Chapter 33: Case Closed (Part I)

Elaine watched as her brother rolled the overlarge crate into the room with a hand-truck, the muscles of his arms strained beneath the short-sleeves of the armpit stained brown uniform he wore. Bump, thump, the dolly protested when he shoved it over the threshold to the Faraday rune-cage that surrounded his basement tech laboratory. She suspected he rarely washed said uniform, as when he entered he brought with him all the sweaty fragrances of a package sorting room. A few screeching feet later, he let the crate down and tossed his United Parcel Service emblazoned cap across the room—only to miss the hat tree so it rebounded off the far wall of the cage and flopped on the floor.

As if on cue, Elaine sprang up from her seat near his computer and stalked over to the crate as Zane vacated the spot, huffing and puffing as he went. Even with the dampening runes and wards cast over the room she could feel the radiant energies from within the crate riding up her bristled arm hairs like arcs of electricity along a Jacob’s ladder. Her eyes traced the intricate glyphs burned into the surface of the container by Zane’s soldering pen; he’d developed somewhat in his eloquence and talent with producing these designs since she’d last practiced with him. The energetic leakage did not testify as much to the haste of his work, but the power of the sealed artifact.

“Don’t think you’re opening that up until I seal the cage,” Zane said after a few moments of catching his breath. “And you owe me one huge favor for sneaking that out of Manzie. Although, I’m sure that building maintenance is going to have their hands full for a while trying to figure out the impromptu rune-cage we built before wondering what someone could have taken out of that supply closet.”

“Of course not,” Elaine said. “The capacitance still present in this artifact should be treated with great care. We will need to construct at least a fifth circle grounding glyph before we remove the wards from the container if we don’t want this entire room bathed in radiation. The object may have some sort of resonance I did not account for and once disconnected it just started feeding on itself.”

Zane stopped halfway through stripping his brown uniform shirt, revealing a pristine white undershirt. “You do realize that if we ground that thing straightaway it might just drain exactly what makes it work.”

“Let’s not repeat what happened last time,” Elaine said. “If the artifact does crump, at least we’ll have a lot of new arcanosensitive spare parts we can put to our own use.”

At that, he throw up his hands. The last time Zane had brought a powerful technoarcane artifact into his lab and failed to properly ground it before working on it the resulting dispersal fried every piece of electronics within the Faraday rune-cage and seared after-images of the various equipment sets around the room into the wires of the cage itself. Zane took the damage in stride as an expected risk; but Elaine spent the next month drafting a set of safety guidelines and protocols for working with volatile artifacts in the future.

“I’ve got one already etched into the floor,” Zane said, rolling his eyes. “As per your previous instructions. Just give me a few minutes to recover. It’s hot out there!”

“Knock, knock!” Frog banged a spoon against one of the support brackets as she descended from the stairs, bringing with her the welcoming aroma of vanilla and chocolate along with a small tray of mugs. “I have some ice-cold chocolate milk and tea for anyone who wants some.”

“You’re a lifesaver, Frog,” Zane said, reaching for one of the mugs as she passed.

“Mint in yours, hon,” she said to Elaine who took a mug with a murmured thank you.