False was just standing there, staring at the flames that engulfed the bridge. Jimena could see her eyes were vacant, like they were seeing something no one else could. False slowly smiled a manic grin, but she still wasn't responding to the tongues of fire that stretched toward her. I've got to get her! Jimena ran forward and dragged her away from the fire, while Shelby dropped the rest of the iron she carried to grab her wand and put the flames out. As soon as the last glow of the dying embers receded, False came to. She blinked, looking confused.
"What were you doing?!" Shelby gasped. "You nearly got singed!" False looked at her hands. "Was I?" "Yes, you were," Shelby said. False frowned and looked at the bridge, or what was left of it. The smell of burnt wood wafted over to them from it. The bridge wasn't entirely there anymore. From the edge where the zeppelin parked all the way to the middle, the wood had been reduced to ashes and completely gone.
"I need a new bridge," False said. "Understatement," Jimena said. "We need to get over there first," Shelby pointed out, picking up her iron again. Luckily, False was still wearing her elytra, and Shelby's broom had room for two, so the three girls flew over the smoking gap to the ground.
"I have a spare shulker box you could borrow," False told Shelby, watching the witch try to carry all the iron she'd bought. "Oh, thanks, that'll make things a whole lot easier," Shelby confessed. False gave her a purple shulker box and after packing up all the iron, the witch said 'goodbye' and flew away on her broom. Jimena turned to False. "False? What happened back there? With the fire?" False blinked a couple of times. "I... don't remember..." She said vaguely. Jimena frowned. She had a nagging feeling that what False was saying wasn't necessarily true. Now the question is, what is False hiding?
"So uh, has anything happened while I was at Tumble Town?" False asked. She's changing the subject. "Well..." Jimena was about to tell her about the voice, when something seemed to silence her. She felt an uncomfortable urge to not say anything to False about the voice. At the same time, her ear prickled, and she could almost hear someone whispering to her. Shh...
"Nothing," Jimena blurted, feeling tongue-tied. False looked at her, a flicker of suspicion in her eyes. False is so paranoid; what does she think of me right now? "How did your meeting with the sheriff go?" Jimena asked, trying to sound casual. "You're right; he's nice," False answered. "Kept offering to do things for me to make up for his outburst. I think he's okay."
"That's nice." Was all Jimena could think to say. She looked back at the burnt bridge. "When we rebuild that, we need to make it non-flammable." "I think copper would look nice," False said, eying the buildings around them. "It would match. And it's sturdy and non-flammable." She paused, thinking of the materials she would need. "We'd need to wax the copper so it won't rust. How much wax do we have?"
"I'll check," Jimena said, running off to the storage room. It was built even deeper into the mountain than most of the other buildings in Cogsmeade, for security. False didn't want to be stolen from. However, it meant that the storage room was a little harder to get to. The entrance was so sunken into the cliffside that when a recent cave-in brought some rocks crashing over it, it was now partially hidden from view and also a bit of a squeeze to get in safely.
Jimena was slightly surprised to feel something bouncing in her pocket as she ran, but then remembered the candle Shelby had given her. I hope you work. I really don't need another candle otherwise. You're still pretty, though. Jimena slowed to a stop as she spotted the crack in the mountainside, lit up by a singular redstone lamp hooked to the rock wall. She entered through the hole sideways, tiptoeing around the large rocks until she hit a polished iron door with a rusted lock. Jimena reached to her belt and unhooked a copper keyring off it. False had eventually given her the emergency keyring with keys to all the major buildings in Cogsmeade, so that the girl could get around the place by herself without having to rely on the empress for entry.
After three tries, she found the right key and unlocked the door. As soon as it was opened, it triggered a redstone signal that turned on several lamps inside the massive storage room. As the lights came on, Jimena could clearly see the rows and rows of chests and barrels and shulker boxes arranged on labelled shelves depicting what they held. She turned to the right and watched the signs to see which one of them said 'w'.
After a few minutes, she found the row she was looking for, and a chest labelled 'wax' was the first on the shelf. She opened it, and was disappointed to find out that there was only a quarter stack of wax left. Doublechecking, she searched the next two chests nearby, but they were likewise lacking wax. They would need to get more. Where would I get more wax from? Then Jimena wondered, and then remembered. Shelby's words echoed in her mind. That place is all about the sun and sells honey and beeswax and golden carrots too, I think.
Jimena grabbed the remaining wax and left the storage room. When she returned to where the bridge was supposed to be, she found False scribbling notes on blueprints and planning out how she was to build the new copper walkway. Jimena carefully walked around the piles of torn scrap paper that had somehow already sprung up in the short while that she had been away searching in storage.
They were mostly diagrams about bridge placement; like how angled the walkway should be, and where to place supports. There were also a couple of scrapped blueprints with large 'x' marks inked on them, as well as lists listing the costs of materials and where she was to obtain materials from. There was even a whole long sheet of paper that was filled up with only complex geometrical math equations. False works fast...
"We're running out of wax," Jimena informed her. False looked up, slightly startled and tense, but relaxed when she saw it was just Jimena. "Sorry, I zone out when I plan builds like this. It's really satisfying, figuring out how a build could come together, and I get lost in it." Jimena wasn't sure she got it. She hadn't found anything yet, any hobby or pastime, that got her lost in thought like that. But she could imagine how it felt. I probably had a hobby like that, that made me so happy to get engrossed in, before I lost my memory. Jimena shook her head. She should stop obsessing over her lost memories. It wasn't like they were coming back any time soon.
"Wait, you said we're running out of wax?" False suddenly asked, comprehending what she'd just said. Jimena nodded and passed over the wax she'd brought from the storage room. False counted it, and then frantically searched for a relevant paper to scribble down on. She found a suitable sheet and noted the number, then started manically calculating how much wax she needed. Jimena just watched her scurry around the piles of papers, doing her thing. It was oddly engrossing to simply watch her work out solutions to problems in her own technical minded way. False finally stopped moving and frowned.
"We're lacking. We don't have enough to seal up all the copper." "We could go to Dawn," Jimena suggested. "Shelby told me that empire sells beeswax." False nodded. "Do you mind going to trade for me? I need to stay here and figure out some kinks," She glanced at the pile of messy notes, which definitely needed some serious sorting out. "I'll need to borrow your elytra." Jimena said. False passed it over and Jimena put it on. "Don't worry, I won't lose it in the deep dark this time!" False nervously laughed.
---
Gem hummed as she flitted over to the coastal areas of Dawn, a flowerpot with a flower in one hand and a watering can in the other. She headed towards her greenhouse, which despite its name, was more yellow than green. But 'yellowhouse' didn't have the same ring. Technically, though, it was mostly made of glass, which had no color. But 'transparenthouse' sounded even worse, and if you wanted to argue, the most of glass that made it up was tinted white, so it was translucent and not transparent. But the name 'white house' in context of a building was already taken, so the massive building was wrongly dubbed a greenhouse anyway.
The house by the seaside was a place that Gem liked to visit all the time. It was pretty, with stained glass windows framed by spruce wood that had vines and leaves crawling down its sides. It was even prettier on the inside, with flowers and plants sitting in pots and growing freely in the natural dirt floor, surrounding a tree that had sprouted up in the middle of the house. The air was filled with the scents of pollen and spores that drifted from the many flowers, flowing with the breeze that drifted in through vents in the ceiling.
Gem was glad that she had to visit often anyway, due to her chores. Half her bees lived in the greenhouse, in hives that hung from the great tree, producing honey that wouldn't be turned into beeswax like they were at Gem's barn. Instead, the honey was collected and bottled to be sold as a sweet drink.
Those bees were the main reason that Gem visited the greenhouse weekly. She had to water the plants so the flowers would give the bees a constant supply of nectar and pollen to gather. And then the bees would be able to produce the honey that Gem was supposed to collect every week. And then she could process the honey and sell it to make money. So tending to the needs of the greenhouse saved Dawn's economy from crashing.
"Hello, bees!" Gem greeted, and the insects immediately flew toward her. They hummed and zigzagged around her head, buzzing loudly. Gem knew what a happy bee looked like, and today the hives were full of happy bees. Happy to see me. "I'm happy to see you too! Look, I've got a present for you!" She held up the flowerpot that she'd brought, which had three flowers planted in it, two alliums and one lily of the valley.
The bees buzzed and examined the buds closely. "I was clearing out a section of grass to build a new house on, and I had to save these before they got flattened," Gem explained to them. The bees somehow understood what she was saying. Gem wasn't entirely sure how. "I decided to plant them in the greenhouse, so you've got new flowers to harvest nectar from!"
Gem watered the soil until it was nice and wet, and then she got to work repotting the plants. She carefully dumped out the soil with the flowers, untangled the roots, and then replanted them at various points around the greenhouse. Gem stood up, proud of her work. The thing with Dawn was, it had a lot of flowers growing naturally around its lands.
It wasn't a bad thing, if anything it made the place more beautiful, but now Gem had to spend extra time saving the flowers whenever she needed to expand her empire. She didn't mind, though. She liked gardening. And the bees liked her gardening too, apparently, because they instantly started zigzagging around the flowers she'd just planted. Gem smiled, glad that they were happy.
The princess of Dawn was distracted by the sound of an elytra being used in the sky above her. She didn't have extraordinary hearing, but the elytra sounded distinctly mechanical, with metal chinks clanking against each other as it flew. Gem thought that maybe it was False's elytra. She'd heard that Cogsmeade was a steampunk empire. Well, I wanted to be friends if she ever came here, time to meet her. Gem said her farewells to the bees and left the greenhouse, looking for the owner of the mechanical elytra. She soon found the girl landing next to a tree, watching the birds and butterflies fly away from her.
Gem frowned. Is that False? Something about her seemed... odd. The newcomer had raven-black hair for one thing, and Gem was pretty sure False was a blonde, though they'd only ever met once, at the campfire when they all started their empires together, so she could be mistaken. Just then, she heard Gem's footsteps approaching and turned around, giving the sun princess a good view of what she looked like.
She wore a simple off white dress with rolled-up sleeves and a miniskirt that revealed pale yellow stockings. A copper watch ticked faithfully away on her wrist, matching the copper buttons on her white corset. A leather satchel hung by her side, made of the same material as her simple brown boots. Her hair was cropped short, not quite reaching her shoulders, with bangs long enough to cover her amethyst-purple eyes.
It was those eyes that really struck Gem. They looked like they were watching her every move, and not in a friendly way. It was the eyes that made her remember. Gem knew the girl. What is she doing here?!