After a couple of minutes I began to feel like Iâd looked at it long enough, and intently enough, to qualify as being some kind of mecha pervert. Iâm not, by the way. Just putting it out there that thereâs a big difference between keen interest and sexual desire. Yes the two can and frequently do overlap, but they donât here. You can appreciate and be curious about the form and workings of a thing (or person) without wanting to fuck it. Itâs fairly critical not to conflate the two, in fact. Iâm going to stop banging on about this for now, and I await the inevitable slander, but this is a hill I will die on, cowards.
The languid rhythm of the footfalls made it feel like it was approaching slowly, though the length of each stride ensured it was anything but. I could hear, faintly, the whirring of the mechanisms that lifted each leg again, and the hissing of pistons and hydraulics that cushioned the weight of each titanic impact. At the time I had no idea what any of those sounds were, but the distance I could hear them from (several hundred metres) was enough to tell me that this would be deafening up close.
Speaking of noises, I began to hear jangling and clanking behind me, along with the occasional raised voice, though luckily it didnât seem to be raised voices directed at me, just people trying to be heard above their clattering gear. It wasnât hard to guess who this was, and so as quietly as I could, I slipped over the lip of the crater, and crouched down below the rim, trusting that they were either looking at where they were putting their own feet, or up at this thing, instead of seeing me drop into the hole in front of them.
It seemed my plan worked at least a little bit, since their speed didnât seem to change as they got closer. They were going at a fast walk: enough to make their intentions clear, but clearly not the dead sprint Iâd set off at. Their voices started to become clearer as well, so I assumed they werenât worried about being overheard at all. That was confirmed, as far as I was concerned, when it sounded like they were talking about me.
â-they knew something about it we donât?â came the first voice.
âThey must haveâ replied the second, âyou saw how quickly they took off this way.â
âAnd letâs not forgetâ said Gialli (whose voice I could recognise since Iâd spent what felt like a year trapped in conversation with him) âthat they claimed to have been conducting a dig of some kind here. It stands to reason that they might have learned something about this, we donât know how long theyâve been here for after all.â
âAssuming itâs even the same person we spoke to,â said Tove. Her (unfortunate) status as that groupâs only woman made it a distinctive enough voice, and luckily people were getting close enough by this point that I could start identifying the rest.
âWell I donât see who else it could be. Nalfis, you did check their room, yes?â sniffed Eoin.
âYes boss.â I could practically hear his eyes rolling as he said it. âIt was just an empty room. More of a hole really. No doors, no windows, no nothing.â
âThen that settles it. We shall just have to interrogate them once we catch up.â I felt my breath catch at that, especially because they were practically on top of me, the clanking splitting to the left and right of me as they walked around my crater. I pressed myself up against the edge, clawing at any trace of a shadow and doing my best to think unobtrusive thoughts. There was something wrong about the way he interacted with this group. His casual assumption of control was at odds with the mutual disdain that seemed to exist. It felt like they obeyed him, but they didnât defer to him. Even if they were bodyguards, as he claimed, it didnât make sense to me that he would be so obviously contemptuous of them, and I really wasnât keen to see how far that contempt went when it related to someone he probably didnât care about at all. Like me. âInterrogateâ is a really shit word to be on the receiving end of â he could surely at least have said something like âaskâ. Whatever the case, I wasnât in a hurry to give them a reason to break out the pointy things for the sake of little old me. Still, it was flattering to know that they thought I might know something about this. In reality, Iâd left quickly because I didnât want them to stop me, and because my decision-making process pretty much follows a process of âcuriosityâ â âimpetuousnessâ â âactionâ â âdiscoveryâ. Whether the âdiscoveryâ part was good or bad was a lottery I played frequently, but regardless the steps that I think are meant to feature, like âconsiderationâ or ârisk-analysisâ werenât really star players in the team pulling the levers upstairs.
I did have a new problem now which (sadly) I had to think of a way around. Since this lot had passed in front of me now, they were between me and big stompy, who was of course, still getting closer. Soon enough, they were going to have to start doing something, and I had no idea what that something was going to be. Was it to try and fight it, was it to try and learn something about it, or was it just to suddenly start running away? Or, a concerned part of me thought, were they just coming this way to try and find me? If that was the case, I didnât think I could hide for long. They would probably have to turn around as it got closer, and I would have to climb out of this crater regardless of anything, since otherwise I would be turned into jam â a fate I was keen to avoid.
Options dwindling, I slunk around the crater, keeping low and to the edge to really try and minimise chances of being noticed. By the time Iâd completed my slow semi-circle, it seemed theyâd come to a halt just ahead of me, but I wasnât paying attention to that. The minute or so I had spent hiding didnât seem like a long time in the grand scheme of things, and yet as my head popped up over the edge, it suddenly felt like much, much too long.
There is no better way to put this â it loomed. Itâs a greatly evocative word, âloomâ. At least I think it is. As long as youâre not talking about the cloth making thing (I donât really understand them), it conjures very neatly all these feelings of terror, power, mystery, doubt, and above all a certain sense of presence â an aspect of undeniability. You canât properly discern anything that looms, but you canât ignore it either. An uncertain certainty; something that puts you in a position where the specifics elude you, but they also donât matter. It was like that here. I didnât know how tall it was, only that it was taller than anything else I could think of. I didnât know how much it weighed, only that it weighed enough to crush me. I didnât know what it was like up close, only that I had to know.
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That time spent hiding had, in a way, let it sneak up on me, and so now as I saw it again, a frightening amount closer, it felt inexorable. Down in this crater, I was only standing about a metre lower than I had been, but somehow that felt like enough to shrink me down to the size of a beetle. I think it was because it was suddenly so much closer in my sight, but that didnât matter; I felt entirely loomed over.
I could hear their voices in front of me, but since they were turned away, it was voices instead of words. Bastards not being considerate enough to let me, an eavesdropping stranger, overhear their conversation. Any thoughts I had of being able to hear any words were quickly swept away by the next crashing footfall of the titan. I was still clinging to the edge of the crater, but poorly balanced in my weird half-standing position. I toppled very ungracefully, landing square on my butt and feeling all the more stupid for it. Luckily, I was pretty certain nobody would have heard that on account of the general âlandslide-yâ noises that happened with each step; so as I stood and dusted myself off, it was back to pondering instead of panicking. I did notice, a bit disappointingly, that none of them had fallen over, making me the idiot.
The groaning and creaking of the vast sheets of metal were also audible now â a slight flex as the bending of the knee and lifting of the thigh warped the plates of the leg, a little akin to the way a large ship might bend with the pressure of water, or a house might âsettleâ. Only louder. Much louder. And just when that groaning reached a pitch that seemed to threaten serious structural damage, down would come the boot, fast, as if each step was a stomp. The tension would release, the strain handed over to the suspension, and the other leg would repeat.
Things were much brighter as well, the amber lamps of the eyes bathing the plains around us all in a sunrise glow, being diffused by the mists into something soft and ethereal. The light was very much a boon for me at least, and with the shorter distance as well, I could make out more features. I wonât go back into the full hyperfixation description, but the important thing was that it wasnât smooth, unbroken metal all over. There were other bits here and there, which mostly seemed deliberate but still broke up the outline, and were mostly concentrated from about the knee downwards, although some were elsewhere. They mainly consisted of bumps and protrusions, small in comparison but I guessed probably still at least a metre or so in diameter. Some were just flat platforms that stuck out from it, some were hemispheres of the same brass, and some were domes of glass which in many cases were soot-stained and cracked but still gave an indication that things were meant to look out from this being. It may seem obvious enough, and had crossed my mind a little bit (why else would the eyes glow) but this was so far outside of my wheelhouse that I was hardly sure how to comprehend it. These âobservation postsâ were dotted around what weâd probably consider important parts of ourselves, and positioned symmetrically. On knees, shins, the hips, elbows, shoulders, and more. Iâm sure it must have had eyes in the back of its head as well, anything to give whoever the occupants were an all-around view.
Easily the strangest feature revealed in the light though was the arms. Or the arm, I suppose. There were 2 shoulders (as mentioned) which both had something in them, but where the right arm flowed down into elbow, forearm, wrist, hand, and fingers as normal, the left only got as far as the elbow before warping into something altogether different. A vast, tubular construction built in one solid form, consisting of nested cylinders which tapered towards the front, like a stepped cone, but cut at the front, displaying a dark, hollow interior. The widest part of this thing protruded back behind where the arm joined on to it, making the arm seem like the branch growing off the trunk of a yet-mightier tree. Snaking down from beneath the pauldron, and connecting to different positions along its length were thick, heavy-looking cables, dangling with slack I imagined would be needed if this âarmâ moved.
Uncomfortably, nervously, I glanced at my PDS. The only real similarities were the fact that these things both had metal cylinders as part of their construction, but frankly that was enough for the cold certainty of âmagical and dangerousâ to be applied to that arm. Iâd cribbed a lot from old Gnomish tech by that point, and it didnât take much of a leap to piece it together now. This being, this thing, this colossus â it was a weapon.
I know that must come across as a statement of the bleeding obvious, but again, there was nothing like that I had ever heard of. The others clearly didnât know anything either, and I think itâs also important to understand how alien this was to us from a technological perspective. I knew better than most people that the Gnomes had created technology centuries ago that eclipsed what we had now, but I also knew that nearly all of it had either been destroyed during the last War of Light and Dark, abandoned when the Gnomes returned to isolation, or ditched after the peace on account of how it worked. Gnomish tech was advanced, but it was pretty much all for military use: better weapons, better armour, better soldiers. It was potent, but it was a tool of necessity and desperation which came with a cost. At the very least your body, and often your soul too. Harnessing enough of their advances to create just my own hand was an exercise that had taken about a year and which I considered a massive stride in its own right. That was part of why I was so shocked by Gialiâs metal reindeer â the technology to create an autonomous (or robotic) thing like that was unheard of, like making a programmable computer in a world that didnât have electricity (or really even formal logic).
The point is mostly that this giant was pretty much taking a sledgehammer to my understanding of magic, science, and history. If you want an equivalent, imagine that a society or culture, which still exists, invented the technology for teleportation about 1,000 years ago, and then destroyed and buried it about 900 years ago. It would be shocking, wild, and fantastical, but at least if you grew up in a world where from childhood you knew that was true, you would find it normal, and easy to believe, even if the concept was still crazy â how did they discover it, why did they destroy it? Now imagine finding out, first hand, that they had also invented (and then got rid of) time travel. It stacked a new layer of incomprehension on the questions I already had. I could see how knowing how to construct a metallic version of your own race (the Autognomes) would be a first step for creating this, (like how you might see teleportation as a necessary step for time travel), but it really answered nothing, since we still didnât know how theyâd even done the first part. Absolutely crazy days.
We didnât have it back then, but if we did then I would say the feeling was like this: it was as if every Christmas had come at once.