Blindfolded, I allowed Eleanor Whit to guide me through a maze of hallways. As usual, walking blindly caused me to feel temporarily paranoid that I would either walk into some seditious object whose soul purpose is to bruise my shins or find myself standing in thin air like a cartoon before plummeting down an unexpected staircase. However, I trusted Eleanor enough to follow her without having the faintest idea of where we were going.
Suddenly, my unfounded fears became quite founded as Eleanor pushed me into a wall. As I began to protest this breach of trust, she hastily covered my mouth with an insistent hand and impatiently hushed my muffling.When a woman has you pinned to a wall, blindfolded, and gagged, it is best to simply do as she says and not worry too much. She is likely doing it for the best of all possible reasons. After a few moments, she removed her hand from my mouth and allowed me to step away from the wall.
"I'm sorry for startling you, Geoffrey. I heard someone coming, and I would prefer if we weren't seen."
"Why all the secrecy? Is this the point I start to fear for my life?" I joked, addressing the spot that I hoped Eleanor occupied.
"I ought to be very offended at such a suggestion. If you did not look so adorably helpless in that blindfold I would slap you for it." I could hear the smile in her voice.
She continued to guide me through hallways, across rooms, and even down several flights of stairs, a stage of the journey I did not particularly enjoy. Finally we stopped. I heard the clinking of keys, felt a rush of warm air, and whiffed a metallic scent on the breeze. She guided me a few steps forward and closed a door behind me.
"It will be bright," Eleanor warned me, as she gently pulled apart the knot on my blindfold. The fabric slid away, and I stood for a few moments scrutinizing my feet through barely cracked eyelids. The floor was bare cement, unlike the mahogany floorboards and oriental carpets that covered all the other floors in the Guild compound. As my eyes adjusted, I carefully lifted my gaze.
"Whoa!" The sound that actually came out of me was more along the lines of a lobotomized piglet discovering its reflection. However, it is significantly more difficult to find an onomatopoeia for that.
The cause of my idiotic squealing was the sight of a monstrous boiler crowding the back wall of the long, narrow room. The steely maw of its combustion chamber gaped like the mouth of a suffocating fish. It could easily have swallowed four Geoffrey Fishers. The boiler itself squatted over the combustion chamber, slicked with condensation and bulbous like the throat of a croaking toad. It may have been my imagination, but I could have sworn that the floor tilted ever so slightly toward the steaming beast.
After a fraction of a second, I got over myself and took in the rest of the room. This time, I did say "whoa." The walls seemed to be plated in machinery ranging from little doodads to massive thingamabobs and everything in between. They had been arranged like shining Tetris pieces to form solid blocks of metal that fit neatly onto shelves. Filling the middle of the room were four perfectly ordered worktables and several very serious looking devices capable of punching, bending, cutting, drilling, and lord knows what else.
"So," Eleanor prompted, "what do you think?" Until that moment, I had thought it physically impossible for Eleanor to sound vulnerable.
"It's kind of scary," which was certainly true, but not the best thing to say in the given situation.
"Scary," she said. Who knew that just by saying a word, you could give its definition?
"Well, that's not really what I mean. I just thought, that is, the boiler surprised me!" At that moment I almost preferred the boiler to attempting to dig myself out of a quickly growing hole.
"Is that all you have to say?" she growled, though I could hear an edge of hurt behind the anger.
"No! I meant scary in a good way, you know! It's scary how awesome this stuff is." Her brow remained furrowed, clearly unconvinced. I instinctively cringed away from her, despite weighing easily twice as much as her. However, before she could stare me into oblivion, I saw a chance at salvation. "Hey, what does that thing do!?"
I pointed to a cube no larger than the palm of my hand that lay on the closest work table. I could see intricate clockwork laced through it, but could not discern any purpose to it all. Eleanor followed my finger and instantly relaxed from furious spited woman to annoyed woman with an imbecile on her hands. It was an improvement in my opinion.
"This is a side project of mine. He is an experiment in Intelligentia de Machina, or machine intelligence. However, that is not what I am interested in talking about right now." My clever plan worked for as long as it took me to think of it. Ah well. It appeared that all I had left to me was the fail safe every man resorts to once in his life, apologizing by way of self-deprecation.
"I'm so sorry. The thing is, I'm just an inarticulate idiot with a phobia of boilers who really doesn't want you to be angry at me. This place looks amazing, but I don't actually know what I'm looking at. Would you please take pity on me and tell me about it all? I promise I'll learn faster than I did when you taught me about the Guild." Miraculously, she let slip a tiny smile and ceased her glaring.
"I am also sorry," she confessed, "I overreacted. You know that I do not usually lose my temper so easily, but I am so proud and protective of my workshop and everything in it...You are absolutely right. It isn't fair of me to expect you to love it all as much as I do."
"I just need to be properly introduced, is all. Who knows? You might have to fight me one day for the affections of that intelligentia thingy." Laughter trickled out of her as she walked over to the table to pick up the clockwork cube.
"I'm afraid you would not find him a very agreeable lover. He has a tendency toward...shall we say...excitability."
I joined her beside the table, and examined the strange box. "You never really told me what it does."
"In theory, he behaves just like a small animal, learning and growing, as long as I give him new parts to work with. However, he needs retuning. Would you like a better look?" She asked, offering me the compact bundle of metal.
I accepted it (I could not yet bring myself to think of it as a 'he'), and turned it over in my hands until I found a side with a small switch set into it. Curiosity overrode common sense, and I flipped the switch. After all, what was the worst a little cube could do?
A second after flipping the switch, the same side of the cube hinged open slightly revealing two proportionally large glass eyes that peered out through the crack at me. I felt an overwhelming pity for the tiny machine, stuck in a box.
"Geoffrey, flip the switch back right now." That was not a command. It was a plea.
I reached for the switch, but as I did so, the cube rolled itself off of my hand and onto the tabletop. In a flurry of clicks and ticks, it unfolded itself into a tiny mechanical creature complete with spindly arms and legs and a belly full of gears. It would have been cute if not for the fact that it launched itself at my head before I had a chance to duck. It scurried over my head and around my neck while I frantically grabbed for it, slapping myself in the process. Eleanor shot a hand towards it, but it dove down the collar of my shirt and out of reach. As it skittered around my torso, I alternated between accidentally hitting myself in the attempt to catch it and wildly wriggling to shake it loose. All I accomplished was looking silly and possibly inventing a new dance.
Then, the tickling and scratching stopped. I looked about me, but saw no immediate signs of the devil machine. Eleanor help up and hand for silence, and we both scanned the room with our eyes and ears. She pointed towards the left wall, and we both crept towards it. After a few steps, I could hear the spastic clicking and whirring of the cube creature. By the sound of it, it was looking for a way out again, heading ever upwards along a zigzagging path. Finally, it appeared at the top of a shelf. Its tiny head swiveled back and forth, pausing briefly on me, and then Eleanor.
"Magnus, get down from there this instant!" Eleanor demanded. Somehow the thing managed a defiant expression.
"You named him Magnus?"
"He named himself," she muttered to me, not taking her eyes off the disobedient robot, "I think he's overcompensating for something."
Then, Magnus leaped from his shelf, soaring over our heads to land on one of the serious tools. We scrambled after him (I had decided that he had enough of a personality to warrant a gender, even if the personality was that of a defiant, hyperactive puppy.) Every time we closed on him, he bounded to a new spot. He turned as though to leap onto a circular saw cover, but as I slid across the floor to intercept him, he hopped backwards, flipping in the air, and landing on the door handle. For his next trick, he hopped over each table in turn, bee lining for the boiler. As I watched what I expected were Magnus's final moments, a hand shot up from behind the final table and grasped the wriggling automaton. Eleanor stood up from her hiding place and toggled the switch, at which time Magnus snapped back once more into a calm little cube.
"All right, I admit it, " Eleanor gasped as she caught her breath, "it is conceivable for someone to be slightly... intimidated by this place."
