Chapter 6: Chapter 6

Pip plopped onto the floor. Her best pair of shoes, clacking on the metal, was still as unsullied as it'd been when she left the castle. Her dress needed nothing but a light brushing-off to get back into ship-shape.

Clasping her hands together around her summoned Duster, she looked up at her approaching prince and announced, "At your service!"

Apparently Jacob didn't appreciate this, since he shushed her again. Then he plopped down in front of her and took a look around.

The layer of the ship just below deck was all round corridors and pipes. They'd landed in a kind of hub area that branched off—three paths going toward the stern, three paths toward starboard, and two going to the sides. All of them walled with networks of pipes, some wide, some slender and even reaching the width of spaghetti. Intermittent yellow lights, colored by the aetham that powered them, beamed from the corridor ceilings.

They heard the quiet gurgling of the Known World's Fair's inner workings, a very distant chittering, and then a horrific, all-consuming creak.

The ship was reeling. The whole ship was off-balance. Jacob and Pip teetered forward, with Pip losing balance so dramatically that she hopped and bobbed her way into a pipe cluster.

"Ow! How are you even staying on your feet!?" she shouted back at Jacob.

He didn't answer immediately. He'd needed that moment to reason that the ship was careening forward either because the pilot was taking an unexpected detour downward, or because celestial bats had clustered on the ship's stern, massively front-loading it.

Then he told her, "Fighting stance. I ground myself and focus on keeping my legs and my center of gravity steady."

Pip smiled. "Oh! That's not so different from how I balance plates when I set the table. You should teach me sometime."

"Teach yourself!" he said. "I know I had to."

She pouted. "I use powers that aren't even supposed to exist! What do you think I've been doing all this time?"

The earthquake-like shifting of the ship was slowing down. Good. That meant the ship was righting itself and the bats were being scared off, shoved off, or slaughtered.

"Let's move on," Jacob said, setting his eyes on a path toward starboard. "Pip, grab the net and the spear."

She was recovering from the ship-quake, straightening herself out again. "What am I gonna do with them?"

"I'll take them, and when people ask, I'll say you used them."

"Alright."

They made their way down the corridor. Dimly, through copper tints, the colors of flowing magic showed through the pipes on either side. Jacob expected to pass a repair-person or someone of that nature, but besides themselves, the hall was empty. Not that it was quiet. Far from it. Past the ambient noise of the pipes and of mysterious ship workings below the floor, they could hear, louder and louder, bats screeching ahead.

It was clear they'd made it to the end of the passage when the walls got wider and the pipes got vertical. That's right: now it was a maze they had to duck and weave through. No, not a maze...a jungle.

Jacob stepped over and through a cage-like formation of pipes, careful not to step on them. Pip followed his movements exactly. Now they were looking at a tangled field that certainly some employee, somewhere, could make sense of. The pathetic scraps of paper instructions taped to patches of exposed wall tried their best.

Some of those scraps had been torn in half by bats. Because there were lots of bats here, most of them hanging upside-down from the plentiful pipework, snuggling up against each other as if they lived here. Others were flapping their way across. The noise was cacophonous.

Jacob considered whispering to Pip instead of speaking at regular volume, but fuck that—clearly the bats had already noticed them. Even the coziest ones weren't asleep. They could attack, they just weren't choosing to.

"Toadie," he said. "Is it active?"

She answered with a strong nod.

That paralleled the way Persuade worked: the buffs turned on when the goal was being worked toward, turned off when it wasn't. (The Curse debuffs always stayed active.)

Again, its paltry multiplier didn't necessarily make a huge difference, but you know what? Maybe the most important part was that it made Pip happy. A happy Pip was a determined, headstrong Pip, with any chance whatsoever of being viable in combat.

Phew, that was almost sappy for a minute there.

"And you have...that duster. Why?"

"I wanted to be ready."

"No, I mean why wouldn't you go for the Iron?"

Maybe the Duster had a special upside he didn't know about—heavy handle, strange material, an extreme tendency to cause allergies?

"Ah, just for variety. I try to use it instead of dust rags at the castle when I can,...mainly to see if I can get it to do something cool when it hits a high-enough level."

"Pip—"

He stopped himself from saying that weapons didn't work that way, that they didn't evolve. For one thing, Pip probably knew enough about systems to know that much. For another, nobody knew enough about systems to know that much.

"'Pip' what, sir?"

"...Let's hope you're right about it being cool."

"I'll try to bean a bat on the head." She took aim like a ball player, using one straight arm to aim and the other to hoist the duster above her head.

"No!"

She threw the Duster, but it went off the mark and slapped sideways against a pipe that echoed viciously. The Duster disappeared, but it'd roused a number of bats and drawn their attention. A gang of five immediately flew after her.

Jacob, taking a "save yourself" attitude, pushed Pip forward and took as many steps back as he could. He had the kindness to toss her the net and spear, which she waved above her head in the first flush of confusion and fear.

"Aah! Hold on, I can do this!"

The first bat came close enough to crunch down on her head. That was when she swung the net, fast and hard, bringing it crashing down on pipes and rivets.

That made the group scatter, but all too briefly. One flew back for her midsection, its fangs glowing with an electric charge.

"Hah!" she cried, jabbing its belly one-handed with the spear. The tip didn't go in—a single arm wasn't strong enough. The bat kept hurtling forward, followed by another four.

With a hiss, the jaws came closing in.

"Iron!"

She'd summoned it at a critical moment. Metal wedged into the bat's mouth at instant speed, jutting up and through an upper jaw torn bloody beyond recognition. Firework sparks and a wilting shriek followed. The bat fell, but only after Pip shook her Iron, realized the bat wasn't coming off so easily, and unsummoned her weapon.

Now the rest of those bats were, if not frightened, at least wary. They fluttered into high corners, places where pipes bent and zoomed off further into the ship's depths. The rest of the bats were watchful and a touch quieter.

"Ha!" Pip boomed. Her spear and net were on the ground, but the system was the only thing she needed.

Obviously, her next move was to exchange the Iron for the Duster, pick up the celestial bat corpse by the fluffy collar, and plunge the Duster inside.

Jacob cried, "N-n—wha? ...Pip, why are you..."

"I'm grinding for experience," she said, swirling the duster back and forth in the gruesome gut sack.

According to Jacob's rational mind, this shouldn't have worked. Weapons did gain experience through use, it was true, but that use also needed to be rigorous, and to get harder and harder as the weapon's Skill leveled up. After all, you couldn't keep grinding low-level enemies, articles of clothing, or what-have-you your whole life and expect to gain the same benefits from it.

Crucially, that training also had to be relevant. A Morningstar gained levels by bashing people's bones in. A Duster gained levels by dusting. How did Pip expect to gain experience by twisting her feather wand back and forth inside a damp, squelchy, not-at-all-dusty organism?

"Is it...working?" Jacob asked.

She paused and looked off into the distance, checking out her system screens, opening up the Skill's sub-menu. "Nope," she said. Then she tossed the body away—to Jacob, for some reason, like he wanted it. He did not catch it.

One of the bats shrieked over the crowd. It was perched near the ceiling, having flown away from Pip's last attack, but now it was getting ready for another try, flapping its wings and flaring its magiluminescence to show it.

"Shit," Pip grumbled. Her Iron gave off only the faintest trail of steam. "I need more water, prince. Throw me one of those crystals!"

Hell no! he thought.

"You don't need them," he said, trying to keep his cool. "You have the only weapon you need—assuming you're okay with letting the bats get as close as they've gotten earlier. Just cheese it."

"What's 'cheesing it?' Did you make that up? Are you the dumb one now?"

No! he thought a little too quickly and defensively.

"It's when you summon and unsummon your weapon at strategic times. Works great with anything heavy or sharp."

Pip's eyes glimmered with fascination. A new discovery! New, odd, and horrific! "Oh, you're right! I can literally throw this Iron at someone, unsummon it, and keep throwing it again and again!"

"Yeah, but that's much less exploitable than what you just did—"

The bat leaped up with a screech, its wings beating mightily.

"—summoning it at close range. Go!"

Pip shut her eyes tight and threw her Iron-holding arm in front of her face, toward the bat. "Iron Iron!" she cried, not because she had to but because shouting commands felt cool sometimes.

It blipped in and out of existence. Just as the bat's head came close enough to ram her hand, thwack.

The headless body went spiraling down.

"I did it!" she cheered to Jacob. "Only I...I didn't really gain much experience."

"What's your total?"

"884/900 (+1). But sometimes it'll say 'plus one' when really what I gained was a half-point or a tenth-point or even less—"

"I know that part." Anyone who knew about "cheesing the system" was also aware that it awarded almost no experience points. Infamously, there were certain rare cases in which it apparently subtracted points. Jacob hoped that wouldn't happen as a result of Pip using maid tools to do a royal's job.

But maybe killing all the bats in this room would net her a full point? Possibly? Now that Jacob had that fraction 884/900 in his mind, his id desperately wanted to ratchet it up to, at least, a whole number. Sure, he knew it was unlikely and would probably amount to nothing, but it couldn't hurt, right? ...Right?

Pip ran around like a headless chicken, galloping around the pipes while gurgling and flapping her arms to stir the vicious life-threatening bats. All as, at well-timed instants, she called the Iron forth, and back and forth, from her system. This time she beaned them all, not just in the torsos but also in the chests and stomachs, lungs and hearts. Sometimes the guts leaked into the magiluminescence, forming patches of delicious-looking yellow jelly.

At the end of it all, Pip sighed with satisfaction and gave her Iron a sentimental rub. "So much damage, but not a single scratch..." she said with quiet amazement.

"Great," Jacob said. The compliment was short and strained, but not unnoticed. He approached Pip, scanned the blood-covered pipe tangle around them, and concluded that about three dozen corpses were successfully scattered here. "How are you feeling? Fatigued?"

"Just pleased."

"No, focus on the physical. I need to know how your body feels—if you can estimate how far your MP's dropped."

"Oh!" she said, as if it took her body a minute to catch up with her hyperactive brain. "Um...yeah, I do feel slightly dizzy, and my stomach is feeling a lot emptier than before. Not like hungry-empty."

Jacob wanted to say, yes yes Pip, he'd heard about the side effects of lowered MP many times before, and in detail, even. Hunger-adjacent, lack of energy, hollowness of the soul, blah blah blah.

But he moved on. "Not bad enough that you can't continue?"

"Mm-mm. Not at all."

"I'll ask a more specific question: if you had to guess how many more times you could summon Iron...?"

"I dunno, like, hundreds?"

You are reading story The Maid Got My System at novel35.com

Jacob sighed through his nose. "No, that doesn't count as an answer, but I can tell I won't get anything better."

This was why it paid to keep an approximate running total in the back of his mind. If three dozen bats were lying dead, and all had been pulverized, the math there was easy. Just add the kills she'd make later tonight, and if she wipes out, you've got her MP capacity.

A path went forward and a path went back to where they came, but...if they kept on toward starboard, would there be any more bats to fight? A hand cupped over the ear suggested that nearby there were none. Jacob wasn't sure of the best path to take next until he heard the faintest tooth-gnashing of bats coming from what seemed to be a totally blocked-off chamber. Taking a closer look at what parts of wall were exposed behind the humming pipes, Jacob found the edges of another round hatch, this one about eight feet in diameter.

It was hard to get his arms around the latch, considering all the copper tubes in the way, but soon he was able to wriggle his arms awkwardly through, unlatch, grab on and pull.

The door could only move so far from the wall before it bumped into pipes and went still. Jacob and Pip now looked into a crescent-shaped crevice of darkness.

"Want me to clear the vines away for you?" Pip said. "So it'll be easier to climb in? ...Oops, I meant pipes. Sorry, I got confused."

"Pip, what is with your abstract thinking?"

Though he would never have admitted it, Jacob saw a pinch of logic in her reasoning there: why would a door that looked so imposing, so essential, be buried behind some awkward-ass pipes that Jacob and Pip had to jungle-gym their way through just to enter? Why, unless those same pipes could be conveniently moved like vines?

In stark contrast to Pip, his conclusion was simply that the geometry of the ship was hostile to employees. Plus, the thing was so much larger than any ship made before that it was basically a prototype. No time for ergonomics yet.

Wedging themselves through the door, wriggling into the dark, they could make out nothing besides glints of yellow from bats and a single, distant aetham lightbulb that seemed to be coming from yet another door. Though they had to move slowly in the big dim room, at least there were fewer odd tubes in the way for their feet to bump on.

The chattering of celestial bats was constant and omnipresent.

"Follow me," Jacob whispered to Pip. "hands on my shoulders."

Pip gently conga-line'd him.

They moved ever so slowly, ears alert for any change in the whirring of this room, eyes open to scan any obstacle that might be between them and that sliver of aetham...

"Stop," Jacob said.

Pip did.

"Hand me the Duster."

She summoned it, and did.

Jacob felt it all over. Its feathers were made of the softest duck down, and its handle, lightweight yet ornately patterned, was lacquered wood. He wobbled it, twirled it for a second.

Yep, as a weapon, this one was absolute shit.

"Can you summon both at once?"

"The Duster and Iron? Yeah."

"In the same place?"

"...But two things can't be in the same place. Where's your abstract thinking?"

"Yes they can. It happened when you beaned those bats."

(Ugh. He wasn't supposed to say 'beaned.')

Another thing unknown to the history books was the idea of one system bestowing multiple weapons. You could get a Sword or a Shield, despite how unfair that sounded to the poor souls using shields as makeshift bludgeons.

Really, it was tricky to get system weapons to materialize in solid matter at all—summoning them into oncoming projectiles and the faces of high-speed foes being notable exceptions, quite possibly errors. Even summoning them in water was hit-or-miss.

But a weapon inside a weapon, both summoned same-speed same-priority? It could happen.

Jacob led Pip closer to the open door, saw by its light that it could be shut in a hurry. "Try it now," he said, then turned around and tried to get a good look.

Holding both hands around the same parcel of air, Pip brought an Iron and a Duster into the world. They overlapped each other before exploding.

"Aah!" Pip cried, hands immediately guarding her face.

Jacob groaned as a piece of shrapnel hit his temple. He charged into the doorway and shut it just as a bunch of bats rose up and dive-bombed the weird noise and its weirder noisemakers.

The door didn't seal, but it would do. Bats threw themselves at it, but they'd never get through with that strategy, since the door opened outward, not inward.

"Ow," Pip said. She licked a cut finger. Jacob's temple was bleeding too.

Putting the weapons inside of each other had created, essentially, a portable supply of shrapnel. It'd sent metal parts—along with wood and feathers, but the metal was the star here—zooming in all directions. No single chunk was all that big, but if one happened to angle into an eye? Damn would that hurt.

Meanwhile, the room they'd ended up in actually resembled a normal office, on another planet.

A wood-paneled refrigerator sat in a corner, parallel to a counter that held a pitcher of water, scattered mugs, tea bags, a pitcher-sized machine beside the tea bags, and a gravy-boat of creamer too old and filmy to safely drink.

When Jacob and Pip pried the fridge door open, they found—aside from a crowd of sleeping bats—perfectly air-conditioned raw meat and bat-nibbled fruits. Besides the whiskey flask that the bats had knocked over, nothing was dribbling. The carriage-sized icebox at Castle Alzeny was always dribbling coolant, and while it kept food fresh, its smell was so far-reaching that even Jacob, who rarely set foot in the kitchen, could describe it in depth.

"Pip, Iron those bats," he whispered as he took his head out from the glowing fridge interior. (That was another thing: the one at home didn't glow.) "And by that, I mean, try to literally iron one. Press it against the fridge sides. There's water on the counter."

"Got it! Um, how do I kill the rest?"

"Startle them, they'll fly at you."

She gave him a thumbs-up.

He passed her the pitcher as his gaze drifted to the other objects here. Several mugs, including one about as big as a bowl that seemed the perfect size for a...a very broken tea machine. It had come apart at the top, looking like a busted alien egg. Splotchy streaky tea stains decorated the rim and side. Squinting with two parts disgust and one part curiosity, Jacob touched the hot plate at the bottom, tried to suss out how it worked.

Yet he had barely spared a thought for the strangest element in the room: the part with the one employee...

Tidal waves of steam and a sizzling, barbecue-like sound snaked out from the fridge.

"Experience?" Jacob said.

"Yes! A lot of it!"

"Lower your voice!" he hissed.

...yes, the one employee, alongside the glaringly bright light source that was the focal point of the whole damn room. From wall to wall stretched a glass tube full of lava-lamp effluvia. Huge bubbles of magic, discretely separated into orange, yellow, and blue, rushed through a fluid like milky water. Their bright colors, oddly soothing to the two newcomers, flickered across the face of a lone employee, who didn't seem to be "soothed" so much as "in a trance-induced waking coma."

If the hum from this tube sounded a tad different, that was only because the tube was far bigger and the employee was also moaning.

He was bent over the tube. His hands were splayed out on its glass. Food and drink sat on a desk next to him, but were nearly untouched. What caught Jacob's eye immediately about that desk was the notepad, so he walked slowly over to the worker, scrutinizing him up and down, for several seconds, just to make sure he was still alive, and then he took the papers.

"Eh," the employee said. It seemed like the prelude to a "hey that's mine," but nothing followed it up, not even a turn of the head.

Jacob leafed through as Pip popped her head over his shoulder. Only a few pages of this legal pad had been written in, but he had a feeling it would be well used up by the end of this trip.

The front page read:

“Abnormalities
—
8:24 Too large
8:27 Outsize lump of hair
9:02 Novam bubble
9:17 Glass fragments
9:35 Rat
9:48 Rubber band
9:59 ???”

...and on and on in the same fashion. Every two hours, a line break would appear and a new person's handwriting would begin. And what about the "novam"...?

The worker interrupted his train of thought by managing to speak. "I've had a good run the past hour," he said, unmoving. "No nothing."

Jacob asked, "What do you do?"

"Hi!" Pip blared. She curtsied even though the worker may as well have been blind. "You look like you need some help, badly! Can we—"

"That's nice of you," he droned, "but I can't let you do that. I have to watch for abnormalities."

Pip started forward. "Maybe just a—"

"No," Jacob said, holding his arm out so that she bumped against it. "Wait."

He asked the man, "It isn't just you, is it?"

"No, there's other rooms." He jerked his head sideways, indicating that further into the ship, there were more chambers much like this.

"Do you enjoy it?" Pip said cautiously.

"Honey, does it look like I'm enjoying it? No. But it has to be done, I take pride in it."

Didn't look like it.

"But what is it?" Jacob asked, making his tone deadly serious, trying to intimidate him into a straight answer. He got close and peered into his eyes, but the pipe-watcher didn't meet his gaze.

"Please don't make me turn my head, man." After a pause: "I'm not just watching, I'm casting."

Through his fingers streamed a near-constant flow of commands for the magic within to activate and move.

Running the skyship's inner sanctum didn't take machinery. Why would it? Machines didn't cast magic. Humans did.

Jacob considered telling the man that even before this conversation began, his shoulder had been bleeding out. The wound wasn't dripping as badly as it could've been—electricity from the bat fangs had partly cauterized it—but "not as bad" doesn't equal "good."

Instead, figuring that the shock upon learning about the injury might jolt him out of his work, Jacob whispered to Pip, "He needs unbelievable focus. Don't touch him."

A guilty look overcast Pip's face...and it threatened to infect Jacob too. He felt a twinge of shame, as a prince who had, in fact, managed a few acts of minor heroism in his past. He simply didn't like to talk about it, didn't like to brag, didn't want to draw that kind of attention to himself. Never could be the best at it.

They had to leave.

***

Total Dusters cast: 7
Total Irons cast: 57
Total celestial bats killed: 52
Pip's subjective report of her current MP levels (as a reply to the question, "On a scale from one to ten, how full does your soul feel?"): 2.5/10

If we pretend Pip started with: 1000 MP
Then let's say one Iron roughly costs: 12 MP
And a Duster also costs: 12 MP
Putting her at around: 256/1000 MP

The effect of Toadie: totally inconsequential.

Oh, but at least Pip's Iron leveled up.

"17/1000 EXP on a Level 9 Iron, and...it says I can now use Ironing Board!" she said as they descended metal stairs, going from the land of industrial magi-sewage toward a dinner they were both craving.

"Hooray," Jacob murmured.

Hooray! cheered the numbers-loving part of his mind.

You can find story with these keywords: The Maid Got My System, Read The Maid Got My System, The Maid Got My System novel, The Maid Got My System book, The Maid Got My System story, The Maid Got My System full, The Maid Got My System Latest Chapter