Sgt. Golem: Royal Mech Hussar - Stubs Soon!

“What are you doing?"

I jerked awake. I was in a classroom. A bearded professor in tweeds stood up front, pointing out something on a giant diagram of an armored vehicle, writing on a big green chalkboard.

I looked around. An old woman sat next to me. She grinned as she saw she had my attention, showing a missing tooth.

"Baba Yaga?"

She was squinting at the chalkboard as the professor droned on. "What are they teaching you, boy? This is all wrong. They stole my magic and they haven’t got a clue what it’s good for."

"Where am I?" I asked.

She shrugged and gestured vaguely at the room around us. "You tell me. Your mind concocted this. Apparently, this is what you associate with learning. Bizarre, if you ask me."

"Oh, so this is another dream?"

She sighed and gave me a long-suffering look. "Yes, you're still hooked up to their silly machine. You don't sleep often enough. It is remarkably hard to get a hold of you."

I eyed her suspiciously. "Are you here to give me another cryptic message?"

"What makes you think that?" she said.

I just held her gaze until she spoke again.

"You do cut to the chase, don't you?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. We've kept the fire soul safe. It's in..."

She interrupted me. "Yes, yes, the giant mech, I know. And you kept it from Natasha. For that, I thank you. But she'll be coming back for it again soon, and this time I want you to let her have it."

I stared at her. "You what?"

“Did I stammer? Natasha's going to be coming for the stone again and I want you to let her have it."

I shook my head. "Why would you want her to have it when we've spent all this effort to keep her from it?"

"Look," she snapped. "It's hardly any of your business, is it? Before, I wanted it kept away from her, and now I want her to have it."

"We fought hard against her. A lot of people died." Alexander's face flashed before my eyes. I was getting angry. "And now you just come in here and say it was all for nothing?"

She glared at me for a moment and then sighed. "Not for nothing. It was too early before. It’s still too early. But soon, she will have to take it."

"I’m not taking all that on faith. I want some explanations. I think you owe me that much.”

She glared for a long time before sighing and relenting. “That stone is important to me.”

“Obviously.”

“Natasha is – connected to me.” She was clearly trying to skirt around something she didn’t want to reveal. “That isn’t something I want everyone to know about. She's been running away for years. Decades, really. Now she wants to come and steal some of my power for her own ends."

"Why?" I interjected. I was sick of this beating around the bush. I wanted hard information.

"Because she's getting older. She's starting to lose her powers. She's probably already felt her connection to her mech slipping and her ability to use magic getting weaker. She’s getting desperate. Someone has told her that he can restore her magic if she pays him with that stone."

More vague answers. I glared. "Who? Who exactly?"

She sighed. "Dr. Frankenstein has promised her help, in exchange for a little more of my power."

I stared for a long moment. "Dr. Frankenstein? The Dr. Frankenstein? The man who invented Golems? Founder of the Frankenstein company?"

"Yes, yes, that Dr. Frankenstein. But he didn't invent Golems. He stole them. Golem magic is very ancient, a secret known only to the Jews for millennia. Somehow he bribed or blackmailed or..." She waved a hand. "Who knows. But he got the secret out of some rabbi and commercialized the whole thing.” She seemed to be almost impressed. “It was actually a fairly brilliant bit of engineering to start mass-producing the bodies and his machines are a wonder of technomagic. Though I would never tell him that."

I rubbed my forehead. My head was really starting to throb. It had been aching since the beginning of the dream. In fact, it had been hurting for the last three uploads the doctors had given me. I hadn't told them yet, because I didn’t want them to stop, but I was starting to worry about the consequences. Baba Yaga wasn’t helping.

"So Frankenstein wants the stone. What’s he plan on doing with it?"

She shrugged. "How should I know? Power, I guess. That's all he's ever craved. Power and experimenting with his abominations."

“I thought you said they were a marvel of techno-magic.”

"Golems are a marvel. But what he wants to do with them is an abomination. He keeps pushing the limits. He got his hands on one little piece of magic and he has to dig and dig and dig until he wrings every bit out of it that he can. That's why Frankenstein Incorporated kicked him out of the company, you know. He was doing experiments that should never be done.”

I decided to take the bait and ask what exactly this old woman, the personification of a boogeyman if I’d ever seen one, thought was beyond the boundaries of reasonable. “What sort of experiments?”

“He was trying to load human consciousness into Golems. I think he’s been chasing immortality. He took vagabonds and gypsies and anyone else that he could disappear, anyone he could kidnap without raising alarms. He was loading them into Golems, trying various experiments and then destroying them afterwards. When he got caught, they kicked him out of the company. Why do you think he's in Transylvania?"

"Frankenstein's in Germany, isn't he?” I remember reading that on the golem machine label.

"That’s where he's from and that's where he founded the company. After they kicked him out, he went to Transylvania."

I don't know what was more annoying, being in the dark about so many things of this world or actually getting hard information that was all too ridiculous. “Right, so Dr. Frankenstein is in Transylvania. And he likes experimenting on Golems, trying to load people into them. Kind of like you did to me. So why exactly does he want the stone?"

She glared. "We're wasting time. This won't go on forever." She pointed at the professor who was droning on.

"Just humor me for a minute.”

“Yes, he wants the stone, probably to make some sort of super golem. I don't know. It's not my magic. I have enough on my plate keeping the cycle intact without delving into that sort of thing. The point is, Natasha's trying to sell it to him, but when she gets her hands on it..." She sighed, probably realizing that she had to tell me than she wanted. "Now that she's losing her power, this gem will have an effect on her, one that she's been trying to avoid. Look, I didn't become an ancient, inscrutable, mythological witch by telling people my secrets. All right? Just make sure that when she comes back for it, she gets the gem this time."

"Right, so the Red Widow is going to show up, after killing my friend and blowing up our stuff, and asks nicely for the stone in the center of Eva’s mech, this time we’re just going to hand it over? Yeah don’t think so. Find another patsy, lady.”

A voice cut through our bickering. "You're interrupting the class."

I looked up; the professor had turned and was fixing us with a glare. I frowned. Was this part of the program they were loading into me? Why was I even in this dream? None of the other uploads had involved any kind of a dream or anything that I could remember. I simply went to sleep and woke up with a headache, but feeling refreshed in other ways.

Baba broke off and looked more closely at the professor. She leapt to her feet. "You!"

"You know it's rude to intrude on other people,” he said. He had a German accent and sounded like my stereotype of Dr. Sigmund Freud, only more so.

"What is this? You can't be here." Baba sounded indignant and more emotional than I'd ever heard her.

The professor took a step forward and jabbed his chalk toward Baba Yaga.

"What are you doing in my domain, witch?"

She fixed him with a sneer. "Your domain? You're a pathetic little thief, Frankenstein. Tinkering with other people's secrets."

Wait, this was Dr. Frankenstein. What was he doing in my dream?

The dream came from a machine he’d invented. He must have put something of himself into it.

"How are you here?" Baba demanded. "You don’t have the power to throw yourself in people’s minds. That’s my trick."

"I do when they put themselves willingly into my grasp by hooking up to one of my machines." The man's smile was diabolical. Then his tone of voice shifted. “Pineapple. Three. Fifty-seven.”

I felt a tingling starting in the back of my brain. A now familiar sense of something implanted there, trying to make its presence felt.

Oh shit! This was apparently another of the sets of keywords. My mind whirled furiously. Was this the one that would freeze me in place or something else, something much worse?

"Six fourteen. Blissful ignorance." The tingling exploded in a stab of pain. I pushed against it, but that only seemed to make it worse.

"Now you will listen closely as I give you your real programming," Frankenstein was saying.

"Stop this at once," Baba shouted. For the first time, she sounded almost fearful. "This one is mine. Don't interfere."

"I should tell you the same thing," Frankenstein countered.

"I should tell you the same." My mouth repeating the words without my willing it. My conscious mind was trapped, pushed to the back of my own brain. Something else was at the front, something receptive, something repeating everything he was saying.

No. Oh, fuck no, this was NOT happening! I pushed hard, felt the pain increasing, and pushed again. Something snapped.

"I am not your plaything," I growled.

"Oh, but you are," Frankenstein said. "By every definition of the word, you are. I don't know how you're resisting my compulsion, but I will simply have to..."

"No," I shouted. I leapt up from the table. I leapt up from my chair, knocking the desk aside and lunged for him. Desks and chairs flew in all directions.

"That's most peculiar," he said, frowning at me. I leapt up from the table, knocking the desk aside and lunged for him. "Mermaid's feather, five, seven."

I felt the same tingle and started to resist.

Then something occurred to me. This was a third of the code words. I pulled up short just before I reached Frankenstein. I had been able to push away the other two. If I could just let him complete this one and defeat it, then I wouldn't have to worry about code words ever again.

I froze with one hand outstretched. The doctor grinned.

"Pustulant pickle, twenty-seven."

The tingling took hold and it froze me where I stood. All of my muscles were locked and didn't want to respond. But my mind was still my own, barely. I pushed back against the compulsion.

"Excellent. Now we will see about refreshing your compulsions."

"Enough!" yelled Baba Yaga from the back of the room. The lights dimmed and the whole room took on an eerie green glow. Her voice deepened. "I will not be ignored. This one is to do my bidding."

Frankenstein took a step back, staring at her. He raised his hand defensively in front of him. "How do you have that much power in this place? This is only an echo of reality. You should be helpless here.”

My mind was blank. The familiar tingling was very faint. There were no stabs of pain. I was finding it hard to find something to push against. As they spoke, I felt my anger rising. I would not be a plaything torn between two petulant super-beings. As my rage filled me, I felt the familiar pressure again. There! And then I had leverage. I shoved hard. Again the pain, and again the snapping sensation.

I was free.

I completed my lunge. My hand wrapped around Frankenstein’s neck. I lifted him effortlessly from the ground. His eyes bulged as I pulled him in close.

“I am not your plaything.”

And then I closed my fist.

The world exploded into swirling mist, wrapping around me, choking me, ripping my body apart. I blinked up from the slab-like table with Dr Szabó leaning over me.

“Are you alright? Sorry, sorry, our machine seems to have developed a problem.”

The smoke was still here, but this smoke was real and smelled of burning electronics. I coughed and struggled to sit up. I felt a brief tightness around my chest and heard a snap. I had forgotten that they had strapped me down.

Dr. Szabó gasped and jumped back. "I'm alright," I muttered, trying to clear my throat of the smoke, both real and remembered. "I'm alright."

"What happened?" I asked.

The relief on the doctor's face was amusing. He must have thought I was about to go berserk. "We don't know yet. Something in the machine burned out."

"I found it!" The other doctor, Kovács, called. His feet were protruding from the bottom of the machine, the rest of his body was up inside of an opened panel. "There's some module in here that's burned out. I don't know what it does. I'm not sure I've ever paid attention to this one before. Hang on, I'll get it out." The man's legs shifted around as he wrestled with the machinery, and then he crawled back out to where Szabó and I were waiting for him. He had a module the size of a shoebox. It was metal. Around the edges it had split open and the sides were charred and smoldering.

"I think you'll find if you jumper over where that was installed, your machine will probably work as well as before,” I suggested.

"What? How do you know that? I know most of the components in the machine, but this one isn't familiar to me."

"If I'm right, it's a little something Dr. Frankenstein left in his design. A little present to himself." I smiled at the wreckage. “Thanks for the memories, but I think we’re done here.”