded something. If I put too much strain on that side, stuff freaks out, and I have to replace the batteries. They’re expensive though, and I used my last spare a month ago.”

Naira sniffed then gave a small nod. “That explains the Electrum smell.”

Raising an eyebrow at her, Leo asked, “Electrum has a smell?”

Naira nodded again, “The alchemical components don’t really, but the reaction does. You can’t smell it in a battery unless the battery’s been compromised.”

“Like I said, anytime this happens, I have to replace the battery.”

Someone honked as they passed, sticking their hand out the window with a rude gesture. Leo returned the gesture. “Not like I want to be grounded here,” he growled.

Naira’s thumb tapping crescendoed then stopped. “Can we access the batteries? Or are those underneath the car?”

Leo had to stop and think before answering the question. He knew basics, like the difference between the pellets that fueled his car and the pellets that were used to wash the windshield. The only reason he knew where the repulsor batteries were on his car was because he’d had to replace them before. “We can get to them, actually. The one we want is on your side of the car, but that puts us on the same side as afternoon traffic. And again, I don’t have a replacement on me. The last one cost me 300 Crystum.”

That got the teacher’s attention. Leo smirked, “Replacing the whole system was going to cost me 4,000. I could almost get a new car for that, so I’ve been putting it off.”

“That is a lot of money.”

“Yeah…”

Her shock did not last long. “Still, may I see the batteries in question?”

Leo watched the stream of passing traffic in his side mirror. He really didn’t want to do this. The tow truck was already on its way.

Unfortunately, even only viewed from the corner of his eye, the look she gave him was filling him with guilt. There probably wasn’t any harm in looking. Besides, it wasn’t like getting hit by a passing car could make his day any worse.

With a sigh, he got out of the car. 

It took three attempts to get the panel open. The interior was coated in a faint blue slime that smelled a bit like the smoke from an electrical fire. Leo waved a hand in front of his face, as if that might help. Inside, the battery had blown out on one side, hence all the blue goop everywhere. He’d just replaced it a couple weeks ago, so there was a lot.

Beside him, Naira crouched to look inside. Her eyes studied the mess, though there wasn’t really much to look at. Just a bunch of wires, metal contacts, busted battery, and battery guts to cover it all.

He left her to it, wandering away to smoke a Necral stick. Leaning against the car, he felt the soothing numbness kick in, though it wasn’t strong enough to beat back as much anxiety as this situation had unearthed. The entire car rocked, and for a second, he thought someone had sideswiped them, but a glance to the side showed Naira, inspecting the dead battery she’d just wrenched free. The blue slime ran down her arm, causing much of the fur around it to stand on end.

She held it up to the sunlight, studying it. Then she looked at him. Her eyes immediately darted to the Necral stick between his lips. She said nothing and returned to inspecting the battery.

Frustration and shame bubbled inside Leo. Most people had the decency to openly judge him with words for his habit. Others would smoke beside him. Somehow, the silence was worse. With a growl, he inhaled twice more, then stamped out the stick a little early.

Walking back around the car, he positioned himself between her and any oncoming traffic. Keeping the passing cars in his periphery, Leo watched as she wiped out the inside of the compartment with a white cloth rag.

“Makes a mess, doesn’t it?” he commented.

Rather than her ears, her nose twitched in response to his words. What, did he need to breathe away from her now, too? As before, she made no comment on it. Instead she nodded, “Alchemical reactions are often messy when interrupted. Though, as you can see, by spreading it out, much of it is evaporating.”

There was a bit of an odd filmy residue being left behind as she wiped, like flecks of golden glitter. Leo gestured towards the compartment, “You do science. Any of this make sense to you?”

She regarded him with raised eyebrow and her quirky little head tilt. “I do ‘do science’. So I recognize a circuit when I see one, even if it’s got a lot of additional branches coming off of it. You said this is your repulsor? Meaning this is what keeps the car off the ground?”

Leo shrugged. “It’s supposed to. Pushes off the metal in the street or whatever, so it doesn’t work if you try to drive over someone’s lawn. When it goes out, your car stops hovering.”

“And the tradeoff from reducing friction from something like wheels justifies the inefficient energy expenditure of micro-thrusters?”

Leo shrugged, “I don’t know half of those words. I just activate the lever to make the car float, then use the pedals to make it go and the wheel to steer.” He pantomimed the actions with an appropriate ‘vwooshing’ noise.

Naira sighed, “I get the feeling it’s not about efficiency so much as people buy it because it seems cool.”

“At the very least, it’s convenient.”

“When it works.”

“When it works,” Leo agreed.

Naira continued wiping out the inside, then held up the battery for him to inspect. “See this cap on the end? It’s designed to fail. If your reaction is going to explode, this gives you a chance to direct it away from anything vital. Lucky for us, the reaction was a slow burn with low-grade reactants, so it just gooped everything up rather than electrifying your whole car and us with it.”

The more she talked about science, the more her natural accent surfaced. She raised an eyebrow, waving the battery case as if expecting a response. Leo realized he’d been paying attention to the sound of her words when he should have been listening to the words themselves. Thankfully, he’d heard enough to form the safe layman’s response, “That sounds bad.”

Naira sniffed, as if getting what she’d expected. “They shield these things so much, they’re generally pretty safe. Makes them hard to modify, but since this one already blew open I might be able to limp it along.”

“But all its insides are now its outsides. Did you scoop the goop back inside?”

Naira gave him a look that made him feel like a schoolchild. “No, the reaction was diffused, and spreading out the surface area made everything evaporate. It’s the safer clean-up path when you’re unsure of the strength of the reactants involved. But if we start up a fresh reaction, and seal it up again, we might be able to make a temporary battery.”

“You’re the expert.”

The grimace on her face made it plain she disagreed, but she reached through the open window for her large bag anyway. Rooting around inside, she fished out a trio of thin batteries, each about the size and thickness of a fancy fountain pen. Gripping one in both hands, she tried to crack it like a glowstick. Nothing happened. She grunted and tried again. The metal case remained unyielding.

She looked around for a moment, then reached inside to open the car door. Positioning the batteries inside the doorframe, she turned to Leo. “Would you hold these in place? And watch your fingers.”

Warily, Leo stepped up and gripped both ends of the batteries. He curled his fingers back as if he was chopping something with a knife, trying to keep them as far away from the door as possible. “This isn’t going to damage my…?”

The slamming of the car door cut off his question of concern. Two of the batteries began to glow with a faint blue as Naira opened the door to check her work. “Swap them around so I can get the last one.”

Leo complied, and she slammed the door again. Now all three batteries were giving a faint glow, though their outer casing was crimped inwards. “Thank you,” she said, dropping the batteries into the spent repulsor battery case one at a time.

Leo opened the door for himself, scowling at the new dents within the frame where some of the paint had rubbed off. He sighed, turning back to see her using the roof of his car to push the metal battery cap back into a mostly closed position. Claws immediately bit into his palm pads, and keeping himself from saying anything was almost harder than having another Necral.

He reminded himself that she was trying to help. Naira left a bit of a gap, which she used to fill the battery with some kind of solution from her bag. Once liquid began to pour out of the battery, she tried to finish wrenching the cap into place. She struggled to close it all the way and wound up pounding the end into the part of the car’s frame between the front and rear doors.

Leo forced himself to watch her, rather than risk seeing what else she had done to his car. He breathed in through his nose, and out through his mouth.

Naira gave the battery cap one last smack for good measure, then held it up to inspect. Turning it this way and that, she smiled. “It’s actually sealed!”

“Great. That’s–” Leo allowed himself a look at the side of his car, regretting it immediately. “--that’s just great.”

Leaning back into the compartment, Naira reinstalled the battery. “Want to power it up? I’d do it slowly, if you can. I’ll keep an eye on it.”

“Yeah, sure. That–yeah.” Leo shook his head and climbed back inside his car. As carefully as he could, he engaged the lever that activated the repulsors. To his surprise, they both responded. He had to make some adjustments with a small dial he’d never even touched since purchasing the car, but the car lifted off the ground and came very close to leveling out.

Outside, Naira closed the access panel before dusting herself off, shaking out her formerly goopy arm, and joining him in the car once more.

“So I’m good to go?”

Naira shrugged, “You might want to take it easy. If too much strain blew out your last one, this one’s even more likely to blow. But if you are gentle with it, you should be fine.”

He nodded. Gentle. Yeah, that thing he was good at being.

Starting up the Firum engine, he checked his dash to make sure that all his settings were still good. If he needed to be careful, then he didn’t want to forget anything. Which was exactly when he saw the tow truck approaching in the rear view mirror...