jumped without a jump drive

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Nick, in a full environment suit like any sensible person would wear in untamed wilderness, is overseeing a small swarm of robots harvesting various useful plantlife from the uninhabited parts of a sparsely settled planet, when something suddenly comes tearing through the undergrowth towards him and it's not showing up on scanners-

He raises his hand-phaser, notices it has a mirror for a face and hesitates a little too long. And then he is in a clearing, cut off from his ship and 'bots, with all available sources of data telling him he just went through a jump.

What.

Comments

[alicornucopia]

The staff pick up the slack as best they can.

(It's only a matter of time before a little kid wants to see what's inside the wires -)

Obnoxious employee starts compiling radio news and printing it up for people who don't have their own radios.

(He's never going home, he's stuck with these ignorant primitives until his untimely death -)

The cartload of iron he ordered shows up.

(He might not even last to seventy, he could catch something from these filthy uneducated people at any moment and die, alone, while he slaughters a few million of the locals by electrical proxy -)

[rockeye_stonetoe]

He locks himself in his room for most of a week and watches movies from his cranial computer it'll break eventually, there aren't any proper surgeons here you'll never fix it, sliding coins under the door when his employees complain they haven't been paid. When he does come out, he kicks the business back into more or less the proper shape and makes slow, slow progress on coal-to-oil conversion and combustion engines the greedy primitives will just use them as war machines.

It's only when he happens to hear of a zombie attack on a neighboring village when he remembers that dark things exist. And one of the dark things that exist are woke shadows.

He scans himself with every still-operational sensor he owns.

[alicornucopia]

Nothing out of the ordinary.

He's just cracking up, that's all, his own mind is turning against him and if the medicine here is ridiculous the standard of psychiatric care is worse, he's just going to go steadily more insane until he hurts someone directly enough that they lock him away, and then every harmless thing he's tried to do will be dismissed as a madman's toys but that won't stop people from keeping things they can use to kill each other, no, practicality is always the ultimate concern there -

[rockeye_stonetoe]

He tries to shove the Winter Light talisman in his ear. This fails to work. Proof. That's what he needs. Objective proof from the people who deal with this kind of shit for a living.

He forces himself to be angry at whoever did this to him, not himself, not the rest of the world. He storms up to the paladins' compound and asks the gate guard how they check someone for woke shadows.

[alicornucopia]

"...Do you think you have woke shadows?" asks the guard. "Or someone else?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Me. I can barely sleep. I keep thinking people are going to kill each other with my inventions. I feel like I'm going to catch some horrible disease and go blind and lose my hands and die. I tried to find them myself, but no, nothing, nothing. Your job is dealing with this. So, check somehow!"

[alicornucopia]

The paladin's response to this is to tackle Nick and start tying him up.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

They're trying to kill you! He struggles. Nick's strong, but not stronger than a paladin. He pulls his phaser- it's self-defense!- And throws it away as hard as he can force himself to do so.

[alicornucopia]

Once the paladin has him securely tied up he starts systematically patting Nick down with Winter Light sigils, not the pendant version but long slightly flexible wooden ones, one in each hand.

And when he pokes one into Nick's left ear there is a hissing scream, intolerably loud -

- and silence.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

He starts crying. "Oh, thank god, I'm not insane."

[alicornucopia]

The paladin does not untie him right away; he checks the other ear. "There might be some in your home. I'll find a novice to sit with you while I go check."

He finds a novice, who is a twelve-year-old girl who pats Nick's shoulder comfortingly and also doesn't untie him.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

He looks at his phaser. "Could you fetch that thing for me, put it back on my belt?"

[alicornucopia]

"What is it?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"It's a phaser. A weapon. If you don't want to give me my weapon back quite yet, at least make sure nobody else touches it?"

[alicornucopia]

The novice picks up the phaser carefully and puts it in her skirt pocket. "Once he's sure all the shadows after you are gone and you're feeling calm and collected we can untie you," she tells him.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"They started the very same day that somebody ignored all my warnings and managed to electrocute themselves on their lights. I would almost think someone she knew sent them after me, but I'm no private investigator."

[alicornucopia]

"The paladins will do their best to find who woke the shadows."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Would you happen to know if my radios have been useful yet? Last time I asked they had only given false alarms."

[alicornucopia]

"A radio called a band of paladins over to fight a lich, just yesterday. They aren't back yet."

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Nick pulls up an engineering sim in his eyelid-screen and works on his plans for coal and iron mines, and a steel mill, until someone unties him.

[alicornucopia]

Eventually - it takes a few hours - the paladin who killed the shadow in his ears comes back and says his residence and business are clear and his employees haven't been having bad dreams. The paladin and novice untie him, since he's been pretty placid.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

He thanks them, receives his phaser, and goes on his way.


Three days later he drives a horseless carriage to the moneylender's place.

As soon as she's free, he reports, "I would like another loan, to produce those."

[alicornucopia]

She looks at it.

"How fast can it go?" she wants to know.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"On good roads it can outpace a horse at full gallop for hours on end. On poor roads it will need to move more slowly. This is a prototype, I have discovered small flaws and opportunities for improvement, so the final version will be better."

[alicornucopia]

"How does it do with snow?"