<h4>Chapter 678: Clockwork Dream</h4>


    ——————————


    After the rough arrival at Clockwork City and running first into Jon Dare and his two newpanions, Kota and Ram, Glymet and Lah were led by the three to a ce of hiding where Jon referred to as "his toy house".


    "Amazing, isn''t it?" Jon spoke as he pridefully showed off his part of the dumpster.


    "It is decent, as little as decent goes." Lah said as she walked past them and found a piece of furniture that looked soft enough toy on, "Azura! I''m all beat up!"


    "Refreshment?"


    At this point, the Factotum, which is one of Jon''spanions, approached Lah with a canister in his hand. His voice was what can be expected from a robotic being except for the fact that it sounded young, too young to be anyone mature but more like the voice of a child despite its adult-sized body.


    "Is that water?" While trying to hide her thoughts about that Factotum, Lah looked closely at the canister and seemed agreeable, "I can use some water."


    "Oh!" The Factotum, however, became disappointed all of a sudden, "It''s… … didn''t mean… anything." And he moved away.


    "I said I would drink water." Lah was somewhat taken aback by the behavior of the automaton.


    "Oh, that''s not water." Jon interfered in their conversation at that point while he was offloading the monster bodies off the cart that was being pulled by Kota.


    "It is not?" Lah frowned.


    "Yeah. There is no running water in Clockwork City, not in this area at least." Jon said, "Ram here thinks that everyone and everything must get oiled thoroughly for their limbs to keep functioning. He almost poured some in Kota''s mouth when he was asleep."


    "That''s unfortunate." At this point, Glymet participated in the conversation as well, "So, you''re Jonhild son of Jonrad, the one I heard so much about."


    Glymet offered a handshake.


    "And you''re Glymet, my father''s friend." Jon replied and returned the handshake, "For the first time, I''m not disappointed in a friend of my father."


    "You sound just like him." Glymetughed.


    "Nope! Now I''m totally disappointed." Jon looked away and withdrew his hand.


    "Hey, Jon. You said you were here for 5 days, right? Where is Swims-at-Night? The Argonian that arrived here with you." Lah asked.


    Jon threw another monster on the ground and helped Kota pull the cart away before returning to Lah.


    "Large for an Argonian, crafty, deep voice, like to steal things?" Jon asked.


    "That''s him." Lah and Glymet replied.


    "Sadly, he is held captive by Mecinar and his goons." Jon said with a long sigh.


    "You didn''t free him?" Glymet asked.


    "Aside from being immersed in research and scouting the city, the ce around the Brass Fortress, I haven''t achieved much." Jon replied with a regrettable tone in his voice as he took off his gloves and his helmet.


    Everything in his surroundings was made of scrap and the situation he seemed to be in wasn''t what to be expected of the usual Jon Dare.


    "Jon, what happened during the past 5 days?" Glymet asked.


    Now that they started to head down with questioning in this direction, Jon seemed a little bit annoyed and dejected.


    "Mecinar was right." Jon said.


    "About?" Lah sat straight and asked.


    "I had met Mecinar three times before. We always ended up fighting." Jon said, "Back then, he told me that because I am in Skyrim, my turf, he couldn''t really do much against me. But now, I am in his yground."


    "He defeated you?" Lah asked.


    "What? No! I kicked his ass for the fourth time just alright." Jon said with total ease, "The problem now is that he is hiding in the Brass Fortress where I can''t reach him. I tried to invade the ce twice but I couldn''t even scratch the defense of that thing."


    "That doesn''t seem like it is all that is troubling you." Glymet said.


    "Yeah. I don''t know what it is or how he does it but I suspect that Sotha Sil has left behind some beefy Defense System in the city. Not only can it stop me from breaching the fortress, but it is also keeping an eye on my movements and keeps overheating the Magicka around me."


    "How is that?" Glymet asked.


    "It is like instead of walking on normal ground, one is walking in a deep pit of tar." Lah said, "I''ve read about the applications of Magicka Heat Wave attacks."


    "Very annoying." Jon sighed, "But it''s all good and dandy out here. My boys Kota and Ram are here with me and we''re having fun tinkering things around."


    Jon pointed around his garbage dumpster which looked like a scrapyard and a workshop where he had tons of machines and monsters lying around. Everything looked like a mess but just in the middle of it all, it seemed that Jon had constructed a cottage from scrap which looked annoyingly simr to the Cottage of Alfe Fyr, the grand sorceress that sent Glymet and Lah here.


    "Those things…" Glymet spoke while he was focused on the monsters that Jon just offloaded, "… they are the makings of Sotha Sil?"


    "What? The Abominations? Come on, of course not." Jon denied that as if it was the most obvious thing.


    "Abominations?" Lah reacted, "Never heard about that. There is no mention of them in the books."


    "Because that''s the name I gave them." Jon replied, "And the reason they never appear in any book is that they only started appearing four days ago."


    "Meaning?" She asked.


    "When I arrived here, Mecinar was already setting his ns in motion and in order to keep me from getting to him, he is sending hordes and hordes of those… abominations." Jon replied.


    "But… these things… Some of them look like people." Glymet noted.


    "That''s because they are… were, I mean." Jon couldn''t help but shake his head with regret.


    "Mecinar is using people in this… sickening thing?" Lah asked with a horrified face.


    "Yes. They are a byproduct of machinery and biological alchemy. He made living people into this. But…" Jon halted his words and approached one of the tripedal corpses before making a cut over its chest and extracting something from inside.


    "No way!"


    Glymet and Lah were even more freaked out now.


    "Yes. ck Soul Gems." Jon nodded.


    The only type of Soul Gems that can harvest the living souls of Humans, Elves, and Beastfolk, the ck Soul Gem. It means that every Abomination they took down was fueled and powered by someone''s life.


    Just an hour ago, they had put down around a hundred of them, for a hundred to be made, a hundred souls had to be killed.


    "Mecinar is killing the people who live in the Brass Fortress. There is a poption of a few thousand over there and they are thest of Sotha Sil''s worshippers who survived for the past 200 years after his death." Jon exined, "First, he started with the ones that lived outside the fortress, they were nomads known as the Tarnished. Once he killed most of them, he invaded the city via secret routes. Among those Tarnished, I was only able to save Kota over there."


    Jon said while pointing at the small-bodied Argonian that was ripping the ck Soul Gems of the Abominations'' chests.


    "Isn''t he just a child to be doing that kind of thing?" Lah asked.


    "A child?" Jon was taken aback, "No, he''s… weird, even by my standards."


    "That tells a lot."


    "I''m not sure about his age but he is surely an adult. He''s just a midget. As for his other mood swings, he can be very different with each form." Jon exined.


    "How so?"


    "Well, he can be different as if having many personas depending on what he does. Kota is kinda goofy but he''s the one that talks to other people. There is this cranky person that he has when I give him a task and another persona thates up when he tastes liquor. It is all a Dissociative Identity Disorder but I seemed to have made it worse when I gave him my blood once."


    "You gave him…" Lah halted for a while looking at Jon with narrowed eyes.


    She is one of the few who are aware of Jon''s secret as a Dragonborn and with Glymet present, she was acting a bit weirded by how Jon would just give his Dragon blood away.


    "He was bleeding out, that''s how I saved him. After doing so, he started to have this persona called Dragon that suddenly makes him like a big Behemoth. Weird, right?" But it seemed Jon didn''t take a hint and kept exining.


    "d to see the son has taken after his dad''s dragon obsession." Glymetughed from the side whilementing on Jon''s statement about causing Kota''s Dragon persona by his blood.


    "I know, right?" Jon took it for augh, "But speaking of children, that guy over there is certainly a child."


    Jon then pointed at Ram, the Factotum that was standing ideally while doing nothing.


    "The Automaton?" Glymet looked closer at Ram.


    "Yeah. Weird story actually. I was exploring the surrounding area on my second day and I stumbled on a ce crawling with Abominations. It seemed to be the first location of Mecinar hit. Over there, I found a Factotum that was out of service and it wasn''t powered by any Soul Gem whatsoever. There wasn''t even a ce to insert one but all I found on him was a memory crystal."


    "What for?" Lah asked.


    "Here''s the crazy part." Jon got closer to Lah and Glymet, "Memory Crystals can contain memories of the past but that one carried something I couldn''t fathom, to be honest. Once I fixed the Factotum''s power circuit, it started behaving and speaking in a weirdnguage. I had to polish my Dunmeri (Dark Elvish) just a little bit and he was speaking a very old dialect from Vvardenfell."


    "And?"


    "From what I could gather, he is the son of an important person. He was diagnosed with a rare condition and was dying so his father called upon a friend of his, whose name was Sotha Sil, to save the child. Sotha Sil managed to backup the child''s psyche on a Memory Crystal. There was no record on the Crystal that it was activated before I powered it but when we first spoke, Ram told me something very… very strange."


    "Don''t keep dragging." Lah beckoned Jon to keep going.


    "He told me that his kind is at war with my kind and he will ask his father to spare and reward me if I take him to his home city at Vvardenfell."


    "Hold on, hold on, hold on!" Lah called for a timeout, "This doesn''t mean… wait wait wait… give me time to catch up."


    She seemed totally freaked out about what she just heard while Glymet was slowly trying to pick up the pace behind her.


    "So you''re saying that the psyche in the automaton belongs to a child from the Dwarves? The race that went extin…"


    ""Shush!"" Both Jon and Lah shushed Glymet.


    "Oh…" Glymet realized that Ram is not aware of the fact that the Dwemer,monly known as the Dwarves or the Deep Elves, are no longer in this world.


    "Plus, it wasn''t just the Dwemer that were at war with the Nords at that time. There was also the Chimer." Jon said.


    "That''s two races that have gone extinct." Glymet whispers.


    Much like the Dwemer, the Chimer lived above thends of Vvardenfell and weremonly known as the Changed Elves. Unlike the Dwemer that poofed out of existence during the war with the Nords at the Red Mountain Vvardenfell, the Chimer changed their worship from the Trinity of Azura, Boethiah, and Meph to the Tribunal of Almalexia, Sotha Sil, and Vivec. This led them to be cursed by Azura for their skin to be gray and their eyes to be red which are the characteristics of today''s Dunmer, the Dark Elves, the people of Lah.


    So whether Ram is a Dwemer or a Chimer remains uncertain.


    "Why can''t you guess whether he was a Dwemer or a Chimer?" Glymet asked.


    "Language barrier. I can cast Linguistic Comprehension on a human or a book but not on aplex machine like that." Jon replied.


    "This is shocking." Glymet said and let out a sigh, "Sadly, this problem will be on your hands. We''re here for Swims-at-Night and once we''re done, we''ll scurry our way out of this ce. I suggest that youe with us when we find him."


    "That will be moreplicated than you think." Jon sighed with a tired face, "There is a reason why people can''t simply teleport in and out of this ce."


    "It is another realm, we get that." Lah said.


    "If it was only that simple." Jonughed, "You know what Clockwork City is, right?"


    Both Lah and Glymet nodded. Earlier before they met Jon, Lah exined to Glymet that this doesn''t exist in the same Time and ce as Nirn but still exists within the physical reality. Still, it is known as a Metaphysical World or a Metaphor made Reality.


    "If that''s the limit of your knowledge, then you simplyck understanding." Jon said, "You need to know what this world is so that you can understand how to navigate it."


    "Alright. We''re listening." Glymet sat down beside Lah.


    "First, there is a theory about the stability of Realty. Simply think of it as if worlds branch from one another, a branch world is less real than a real-world but it is still real nheless.


    While we can''t imagine grades for the word "Real" or how one thing can be more real than another, you can simply imagine it like the difference between Reality and Dreaming. We can''t imagine how a world from a Dream can be real but if it ever is, it would be branched from the world of the Dreamer.


    This also doesn''t rule out the fact that a dream can happen inside a dream so on and so forth. What we need to understand is that each Branch World depends on its Origin World to anchor it to its own reality."


    "So that''s what Clockwork City is?" Glymet asked while being bored with the exnation.


    "I don''t know." Jon replied, "It is just a theory that we have no evidence for. But Clockwork City has a physical anchor to Nirn rather than just some Dream-like state of imagining or whatever, maybe an Artificial Dreaming machine or whatever."


    "You mean the Clockwork Globe, the device that was thought to contain this city." Lah asked.


    "Correct." Jon nodded.


    The Clockwork Globe is a physical representation of Clockwork City that exists within Seht''s Vault under the city of Mournhold in Morrowind. No one knows what the Globe does but Jon had a theory.


    "Say… we know that to enter Clockwork City, one must be scaled to a very small size in order to physically ess it but what if that was falsified by the ignorance of the masses and minor misconceptions. Say… rather than being minimized, we were turned into Information!" Jon said with a mad glint in his eyes


    "I''m sorry, what?" Lah narrowed her eyes and had an urge to reboot her head.


    "A Metaphor made Reality! A Metaphysical World! Not existing in the same Time and Space as Nirn but still within the physical boundaries!" Jon rechecked the facts with Lah once again and outlined his conclusion, "We are not inside anything, Lah. We are inside a World that was made inside an enchantment of a Clockwork machine. Just lines of Magical Script, Lah, a simtion of a world!"


    Jon''s smile grew with his excitement at the expense of Lah''s sanity as she could see what he was seeing for the first time.


    "Lah, we were Digitized!"


    [A/n: Tron series? Digimon? Anyone from the golden days?]


    ——————————