Joyride

Magic & Machines: Joyride
Brandon Morgan

         Dart knew he was going to get in trouble for taking Captain Varis’s hoverjet out for a spin, but this was ridiculous. Trying to keep enough control of the speeding craft to not crash, he swatted at the goblin trying to get a good hold on the handlebars to bite him.  The little bugger disappeared in a shimmer right before his hand could make contact, reappearing about a meter away on the hoverjet’s nose.  Dart stared in amazement at the vicious little blue-green creature as it eyed him with its beady black eyes.  He hadn’t known they could teleport – he hadn’t gotten that far in his few weeks of training at the Border Guard Academy yet.  The goblin opened its mouth and hissed at him, revealing rows of needle-like teeth.  Dart was really wishing that he had already started reading his textbook for the “Magical Creatures of the Border” course right about now.
         Now that a goblin bite wasn’t immediately impending, Dart risked a glance over his shoulder.  The other goblin was still hanging on to one of the tail wings of the hoverjet, unfortunately a safe distance from the twin jet flames roaring out from under the wings.  Dart waggled the tail end of the hoverjet a few times to try and shake him, but the goblin hung on tenaciously with the wicked black claws on each of its four fingers.  It just giggled at Dart’s efforts to dislodge it, grinning madly with its long purple tongue hanging out of its mouth, flapping in the wind.
         Dart turned his head forward again, just in time to see the first goblin make a jump at his face.  Dart reacted instinctively, ducking down quickly, his body motion causing the whole hoverjet to dip with him.  He watched the goblin sail overhead, grabbing desperately for a handhold on the hoverjet, but the dip put it out of the wretched creature’s reach.  As the goblin fell out of sight, Dart saw a shimmer in the air as it reappeared, but it was still a couple of meters behind the speeding hoverjet.  The goblin teleported again, trying to catch him, but reappeared over air again, even further back.  It glided on the fleshy membranes stretched from its arms to its sides, screeching at him as it shrank in to the distance.
         I guess they can’t teleport that far at a time . . . See ya! Dart thought as he kicked the accelerator.  One down, now to get rid of the other one.  Dart glanced at the tail wing, but the goblin wasn’t there.  Before he could even start to puzzle this, a weight latched on to his left boot.  Dart looked down at a maniacal grin dangling from his boot.  The little bastard had crawled under the chassis!  Dart shook his foot, but the goblin had a grip like a vice.
         As the goblin started to make its way up his boot, Dart was already dipping the nose of the hoverjet down, in to the trees below.  He dropped below the forest canopy, keeping up the insane speed, setting leaves and branches on fire from the jets.  He dodged among the trees, leaning his body with the turns, narrowly avoiding obstacles.  Captain Varis was a titan, so the hoverjet was much bigger than what a human should be flying, but he was still handling it better than any of the other cadets he trained with.  What he was doing was extremely dangerous, and would get him severely reprimanded if the Academy ever found out, but he was getting pretty damn annoyed at the fact that there was a goblin hanging from his foot.
         He cut one turn especially close, and at the right moment swung his foot out, putting the goblin in a direct path with a tree trunk.  His muscles strained with the effort pulling the hoverjet in to the tight turn, and he nearly lost control when the extra weight suddenly disappeared from his boot.  When he regained control, he looked back over his shoulder.  The goblin was crouching on a tree branch, hissing at him impotently as he sped away.
         Dart pumped his fist in to the air and whooped.  “That’s right, you creepy little freak!” he yelled back at the goblin.  “Don’t mess with Dart Rodann!”  Still laughing to himself, he turned back around.
         And immediately slammed on the brakes.  Ahead of him was a sharp rise in the forest floor.  He pulled with all his might to try and nose up over it, but he had seen it too late for the speed he was going.  The front of the hoverjet clipped the lip of the hill, the force of the impact sending him flying off the vehicle.  Both Dart and the hoverjet tumbled through the air, landing a few meters away.
         Dart groaned as he slowly got up.  His brownish-red leather flight suit creaked with his painful movements. He shook his head, trying to clear it, and wiped the grit out of his azure-blue eyes.  He was young, barely out of his teens, but that hurt.  When he finally stood all the way up, dirt falling off him, he readjusted his flight goggles that had fallen half way down his face, resting them on his forehead.  He took off his gloves and ran his hands through his short sandy-blond hair, dislodging several leaves and twigs.
         He looked around, getting his bearings.  There were relatively few trees around, making a sort of clearing.  Filling a large portion of the clearing was an enormous gray boulder.  Next to the boulder was the hoverjet, where it had stopped just short of the edge of a cliff.  Lucky him.
         He stumbled over to the hoverjet, still reeling from the crash.  The hoverjet’s engines had shut off automatically without a rider, the metal clicking as it cooled. It was laying upside down, and he righted it and gave it a quick inspection.  Seeing no significant damage to his ride home, he balanced himself on the boulder and looked over the edge of the cliff in to a ravine.  A couple hundred meters down, a river roared with angry white caps.  Appreciating his luck, Dart turned back to the hoverjet.
         The first thing he did was unhook Captain Varis’s sword-arm.  He wasn’t going to get caught unawares by some nasty runt with teeth – oh, the teeth! – again.  He struggled to heft the titan’s sword-arm, but finally managed to pull it free.  The blade was as tall as he was, but it was perfect for the hulking titan it belonged to.  He probably should have thought better than to hitch a ride on a titan’s equipment, but that was something to consider next time.  He checked to see if it was loaded – it was.  He should at least be able to lift the weapon enough to fire off the large caliber rounds if he needed to.  He leaned it against the hoverjet for now, close at hand.
         Next he dug out the Reality Field Generator.  He had heard stories about some of the nastier denizens across the border, the ones you needed more protection than quick wits and a big gun for.  He strapped the bracer with the short cylindrical generator on to his left arm.  He tested it out.  An almost invisible sphere with a radius of about a meter grew out of the generator.  Satisfied, he turned it back off, conserving it for later.
         He looked through the compartments briefly, seeing if there was anything else useful.  Finding nothing, he turned his attention back to the hoverjet.  It was a single-seater, but it was still enormous to accommodate a titan’s bulk.  The only damage appeared to be some dents on the nose.  Both sets of wings were unharmed, and the jet engines were intact.  Everything looked in good shape.
         He straddled the seat, and kicked the ignition.  The jets roared to life – and then abruptly died.  Puzzled, Dart hit the ignition again.  This time the engines just sputtered, and then remained silent.  Cursing his luck, Dart dismounted and opened the case for the main engine.  He squatted down and began poking around the innards of the complex machine.
         ”Alright. Fine.”  He said to himself as he checked connections, bolts, and various other areas of the engine.  “I’m bleedin’ Dart Rodann, isn’t this what I’m good for anyways?  Playing a grease monkey?”  He grumbled irritably as he started disconnecting fuel lines and checking if they were clogged.  He grew more and more frustrated, as his thoughts turned in on themselves.
         This is what made him decide to “borrow” the hoverjet and do some exploring in the first place.  Back at the Academy, he was essentially a glorified mechanic.  He had chosen to attend the Border Guard Academy, rather than join the Machinist’s Guild like everyone expected him to, to avoid exactly that fate.  But he was Dart Rodann, and the Academy handled him with kid gloves, even though he was outperforming every one of his fellow cadets.  They kept telling him he needed more training, that they couldn’t afford to have him get hurt.
         Dart was famous among the Nations.  Early in his adolescence, he had shown exceptional mechanical skill, especially for a human.  Not that humans were bad at engineering, but he was showing more aptitude than most adult dwarfs, who were born with a wrench in hand.  Before long he was building better machines than those available from scratch, and even showing golems a trick or two, and they were made of machines.
         The Machinist’s Guild was enamored with his ability, and he essentially grew up surrounded by Guild members preparing him for their way of life.  All he saw was a bleak future stuck in some garage or factory the rest of his life, so on the day he became a man, he chose the Border Guards.  Oh how the Machinist’s seethed over that.  He derived no small pleasure from that, though he did try to not gloat too openly.
         Unfortunately, life at the Academy didn’t turn out to be the swashbuckling adventure he had hoped for.  The instructors seemed to want to force him in to the same role the Guild had.  The last straw had been when Captain Varis had pulled him from joining a training exercise, asking him to give his hoverjet a tune-up.  Dart certainly did give it a tune-up, and he figured it would only be proper if he tested it out for the Captain to make sure it was quality workmanship.
         Which was another reason why Dart was so frustrated with the broken down hoverjet.  He knew it should be working.  He could damn near take the thing apart and put it back together better blindfolded.  He slammed the engine cover closed, and then kicked it.  He massaged his temples with his thumb and middle finger.  There wasn’t a damn thing wrong with the hoverjet.
         He sighed and leaned up against the boulder, trying to think.  What could be preventing the hoverjet from starting?  Suddenly something in his memory clicked.  It was from a lecture at the Academy.  Magic produced an entropic field, which could actually cause things like chemical reactions and machinery to stop functioning.  The more complex the reaction, the less magic needed to make it fail.  Reality Fields worked the reverse of this, projecting an ectropic field, preventing the wild chaos of magic from affecting reality.
         Dart sighed again, knocking his head against the boulder.  It still didn’t make any sense.  He was only a little ways beyond the Border, nowhere near the point the environment began to have its own residual magic.  And those goblins were nowhere near big enough to disrupt the engine like this, complex as it was.  No, it would have to be something pretty damn big to affect the hoverjet.  And he was alone in the clearing .  . .
         The boulder moved.
         Dart’s heart leapt in to his throat.  He spun around, backing up.  His jaw dropped as he watched the enormous boulder unfold itself, cracks forming along its surface to form arms, legs, torso, and a faceless head.  When it was done unfolding itself, it still stood hunched over, its knuckles hovering close to the ground, giving it the appearance of a statue of a gorilla, very roughly hewn out of stone.  Except it stood 20 meters high.  And it moved.
         Dart stood transfixed for only a moment before he dove for the sword-arm.  He got a grip on the hilt, and began to lift it.  He was too slow.  A gargantuan arm swung down in front of him, knocking the wind from him and sending him sailing across the clearing.  He landed on his back, and it took him a moment before his vision cleared and his body started accepting commands again.  He rolled on to his side and spat out a mouth full of blood.
         He wasn’t positive what it was, but he’d be willing to wager a large amount on the educated guess that this was an earth elemental.  Living stone.  Meaning it had no blood, organs, or any other type of vitals.  Hurting it just pissed it off.  The only way to stop it was to destroy it completely.
Great.  The kind of thing the Guards usually send a tank platoon after.
         He got up slowly, wondering how much more his body could take today.  Somehow he had managed to hang on to the sword-arm, however much that would help him.  He needed a siege weapon.  Just for the sake of it, he reached over and turned on the Reality Field Generator, but he already knew it wouldn’t help him.  Reality Fields only counter magic that isn’t already grounded in reality, like making fire out of thin air.  They held no protection against things that are real.  And rock is about as real as it gets.
         He looked down at the generator for another moment, a sly look creeping into his eyes.
         The elemental was still standing across the clearing, watching him.  When Dart stood up, it began to lumber towards him, its footsteps shaking the ground.  Dart stood his ground, and raised the sword-arm, shakily aiming it.  When the elemental was where he wanted it, he fired.
         The kickback from the large caliber cannon nearly knocked him over.  His ears ringing from the blast, he saw that he had hit his mark.  Half of the elemental’s head was now missing.  The beast staggered for a moment, but seemed unaffected otherwise.  Dart used the opening to dive under its legs, rolling back to his feet and sprinting for the hoverjet, the sword-arm still in tow.
         By the time he reached the hoverjet, he had already unstrapped the bracer with the Reality Field, and he wedged it on to the chassis where the Field would cover the engine, countering the entropic magic field from the elemental.  Hefting the sword-arm on to his shoulder, he jumped on to the seat.  With a forceful kick to the ignition, the engine roared to life on the first try, jets flaring.
         The elemental had turned around, and was now shambling towards him, unconcerned with its missing piece. When it had gotten close to where Dart was, he kicked the hoverjet in to gear, heading straight for the elemental.  At the last moment, he swerved around it.  The elemental swung, but it wasn’t quick enough to catch the speeding hoverjet.  Dart had a clear path to the forest, and safety.
         When he reached the trees, Dart suddenly whipped around, facing the giant once again.  He revved the engine, a look of fierce determination in his eyes.  As the elemental slowly turned back around, Dart floored the accelerator.
         About ten meters before the monster, Dart stood up on the seat of the hoverjet.  In one smooth movement, he kicked the safety disengage and launched himself off backwards from the seat, sailing through the air while the hoverjet continued its trajectory.  Landing on his feet, he leveled the sword-arm and fired, and hit his mark.
         He wasn’t aiming at the elemental.
         The explosion from the hoverjet was tremendous, knocking him from his feet.  The blast echoed across the ravine and through the forest.  Pieces of the elemental rained down, now mostly just gravel.  Panting and half-blind from the explosion, Dart regained his feet slowly.  He stumbled a little bit, stunned.  When his vision and equilibrium finally returned, he looked up at his handiwork.
         It was still standing.  His ace in the hole had failed.
         The blast had taken out a large portion of the elemental, making it almost unrecognizable from what it was formerly, but it still stood, still moved.  Pieces of stone that hadn’t been thrown far by the explosion now floated in the air around the elemental, remnants of the limbs they used to be, but still under the conscious control of the elemental.  Dart had only made it more agile.
         Anger and frustration welled up in Dart, his whole core infused with rage.  This was NOT how it was going to end.  They would NOT stand over his grave, shaking their heads, proclaiming, if only he had listened to us, if only he had stayed in the garage . . . He would NOT be used as an example for generations to come, an example of why you should let others decide your life for you.  Most importantly, he was NOT going to let this stupid creature make a fool of him.
         With a cry of fury, Dart aimed the sword-arm, now light with the adrenaline flowing through him.  He fired all four remaining shells into the center mass of the elemental in quick succession, nearly breaking his shoulder from the kickback. “Stay. Down. YOU. BASTARD!”
         The shells slammed in to the fragmented beast, each one staggering it a bit more.  It had lost a lot of mass, so the shells were actually physically rocking it.  The last round hit it hard enough for it to stumble back a step.  Too bad there was a ravine there.
         The elemental fell backwards, seemingly in slow motion.  It grabbed for purchase, but the ground was too soft, and too much of its weight was already over the edge.  After a moment that lasted forever, it disappeared from view.  Dart could hear the crashes of it falling down the ravine echoed from the far wall, until finally a splash, and then silence.
         Dart slowly lowered the sword-arm, and stood watching the edge of the cliff, trembling as the adrenaline left his system.
         After a few minutes, and no rock monster suddenly rising in vengeance, he suddenly burst out laughing uncontrollably.  He pumped his fist in to the air, yelling his victory.  Then he fell over from exhaustion.
         He wasn’t lying there long, occasionally giggling to himself, when he heard a new sound approaching.  He groaned, not even able to lift his head to investigate.  Until he recognized the sound as jet engines.
         He found new strength in enthusiasm, and leapt up as a Border Guards dropjet settled in to the clearing.  The rear hatch opened, showing Captain Varis.  The titan stepped out, towering nearly twice as tall as Dart.  His reptilian snout and eyes held a stern expression.
         Captain Varis’s imposing stature didn’t faze Dart at all, though.  He whooped, and ran up to the gargantuan officer, laughing giddily.  “Did you see that? Did you see that?!” he managed to get out between panting breaths.  He still somehow had enough energy to do a little victory dance.  Varis’s brow drew down even more.
         “Yes, we saw it from the air.  And what did you learn from this little . . . adventure?”  He asked in his low, growling voice.
         Dart’s new found energy ran out again.  He laid back down on the ground, still with a huge grin on his face.  “That I’m ready be trained just like the rest of the cadets.  Hell, I’m even better than some of the men who have already been through the Academy . . . Oh, and that you need a grenade launcher or something on your hoverjet.”
         Varis cocked an eyebrow.  “You mean the one you blew up?”  Dart just continued to grin at him.  Varis sighed, and his features finally softened.  “Dart, you’re training isn’t different because we think that you’re weak or fragile.  We’re not training you to be like everyone else.  We’re training you to be exactly like you were today.  We have plenty of cadets who can outgun a situation, we need someone who can outthink a situation. 
“You were up against a foe that you were grossly underequipped for, but yet, through your ingenuity, you were victorious.  That’s the kind of Guard we’re trying to make out of you.  One who can adapt, survive, and still claim victory.  Your unique genius is the greatest weapon we’ve ever had, and we mean to wield it well.”
Dart’s grin slowly faded as the words sunk in.  Varis offered out his hand to help him up, and he took it.  Dart mulled Varis’s words over as they returned to the dropjet.
         When they reached the cabin, Dart asked “Wait, this does mean I don’t have to spend all my time in the garage anymore, right?”
         Varis rolled his giant eyes. “We’ll see.  You’re definitely going to be in there until you build me a new hoverjet . . . with a grenade launcher.”