All the Dust that Falls

Chapter 84: Heavenly Ascent

I was devastated. When I went to go back into the castle, I found that the collapse of the entryway had destroyed the ramps. It had also got most of the stairs too, but I wasn't too concerned about that. I did my best to ignore the devastation around me, which was a sad sight to see. The careful beauty of this castle was in tatters.

As I mourned for the art, I had a larger issue. How was I going to get back inside with no ramps? I still didn't know what had happened to Beatrice yet, but I couldn't imagine she was undamaged. That last explosion had sent everything flying.

Approaching the stairs, I did have one option. It was relatively untested. I activated my latest mutation, and the boosters flared to life, gently pushing me off the ground. I gave an inadvertent beep of excitement. This might actually work!

Adjusting the nozzles, I tried to direct myself up the stairwell. However, I had misjudged the height and simply ended up bouncing off the bottom step. This collision sent me careening backward, and I lost control of my stability. Wobbling, I started to tip backward.

In a panic, I overcorrected and ended up flipping myself forward and landing on my back on the bottom step. By the most nitpicking definition ever, this was technically progress, but not how I wanted to get upstairs. Extending my arm, I pushed against the ground to flip myself over. However, due to the angle and the width of the step, I only succeeded in pushing myself off the bottom step and back down to the ground.

After writing myself again, I decided to experiment with the thrusters again. I tried lifting off and hovering. This time I didn't immediately go for the steps, but just practiced moving around and pushing up and down slightly. It seemed like I could hover at a maximum height of 4.56 inches at full power. Once I had a better handle on my new abilities, I very carefully hovered towards the stairs. This time as I moved to the stairs, I made it over the lip! I celebrated too soon.

This was it. I could conquer my oldest and most heinous foe. Never again would the wonders of my home be inaccessible to me. I was unstoppable. I could go wherever I pleased! I could climb every stairwell! Ford every gap! I could even-

As soon as my first thruster made it onto the stair, my front half shot up again. The bottom step was too close for this level of thrust, and the sudden difference in force was many times what I was expecting. I rocked back a bit but was able to stabilize before I flipped again. Ok, maybe I wasn’t completely unstoppable yet.

Backing up, I prepared for a third attempt. This time as my front thrusters moved over the stairs, I reduced their power. I overcompensated, and instead of staying level, I tilted forward a little bit, and my front wheels landed on the step. That was fine. I could work with that.

Spinning my wheels, I carefully worked myself the rest of the way onto the step. Looking up to the next step, I realized this might be slightly harder as I didn't have space to back up. It took a couple of tries, but I eventually figured out that if I came at it from the side, I could get over the lip. By the time I reached the top of the stairs, I was able to adjust my front thruster well enough that I didn't have to land and reorient for every step. My models were beginning to understand the physics behind this new mutation.

Once I crested the top of the final step, I plunked down on the ground. I spun around and gave a celebratory beep as I admired my progress. I climbed up the stairs all by myself! Me! Though, as proud as I was of my momentous accomplishment, I didn't want to have to do that again. The ramps were just so much better. And I couldn't even imagine going down the stairs like that. Just the thought made my wheels shiver. Yeah, I wasn't about to try that anytime soon.

Now that I had conquered the stairs, I set off to go find Beatrice.

***

It took a little searching, but I found that Beatrice had dragged Tony back to what remained of the library. One of the walls was caved in, and a lot of her glass equipment seemed to be in pieces. However, most of the books had survived, even if just barely. Instead of carefully organized and in their proper places, the ones that were on the destroyed wall were now scattered everywhere.

Honestly, I was just glad that, one, no fires had started, and two, that apparently enough load-bearing walls stayed upright that the ceiling was not caving in. Though the fires were a close call, I did have to consume a few little mess makers that were hot and glowing on the way here. They were like the one I saw when I had first met Beatrice, the one that attacked her so rudely. Apparently, they had escaped at some point in the last couple of hours.

Understandably Beatrice didn't notice me right away, as I came in while she was busy tending to an unconscious Tony. Beatrice herself didn't look in amazing condition either. There were no obvious broken parts on her, but I did see lots of strange color splotches all over her face. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought she had been doing arts and crafts.

Rolling up to her, I gently bumped her in the leg. She jumped several feet in the air. "WHAT in the five.."

Looking down, she finally saw me. Taking a second to compose herself, she stepped back and gave me a bow. "Hello, master."

I beeped at her to cut it out and tell me how Tony was doing. She sort of seemed to understand the message as she started telling me what had happened to her during the fight.

---

Bee nearly jumped out of her skin when she felt something touch her ankle before she realized it was only Void. That realization only slightly decreased her alarm. As much as she trusted her master, she had just gotten a very up-close reminder of how dangerous it was.

Void may act innocent and sweet most of the time, but with hardly any effort, it could bring the world down around it. Watching her master go toe to wheel with one of humanity’s greatest terrors had been eye-opening. Once she heard the battle cease, she held her breath, but when the castle wasn't immediately obliterated by demons, she knew the result. What Void was doing in the hours between then and now, she couldn't begin to guess. Probably consolidating power or something.

As Bee filled Void in on her side of the encounter, she continued her work trying to make more healing potions. Her equipment was shot, but she could manage the lower-level ones without it. Plus, both she and Tony had taken more powerful potions than was advisable recently, and they couldn't handle any more of the superior, faster acting ones without getting sick. So some more basic ones needed brewing.

Luckily, those were the easy kind. She had considered going upstairs to see if there was any glassware that had survived in the labs but honestly was a bit hesitant to trust the floor's integrity yet. Perhaps Void would be willing to help her?

She looked down at her master, but it was already gone. Scanning the floor around her, she noticed Void picking through the debris and separating items into groups. It seemed that its categorization system fell into three distinct piles. One was the books it picked out and meticulously cleaned. The other was intact and mostly intact bricks. The last bit was things that it devoured.

Seeing her master engaged in its work, Bee turned back to her own. Pouring the contents of the mortar she had just finished grinding into the shattered lip of a mixing flask, she started swirling.

***

It had taken a couple of days of working non-stop, but I finally got the library in working condition. Well, mostly. There was still a huge gap in the wall, but all the books not on the shelves were neatly stacked in alphabetic order, and the blocks that might be usable for reconstruction had been classified.

I wasn't sure how I was going to go about fixing the walls yet, sadly. While I was cleaning up the books, I had looked for some related to building but hadn't found anything relevant. Still, I held out hope.

During my time trying to bring order to the library, Bee had mostly repaired herself and Tony. Well, I assumed Tony was mostly repaired; he had yet to be turned on again. Judging by Bee's attitude, though, things seemed to be getting better.

Once I finished ordering the library, I made my way outside and tried to get the hall cleaned up a bit. This was in much worse condition. Taking a step back to categorize the damage, I could see a swath of destruction leading from the demon's containment to the exit of the castle. All along the way, the floor was damaged. The beautiful marble had been shattered by its steps and fists.

As devastating as that was, the damage was not limited to the floors alone; it was, in fact, even worse. The walls were cracked, if not outright collapsed, in many places. Each door that it had charged through while chasing us had a decent amount of stone missing from each side.

I was deeply distressed. Only recently I had lamented how my newfound efficiency left me without any meaningful cleaning to do. But now… Now I was faced with yet another mess the likes of which I couldn’t begin to tackle myself. It was humbling. The only thing that I could realistically do right now was clean up and salvage what I could.

Eventually, I would set this right, I vowed.

Before I could start cleaning the halls in earnest, Beatrice asked for my help getting new equipment from upstairs for Tony's treatment.

On the trip upstairs, I found many surprises. The first thing was the ramps here were still intact. I made it up without having to use my tedious jet method. I was quite grateful for that, as it would have been rather embarrassing to have Beatrice watch me hop my way upstairs. Having her carry me might actually have been preferable to that. Still, it was ultimately unnecessary.

As we made it up the stairs, Beatirce led us to one of the closer laboratories. Inside, it looked like an earthquake had happened. I was familiar with the phenomenon - I had experienced something similar with my family before. The dishes went everywhere…

This wasn't nearly as bad, though. Mostly the tables were shifted, and things had fallen off the counters. The items in the cabinets that Beatrice needed were still intact. Once she had loaded up, we ran a quick check through the rest of the rooms on the upper floors. Everything was in order despite the enormous disturbance from downstairs.

After Beatrice had finished cleaning up a moderate-sized pile of guano at my insistence, we headed back downstairs. From there, we settled into a daily routine. I cleaned where I could and stacked everything else into neat little piles. Everything was going as well as I could have expected. Well, until something odd started happening.

Where I stayed near Beatrice while she slept, the castle was changing. I wasn't sure at first, but my sensors confirmed it. It was almost as if the holes in the walls were shrinking as the stone grew up around it.