Iron Dawn [Horizon Zero Dawn, Marvel CU]

Cereburn · May 6, 2024

I'm posting this as a request for thoughts and ideas to help me get past some indecision I've got with this story. I'm fully expecting to re-write this a few times based on feedback.

Disclaimer - All characters owned by someone else aren't mine, this is not for profit. Plot idea is mine though; if you want to use it, please ask.

More authors notes at end.
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Iron Dawn

Chapter One: Prologue

The battle is over, but the pain sure as hell wasn't. Tony stumbled over to a piece of rubble to sit on and slumped down, leaning back against something that had a worse day than him. The stones were still on his right hand, but the power they'd released when he'd used them to defeat Thanos and his alien army had played havoc with his body and his armor. The armor around his right arm and right side of his chest was burned and damaged in ways the battle hadn't accomplished.

The tiredness was overpowering but did not stop Tony from thinking to himself. Clearly, dying in a blaze of glory didn't happen yet—If Thor puts me on a burning boat I'm gonna bring his mom back from the other side to haunt him.

He faded out a bit but could hear voices around him. Peppers' voice draws him up from the settling fugue, "It's okay, we'll be fine." He is still trying to focus on her face and hearing those words realizes she is trying to let him go, but that doesn't let him rest easy. Raising his little girl is still his job.

Trying to speak, but mumbling instead, "I know, but I'm not gonna get cheated out of a daddy-daughter dance."

In his hazed mind, he decides to try to snap again to save his life. Although he isn't thinking very clearly he definitely notices that trying to move his right hand isn't happening. Just more pain.

He calls to his AI assistant F.R.I.D.A.Y. who had replaced J.A.R.V.I.S. a while ago."Friday, we gotta go again, move the stones to the left hand."

All the people collecting around the dying man are surprised he's still alive, much more trying to keep going.

The A.I., Female Replacement Intelligent Digital Assistant Youth responded, "Boss, I've got critical failures everywhere, we can't take another burst like that, everything is shutting down already, including your organs."

Struggling to get his left hand working, he wiggles his fingers as he replies, "I can fix it, just get the stones on the working hand."

"I'd like to, but we need more power to reconfigure again"

Looking up, Tony blurrily see's Steve, still carrying Thor's hammer.

"Capcicle, I need you to hit me with some juice."

"Stark, are you nuts?"

"Probably, but that doesn't mean lightning from that hammer won't jumps start my suit, so please everyone back off and hit me."

Steve looked over at Thor who looked between them and shrugged then said, "Perhaps start small?"

Steve took up the hammer and focused, and as he swung his arm back, the hammer gathered small arcs of lightning over its surface and then he brought the hammer forward, underhanded and shot a bolt of blue-white lighting along the ground and up into Tony's feet. The bolt left a glowing red trail in the dirt that was quickly cooling.

In the suit however, the energy brought the arc reactor's radiant glow back up amid sparking on his right side. He heard Friday's surprise, "Boss it's working, power is back up over 200 percent although we're bleeding a lot of juice to damage."

"That's okay, just build me a gauntlet for the other hand and move the stones over."

As he said that, he tried to brace himself against the rubble he was leaning on then reached over with his left hand towards his right even as F.R.I.D.A.Y. moved nanites from broken parts of the suit to rebuilt a left-handed gauntlet around his hand. As soon as he touched the back of his right hand, the stones moved to his palm and started shifting around to the back of his hand, moved by nanites to the proper spots required for them to work together.

"Boss, we got the stones, but we still aren't going to make it through another burst. Are you sure you wanna do this?"

"Trust me, it's not like it could get worse."

Tony then tries to imagine himself healed, but these thoughts of being healthy are mixed in with other random memories of their fight to travel time for the stones, then other memories of his younger life watching bad 80s sci fi shows of time travel with dinosaurs, girls in deerskin bikinis and robots. He shakes his head, trying to focus on being a strong dad for his girls then with mind a' whirl; he snaps again, and the world goes white. During the flash, the stones heal him but the feedback fries a lot more of the nano-particles of his suit surrounding the stones causing the particles and the stones attached to start falling away-further dissolving the nanite made glove; but the process of his semi-coherent wish is still ongoing and as the flash fades he disappears leaving the stones to drop from the now non-existent glove into the pile of broken nanites and dirt.

----

Tony wakes up in a field of tall green, turning to slightly yellow grass. He checks himself and finds with relief that he is healed.

In his excitement, he shouts "Now so inevitable now you purple skinned smurf reject!"

It then occurs to him he can see his hands and skin, a rather youthful looking skin in fact. Looking down, he notices much of the upper half of his suit is gone, leaving essentially the center neck and chest of the suit leading down to the stomach and legs being left covered, but both arms, shoulders and helmet are gone, even his watch. Stones? Turning around and looking down shows no flashy universe altering gems laying about or under him.

His attention turns again to his surroundings; the area is fairly warm and appears to be a clear mid-morning or early evening. He isn't sure if the Sun is currently in the east or the west yet. He is in a grassy plain and he can make out a body of water, maybe a river on the opposite direction of the sun. Nothing about his surroundings look much like a recognizable landmark, although there are what are probably mountains further out on the other side of the water.

He tries to remember what happened before the flash and has glimpses of his friends, the end of the battle and the crazy things he thought of before his second snap.

"Friday, you awake?"

His young digital assistant doesn't respond.

Moving carefully, minding the sharp edges of the damage on his suit, he gets up and looks around, again observing the lack of aches and pains, like when he was young. He looks down and sees through the holes in his armor there are bits of charred shirt showing through and the light on the front of his suit is flickering and a bit dim. Hoping that isn't too indicative of the state of his reactor, he uses his neural interface and is able to get the suit to disassemble and retract into the storage space of his reactor leaving him in tattered upper clothes; burnt black shirt and undershirt. His black pants and shoes seem incongruously fine. Stark reaches through the hole in the side of his shirt and with a slurping noise takes the reactor off his chest and looks at the back of it, revealing a small status display. He can see it is in low power/repair mode, Friday is disconnected-no signal and her backup local copy is offline. The suit systems should have tried to use some of the recovered nanites to try to fix the reactor, but the power level is down to around 10 percent now; about 8 percent more than the minimum needed to keep it going. He has a gut feeling with all the weird infinity energies that were hitting his system that it needs realignment/timing adjustment to get the reactor working near full again.

He puts the reactor back on his chest to enable the neuro-interface and brings out enough nanites to create a pair of Augmented Reality glasses and puts those on. With those, Tony connects to the suit diagnostics suite and is able to see more information about the issues in the Arc reactor; a misaligned electron impeller coil and a few blown capacitors in the primary exchange buffer, but the backup buffer is working. Unfortunately, he can't use the nanites to fix the impeller while it is running as the field around the coil will kill the loose nanites if they get too close. To fully fix it will require shutting the reactor down entirely, which means the nanites aren't going to be doing any powered work while it is offline. He commands the system to use available nanites to replace the blown capacitors on the primary exchange buffer, which is far enough away from the coil to not be a problem. That repair doesn't fix the output capacity issue, but he at least has full buffering back in place in case he gets hit with any other power surges in the future. Fixing the rest will mean finding or making some very small tools, shutting down the reactor then opening it up, manually repairing the damage, which will hopefully be just a misaligned field guide for the coil and not the coil itself, then putting it back together and hoping he can get it started again. The trickiest part will be restarting it, which will require an external power source.

For now, he is leaving it in low power mode so he can use the limited tools that gives him.

He looks down at his hands again, takes his glasses off his face and spins them around to look at himself then taps the side near the hinge to take a selfie. He puts the glasses back on and has a look at himself.

"Well, hello you handsome devil, it's been a while since I've seen this face."

Looking at the image a now younger Tony fits together the scattered bits of what he can remember of the end of the battle and thinks he must have been thinking of himself when he was a teenager in the 80s as he imagined being healed. In the recorded image, he sees himself at about 15 years old, but looking healthier than when he was originally at M.I.T. at that age.

Ruminating to himself outloud, "How the heck is Morgan going to deal with a dad that looks only eleven years older than she is? Will she think it's creepy? At least it won't be as weird when I watch cartoons with her."

Looking around again and remembering Thundarr the Barbarian, he says to himself, "There better not be actual cavemen around here. Hmm…I wonder if Thundarr and Thor are related?"

Tony doesn't know it yet, but he is still on the east coast, in what was once New York state, physically the same place where he snapped before. For purposes of this story, Avengers base is in upstate New York southwest of Grassmere farms, east of the Hudson river. West of highway US-9.

Iron Dawn

Chapter One

The battle is over, but the pain sure as hell wasn't. Tony stumbled over to a piece of rubble to sit on and slumped down, leaning back against something that had a worse day than him.

Clearly, dying in a blaze of glory didn't happen yet—If Thor puts me on a burning boat I'm gonna bring his mom back from the other side to haunt him.

He faded out a bit, but could hear voices around him. Peppers' voice draws him up, "It's okay, we'll be fine." He is still trying to focus on her face and hearing those words doesn't let him rest easy. Raising his little girl is still his job.

"I know, but I'm not gonna get cheated out of a daddy-daughter dance."

He decides to try to snap again to save his life, although he isn't thinking very clearly he definitely notices that trying to move his right hand isn't happening. Just more pain.

"Friday, we gotta go again, move the stones to the left hand."

Everyone around him is surprised he's still alive, much more trying to keep going.

"Boss, I've got critical failures everywhere, we can't take another burst like that, everything is shutting down already, including your organs."

"I can fix it, just get the stones on the working hand."

"I'd like to, but we need more power to reconfigure again"

Looking up, Tony blurrily see's Steve, still carrying Thor's hammer.

"Capcicle, I need you to hit me with some juice."

"Stark, are you nuts?"

"Probably, but that doesn't mean lightning from that hammer won't jumps start my suit, so please everyone back off and hit me."

Steve looked over at Thor who looked between them and shrugged then said, "Perhaps start small?"

Steve took up the hammer and focused, and as he swung his arm back, the hammer took on lightning over it's surface and then he brough the hammer forward, underhanded and shot a bolt of lighting along the ground and up into Tony's feet.

The energy surged through the suit and brought the arc reactor back up amid sparking on his right side. He heard Friday's surprise, "Boss it's working, power is back up over 200 percent although we're bleeding a lot of juice to damage."

"That's okay, just build me a gauntlet for the other hand and move the stones over."

As he said that, he tried to brace himself against the rubble he was leaning on then reached over with his left hand towards his right even as F.R.I.D.A.Y. rebuilt a left handed gauntlet around his hand. As soon as he touched the back of his right hand, the stones moved to his palm and started shifting around, moved by nanites to the proper spots.

"Boss, we got the stones, but we still aren't going to make it through another burst. Are you sure you wanna do this?"

"Trust me, it's not like it could get worse."

Tony then tries to imagine himself healed, but these thoughts of being healthy are mixed in with other random memories of their fight to travel time for the stones, then other memories of his younger life watching bad 80s sci fi shows of time travel with dinosaurs, girls in deerskin bikinis and robots. He shakes his head, trying to focus on being a strong dad for his girls then with mind a' whirl; he snaps again and the world goes white. During the flash, the stones heal him but the feedback fries a lot more of the nano-particles of his suit surrounding the stones causing the particles and the stones attached to start falling away-further dissolving the nanite made glove; but the process of his semi-coherent wish is still ongoing and as the flash fades he disappears leaving the stones to drop from the now non-existent glove into the pile of broken nanites and dirt.

----

Tony wakes up in a field of tall green, turning to slightly yellow grass. He checks himself and finds that he is healed, but his hands and skin look younger. It then occurs to him he can see his hands and skin and notices much of the upper half of his suit is gone, leaving essentially the center neck and chest of the suit leading down to the stomach and legs being left, but both arms, shoulders and helmet are gone.

His attention turns again to his surroundings; the area is fairly warm and appears to be a clear late morning or early evening. He isn't sure if the Sun is currently in the east or the west yet. He is in a grassy plain and he can make out a body of water, maybe a river on the opposite direction of the sun. Nothing about his surroundings look much like a landmark, although there are what are probably mountains further out on the other side of the water.

He tries to remember what happened before the flash and has glimpses of his friends, the end of the battle and the things he thought of before his second snap.

"Friday, you awake?"

His young digital assistant doesn't respond.

Moving carefully, minding the sharp edges of the damage on his suit, he gets up and looks around, again observing that he feels very good, like when he was young. He looks down and sees through the holes in his armor there are bits of charred shirt showing through and the light on the front of his suit is flickering and a bit dim. Hoping that isn't too indicative of the state of his reactor, he uses his neural interface and is able to get the suit to disassemble and retract into the reactor nano-storage leaving him in tattered upper clothes; burnt black shirt, undershirt. His black pants and shoes seem incongruously fine. Stark reaches through the hole in his shirt and with a slurping noise takes the reactor off his chest and looks at the back of it, revealing a small status display. He can see it is in low power/repair mode, Friday is disconnected-no signal and her backup local copy is offline. The suit systems should have tried to use some of the recovered nanites to try to fix itself, but power level is down around 10 percent now; about 7 percent more than the minimum needed to keep it going. He has a gut feeling with all the weird infinity energies that were hitting his system that it needs realignment/timing adjustment to get the reactor working near full again.

He puts the reactor back on his chest to enable the neuro-interface and brings out enough nanites to create the AR glasses and puts those on. With that, Tony connects to the suit diagnostics suite and is able to see the issues in the Arc reactor; a misaligned electron impeller coil. Unfortunately he can't use the nanites to fix it while it is running as the field around the coil will kill the loose nanites if they get too close. To fully fix it will require shutting the reactor down entirely, which means the nanites aren't going to be doing any powered work while it is offline. To fix it will mean finding or making some very small tools, opening it up, manually repairing the damage, which will hopefully be just a misaligned field guide for the coil and not the coil itself, then putting it back together and hoping he can get it started again. The tricky part will be restarting it, which will require an external power source.

For now he is leaving it in low power mode so he can use the limited tools that gives him.

He looks down at his hands again, takes his glasses off his face and spins them around to look at him then tabs the side near the hinge to take a selfie. He puts the glasses back on and has a look at himself.

"Well hello you handsome devil, it's been a while since I've seen this face."

Looking at the image Tony fits together the scattered bits of what he can remember of the end of the battle and thinks he must have been thinking of himself when he was a teenager in the 80s when he imagined being healed. In the recorded image, he sees himself at about 15 years old, but looking healthier than when he was at M.I.T. at that age.

Looking around again, he says to himself, "There better not be actual cavemen around here."

Tony doesn't know it yet, but he is still on the east coast, in New York state, physically the same place where he snapped before. For purposes of this story, Avengers base is in upstate New York southwest of Grassmere farms, east of the Hudson river. West of highway US-9.

----

Chapter 2 Preview

Half an hour later, Tony figured out a few more things about his situation. One, the sun is going higher, so it's morning and the river is to the West. Also, this field is more than just grass, he sees several other species of small bushy plants, some with berries even, but botany was never his specialty; he could dance around a conversation on microbiology and nano-anatomy, but farming for him never made it past the tractor motors.

Moving towards the river, he was also going through his tool inventory in his glasses on what he could make with the few nanites and little bit of power he had left. Specifically, he needed to survive and find civilization; so knives and sensors.

Luckily he had some nanosized electronic signals equipment in his reactor, mostly to talk to F.R.I.D.A.Y. and his other equipment, but no reason it can't be configured to find other signals. Funnily enough, there were plenty of those. He even found signals that looked like GPS, but judging by the error message he got when trying to use it, the communication protocol wasn't the same as either American or European civilian GPS. It did have closer relations to American military encrypted GPS, but he did not want to dedicate too much of his current meager power to decrypting that yet. Maybe later if it becomes more critical.

Right now, old school seems to be the way to go – follow the river.

He was still pondering the other signals he was intercepting though, many of them were small packet bursts, but judging from some of the closer ones, perhaps a mile on the other side of the nearest hill, they were moving around. Some of the packets being intercepted were definitely starting with the same headers, either destination or sender; he wasn't sure yet. He really wished his A.I. assistant were online to help with this; but it did keep his mind busy while he walked.

After about 30 minutes, he arrived at the edge of a fairly wide river, it much reminded him of the Hudson actually. Looking around the shoreline, he spotted some signs of civilization, colored bits of plastic showing through, but buried in the dirt. He grabbed several bits, but the parts closest to the surface crumbled as he pulled. He dug down a bit more and managed to get out a bigger piece, but it wasn't really recognizable as any specific thing; could have been anything from a part of a chair to a piece of car dashboard. He flung it back down towards the water where he saw the edge of a rectangular something colored a mixed green and rust. He walked over to it and pulled, it was stuck a bit, so he ended up kneeling in the moist, sandy dirt and dug around it recognizing the shape to be what looked like a road sign. As it came up, he was able to read some of it.
Attempting to decode it; What have we got here, an 'M' then 'c'or maybe an 'o' , 'r', 't'. Hmm, next letter seems caved in but oh, an 'n', a space; is that a P or an R? And a d. Mcrnted? Morted? Tony realized what this was, "Morton Road." He dropped the sign in shock then Tony spun around again, yup, mountains to the west of the river which was to the west of us. "My God, I'm still in New York." Morton road ran up to and through part of the Avenger compound next to the Hudson. Tony thought to himself, but if I'm still here, where the hell is everyone else? Or, this thought chilled him, when are they?

----
Going back to his glasses, he brought up saved maps of the area around the Avengers compound in upstate New York. Looking through options on where to go; New York is at least a days walk maybe more, Rhinebeck village, that's just a few miles north east; assuming it's still there.

Several miles later where he was hoping to find a village, he found nearly nothing remaining but grass and dirt mounds. A few of those had what used to be bricks or concrete poking out of the dirt, but nothing else. The electronic signals he'd been tracking earlier and moved further north west while he was going north east.

Oddly, he did find some tracks in some areas that reminded him of big chickens; this caused him to snort until he remembered that chickens ultimately were descended from dinosaurs; and these tracks would be chickens the size of Shetland ponies.

Looking through his tools, he decided to use the nanites to remake a glove he'd invented for Morgan. A fingerless glove with metal detectors built in for combing the beach for jewelry and coins. Hopefully he can find some metal left over to make a weapon or two.

Cereburn · May 11, 2024

Chapter 2

Half an hour later, Tony figured out a few more things about his situation. One, the sun is going higher, so it's morning and the river is to the West. Also, this field is more than just grass, he sees several other species of small bushy plants, some with berries even, but botany was never his specialty; he could dance around a conversation on microbiology and nano-anatomy, but farming for him never made it past the equipment.

Moving towards the river, he was also going through his tool inventory in his glasses on what he could make with the few nanites and little bit of power he had left. Specifically, he needed to survive and find civilization so knives and sensors.

Luckily he had some nanosized electronic signals equipment in his reactor, mostly to talk to F.R.I.D.A.Y. and his other equipment, but no reason it can't be configured to find other signals. Funnily enough, there were plenty of those. He even found signals that looked like GPS, but judging by the error message he got when trying to use it, the communication protocol wasn't the same as either American or European civilian GPS. It did have closer relations to American military encrypted GPS, but he did not want to dedicate too much of his current meager power to decrypting that yet. Maybe later if it becomes more critical.

Right now, old school seems to be the way to go – follow the river.

He was still ponding the other signals he was intercepting though, many of them were small packet bursts, but judging from some of the closer ones, perhaps a mile on the other side of the nearest hill, they were moving around. Some of the packets being intercepted were definitely starting with the same headers, either destination or sender; he wasn't sure yet. He really wished his A.I. assistant were online to help with this; but it did keep his mind busy while he walked.

After about 30 minutes, he arrived at the edge of a fairly wide river, it much reminded him of the Hudson actually. Looking around the shoreline, he spotted some signs of civilization, colored bits of plastic showing through, but buried in the dirt. He grabbed several bits, but the parts closest to the surface crumbled as he pulled. He dug down a bit more and managed to get out a bigger piece, but it wasn't really recognizable as any specific thing; could have been anything from a part of a chair to a piece of car dashboard. He flung it back down towards the water where he saw the edge of something mixed green and rust colored. He walked over to it and pulled, it was stuck a bit, so he ended up kneeling in the moist, sandy dirt and dug around it recognizing the shape as what looked like a road sign. As it came up, he was able to read some of it. What do we have, an 'M' then 'c'or maybe an 'o' , r, t, next letter seems caved in but oh, an 'n', a space; is that a P or an R? And a d. Mcrnted? Morted? Tony realized what this was, "Morton Road." He dropped the sign in shock then Tony spun around again, yup, mountains to the west of the river which was to the west of us. "My God, I'm still in New York." Morton road ran up to and through part of the Avenger compound next to the Hudson. Tony thought to himself, but if I'm still here, where the hell is everyone else? Or, this thought chilled him, when?

Going back to his glasses, he brought up cached maps of the area around the Avengers compound in upstate New York. Looking through options on where to go; New York is at least a days walk maybe more, Rhinebeck village, that's just a few miles north east; assuming it's still there.

----

Several miles later where he was hoping to find a village, he found nearly nothing remaining but grass and dirt mounds. A few of those had what used to be bricks or concrete poking out of the dirt, but nothing else. The electronic signals he'd been tracking earlier and moved further north west while he was going north east.

Oddly, he did find some tracks in some areas that reminded him of big chickens; this caused him to snort until he remembered that chickens ultimately were descended from dinosaurs; and these tracks would be chickens the size of Shetland ponies.

Looking through his tools, he decided to use the nanites to remake a glove he'd invented for Morgan. A fingerless glove with metal detectors built in for combing the beach for jewelry and coins. Hopefully he can find some metal left over to make a weapon or two.

Fortunately, 'printing' the glove from his remaining nanites at the correct size for his hand instead of Morgan's took little time to setup through his AR glasses. The designs were already in storage, just a little tinkering to get the features he wanted into an existing framework and he'd be good to go. Looking at the designs he found no need to remove the sonic disabler or the flash emitters. He also layered in another set of EM multi-wavelength antennas, a system from his regular suit into an arm bracer connected to the glove and a sleeve to connect it up the arm then over his chest and into the reactor for power. His previous watch had a micro-reactor, but he did not think he had enough power onboard to start another micro-reactor.

Using his new metal detector, Tony started walking around the former village again occasionally finding rusting bits of sheet metal or rebar below a few inches of dirt or behind some crumbling concrete sticking from a few of the dirt mounds. Remembering that the town had a boat dock and some boating workshops that way, he headed back to the Hudson hoping to find some buried tools.

On the way there, he found himself standing on the remains of an old stone small bridge going over a small drainage ditch. The ditch itself was almost completely filled in, but the bridge looked like it'd fallen in recently, some of the stones showing fairly "fresh" sides without as much weathering.

Going down into the ditch, bypassing the fallen bridge, which once would have been deep enough to help deal with season flooding, but now was only about 4 feet deep and 10 wide, his glove metal sensors started going alerting him to a nearby large mass of metal. His EM sensors also registered very small amount of some power source in the rubble.

He reached down and started shifting some of the ancient stones, one at a time until he found something unexpected a few bricks in, something that looked like a metal tail. Poking at the tail a few times elicited no reaction from it. He hovered his bracer over the tail and while the emissions from the power source were stronger, waving it seemed to indicate that was deeper in the rubble.

Continuing to excavate a brick at a time, he eventually found a metal foot that matched the tracks he'd seen. The foot was not entirely metal, clearing the debris further revealed the ankle and lower leg where he made out what appeared to be muscles and tendons, but made of what appeared to be metalized plastics. Bits of powder around the crushed knee also looked like crushed ceramics that had been coating the joint. This was definitely an interesting bit of technology and moved along lines of research he had done in the past for his suit and other technologies.

After about an hour, he finally had the whole carcass revealed. It appeared to be a robotic biped with digitigrade legs and claws, a low slung trunk and a flexible neck with a large armored lens for a head. The lens itself was crushed along with parts of the neck. Doing a bit of an improvised autopsy, Tony found a small power source attempting to drive a pump, but it was burning out with no more fluid to pump as many the 'muscles' being fed by that pump were ruptured and had leaked whatever fluid was being used by this thing for blood. Tony closely examined the power source, which looked like a chemically powered reactor slowly burning away the last of it's fuel. The fuel seemed to be glowing green. He was alarmed for a moment, but the radiation detectors in his reactor shell did not show any dangerous levels coming from his current location. He did recall noticing earlier they were elevated from what he considered normal at home, but even here next to the glowing stuff it wasn't higher than what he'd seen from where he'd woken up. Taking a bit of a risk and smelling the a bit of it on his finger, he thought it smelled a bit like guano mixed with jet fuel. Wiping his finger off in the dirt, he resolved to be careful about sparks around the glowing soup leaking from the chemical reactor in this thing. Speaking of potential sparks, he followed the output power lines coming from the reactor towards the spine of the creature and found it branched much like he'd expect to see in other terrestrial animals; clearly this thing's design was inspired by living creatures. Eventually he found that behind the 'eye' of the unit below the head armor was what looked like a processing system, but instead of a brain, he found a bit of a cuboid lump, a bit like several old school processors built into a boxy 3D processor surrounded by power and data lines coming from the eye and the body into an interface for the 'brain'.

Intrigued, he traced the power cable from the brain back towards the body a bit until he found where it had been crushed and severed. Quickly looking up and generating a sharp cable cutter from his design bank, he traced back to an undamaged section of cable and cut through it cleanly. He then dissected the cable and found a mix of wire and fiber optics bundled together. He opened a notes file in his glasses and taking pictures and annotating them, he documented what he could find of how the body worked as well as likely operating voltages. While doing this he also found that some extra lines in the spine seemed to act as antennas. Measuring them he made some educated guesses as to the radio frequencies this guy was likely using to communicate on and added that to his notes.

Again going through the corpse of this metal beast, he commented excitedly "Hey there you little beauty!" Found in the dissected pump, he found titanium seals around the pump, which he was able to strip. "Now let me find a little gold and I can start harvesting this to make more nanites!"

Finally before leaving the corpse, he also found a few small bits of armor that looked like guitar picks. Having no guitar, he decided to keep them anyway as they were the right size to use a small cutting or scraping edges instead of messing up his nails. He put those into the pockets of his pants along with the titanium seals he found from the 'heart.'

Finally arriving at the beach, he started walking back and forth along the shoreline waving his gauntlet back and forth hoping to find buried trea…er…tools.

While doing this, he managed to scare out his first sight of wildlife, getting too close to a bush and a flash of furry jumping led to a startled yelp from Tony and a medium sized black rabbit leaping away quickly.

"Was dat a Wabbit" the cartoonish jump scare struck him as funny until his stomach rumbled, reminding him it was getting well out of the morning and towards noon. Calling after the rabbit, he should "Just you wait my hopping McRibs, I'll get you yet"

It was also about this time that Tony realized he did not know how to actually catch a rabbit.

----

Chapter 3 Preview
Catching lunch took new importance over searching for tools as did making clean water.

The clean water part didn't seem overly complicated, get some water from the river and boil it. While he did not have anywhere near normal power, he could certainly crank out enough to do that, thank God he had a reactor and not a battery as long as he was in a place with strong enough gravity, his reactor would turn it into power. That being said, there's no reason he couldn't just get some wood and start a regular fire like proper campers. Speaking of camping, he'd also need shelter soon. He definitely did not have enough nanites to put his suit back together, although he could do an insulated pancho. That might have to make do.

Tony's brought his mind back to the rabbit, no carrots equals no bait so it's time to figure out how to hunt.

Cereburn · May 12, 2024

Chapter 3

Catching lunch took new importance over searching for tools as did making clean water.

The clean water part didn't seem overly complicated, get some water from the river and boil it. While he did not have anywhere near normal power, he could certainly crank out enough to do that, thank God he had a reactor and not a battery as long as he was in a place with strong enough gravity, his reactor would turn it into power. That being said, there's no reason he couldn't just get some wood and start a regular fire like proper campers. Speaking of camping, he'd also need shelter soon. He definitely did not have enough nanites to put his suit back together, although he could do an insulated pancho. That might have to make do.

Tony brought his mind back to the rabbit, no carrots equals no bait so it's time to figure out how to hunt. Looking back into his design inventory, he regretted never getting a closer look at the Wakandan spears those Dora Milaje folks carried. Not that he didn't try, but Shuri's a sharp little kid and a bit too quick with the energy blasters.

Thinking again about some of the bits of rebar he'd seen helped him decide on his choice of hunting tool; it'd be adapting a design he'd built for something much more sophisticated back home, but the bones here could work wonders with what he had available. However it wouldn't work without some additional tools so he went back into the design editing suite in his glasses and got to work on putting together a pellet mold with a built iron smelter that could be powered by his reactor.

While doing this he started walking back towards the dirt mounds with exposed concrete and rebar. Most of the rebar was worn down to the stone, although he did see a few that appeared to have shinier ends than the others less rusty and possibly recently ground off. As his new friend under the bridge did not have any grinding tools, he reminded himself to keep watch for any other models of odd robo-dinos.

With a bit of kicking and smashing loose stones against the concrete he could get at, the old brittle concrete finally crumbled away leaving access to some quite rusted, but still useable rebar.

He quickly setup a more standard gauntlet on his other hand with a cutting tool and proceeded to cut off three 10 inch sections of rebar from the broken concrete wall. He then recovered the nanites from the sensor hand and then printed the iron pellet maker with built in smelter he'd designed while walking to the dirt mound. The cylindrical pellet maker had an electro-plasma conduit leading from the unit to under his shirt which started to glow blue as it began heating up. On one end of the cylinder he fed in one of the rebar rods and watched as it began to glow orange as it fed closer into the hole in the induction powered smelter side of the pellet maker. In the other end he could hear the new pellets dropping into the screw on hopper on that end. After one bar, the yield on pellets ended up being about 20 half inch pellets, each about one quarter inch in diameter, shaped much like a .22 caliber bullet. He then shut down the pellet maker and recalled the nanites again and checked his power levels.

So far the last few changes in creating and recalling the nanites had used up about one percent of the output from his reactor, but it was recovering back quickly so he saw no need to slow down right now. He then switched to the other design he'd worked on, a gauntlet with bracer that had a 12in barrel attached to the bracer surrounded by miniaturized electro-magnets and a series of capacitors with a small magazine about 5 inches long for the pellets pointing at a tangent from the bracer, relatively down when his arm is pointing forward.

With this on his right hand, he ejected the spring loaded magazine with his left then started loading it from the pellets he dumped from the hopper. The full magazine had 16 pellets leaving four to put in his pocket for later and make a reminder that the next magazine should be an inch longer. He then held out the gauntlet and started working on tying the aiming system into his AR glasses instead of the helmet he did not have at the moment.

After a few test shots at another bit of crumbling brickwork on another mound, he was happy with the results. Nearly 700 ft/s according to his sensors. The soft iron would never be a great armor penetrator, and couldn't be accelerated too aggressively to avoid it deforming in the barrel, but it should be plenty for the rabbit, or now named, future lunch.

Sadly, on a clear day such as this one, turning on IR mode on his glasses wasn't super helpful as everything was washed out with the light from the sun. He'd need to be still and watchful. Honestly, not his best skillset, but he was hungry, so he waited. Then he started browsing his notes again and wishing for his lab to take apart the materials on the giant robo-eyeball he'd found. When he finally noticed movement again, it was already too late. As soon as he turned his head, the rabbit was off again. The few shots following the bounder found the ground instead of fur. Disappointed, he looked around for another spot to camp and watch from, this time picking a spot behind a bush on one of the hills. And so he waited. Again. And refused to get distracted by pulling up his notes again.

After about an hour and a half, he spotted movement from the corner of his eye, but this time, not a rabbit. Ok God, if you let me make this shot, I promise I'll restart the Thanks Giving holidays. Slowly, Tony took aim at the cautious big black and brown feathered turkey wandering into the low area between the mounds. As the Turkey bent over to peck at a bug or something in the grass, Tony shot twice and hit both times.

"Yes!" His sudden shout scared former-lunch out of a bush, but that's fine, lunch was being replaced by turkey dinner, amen!

While Tony had never been a boy scout, he had spent some time at Barton's farm and seen how they turned chicken into chicken dinner; so he attempted to do the same. First he built a fire using found wooden branches from around the area, even a few small logs which he got started by hitting it with a little plasma from an EPS conduit. He also used a few branches to make a spit over the fire. He then used his nanites to make a metallic bag, filled it with water and hung it over the fire until it boiled. He pulled the bag off the fire to the side and put the bird into the bag for about 30 seconds then pulled it back out again and started pulling feathers. You know, I wasn't expecting your size to be mostly fluff, he thought at the now much smaller bird in his hands. Next, he used a nanite made knife to cut off the parts of the legs he wasn't going to eat, the head/neck and then opened up the back to empty out the organs into a pile well away from where he was going to continue cooking. Next the bird went into the bag again for a rinse then onto the spit and over the fire. While the bird started cooking, he emptied the bird sized bag of water and then resized it using the nanites to one with about a gallon of volume then refilled it from the river and set it on the edge of the fire to boil again, but this time for drinking water. Sadly, no coffee.

Even without butter, salt and pepper, hunger, he found, made the best spice. It was delicious, parts were a bit burnt; he could have been more consistent with the turning the spit thing, but for a first attempt, not bad at all. He ate about half the small turkey and then cut the other parts into thin strips and set them on rocks on the edge of the fire to dry out and hopefully become jerky. He wasn't sure if it'd work without salt, but he had to work with what he had. It did occur to him to make a vacuum bag from his nanites, but he might need those nanites at a less convenient time.

While waiting for the jerky to dry, he reloaded his pellet gauntlet and began thinking again about where to resume his search for buried tools or if he should move on to another site.
---

Chapter 4 Preview
Tony ended up staring at his map of the town again and trying to fix his position on the map by comparing the dirt mounds to where buildings had previously been. Then walking to where the boat shops used to be, he found himself walking into the water. Clearly the Hudson had shifted and swallowed up the shore-based shops.

He briefly considered designs for a diving mask but gave up on it as the Hudson was still too murky to consider attempting underwater salvage with the tools on-hand. It's time to find another possible location, so he looked at the map again and reconsidered a trip to New York. It'd be a bit more than a day, but with some food with him, he could make it.

He reused some nanites again to make a backpack with three compartments, one for the water he'd boiled and the other for the two rebar rods and odds and ends he'd picked up and the final for the dried turkey jerky he'd made next to the fire. He threw dirt over the fire to put it out then As it was now late afternoon, he got ahead and started walking south towards where New York should be.

Cereburn · May 16, 2024

Chapter 4: Rollin' by the River

Tony ended up staring at his map of the town again and trying to fix his position on the map by comparing the dirt mounds to where buildings had previously been. Then walking to where the boat shops used to be, he found himself walking into the water. Clearly the Hudson had shifted and swallowed up the shore-based shops near Rhinebeck.

He briefly considered designs for a diving mask but gave up on it as the Hudson was still too murky to consider attempting underwater salvage with the tools on-hand. It's time to find another possible location, so he looked at the map again and reconsidered a trip to New York. It'd be a bit more than a day, but with some food with him, he could make it.

Carefully considering the amount of nanites he had left and how much he'd used for his smelting, He looked through some existing designs, and not realy finding any, he set to work with the design tool to scavenge sections of other design to make what would essentially be a backpack. He copied the back inner frame from the suit, separated it from the powered frames and then added additional materials to make it rigid instead of flexible. Two stronger vertical pipe frames on either side of that back section then a cap on the 'out' side gave him enough room to now copy in the computer hardware needed there. Some additional tweaks later and he executed the command to redeploy some nanites again to make a modular backpack, the main support plate will have enough processing and RAM capacity to boot up F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s backup as well as several of the sensors and communication systems usually integrated with the suit. Normally these were distributed in the suit around his back and waist, now they'd be consolidated between the main support frames for the backpack with additional sensors in the straps that will go over his shoulders. The rest of the backpack will have three modular compartments, one for the water he'd boiled with a sipping tube and the other for the two rebar rods and odds and ends he'd picked up and the final part for the dried turkey jerky he'd made next to the fire. This left him with enough nanites for two sets of gloves and bracers and some thin greaves; maybe some low powered jump boots, but that'd be pushing it. He either needed to find enough materials to create new nanites or make some non-nanite based tools and equipment to hold his junk. Looking at his shiny backpack, he went back into the software again and applied a thin layer of nanite as flat black paint. He wasn't ready to be flashy yet.
With the backpack on, he started the process to get his young assistant online.
"Good afternoon, Boss." After a moment, she then said, "Have we now gone camping?"
He threw dirt over the fire to put it out as he started to respond to Friday then got a feather in the face that had been blown by the wind out of the pile he'd dumped them into earlier. Waving it off him, he continued his reply. "What do you remember from your last backup?"
As it was now late afternoon, he moved onward and started walking south towards where New York should be while Friday told him about her memory stopping right before he snapped after capturing the stones from Thanos.
"Well, what you're missing is that after the snap, the surge nearly killed both of us. I got Rogers to hit is with a bolt of lightning from Thor's hammer, then we setup a 2nd glove on my other hand so I could snap again to heal meh…er us. That worked, but keeping mental focus with using the stones is super important and I ended up drifting and remembering things from when I was a teenager. So when the stones healed my body, they also de-aged me and put us on what appears to be another Earth, but in the same physical location from before. It also appears that there was an apocalyptic event here. I found no remains of Avengers HQ. I found a signpost for the road that runs through our place on the west side, and old degraded plastic bits on the beach. Up at Rhinebeck, the place is a pile of stones and dirt."
"I'd like you to take a look through my notes and some signal captures of done. Someone here has made robots that kinda look like dinosaurs and despite me not seeing any other tech, there are encrypted data signals bouncing around. Speaking of which, take a look at the encryption on the GPS signals I found and see if you can get us interfaced with that. I'm currently locating on guess work based on old maps we've got saved. I'm hoping you might even find some satellites to get us live pictures of what is around us."
"On it Boss, I'm working on the GPS signal now I'll let you know when I've got it cracked. It will take a little longer with just the suit processors to work with; I'm getting no response from any of the datacenter connection protocols."
"Yup, I thought you'd say that. Keep on rolling, oh, and keep an eye on the output of the reactor, it's damaged but seems to be stable at the moment, if that starts to change, let me know."
Walking south was as tedious as he'd expected, although the view was nice; even before his trip, this area of New York had always been mixed large farms with small forest-y bits squeezed in here and there. Walking south kept him mostly in the river valley flood plain, but there were still a lot more trees now than he'd remembered before. Not surprising really. Recalling a documentary comparing how ancient forests reclaimed ancient cities in south America and Indonesia, he figured from what he'd seen so far it could be 400 or more years since humans had been messing around in this area. He was still considering how long humanity had been gone when he stepped around a tree and got another feather to the face, only this one was attached to an arrow.

His shock lasted a moment before his own sense of survival kicked in and he crouched and rechecked the area around him very carefully. Seeing no movement, he checked with Friday.

"Friday, you seeing this?"

"Yes Boss, I don't detect any enemies nearby, but my sensors are a bit limited."

He stepped back to the side of the tree to examine the arrow and tried to look at it while keeping an eye on everything else at the same time. The arrow, it turned out had been in the tree long enough that the wound in the tree was already starting to seal up. Puling the arrow out took a bit of wiggling back and forth, but it did come out and revealed a metal tip that looked a lot like the metal picks he'd pulled from the robo-dino he'd autopsied earlier, the rest was what looked like basic home made arrow, straight wooden stick, feathers fletched with some kind of string and glue, the only odd part was the metal pick, but he conceded that was a better tip than just burnt wood or stone.

Checking his map compass against the direction the tree was sticking out of the tree, it seemed to be going south and a little west.

"Friday, where are we at with GPS or finding a satellite?"

"I'm about halfway through the GPS signal packets we've captured; there is no longer contiguous coverage above us, but I did get a timecode decrypted. Boss, the year is 3016, June 1st."

"993 years in the future?"

"Yes Boss, but I as you suspected, I don't think it is our future. As we passed south from Rhinebeck I scanned the field in the place where our HQ should have been. Visual comparisons show an area remarkably similar to the same location on our Earth before we began construction. There is evident of erosion and river migration, but none of the artifacts that would be apparent from the basement levels we dug out for our HQ."

Carefully continuing to move south, he kept ponding this new information and confirmation on his thoughts. So if he was never part of this timeline before, maybe he can get back to his own timeline and his family?

"Friday, did you find any logged sensor data in the reactor from the two snaps?"

"Yup, but most of it is useless as the energy density was higher than the ability of the sensors to handle. I can see some high to low transitions and frequencies, but neither the upper or lower end of those signals. It won't be enough to try to recreate the pattern that got us here."

Tony, stopped and bent over as if he'd been gut punched. Now sucking in air and feeling overwhelmed at the possibility of his not being able to get back to his family. He slowly tried to reign in his breathing and get his mind under control. He dropped to his butt from his bent over position and ended up losing the fight, thinking of Pepper and his little girl, he cried.

---

After a while, he awoke to Friday calling for him. "Boss, if you're going to stop here, you should probably look at setting up a camp."

"How long was I out Friday?"

"About 2 hours Boss. Are you feeling better?"

"Yeah Friday, thanks. How much sunlight do you think we have left?"

"It's 5:52pm eastern time boss, You've got about 5 hours till dark."

"Ok, let's push on a bit, in about 2 hours we'll start looking for a place to set camp."

After about 100 yards, he ran into the remains of another bridge, but bigger and made of concrete going over a wide creek apparently. Near the road, he found another old sign sticking partly out of the road, the paint was long gone, but enough of the shape remained to let him know this was the old US-9 highway that went north and south through New York and east of Avengers HQ.

The bridge was, like the other one, collapsed, but the pile itself now covered in dirt and a few bits of greenery had made its own combination dam and bridge over the creek. Climbing down from the roadway, he crossed the 'bridge', making wide steps over the parts still passing water over it, then walked on the east side of where the bridge had been until he could find a place to climb back up to the elevated area where the road used to be. After getting back up and following south and then swinging west where there should have been another three-ish miles of road, it instead ended in more water; a large creek connected to an adjacent small lake or large pond. Tony wasn't sure how you defined the difference but more importantly, off to the west near the middle of the body of water was a cliff-sided island and on top of it was smoke and what looked like log and stone cabins. Wishing for a coin, he mentally flipped a coin, Humans or Ape people? If it's Humans, Heston will be so jealous.

---

Checking distances with tools in his glasses, the island was a little less than third of a mile away from the shoreline he was at. It seemed to be fairly oblong from this end, about 560 yards, about as wide from north to south as it was away from him. The area next to the road appeared to have been eaten by a wider creek that had undermined it in the past and from the flow in the water, was the exit for the water in this small lake. Looking further north then looking south, the lake could be seen to arc back to the west in both directions, so likely there was another creek on the other side likely fed from the Hudson.

Looking back at the downstream exit of the lake, he could see a few yards out it seemed to stay shallow without much drop from the lake side to the creek side.

He again pondered the cliffs of the island, it was a solid defensive obstacle, but what were they defending against, more robots or other people (please be people and not apes)?

---

Nialo had to sleep in the village for safety and to keep his mother, if not happy, at least less worried, but he always preferred to be away when awake. He was not a man of many words, he preferred subtler whispers leaves in the wind, the pattering of creek water falling on stones. Even the people he loved annoyed him, but he still loved them, so he would hunt, and guard the territory of his people, the Oosine.

Today was clear, the snap maws were still down the river out of sight since yesterday. He had left the village on the other upstream side of the lake, heading south. No other machines seemed to be in the area today as he looked for evidence of them or other trespassers on his way around. He stopped by a few bushes near the edge of the water, tied on some strings and threw the baited hooks and floaters out into the water. He would check on his fish traps when he came back.

Most of his people fished from the floating bridge they'd made to their island, casting with the flow hoping to get bites from fish swimming into the lake from the river.

He had crossed the downstream side of the lake a little while ago and was on the north side of the lake when he turned back and saw movement through the trees on the wider trail going north east away from their lake. He crouched in the shadows of the bushes and trees to wait to see if it came again. Sure enough, after a short time, he saw a pale man in a black shirt with a large black pack on his back. The man was also crouching near the downstream end of the lake, he did not know how he'd not seen him earlier, he was clearly not very good at hiding.

Getting his spear caster ready He decided to wait and watch to see what the man would do next.

Cereburn · May 19, 2024

Chapter 5: Beads or mousetraps?

Using his AR glasses to magnify the camera sensors, he watched what he could now see were wooden walls at the tops of the cliffs, but no heads were so far peaking their heads over those walls.

"Friday, are you seeing anyone watching over those walls?"

"No Boss, I am picking up some audio though, it sounds like they are speaking English, American English even."

"Are you kidding? Let me hear"

Through his neuro implants, he could hear the conversations Friday was picking up with her sensors, though fragmented as people were apparently moving around or he was moving his head shifting the target of the audio sensor.

He heard what was clearly faux concern in the tone of an older woman. "…You shouldn't feel it's your fault your son is not with mate."

The angry woman replied was positively soap opera-ish in it's intensity. "I never said it was, if your daughter had kept her legs shut she could have been here and mated instead off with that trader she left with!"

He shifted his head a bit and heard another conversation,

A tired older male voice, but still with authority; "…Very well, you knew it was your duty to flush the waste well, skipping it will not make the duty go away, you are now assigned two more weeks."

"Two weeks!?" came the astonished teenage reply.

"Would you prefer three?"

Moving on to other conversations, Tony was amazed, it was like he'd bugged an apartment building but with less cursing and blaring TV shows.

"Friday, you picking up any radio or other E.M. signals from there?"

"Boss, no active technology I recognize, but I am picking up occasional E.M. spikes that sound like someone shorting a capacitor. It is just a spike, no complex waveforms I can find in it."

"Well, sounds like it might be time to meet the neighbors. One of the intercepts mentioned a trader that apparently has a thing for giving young girls a ride. I just need an idea of what they need to trade for."

"Friday, gimmie a remote sensor we can put in one of these trees. I want you to keep an ear out for folks asking for stuff they don't have please and I'm going to walk back a ways to see if we can find some more exposed rebar or other metal resources. I think we're going into the blacksmithing business."

The requested sensor manifested in his hand, a small black circle about 2 inches across with a small screw on one side. Tony pulled back next to a tree and screwed the sensor in the joint between the tree and a branch, the open side still having visibility(and audibility) to the island village.

He then walked back towards the trail looking through his map again for likely sources of metal to be recycled.

---

The strange man got up, leaned against the tree for a bit, then left. Nialo relaxed slightly but then started heading through the woods to try to find a place to observe him if he comes back on the north trail. If he doesn't come back on the north trail, then he must be heading further south.

Knowing these woods very well, it did not take him long to find a tree observing the trail and to climb up it and wait again.

Only ten minutes later, he heard the strange man walking back up the trail when he saw him stop then bend over to get something from his bag, took a bite of it, then stand up again and keep walking. Nialo thought for a moment he'd been spotted, but as the man walked, he gave no indication he was even checking the trees.

He continued walking, occasionally whistling and occasionally mumbling to himself. It was very odd behavior for anyone who survived in this area alone. After some consideration, he was very glad this crazy man did not try to come to his village. Waiting a while longer to make sure the crazy man continued on his way, he climbed down and returned to his village to report what he'd seen, then he went to check his fishing lines.

---

Earlier, after Tony left the shore, Friday spotted their watcher taking up his tree hide location and let Tony know.

"Boss, we've got company ahead, there's a man climbing a tree, looks like he's either on watch duty or he's going to try to jump us." At the same time, she highlighted his position in Tony's glasses. In these trees, he was in shadow and not washed out by the sun like the rabbit was earlier. He could clearly see the infrared image of the person crouched on some branches in the tree near the trunk, apparently looking his way.

"Friday, we got enough juice and nanites for some of the Wakandan holo-shields?"

"Yes boss"

"Ok, I'm going to stop and dig in the bag, I want you to setup the shields on the pack straps in front and back and be ready to bring them up if he tries anything. Honestly we should have set this up earlier."

"On it boss, I'll be ready in about 30 seconds."

Twenty-nine seconds later, she announced, "Ready boss."

Tony then stopped, as casually as possible swung off the straps off his pack and turned to the side to dig in his pack and pull out a piece of the turkey jerky he'd dried earlier. As he did that, the straps on his back grew slightly thicker and wider at the level of his pecs when wearing it and a rounded bulge appeared in the middle of the pack facing the rear. Both new areas had what appeared to be black lines running through them, one long horizontal arc in back and two smaller lines in front.

Tony then re-shouldered the pack and kept on walking, taking a nibble of the jerky then kept on walking. He tried whistling as his nerves got to him, but Friday told him he was being suspiciously loud. So he quit and instead mumbled to himself thinking up ideas on things he could make they might want in the village while trying very hard not to look up.

Not long later, Friday chimed in, "Our watcher is leaving, he's dropped from the tree and appears to be heading into the woods and towards the lake Boss."

"Well that went better than I expected. Did we get a good look at him when he left?"

As before, Friday replayed the images she captured of the person climbing down the tree, taking another look his way then turning to head into the forest. Tony thought the outline looked rather masculine, so likely a man; Friday's sensor information overlaid on the image showed he was right and that the man was about six foot tall, well-muscled and not overly burdened with fat nor EM sources.

"Welp, no ape-men, so we lucked out."

"Boss?"

"Planet of the Apes, give it a watch when you get a chance. Um..the 70s version, the remake sucked."

"Sorry Boss, I don't see either in the onboard library."

"Hmm…what have we got with us?"

"Mostly your personal music playlists, your wife asked me to download all the Halmark movies starting with the word Love, the first season of Rick and Morty, and the youtube videos you had me locate and download while at the Barton's for living off-grid. Oh, I've also got a show Clint Barton said you needed, all 21 seasons of New Yankee Workshop."

"Well, those youtube videos might come in handier here than they did there. Any of them focused on fishing?"

"Yup, we've got a couple versions of making rods and line to fish with, fly-hook making, making nets and a couple of fish traps. I've also got a few boat making videos, from hollow logs to log mats Boss."

"Ok, give me a playback window in the upper right corner and start with the fish traps please. And keep an eye out for resources we can use to make stuff in those videos."

---

Tony kept walking for a while and watching the videos until he checked the map and confirmed with Friday it seemed to be the right area for the horse farm he'd planned to go to. Starting from the edge of where they think US-9 was, they started walking around the property looking for signs of previous habitation. Quickly, then did find some dirt and stone piles like what he'd found in Rhinebeck, but these were also grown through with good sized trees. Not too long into their foray, the metal detectors lit off and helped them find the remains of several old steel beams that had made up what was once a covered riding area or warehouse. With the cutting laser, he began shaving off long strips, a little thicker than the rebar had been before. In the end, he shaved off about 50 pounds of rusted metal and discarded about half of that has being too rusted while he went back and cut further hoping for more metal that had avoided corrosion.

Next he carved cut down a smallish tree, about 7" across the trunk at chest height, and reaching about 30 feet tall. The smaller branches he cut up into kindling and started a fire. Then he took sections of trunk about 13 inches long, cut them in half from end to end and set them standing around the fire with the cut face exposed to the flames. Not long later, those were now burning from the inside out. After about an inch of the inside was burning, he used his nanite knife to, one by one, cut out the charcoal embers of the trunk sections and set them back by the fire, although a little further out, charring the now hollowed out sides of the trunk sections and drying them.

Once they had about a quarter inch of char, he pulled them off the fire entirely and put dirt on them to stop them burning more.

As they'd been set aside to cool, it was starting to get dark, so Tony set about setting up a hammock tied between trees about 10 feet up. The height was a little deceptive though as it was also next to one of the dirt mounds, and only about 2 feet away from that.

After some more of the turkey jerky, and some water from his back pack, he climbed the dirt mound, took off the back pack and hung it from another nearby branch but with a cord still leading from the pack back to his reactor. He said good night to Friday and trusted her to watch over him while sleeping.

---

F.R.I.D.A.Y. watched over Tony while he slept and watched the rest of the world world through her sensors. Several more GPS satellites passed overhead and some others whose radios she could detect the edges of, but was not in the right position to get enough of the signal to convert to workable data. She also found some satellites that she observed visually passing, but emitted no signal she could intercept with the equipment she had. They were a mystery she hoped to solve later.

For now, she was still working on the GPS signals she could get, trying to dig into the more heavily encrypted parts of those signals. The encryption was more than she'd first thought, at least three levels of encryption. The first gave her the time code for the packets and another number that increased and decreased on a fairly regular basis from what she'd seen in the captured packets so far. The next encryption level was a rotating cypher based on an algorithm she knew from other systems in her own world. The information she found at this level of the GPS data was what she believed to be the satellite ID and what looked like recycled status codes from NSA Keyhole satellites. This was exciting as if she could get bidirectional access, she may be able to get live images of the earth and their current position, however this was also when she found there was yet another level of encryption to the data that also appeared to be based on rotating encryption.

While most of her attention was on the GPS encryption, she was also tracking several ground level radios moving around the area. Some came close enough that she almost woke up the boss, but their apparent direction of travel then took them away again. It seemed this area wasn't interesting to whoever owned those radios at this time. The signals from them were interesting, a mixed load of long-range omnidirectional packets that seemed to be a mix of beacon and probably status information judging from the amplitude, brevity and regularity of the broadcasts, then she caught some lower powered broadcasts that were likely to other, more local radios. They were also encrypted, but much more random in length and timing.

She began considering asking Tony to walk back to Rhinebeck to the robo-dino he found there, if she could interface with the processor and memory of that system, she may find the keys to decode the ground-based radio traffic, but possibly even the GPS systems. She decided to bring up the topic when he awoke after giving him an update on the GPS encryption.

In the meantime, the night temperature was turning a bit chilly for humans. She checked the nanite inventory and deployed an insulated blanket over Tony while he slept fitfully.

---

Morning came before sunup for Tony, the trauma of discovering he was over 900 years too late to raise his little girl did nothing for granting good dreams.

Friday then gave him the unpleasant news about the GPS encryption, while he could see the silver lining on the possibility of getting into a keyhole satellite, but he was a bit perplexed on why they were being so layered in their approach vs his world. Clearly this one went into some directions with information tech that may be very interesting to discover.

Friday's estimate, based on the time it took to break the other two layers was likely another 24 hours before she could see if this satellite had another nesting Russian doll of encryption inside.

In the mean time, he needed to finish working on making an inventory to trade with.

He re-collected his sleeping gear/nanites and with a now curved nanite knife started working on carving out the charred logs he'd made the evening before. Slowly he hollowed them out more to create oblong shallow divots lined with rough graphite. He then lined those up, worked with Friday on some mods to the smelter/pellet maker he'd earlier made, this time setting it up to use a crucible instead of a hopper. Next he fired up the induction furnace and started feeding in the scrap metal he'd carved off.

The smelting process was not quiet, the old material screamed and popped as it heated up, there was apparently a lot of trapped moisture in the rust. Luckily the system was enclosed, so the mess should be contained, and hopefully drain into the dross collector built in. Quickly after, he started pouring the hot steel into the molds. He ended up with 12 molds, after the first batch cooled enough to stay solid, he dumped them out and began again until he had 36 ingots.

Tony had figured he'd initially make a few items. First, some knives, 12 K-Bar style, carve some rough handles from some of the spare wood. He was considering leaving half the knives with no handle so they could attach whatever handle they wanted. Next he was going to put some ingots through again to heat and pull into wire, probably 16 gauge, about 1 mm diameter. It should be malleable enough for them to use for fishing hooks or lots of other things. Finally he'd make some leather working needles and maybe a net makers needle in half inch size.

First, the wire. Friday updated the smelter design again and not long later they were wrapping hot wire around another bit of log. They ended up with about 100 feet of wire then set it aside to cool.

Second, Tony started hollowing out his molds even more then packing them with sand. Next, on one side of the mold he used his cutting laser to drill three holes, one to pour and two to vent. He repacked with sand again then wrapped the two sides with bands of the wire pulled earlier to keep them tight. Finally he had Friday send in nanites to hollow out the sand into a K-Bar pattern and to clear the pour and vent holes. They repeated that 5 times, leaving two untouched ingot molds.

After that was done, they switched the smelter back to crucible mode and sent through the ingots again, this time they melted without much drama and poured into the molds fairly easily, although there was a bit of overpour and missed hole drama as this wasn't something Tony usually did in the forest. Caves, yes, forest, no.

After a few hours, Tony opened the molds and found several serviceable knives that would need a little clean up and sharpening, then a handle and they'd be saleable.

Tony and Friday repeated this process for the leather needles and net makers needles.

Next, for the polishing and sharpening, Tony worked and Friday worked on an attachment to his cutting laser to add a series of mirrors and motors to allow Friday to use the layer to act as a CNC.

He took the glove and bracer off, strapped it to a log then lined it up where Friday wanted it and used the wire again to secure it in place. Next he placed each item into the cutting area and she went to work on them, had Tony flip them then finish them off.

Not to miss a trick, he had Friday also cut out the handles for the knives using this method but with some recessed grooves in them. Then he bound the handles to the tangs, again with wire but in the grooves Friday made for him. None of the work was master knifemaker level, but for these guys, it was likely stuff they did not have access to.

The next problem was his pack wasn't setup to carry thirty-five-ish pounds of trade materials. After experimenting with several ideas, he decided not to try to strap it to his backpack, he did not want the extra weight. Instead he made a rolling travois, a slice of a log for a wheel, and axel lubed with scrapped off graphite/charcoal and two long branches for him to grip and then pull the travois behind him. However the cargo would also need a net or bag of some kind to stay on the travois. Fortunately, he was able to make some raffia webbing pouches from young sapling bark he stripped off several young trees in the area. Finally prepared, he started heading back down the road to see what they'd make of this new trader in the area.

Updated version:
Using his A.R. glasses to magnify the camera sensors, he watched what he could now see were wooden walls at the tops of the cliffs, but no heads were so far peaking their heads over those walls.

"Friday, are you seeing anyone watching over those walls?"

"No Boss, I am picking up some audio though, it sounds like they are speaking English, American English even."

"Are you kidding? Let me hear"

Through his neuro implants, he could hear the conversations Friday was picking up with her sensors, though fragmented as people were apparently moving around or he was moving his head shifting the target of the audio sensor.

He heard what was clearly faux concern in the tone of an older woman. "…You shouldn't feel it's your fault your son is not with mate."

The angry woman replied was positively soap opera-ish in it's intensity. "I never said it was, if your daughter had kept her legs shut she could have been here and mated instead off with that trader she left with!"

He shifted his head a bit and heard another conversation,

A tired older male voice, but still with authority; "…Very well, you knew it was your duty to flush the waste well, skipping it will not make the duty go away, you are now assigned two more weeks."

"Two weeks!?" came the astonished teenage reply.

"Would you prefer three?"

Moving on to other conversations, Tony was amazed, it was like he'd bugged an apartment building but with less cursing and blaring TV shows.

"Friday, you picking up any radio or other E.M. signals from there?"

"Boss, no active technology I recognize, but I am picking up occasional E.M. spikes that sound like someone shorting a capacitor. It is just a spike, no complex waveforms I can find in it."

"Well, sounds like it might be time to meet the neighbors. One of the intercepts mentioned a trader that apparently has a thing for giving young girls a ride. I just need an idea of what they need to trade for."

"Friday, gimmie a remote sensor we can put in one of these trees. I want you to keep an ear out for folks asking for stuff they don't have please and I'm going to walk back a ways to see if we can find some more exposed rebar or other metal resources. I think we're going into the blacksmithing business."

The requested sensor manifested in his hand, a small black circle about 2 inches across with a small screw on one side. Tony pulled back next to a tree and screwed the sensor in the joint between the tree and a branch, the open side still having visibility(and audibility) to the island village.

He then walked back towards the trail looking through his map again for likely sources of metal to be recycled.

---

The strange man got up, leaned against the tree for a bit, then left. Nialo relaxed slightly but then started heading through the woods to try to find a place to observe him if he comes back on the north trail. If he doesn't come back on the north trail, then he must be heading further south.

Knowing these woods very well, it did not take him long to find a tree observing the trail and to climb up it and wait again.

Only ten minutes later, he heard the strange man walking back up the trail when he saw him stop then bend over to get something from his bag, took a bite of it, then stand up again and keep walking. Nialo thought for a moment he'd been spotted, but as the man walked, he gave no indication he was even checking the trees.

He continued walking, occasionally whistling and occasionally mumbling to himself. It was very odd behavior for anyone who survived in this area alone. After some consideration, he was very glad this crazy man did not try to come to his village. Waiting a while longer to make sure the crazy man continued on his way, he climbed down and returned to his village to report what he'd seen, then he went to check his fishing lines.

---

Earlier, after Tony left the shore, Friday spotted their watcher taking up his tree hide location and let Tony know.

"Boss, we've got company ahead, there's someone climbing a tree, looks like they're on watch duty or may be planning to try to jump us." At the same time, she highlighted the position in Tony's glasses. In these trees, their watcher was in shadow and not washed out by the sun like the rabbit was earlier. He could see the faux-colored infrared image of the person crouched on some branches in the tree near the trunk, apparently looking his way.

"Friday, have we got enough juice and nanites for some of the Wakandan holo-shields?"

"No problem Boss"

"Ok, I'm going to stop and dig in the bag, I want you to setup the shields on the pack straps in front and back and be ready to bring them up if he tries anything. Honestly, we should have set this up earlier."

"On it boss, I'll be ready in about 30 seconds."

Twenty-nine seconds later, she announced, "Ready boss."

Tony then stopped, as casually as possible swung off the straps off his pack and turned to the side to dig in his pack and pull out a piece of the turkey jerky he'd dried earlier. As he did that, the straps on his back grew slightly thicker and wider at the level of his pecs when wearing it and a rounded bulge appeared in the middle of the pack facing the rear. Both new areas had what appeared to be black lines running through them, one long horizontal arc in back and two smaller lines in front.

Tony then re-shouldered the pack and kept on walking, taking a nibble of the jerky then kept on walking. He tried whistling as his nerves got to him, but Friday told him he was being suspiciously loud. So he quit and instead mumbled to himself thinking up ideas on things he could make they might want in the village while trying very hard not to look up.

Not long later, Friday chimed in, "Our watcher is leaving, they've dropped from the tree and appear to be heading into the woods and towards the lake Boss."

"Well that went better than I expected. Did we get a good look at him when he left?"

As before, Friday replayed the images she captured of the person climbing down the tree, taking another look his way then turning to head into the forest. Tony thought the outline looked rather masculine, so likely a man; Friday's sensor information overlaid on the image showed he was right and that the man was about six foot tall, well-muscled and not overly burdened with fat nor EM sources.

"Welp, no ape-men, so we lucked out."

"Boss?"

"Planet of the Apes, give it a watch when you get a chance. Um..the 70s version, the remake sucked."

"Sorry Boss, I don't see either in the onboard library."

"Hmm…what have we got with us?"

"Mostly your personal music playlists, your wife asked me to download all the Halmark movies starting with the word Love, the first season of Rick and Morty, and the youtube videos you had me locate and download while at the Barton's for living off-grid. Oh, I've also got a show Clint Barton said you needed, all 21 seasons of New Yankee Workshop."

"Well, those youtube videos might come in handier here than they did there. Any of them focused on fishing?"

"Yup, we've got a couple versions of making rods and line to fish with, fly-hook making, making nets and a couple of fish traps. I've also got a few boat making videos, from hollow logs to log mats Boss."

"Ok, give me a playback window in the upper right corner and start with the fish traps please. And keep an eye out for resources we can use to make stuff in those videos."

---

Tony kept walking for a while and watching the videos until he checked the map and confirmed with Friday it seemed to be the right area for the horse farm he'd planned to go to. Starting from the edge of where they think US-9 was, they started walking around the property looking for signs of previous habitation. Quickly, then did find some dirt and stone piles like what he'd found in Rhinebeck, but these were also grown through with good sized trees. Not too long into their foray, the metal detectors lit off and helped them find the remains of several old steel beams that had made up what was once a covered riding area or warehouse. With the cutting laser, he began shaving off long strips, a little thicker than the rebar had been before. In the end, he shaved off about 50 pounds of rusted metal and discarded about half of that has being too rusted while he went back and cut further hoping for more metal that had avoided corrosion.

Next he carved cut down a smallish tree, about 7" across the trunk at chest height, and reaching about 30 feet tall. The smaller branches he cut up into kindling and started a fire. Then he took sections of trunk about 13 inches long, cut them in half from end to end and set them standing around the fire with the cut face exposed to the flames. Not long later, those were now burning from the inside out. After about an inch of the inside was burning, he used his nanite knife to, one by one, cut out the charcoal embers of the trunk sections and set them back by the fire, although a little further out, charring the now hollowed out sides of the trunk sections and drying them.

While waiting for the char, he checked with Friday on the take from the tree sensor, she reported the conversation between their watcher, who was named Nialo and the chief of the village, Chief Hul'ka.

"Hul'ka? Does he sound like a short drill sergeant? I wish I could have you watch an '80s movie called Stripes."

"I'm sure it'd be funnier if I could Boss, I can't tell if he's short, but he does sound like an older male, apparently fairly sharp and good at asking for details."

"What details?" asked Tony, leaning forward with curiosity.

With more than a hint of mischief in her voice, Friday reported "Well ,apparently Nialo thinks you're nuts because you were whistling then talking to yourself. Told ya so, Boss."

"Noone loves you when you brag about telling them so Friday." Said Tony as he pouted. He then switched his attention back to working on his future molds and forgetting to ask about the other reason he'd put up the sensor.

Once they had about a quarter inch of char, he pulled them off the fire entirely and put dirt on them to stop them burning more.

As they'd been set aside to cool, it was starting to get dark, so Tony set about setting up a hammock tied between trees about 10 feet up. The height was a little deceptive though as it was also next to one of the dirt mounds, and only about 2 feet away from that.

After some more of the turkey jerky, and some water from his back pack, he climbed the dirt mound, took off the back pack and hung it from another nearby branch but with a cord still leading from the pack back to his reactor. He said good night to Friday and trusted her to watch over him while sleeping.

---

F.R.I.D.A.Y. watched over Tony while he slept and watched the rest of the world world through her sensors. Several more GPS satellites passed overhead and some others whose radios she could detect the edges of, but was not in the right position to get enough of the signal to convert to workable data. She also found some satellites that she observed visually passing, but emitted no signal she could intercept with the equipment she had. They were a mystery she hoped to solve later.

For now, she was still working on the GPS signals she could get, trying to dig into the more heavily encrypted parts of those signals. The encryption was more than she'd first thought, at least three levels of encryption. The first gave her the time code for the packets and another number that increased and decreased on a fairly regular basis from what she'd seen in the captured packets so far. The next encryption level was a rotating cypher based on an algorithm she knew from other systems in her own world. The information she found at this level of the GPS data was what she believed to be the satellite ID and what looked like recycled status codes from NSA Keyhole satellites. This was exciting as if she could get bidirectional access, she may be able to get live images of the earth and their current position, however this was also when she found there was yet another level of encryption to the data that also appeared to be based on rotating encryption.

While most of her attention was on the GPS encryption, she was also tracking several ground level radios moving around the area. Some came close enough that she almost woke up the boss, but their apparent direction of travel then took them away again. It seemed this area wasn't interesting to whoever owned those radios at this time. The signals from them were interesting, a mixed load of long-range omnidirectional packets that seemed to be a mix of beacon and probably status information judging from the amplitude, brevity and regularity of the broadcasts, then she caught some lower powered broadcasts that were likely to other, more local radios. They were also encrypted, but much more random in length and timing.

She began considering asking Tony to walk back to Rhinebeck to the robo-dino he found there, if she could interface with the processor and memory of that system, she may find the keys to decode the ground-based radio traffic, but possibly even the GPS systems. She decided to bring up the topic when he awoke after giving him an update on the GPS encryption.

In the meantime, the night temperature was turning a bit chilly for humans. She checked the nanite inventory and deployed an insulated blanket over Tony while he slept fitfully.

---

Morning came before sunup for Tony, the trauma of discovering he was over 900 years too late to raise his little girl did nothing for granting good dreams.

Friday then gave him the unpleasant news about the GPS encryption, while he could see the silver lining on the possibility of getting into a keyhole satellite, but he was a bit perplexed on why they were being so layered in their approach vs his world. Clearly this one went in some directions with information tech that may be very interesting to discover.

Friday's estimate, based on the time it took to break the other two layers was likely another 24 hours before she could see if this satellite had another nesting Russian doll of encryption inside.

"Friday, before I get started on processing the metal, what'd you pick up from the village for trade needs?"

"It turns out our village does a bit of hunting for local sheep, turkey and rabbit but most of their food is from fishing the lake and pulling in fish off static lines they drop from their floating bridge."

"Okay, so portable fish traps may be something they'd be interested in – I'll have to get a look at this bridge they've got and see if we can make something that'll work with that. Any idea why they went with a floating bridge instead of fixed?"

"It hasn't' come up in conversation yet Boss."

He re-collected the nanites that had been sleeping gear mostly recently and with a now curved nanite knife started working on carving out the charred logs he'd made the evening before. Slowly he hollowed them out more to create oblong shallow divots lined with rough charcoal-graphite. He then lined those up, worked with Friday on some mods to the smelter/pellet maker he'd earlier made, this time setting it up to use a crucible instead of a hopper. Next, he fired up the induction furnace and started feeding in the scrap metal he'd carved off.

The smelting process was not quiet, the old material screamed and popped as it heated up, there was apparently a lot of trapped moisture in the rust. Luckily the system was enclosed, so the mess should be contained, and hopefully drain into the dross collector built in. Quickly after, he started pouring the hot steel into the molds. He ended up with 12 molds, after the first batch cooled enough to stay solid, he dumped them out and began again until he had 36 ingots.

Tony had figured he'd initially make a few items. First, some knives, 12 K-Bar style, carve some rough handles from some of the spare wood. He was considering leaving half the knives with no handle so they could attach whatever handle they wanted. Next he was going to put some ingots through again to heat and pull into wire, probably 16 gauge, about 1 mm diameter. It should be malleable enough for them to use for fishing hooks or lots of other things. Finally he'd make some leather working needles and maybe a net makers needle in half inch size.

First, the wire. Friday updated the smelter design again and not long later they were re-heating the wire and pulling it through a 1mm die then wrapping the hot wire around another bit of log. Since they weren't heating the metal to liquid state, it was much less power intensive then the first run through. They ended up with about 100 feet of wire then set it aside to cool.

Second, Tony started hollowing out his molds even more then packing them with sand. Next, on one side of the mold he used his cutting laser to drill three holes, one to pour and two to vent. He repacked with sand again then wrapped the two sides with bands of the wire pulled earlier to keep them tight. Finally he had Friday send in nanites to hollow out the sand into a K-Bar pattern and to clear the pour and vent holes. They repeated that 4 times, leaving two untouched ingot molds.

After that was done, they switched the smelter back to crucible mode and sent through the ingots again, this time they melted without much drama and poured into the molds fairly easily, although there was a bit of overpour and missed hole drama as this wasn't something Tony usually did in the forest. Caves, yes, forest, no.

After a few hours, Tony opened the molds and found several serviceable knives that would need a little clean up and sharpening, then a handle and they'd be saleable.

Tony and Friday repeated this process for another batch of knives, then remelted the cut off, lft over metal into another two ingots made with the last of the ingot molds. After that, they repeated the sand mold making process for the leather needles and net makers needles. With some careful work, they were able to get about fifteen leather needles per mold and two netting needles in one mold. They ran one pour through all five molds resulting in three molds of forty-five leather needles total and two molds with two netting needles each.

Next, for the polishing and sharpening, Tony and Friday worked on an attachment to his cutting laser to add a series of mirrors and motors to allow Friday to use the laser to act as a CNC.

He took the glove and bracer off, strapped it to a log then lined it up where Friday wanted it and used the wire again to secure it in place. Next he placed each item into the cutting area and she went to work on them, had Tony flip them then finish them off.

Not to miss a trick, he had Friday also cut out the handles for the knives using this method but with some recessed grooves in them. Then he bound the handles to the tangs, again with wire but in the grooves Friday made for him. None of the work was master knife maker level, but for these guys, it was likely stuff they did not have access to.

The next problem as the Sun was finally coming over the horizon was his pack wasn't setup to carry thirty-five-ish pounds of trade materials. After experimenting with several ideas, he decided not to try to strap it to his backpack, he did not want the extra weight. Instead, he made a rolling travois, a slice of a log for a wheel, and axel lubed with scrapped off graphite/charcoal and two long branches for him to grip and then pull the travois behind him. However the cargo would also need a net or bag of some kind to stay on the travois. Fortunately, he was able to make some raffia webbing pouches from young sapling bark he stripped off several young trees in the area. He was still adding more pockets to his travois when Friday interrupted him.

With a concerned tone, "Boss, there are two signals heading to the village lake area from downstream coming from behind the sensor, apparently a patroller for the village has seen them and is stirring up the village. Apparently, they are called snapmaws."

Tony felt that sounded a bit ominous and told her to try to get some visuals when you can, I'm going to go ahead and head that way. If it looks too dangerous, we'll stop and see if we can find another way. I just hope it isn't too much bigger than the dino-robot I found before.

Finally, he finished the last pouch, loaded up his trade goods, re-absorbed the crafting tools and took up his backpack again. As prepared as he could be, he started heading back down the road to see what they'd make of this new trader in the area and what he'd make of the new robots.

Cereburn · May 23, 2024

Chapter 6

Nialo worked with the fishers to pull the floating bridge back to the shore. Every pull of the rope felt like the walls of the world were being pulled back in on him. Now he would be trapped with his mother, her friends and their unending gossip.

Earlier this morning, one of the other patrollers spotted the snapmaws coming back into the lake from downstream. Usually they were not a threat as long as you did not attack them, but they would always tear apart any logs blocking the waterways, including their bridges. Boats in the water would also be targeted, but if you rowed to the short fast enough, they'd ignore you. From this, they had learned years ago that if they made the bridge on floating logs and pulled it out of the way before the maws came, they would ignore them. Any logs that ended up floating away from the shore would get frozen and shattered by the snapmaws.

He recalled the story of the one explorer that thought he could explore the world by floating down the river. He was not fast enough to get to shore, so the snapmaws ate his boat and supplies. He jumped from the boat and tried to attack, he managed to knock loose a piece of armor, but then the eyes of the snapmaw turned red and it rolled over, swung around then caught him and they say he shattered after it froze him like any other log.

He hoped this would be one of the times where they took a few laps of the lake then proceeded up stream. Sometimes, they could be seen digging out the bottom of either the river upstream or downstream or the lake in certain spots or just float, as if asleep. Sometimes after sleeping for more than a day, they'd randomly wake up and move on. Either way, right now they were leaving him stuck on an island that seemed to become smaller and smaller every time he was trapped on it.

---

As Tony walked back down the trail, he waited on updates from their sensor and spared some time to imagine improvements to his travois solution. It was working, but the single wheel only worked right when he held both poles, trying to one-hand it while trying to clear anything in front of him left the travois trying to twist its way out of his other hand. He continued to distract himself from the time required to move such a short distance on foot with the options to fix his design.

A few miles later, Friday fed him images of the snapmaws finally crawling over the downstream lake bridge/dam. He looked incredulous at the clearly robot alligators on a pre-historic scale. Going through the sensor overlays, he observed they were a little over 30 feet long each, appeared to have similar Musculo-skeletal features as the eye-dino he'd found earlier and were definitely the source of some of the short-range beacons they'd picked up previously. Infrared images showed part of the machines appeared much colder than the surrounding body, some kind of sacks around the neck. Also shown were some of the panels on the back appeared to be multifunctional, they looked like photovoltaic panels, but thermals showed they were also being used to radiate heat, the delta was nothing crazy, about 40 degrees C above ambient. In his world, mixing solar power and heat did nothing for you unless you were in arctic temperatures.

He wished he'd tested cutting the metal of that one carcass he'd found, or even tried shooting it with his hunting gauntlet. From what he found, unarmored sections should be vulnerable to both, but he did not want to be in a position where he needed test on a robot alligator that could scare the crap out of the monster from Lake Placid. If Betty White's character were here, what would she feed it? He had no handy cows.

Judging from the sensor feed, the alligators were splitting up and patrolling the lake in opposite directions; one moving south then east, the other north then east to meet back up on the other side where the upstream feed of the lake was likely at.

As long as no one did anything stupid, they might even just move on upriver before he could get there. He and Friday both pondered the creatures as Tony walked, looking at possible weak spots and what other things they might learn.

---

Another hour of walking and observing showed the alligators repeated their patrol of the lake a few more times then came to a spot on the south side of the lake and sat floating with their solar panels just above the surface of the water. He could now see them for himself as he'd just arrived back at the spot he'd been at before.

"Friday, any progress with the signals you're getting from these guys?"

"No Boss, they're being pretty quiet right now, no new broadcasts since they stopped moving."

Tony stepped away from the shore and put down his travois behind some nearby trees then returned to watch. He then shifted his sight to the right and looked at the island village.

"Anything new from our village friends?"

"The few conversations I've picked up were prayers for them to proceed up river soon. They seem to be praying to the 'Mother of the Waters'. I've heard mention of The Mother before, but this is the first time they've apparently started calling on her with the full name since we started recording."

"Anything interesting conversations about her?"

"Not so much Boss, so far the times it comes up are in greetings, goodbyes and pleas for various character improvements."

"Let me know if any of the kids start getting a lesson about their water mom, that sounds like an interesting lesson. So nothing about taking any action about these guys?"

"No Boss, although I did hear someone telling a teenager a horror story of a guy that tried to fight one and got frozen and broken into pieces. The teenager is now reconsidering how to prove his manhood."

"Frozen and broken into pieces? Are these guys are using cryogenics as a weapon?" Tony began scanning back through the recorded video again, but found no examples of these guys even opening their maws.

Looking around, he decided to see what they'd do if presented with some trash in the water. He looked through the underbrush and found a few branches after a short walk; apparently these village guys do clean up around here occasionally. He walked back to the shore, took another look at the alligators to see if they were facing him, they weren't; he tossed in the sticks as far as he could, which ended up being about 30 feet from the shore then he retreated into the woods to watch through the sensor.

Nothing immediately happened for a short while, about 5 minutes later though one of the robo-gaters turned to look in the direction where Tony through the sticks then began swimming towards them. Tony rechecked the feed from the sensor, as the angle on the swimming machine wasn't a direct line to the woody trash, but on a trajectory to where the current was taking it. So these guys could anticipate target positions. Definitely good to know.

When the snapmaw intercepted the trash, the eyes turned yellow then it opened up its big mouth, but then something unexpected happened, it sprayed the branches with liquid that was clearly very cold, the branches turned white with ice frozen to them from the river. After the spray stopped the machine snapped its jaws and frozen shards of the branches exploded around it. The snapmaw refroze and snapped any pieces larger than about foot then proceeded to swim upstream, its eyes still yellow and, he assumed, looking for the source of the trash. However, after it passed his previous position on the shore, it did not stop, just kept swimming on its previous patrol around the lake. Finally, it stopped next to its partner and resumed its floating vigil; the eyes returning to their previous blue color.

I definitely need to report these guys for not posting a no swimming sign.

"How do you think our holo-shields would do against that spray, Friday?"

"The shield itself would be fine, but the emitters would likely freeze up after a few hits and short out. What're you thinking Boss?"

"I'm thinking I don't want to test how well the shields will work against that while I'm wearing them."

"Lets go north around the lake and see if we can find where they've got their tied up bridge at, maybe we can find a good spot to wave at them and talk."

"Ok, Boss."

---

After walking a little more than a quarter around the shore of the lake, they were relieved that the snapmaws took no notice of them and they finally got a look at the other side of the village.

This side was much closer to the shore than the downstream side, it appeared they were only about 70 feet from the short of the lake. Hanging above the water was a pair of ropes fasted about 5 feet above the water level from what looked like a large log post on the shore supported by a cairn of rocks surrounding it and further re-enforced by the ropes continuing down into another log buried at a 45 degree angle and covered with a pile of rocks anchoring it to the shore. The other side was attached to a pillar of rock jutting from the cliff near a path leading up into the village, from this angle, they could see it was about half slope and mixed with hand carved steps.

Along the shallow shore below the cliffs were several floating flat top barges pulled up on the shore and tied down to rock anchors in the dirt. Each barge also had poles on the ends about 6 feet tall with what looked like wooden J-hooks clearly meant to ride on the ropes and keep the bridge in place when in use.

Tony briefly considered the rather girthy ropes and wondered what they were using to make them. They looked like hemp ropes, but he'd not seen that plant so far. They also looked strong enough to support someone's weight by themselves and made a note to himself to look at rope tools he might use.

Continuing to walk around the lake, they also spotted the upstream feed of the lake, this did not seem to be a fallen bridge like the other side, just a wide creek leading west and a bit of a curve northward, likely leading back to the Hudson. It was southwest of the bridge anchor, about 50 yards. Around the bridge anchor was a fairly wide, cleared area of beach with evidence of fire pits, some grass roofed rain shelters and places to sit and likely work. Tony could see an area with flat stones that might be for threshing wheat and some large hollowed out stone bowls likely used to grind it.

Clearly, somewhere around here were some harvestable grains, so these weren't just fishers. Something to ask about later. Speaking of asking, Tony looked across the lake back to the island and found not only the bridge, but a few people hanging around the top of the stair/slope to the village and he waved hello at them. One of the kids waved back while an older woman clearly told another kid to go tell someone about the guy waving at them.

"Ok, Friday, time to setup a show; I hope we can do better than the cable shopping network."

Cereburn · Jun 17, 2024

Chapter 7: Fire Sale

[h2][/h2]On the beach opposite the village, Tony found a well-used firepit dug into the ground. Deciding on making a show of tempering the blades, he started looking for the things he'd need to make a quenching vessel. A sheet metal tub being unavailable and not wanting to "magic" one out of what looked like nothing, he decided to do something similar to when he made molds earlier, just on a larger scale. The cutting laser, he was going to lie and say he re-made something that he saw a rare machine doing. Tony, as always, wanted his reputation to be earned for stuff he made not mystical hooky-pookism. He mentally pushed back inconvenient thoughts of Clark's law; hoping his tech wasn't too far removed from other stuff they'd seen that they'd believe it too was magic.

He walked about looking for any fallen trees, not finding any; he assumed the villagers already cut any of those up for firewood, he instead found a tree about 50 feet back from the shore on a small rise that appeared to be dying, it looked like a previous storm had pushed it over about 40 degrees, pulling up part of the root ball and damaging the taproot. Some quick work with his cutting laser and a few trips with his unloaded travois brought a pile of logs near the fire. First, he cut in half a log that was about 12 inches in diameter and about 3 foot long. As before, he then built a fire and set those two logs to lean over the fire to start burning out their heart wood.

While the fire was going, he went back through the pile and started cutting a few more logs into some sized for sitting on and put those around the fire on the opposite side of where he was going to be working. A clear invitation to the villagers to come over when they decided it was safe.

Although his ego pricked him a bit here, so he did not resist making a rough stool for himself using a 2 inch log slice, he then cut four holes in a rough square and began searching through the branches of the fallen tree for appropriate sized legs. After a little careful work to cut two inch long tenons in the legs, he put them into the holes, then trimmed the branches down so it'd sit level. Giving his stool a test, it worked fine. He set the laser to a lower power to burn instead of cut, then burned his initials into the chair, "A.S."

F.R.I.D.A.Y., deciding to be a bit cheeky chimed in, "Boss, you forgot an S."

"Very funny Friday, how're you doing with the signals work, any news from the robo-gators or GPS?"

"The snapmaws, as the villagers call them, are still chilling in the south side of the lake. The GPS decryption sub-processes are still working on it. "

"In a while, I'm going to need the induction heater from the smelter to heat up some things to temper them. Also, whenever I need to grab a tool, I'm going to go to the bag for it, assemble the nanites there after I stick my hand in the bag when needed please."

"Gotcha Boss"

---

A few hours later, he had completed his quenching vessel after carving out the charred insides coating the edges with some clay then clamping the two sides together and tying them with some of the spare wire from earlier. He then filled it with water and was satisfied that it did not immediately start dripping.

Next, he emptied out the catchall module of his back pack and reclaimed the nanites from that and re-assembled the induction heater but without the smelting section nor wire die. Setting the heater on a log, he then reached into his bag and pulled out a set of nanite made tongs, then held one of the un-handled blades into the heater. When it came up to a glowing orange on the edges and more cherry red in the middle, he pulled the knife out then plunged it into the water.

When a short burst of steam puffed out, he heard through his sensors a few surprised gasps from the islanders watching him work and he grinned knowing he had their attention.

After a few minutes, he pulled the quenched blade out and set it aside in the sand to finish cooling then started on the rest of the blades without handles.

"Boss, the snapmaws are on the move!" said an alerted Friday. "They're heading this way, but don't' seem to be in a rush."

"Ok, might be they're moving on. Let's shut down the heater and pretend we are putting it away in the bag."

Suiting action to words, they did that and by the time Tony turned around, he saw and heard that the islanders had also seen the snapmaws. Families herded their children back up the stairs and followed, keeping a wary eye on the mechanical creatures from the safety of the village height.

Over the next 10 minutes, the robo-gators swam upstream under the rope line for the bridge and past Tony's impromptu smithing show; their eyes stayed blue the entire way then they were into the river on the northern side and out of the lake.

With a thoughtful look at the machines leaving the area, Tony asks Friday "If those two are doing a patrol of the river from it's head to the ocean, how long do you figure till they come back this way?"

Cautiously Friday responds, "There's a lot of assumptions there Boss, how many obstacles do they need to clean up, are they going to pick a spot to linger in again, are they the only ones doing the patrol or are they the only two on just this section of river. The villagers haven't said much about how frequently they come by, just that they sometimes go through the lake quickly and sometimes they linger a while before moving on."

"Boss, I think the best bet here is to ask the locals."

Tony looks back at said locals, still watching the river and not prepping their bridge yet and impatiently replies, "I'd agree if they'd get off their butts and get here."

Walking back to where he'd been working, he saw that he still had two untreated knife "blanks" left along with the knives he'd put handles on but had not treated.

Reaching into his bag again, he pulled out some pliers and began loosening the wire wrapping on the handles, removing the wood then setting them aside in preparation to re-fasten them on treated knives. He next picked up one of the treated knife blanks and checked the edge, the edge felt a bit dull, it appeared to have curled a bit in the tempering process. Sub-vocally speaking with Friday, he put the tongs and pliers away and pulled out a medium sized pull saw. With the saw, he selected another log, about two feet long, put it on its end then cut a groove into the other end, about three quarters of an inch deep and just wide enough for a knife blank to fit in; which he then did with one of the treated blanks. After a little wiggling to make sure it would not slip out, he put "away" the saw and pulled out sharpening tools and went to work realigning the curled edge and re-sharpening the blade. Once it was decently sharp again, he put it into a set of handles, re-wrapped it and then stabbed it into a log then he continued working on the other knives in the same pattern until the ready handles were used up. He left the remaining treated blanks without handles after he sharped them.

Next, Tony pulled out the heater again, this time using pliers to fold over a six inch piece of wire from the middle to form a loop then twist the remaining wire into a one-inch two-sided hook, then treating and quenching it so the wire would stiffen up. He next used a file to sharpen the hook ends and cut shallow barbs behind those tips.

After about an hour and a half, as he finished his fourth set of hooks, Friday let him know that the islanders were finally messing with their floating bridge. They hooked the first "link" of the bridge to the guide rope with a hook carved into a vertical log post at the bow and began pushing it into the river, as the stern came to the rope, a similar hooked post was there to meet the rope along with a smaller looped rope around the stern post and the bow post of the next link, tying them together; this link by link bridge building continued for nine links covering the gap between the island and the shore.

---

Nialo was, as usual, the first to get across the bridge, although this time he was with a few of the other tough men from his village and had the chief behind them. He and the others were curious about the crazy man that had returned after passing through before. Also wary, not all traders were honest in what they sold or who they claimed to be.

As they crossed the bridge, the trader stood up and oddly put his back pack back on, although leaving his wares down. Looking to his Chief Hul'ka, he gave a sign to give the man some space.

The Chief approached and called out, "You are not someone we have met before, why have you come to our lake?"

Tony noted the chief was a well sized guy, but clearly not as big as he used to be, he still held himself up with strength, but he recognized a fighting man gone to pasture, he'd met many before. Unlike some of them, the eyes on this one said he hadn't suffered too many concussion over the years. He decided not to embellish too much, such men had called him on it in the past and right now, he did not have the money and resources to back up his bragging. Not that he wouldn't brag at all, but maybe turn it down to 6 instead of 11.

Standing and speaking clearly as the chief was still about 10 yards away, "Hi, I'm Tony, yes I'm new here, unfortunately most of my trade items and companions are somewhere else, so my selection is a little light at the moment, but I'm certain you can judge the quality of my wares for yourself. Please join me." He finished waiving at the seats.

The chief looked at the logs available to sit on for a bit, making it clear he would sit himself when he chose too, not when told. He then turned to his men and signaled them to let the other villagers get about their usual chores although Nialo stayed to guard the chief. Seeing that his folks were about their business, he then went over and sat down across from Tony; taking the time to look over the wares Tony had set out. "I see you have knives, is that all?"

By this time, the fishers of the village had come out across the bridge and were setting up lines to fish from while other villagers kept moving across the bridge and into the forest to, assumedly, forage for other things.

Tony reached out and picked up a pair of his finished hooks and handed one over, "You might find your fishing improved by some of these. Notice the sharpened hooks on both sides made of tempered steel. Once a fish goes for the bait on one of these, there's twice the chance the hook will catch and it will stay caught until you reel in the string."

Then, picking up one of the knives, "and then you can easily scale and filet the fish with one of my steel knives." He said while mimicking the actions of filleting a fish.

The chief was interested, but doubtful. He held up the hook and asked, "I'd like to test it before we discuss any price."

Tony looked conflicted, thinking of the ways this could fail then asked, "How deep is the river under the bridge where you usually fish?"

Remembering when he was a bit younger and had liked to swim around the bridge himself, the Chief recalled, "About twice as tall as a man. Why do you ask?"

Tony had not done much actual fishing as a child, it took Barton to get him to sit still enough to try it, but he remembered what Barton had showed him. Of course, there was no rod nor reel, but he could make do. "I'd be happy to show you a bit how we do it where I come from, but I'm out of fishing line, can you give me about 30 feet to use?"

It did not seem an unreasonable request to Hul'ka, but the length was longer than they usually used for fishing, so his curiosity was even more piqued than before. He looked over towards the bridge, looking for a specific face, and seeing her on the near side of the bridge, teaching one of the younger fishers, he called out, "U'nia! U'nia, bring me one of the spindles of fishing line."

She looked up and waved back an acknowledgement, then hook the line of her young fisher and sent him to run up to the village to get the requested spindle. Not long later, strung between a stick with two forks on both ends was a length of string in the hands of a young boy about ten running back across the bridge. As he got near to U'nia, she waved him on to the Chief and told him to return to his line after he dropped off the spool. The young boy kept running until he reached the chief and handed over the spool. The Chief looked at him, "You might make a better running than a fisher, but that will be for U'nia to decide. Thank you."

Sensing his dismissal, the boy ran back to the bridge and the nod of approval from U'nia when he got there.

Back at the trade seats, Hul'ka pulled off the requested length of line, coiling it neatly at his feat as he pulled it off the spindle which he then cut which is own knife that appeared to be a piece of metal recovered from a machine Tony observed.

Tony took the line and measured ten feet of it where he tied a knot. He then reached into his backpack for 'his last bobber' and slid that onto the line and tied another knot after the bobbin so the line would not slide either way through it. He then tied on the hook at the end then baited it with some of his turkey jerky. Standing up, he started walking to the shore; but was also subvocalizing. "Friday, find me some big fish please to drop this hook on."

The display in his googles took on an overlay allowing him to see through the water like polarized lenses, but then Friday started highlighting spots where fish should be, or highlighting the actual fish when she found them. Before tossing the line he made a loop of the other end and put it around his wrist, then spun the hook weighted with his bait and tossed it out in the direction of the big fish towards a set of broken trees by the shore and not into the river from the bridge as the others were fishing.

This had many with their eyes on him instead of their own lines; however, not long after casing, the bobber ducked under the water once, twice and then Tony jerked the line and started pulling it back in with a clear fight on the other end of the line. Not long later, he returned to the Chief with much larger than average fish. He then showed how the both sides of the hook had actually caught this time, near the side of the mouth in the top and bottom jaws. With a bit of wiggling, he got the hook free and on an unused seat, cum table, he started butchering the fish, but instead stabbed the fish through the head with the knife and pushed the table back to the Chief, "Please try out my knife."

Impressed, the Chief took up the knife and began to expertly take apart the fish. Tony was secretly relieved, he was never good at filleting a fish, he always ended up with bones all over everything.

As he was working through separating the fish into edible and inedible parts, the Chief started the discussion on price. "So what would you like to trade for your hooks and knifes? Would you also trade for the floating balls?"

"Um, actually, the bobber is my last one, but you can make them from wood or anything else that floats. As far as the price, what I'm after right now is a bit of travel food and information. As I said, I'm new to the area and I was separated from the rest of my, uh…caravan. The maps that I remember are a bit different from what I'm seeing, I'm hoping you can help me get to where they should meet up with me." Tony hoped his lie was close enough to the truth expected to not get called on it. Suddenly Tony remembered something else he needed, "Oh, also, certain metals, if you happen to collect some, I'd be interested in those."

Cereburn · Jul 7, 2024

Chapter Eight: Getting to know the neighborhood.

The kids in the village laughed at Tony's red face when he tried their spicy fish stew. Apparently cayenne peppers and others made it through the apocalypse. After nearly draining his water reservoir and sampling some of the local hooch, he got his burning tongue under control. The adults, while amused, were at least kind enough not to openly laugh. That did nothing to stop Friday from remarking about three different times they'd actually walked past several pepper bushes on the way south and that he shouldn't have been surprised.

Over the meal, he also learned that they traded dried fish and other dried peppers to traders that came through the area every few weeks. Apparently most of the traders went back north then west over an old bridge that crashed, but folks had turned back into a bridge by filling in around the pile with more stones and wooden bridges over the gaps made by the Hudson.

South were some more people, but they were less welcoming, the Emmers were very concerned at keeping intruders out of their area although they did also let in traders and scavengers if you brought enough pay a toll to go through.

South of the territory of the Emmers was what the locals called the Big Rot. It was an area popular with scavengers, but very few chose to live there. The area was full of many more machines there roaming and chewing up scrap. The ruins themselves were not safe, many tails were told of them falling on the on, or out from under, the unwary.

Tony had mixed feelings about continuing to what was clearly the ruins of New York. Considering his experiences with the leadership of that area, he found it honestly amusing that it was now known as the Big Rot instead of the Big Apple, but he wasn't sure what it would be like to see one of his favorite places brought low. Rebuilding after the Chitauri was bad enough, but that was after they'd won. This would be seeing New York ruined and defeated.

Hul'ka, as Tony eventually learned was the Chief's name, remarked on Tony's thoughtful look, "You look like you are not sure if you are going to meet a friend or their grave. Why is this?"

"Sometimes I remember that great ruins were not always ruins, that once many people lived and worked in those places. I'm curious, what are the stories your people tell about how those places became ruins?"

The chief rocked back and looked away in thought before looking back to Tony and replying, "We had a great woman that loved to tell the histories when I was younger, but after she died, the younger folk that had tried to learn the stories were also killed in raids when we spent more time off the island so many of the stories are not well remembered."

He leaned slightly to the side and back, his eyes now closed as he tried to remember. "We believe the Mother of the Waters brought life to the oceans first a great long time ago. After a time, she caused some of that life to leave swimming in the seas and to learn to swim in the skies and finally she made life to crawl and walk on the land. This is when she made men with the parts of all three, eyes that see a far distance, like the bird, soft fingers and toes like the sea snails but with small shells like the crabs and then noses and lungs like the boars, hands like the racoons and finally legs and arms like no others. The first men were made to care for all, but were led away from the mother's shores as they learned to crave power over things as they learned more and more how the Mother made the world. Eventually they made their own creations, machines to serve them but the machines were not made to serve the world and instead cause death and hurt. Eventually the Mother made her own machines that destroyed the machines of men and all that they had built and then drowned the makers of those machines. Eventually the Mother made men again, but this time kept her own machines to keep watch over the men so that they would not do as they had done before." The chief paused in his story, turning his head from side to side, "That is what I remember of the stories she told us about how the world came to be as it is. Her version was much better though."

Tony took this in and lied, "That isn't far off from what my people believe. Uhm, but do you happen ot know if the machines would stop me from going to the Big Rot to explore anything worth scrapping?"

The chief, puzzled, "Very few are dumb enough to attack the machines, they do not live long. You have seen how the snapmaws will destroy what doesn't belong in their waters. I think this is mostly true of all the other machines I have seen. Usually we only come into conflict with the scrappers and glinthawks, if we try to pull salvage parts from their metal piles and get caught, they will try to drive us off."

Looking at Tony more directly in the eyes, "But I am curious, what is it you are wanting to find in the Big Rot?"

Tony relaxed into the truth, "Honestly, I am hoping for a few rare metals that I hope traded there in the past and anything that will help me see their history as they recorded it."

The chief, remembered what Tony said earlier about metals, "What kind of metals are you looking for?"

Tony, now keen for any information on where to get the materials to rebuild his suit expanded from earlier, "Quite a few actually, but right now I'm mostly concerned with finding gold and titanium, but scandium, yttrium, neodymium, among many others would also be very useful to me. The first one can often be found in certain ancient areas, the others are hard to know when you find them as many do not look like metals, but different colored dirt."

Hul'ka's interest faultered over most of the unfamiliar materials, but leaned over to Nialo and whispered something to him, then he turned back to Tony as Nialo left, "I think we can help with that first one, we sometimes fish up things that are not what we expected."

A few minutes later, Nialo returned with what looked like the remains of a gold watch band, but with just a shallow gold bowl attached on one end of the band. With permission from the chief, he took a closer look at it and saw that the other side of the watch had the band brackets sheered off and in the sheer spot, he could see it was indeed a solid gold piece, another look in the bowl where the watch innards would have been and he found faded marks that looked like they said 750, 75% gold weight or 18 karat gold. He could not help smiling before he looked up and asked, "This is good, do you have more?"

The chief smiled, now he had more to haggle with to get the hooks and knives. "I don't know, do you?"

In the end, the needles that Tony had forgotten about had got him more of the stash of gold in the village than anything else. Once the village stitchers were asked to test two of them, Tony new he had a bigger winner than the hooks had been. He was still disappointed the knives were bigger sellers, but these folks had been getting metal cutting tools from scrapped machines they'd found like he had earlier and were used to using those bits. Tony knew from experience, some tools you used because you knew them better than your own hand, not because they were the best tools.

After his trading, he had about 2 pounds of various purities of gold, almost all in old bits of jewelry pulled from the river or, in one case, found in what he decided had likely been a lock box that had finally lost the test of time and popped open where a forager had found the shiny bits inside.

He would need to put the gold through some work to purify it, unfortunately he had no strong acides to do that with so he'd have to work it through heat and a few other tricks he'd learned to help encourage the gold to separate from everything else.

After asking to setup camp for a few days on the shore, Tony setup a hammock to sleep in. This brought more attention than he'd expected as they'd not seen the type of cloth-like material his nanites had assumed for the hammock. Tony, as usual, glibly lied and said it was a remnant of a broken sail and that he did not know how to make more. Turning aside from that disappointment, the villagers instead watched as they came and went on their various tasks as Tony then spent a few days working through the last of his iron rebar to make some more hooks, needles and knives for the next time he had to do some trading.

Once that was done, he switched gears to prepare to make more nanites. This started with running the gold through his smelter, first melting all the gold together to homogenize it, then working to pull off the dross a bit at a time. The AR glasses were very helpful for this so he could monitor closely the temperature strata as he poured and scooped and then applied a small current as it cooled to further encourage movement of the separate aloys in the gold. It took a while, but he finally got the gold above 90% purity with just heat. This still would not be good enough to make new nanites with, but he'd had some thoughts about pulling the gold into thin wire and sending the nanites he had along the wire to see if he could identify the gold with the highest impurities and physically snip out those bits of wire then re-melt and re-test.

Another day later and that worked surprisingly well. The gold was now at 98.8% purity. The likely failure rate on new nanites made with it would be very high, but he figured he could get some working nanites out of it then recycle the ones that did not work a few more times. The problem would be the impurities still present interfering with the nano-circuits in the nanites. At least he'd be re-using his materials instead of tossing it out like other nano-scale makers he knew.

Late in the day on the fourth day, he finally ran through the titanium ring valve he'd recovered and pulled that into wire then ran the gold wire and titanium together to make one gold-titanium alloy wire spool. He still had quite a bit of gold wire left when the titanium wire ran out, but, at this point, he was confident he'd find more valves later if not other scrap with titanium in it.

Next he reconfigured his nanites into his nanite forge config and fed it the alloyed wire. It was very slow and acted more like a nano-scale 3D printer at this scale, but for every 20 nanites printed, he'd get 11 working ones. The non-functional ones were collected in a hopper as what looked like a fine powder. The working ones were used to pad the lining of the forge as they came out. He let that run all night and slept fitfully, waking up every few hours to check on the printer. By the late morning, the spool was empty and he ended up with nearly two hundred, twenty thousand new nanites and one hundred, eighty thousand worth of busted ones waiting to be recycled; which he promptly did that night when folks weren't watching him switch his forge back into a smelter/wire die to pull the alloy back through again then re-feed it to the printer. By the end, he had added another one hundred, forty thousand nanites from the dross of the first printing, the remaining was just too contaminated to re-use. He made those into wire again for storage and hopes of eventually getting enough new material to go through this again.

Sadly, with a total of three hundred, sixty thousand new nanites, in a collective of what had been several billion nanites, his capabilities were not significantly enhanced; but it was still a step in the right direction. He let the Oosine folks know he'd be leaving the next day after this.

Finally rested after a night with no forging and a last breakfast with Hul'ka, he packed up his travois and continued down the road towards New York.

---

The road south, had it been an actual road and not the washed out ruins of one would have have gotten him to New York in good day's walk. Instead it was a broken path of overgrown concrete, fully grown trees in almost every pothole imaginable and many sections missing altogether, undermind by former floods or current streams that needed to then be forded. As it was, he had been walking for about six hours and had only made it about half way to Poughkeepsie. He decided to take a break off the trail and eat some of the dried fish he'd also traded for in the last week. After a snack and a two hour siesta, he got back on the road. Finally after another four hours of walking, he came upon the what his old time map told him were the ruins of Poughkeepsie.

Tony was rather interested as he remembered that IBM had a logistics research warehouse in the area on his Earth; he was curious if any of that had both similitude and survived. He was also curious about the Emmers that Nialo had explained after Hul'ka had brought up the topic. Apparently they were a people fairly Xenophobic of other tribes, they'd occasionally let in traders, but they wanted no social interactions with other tribes. Fortunately, that meant the Emmers did not raid other folks unless in retaliation, but it also meant he might get a reception that was less not very welcome.

Friday was on high alert looking for spotters and ambushers. She still had not cracked the next level of GPS encryption which was frustrating them both. She was also tracking other machines from their sources, quite a few were using the river to travel and others on the other side of US-9 were roaming about, but he seemed to be moving through the gaps of their movements unintentionally. Friday also observed some signals being cut off on that side of US-9 rather abruptly, but she had no information as to the cause of the signals cutting out. Most of the ones cutting out were east of Poughkeepsie.

Friday finally spotted a lookout tower near the remains of a concrete wall as they had started moving through the former boundary of Poughkeepsie's city limit. Tony stepped back and behind some cover and reviewed what Friday had seen through her sensors, confirming the look out was manned and had been fortunately looking the wrong way to spot him at that moment.

Again, he made another remote sensor and planted that on the tree watching the lookout then, after having Friday keep him informed of when the lookout was next looking the wrong way, he came out and got a better view of the wall ruins leading towards the river and spotted additional lookouts as well as what looked like a gate.

Tony decided to wait here a few hours to let Friday snoop acoustically and to see if anyone was going to get through the gate. Not long later, they saw a patrol coming from the ruins of a road leading further to the river. Having a clear look at them when not behind fortifications was a bit odd, despite the heat they were clearly wearing jackets, with lapels as if they were medieval knock offs of business suit jackets yet their legs were more in line with what he'd seen at the Oosine village. Either bare legs up to loin clothes or wrapped shorts; about half also had greaves of what looked like leather and bits of metal. Their shoes were all black, so the details were hard to make out, but some seemed to be sandals with a cover resting over top that would flap about a bit if they moved too quickly.

They signaled to the gate guards and the gate lowered outward like a drawbridge over a moat. Tony wondered if there were things at the base of that section of wall he did not want to stand on. Just before the gate came up, another patrol left heading back towards the river, clearly a shift change. Tony carefully went back to the site of his remote probe and sat to review data with Friday. Through her audio pickups they found these folks were speaking the same language and had what sounded like some children much further back from the wall, barely audible. Almost all the conversations nearby were male and were related to the job of keeping the wall safe with some bits of gossip thrown in here and there. One of the lookouts was a woman who was apparently teased for her good eyesight, but fortunately she was on a lookout tower further down the wall where his area was not her section to monitor.

In the gossipy bits were the usual bits of human drama, but also some facts came through; they were having issues clearing machines from their new area to the east and apparently the head honcho here was called Director Ma'nan and he was wearing a new tie lately.

Having an odd idea, he asked Friday, "Have we got enough nanites to pull out the Armani?"

Cereburn · Jul 28, 2024

Update: Currently fighting through a writers block after realizing I screwed up and forgot a rather important plot point.
I've almost decided on re-writing most of the chapters of this - still mentally feeling about for any mcguffin I can use to fix the problem easily without a re-write.

I'm reassuring myself it shouldn't be a complete re-write but I've not passed the will-check to let me proceed yet.

In other news: Here's a short crack-omake based on where I left the story at.

--------

Standing the gate watch was a duty and Chayden would not be found lacking in it it, no matter how boring it was. Luckily most of the river side patrols went through his gate, so he relished the opportunities to chat with them on what they'd seen while out. Right now, the latest patrol coming back through the gate have given their update of no issues found other than some more washed out areas near the river. This lead to further talk and eventually gossip. All agreed Director Mannan's push to the east through the machine convoys was trouble and more than a few thought his new tie might be a little too tight.
Sabal, the guard on the river tower passed asked this patrol to tell him there were some snapmaws she'd seen going up the river. He appreciated the news, although he still had no idea how she could see enough of the river through the trees on the that side. The gossip soon drew to a close and the patrol passed through again, it was as he was closing the gates that something rather unusual happened.
"Ah-Hem" faux-coughed a voice at the end of the bridge. Chayden and his partner Saith looked and were surprised to see a man standing there observing them. Even while gossiping with the patrol, both men had been dilligently watching the approaches, where had this person come from? He was an older man with an oddly trimmed beard, odd lenses over his eyes and wearing a business suit like no other they'd ever seen. It was immaculate, clean and crisp with sharp lines, and seemed to radiate power. In his hand was a clipboard and around his neck was a lanyard holding a badge that they both recognized and immediately stood to attention.
Unlike the other tribes of this area, the Emmers ancestors had not only found shelter in the ruins they occupied, but also the great Learning Center. In this center, ancient magical technology still worked mostly and one of the lessons that all guards had to take was the Security Loss Prevention courses that covered many topics to secure the people and property of this facility. It also made sure all graduates knew the badge color codes. Most badges were mainly white with blue letters, but there were some special ones, like what security them selves got, the light blue background with yellow letters. This man however had the Navy and Gold, the auditors badge.
The man, seeing them standing to attention gave a small smile that might have been confused for a small smirk. "I see you recognize what I am, now I will tell you who I am and why I am here."
The two guards tried to stand even straighter, the patrol that had recently passed through the gate finally heard the conversation, turned and also saw the badge and stood to attention.

"I, am Auditor Tony. This branch of the IBM Logistics Division-" Saith gasped. Chayden knew Saith was related to Mannan, he wondered what he knew that had triggered that, but the Auditor kept speaking as if the interuption had never happened.
"has not reported to the Ottawa branch in several hundred years, I have been sent to find out why and to get things straightened up." He paused to look them in the eyes to let them know they were already in trouble somehow.
"I need one of you to either take me to your Director or to bring him here. I will expect you to follow your security procedures, I will be watching." The menace of his last statement was knee weakening but somehow Chayden remembered his training and, hesitantly stepped forward.
"Uh..." his through was suddenly dry, he coughed and continued, "Sir, could I please verify your ID."
Again, the fractional smirk, he was sure it was a smirk now appeared. The Auditor looked at Chayden's badge, brought forward the clipboard and while flipping it open with one hand, he held out his own badge for Chayden to more clearly see. "Here you go Security Officer Chayden, my badge."
Chayden visualy inspected the badge, the coloring was deep and perfect, it had no defects like the blotches their own printer left on the corner of his own light blue badge. the IBM logo and the title and name, all perfectly printed. He stepped back, and nodded. "Thank you Auditor Tony"
The Auditor dropped his badge back to his chest and then began making notes in his now open clipboard. "Your observational skills were lacking, I was not impressed that I got this close before you noticed me, but I am reassured that you at least can verify badges. I have made note of this Security Office Chayden."
"Uhm, thank you sir." Chayden flagged one of the patrollers to come up. "This is Security Officer Hinger, he will escort you where you need to go."
Hinger looked at Chayden quickly and the glare let Chayden knew he'd not made his coworker happy to take on this duty before Hinger managed his face and smiled politely to the Auditor. "This way please sir."
Tony looked at Hinger, again came the fractional smirk and said, "Lead the way Security Officer Hinger" as he made more notes on his clipboard. Looking nervously at the clipboard, knowing he was being evaluated and graded, he spun about, ordered his team to stow their gear and stand down from patrol then he started walking forward into the building.
The tapping and writing sounds behind him as they passed through the next gates and hallways inside were not encouraging, especially the occasional mumbles the Auditor made to himself.
Hinger's mind was remembering the stories of the Auditors from training, how they were sent to cull the unproductive and seal the breaches in security by any means necessary, including arbitrary termination.
As he passed through the halls and to the stairs going up to the higher offices, he tried to remember all he'd done wrong and was starting to sweat.
Finally, they reached the tall, cloudy glass double doors marked Director and the guard posted there.
"I've brought Auditor Tony to meet the director, please let us in." The guard on duty, an older man who wasn't as fast as he used to be, thus assigned inside the building startled, loosing his composure.
"Wha-" he started to say before Hinger harshly whispered, "Check his badge then let us in kriff-it"
The startled guards eyes quickly checked the badge, seemed to get even wider then turned to open the door and call inside, "Visitors sir, Hinger and an Auditor Sir" He looked back at them over his shoulder again, then pushed the door the rest of the way open, allowing them entry.

The months following the arrival of the Auditor were, to say the least, tumultuous. Very few knew that this branch was supposed to be devoted to Logistics - the training for that was damaged, but enough was passed down to the Directors, and a few who overheard them talking about it to know it was important. Legends had grown about what Logistics might be. Thanks to the Auditor they now knew they were supposed to be responsible for moving the life blood of the company around the world. The Auditor had found and repaired much of what the Directors never even knew was lost, even a set of lower levels into a vault beneath the main building where Big Blue still lived, the Logistics AI.
From there, new tools and supplies came out of the old vault and repairs thought impossible to the cracked building and it's systems started happening. Newly recovered training taught them that they were IBMers, not just Emmers and started teaching them how to use the tools and repair the systems that remained in the building. Eventually, Tony helped them bring online one of their greatest recoveries from the vault - the molecular foundry. It was a system that worked like magic, to take raw materials and make things of any complexity. It was huge, it could make whole pallets of supplies given enough power. With the training they were now getting, newly badged Systems Engineers were learning to bring back online the old solar arrays, the ancient black panels on the buildings as well as recovered and reconditioned power cells in storage in various places all over the campus. Chargers for those cells were repaired and they were rotated as even more, new panels and other power technologies were made.
Finally, one day Tony went into the workshop and locked it for a day, only communicating with Big Blue. When he came out, he had a brightly glowing light on his chest and armor around it.
He finally explained that he'd damaged his armor on the way there and he'd finally gotten the sites tools sufficiently online to make the repairs he needed and taught Big Blue how to make the replacement materials he needed, not just for the light, which he called a reactor, but for his armor as well.
Before he left, he setup a council, he said this site was meant to host more than one Director, but three, one for the facilities, one for Logistics and one for what he called H. R. Big Blue became the facilities director, making sure the Poughkeepsie branch of IBM was the best it could be, Mannan became the H.R. director, to take care of the people and make sure all were healthy and handle disputes. Logistics went to, unexpectedly, Sabal. She took to the new Logistics training and marketing with an incredible intensity and energy. She did not want to just see the area around her, but she wanted to see their new advantages being used to lift up all the people in the area, to make all the tribes new Divisions of IBM.

Ok- Crack over hope you found it funny.

Iron Dawn [Horizon Zero Dawn, Marvel CU]

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Cereburn

Making the rounds.

Iron Dawn

Chapter One: Prologue

Iron Dawn

Chapter One

Cereburn

Making the rounds.

Chapter 2

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Chapter 3

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Chapter 4: Rollin' by the River

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Chapter 5: Beads or mousetraps?

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Chapter 7: Fire Sale

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Chapter Eight: Getting to know the neighborhood.

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Making the rounds.

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