Chapter One: So it Begins
Chapter Two: Into the Dark
Chapter Three: Confounded by a Lock of Stone
Chapter Four: The Ponderous Path Home
Chapter Five: Fleeing the Immolation
Chapter Six: Weathering the Firestorm
Chapter Seven: An Aftermath of Exhaustion and Cinders
Chapter Eight: The Bitter Cold Night That Lasted a Month
Chapter Nine: Deals with the Dav-Vel
Chapter Ten: The Dav-vel's Due
Chapter Eleven: Without a Solution
Chapter Twelve: With Potential
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen: An Unsettled Union
To be perfectly honest, I was not very happy about the idea of Tristan coming. I ought to have foreseen when I asked for Tristan's help that he would want to come along on the adventure. However, I didn't. And now I had to deal with the fallout of my lack of foresight. I was doing more than merely kicking myself.
In my attempts to find a way around not having to compromise myself with the Dav-Vel, I had opened up our secret to another person. That put us in a perfectly Benjamin Franklin situation: three people can keep a secret if two are dead. I didn't plan on killing anyone, but it meant it was likely Tristan was going to tell someone we had found something if we left him behind.
Taking Tristan with us was going to make this adventure a whole lot more complicated. Based on time alone, we were going to get to the cave and then be forced to come back immediately if we didn't want to be missed. It would have taken Tristan that long to get to the cave and just as long to get back. And, for the immediate future, with the immediate passing of fire season and the snap winter present, we would not have been allowed to go camping. That meant forays to the cave when we could, not sleeping there.
There were ways of getting Tobias there quickly. We could have used a bot. We could have built him a custom exoskeleton that could have linked to his booster to allow him to move his body faster than he normally did. We could have built multiple odd robotic type contraptions to improve his mobility. However, Tristan had a internal, angry bias against this. He had fought his whole life to just be himself. He'd been angry with the counselors who were trying to help and cajole him towards their definition of normalcy. He had his own definition of what was normal...for him.
While by and large American society of the 22nd century was fairly accepting, there were also limits to the boundaries of that acceptance. That acceptance was limited by whether or not you, after your choices, could take care of yourself as an independent individual. In these post robopocalyptic times, that meant a lot of people were wildly independent compared to before, but there was an undercurrent in society that, if this all went away, then people ought to be able to take care of themselves. Without technology, Tristan would have been in trouble. Real trouble. Especially as an adult and without familial support. And triply so on an alien world.
Hence, the counselors had been nudging, cajoling and sometimes outright pushing Tristan towards 'normalcy.' Which he had fought tooth, nail and booster.
If he were to come, then he was going to have to give in on that to some extent.
The equally big problem was Tobias. Tobias and I were best friends, special friends and this was our adventure. Tristan coming on that adventure was pushing into our space and our relationship. I saw Tobias already starting to get worked up already. He didn't care for Tristan and he didn't want him to come. He was already less than thrilled about Tristan's participation to this point and, while he did appreciate cracking the door code so easily, he felt we would have figured it out on our own and would have preferred delaying until we figured out the problem on our own.
Honestly, without an analytical engine and without Tristan, we were going either get caught or have to give up: the insight Tristan had was unique. We could have gone out and tried random permutations, but we would have failed. There were too many and it would have taken too long. We could have also tried running on the library analytical engines and that would have been flagged at some point. Maybe not on door, but if there were more puzzles or locks, we were likely to get caught.
Now I was going to have to make this work. It was not going to be quick. It was not going to be fun. It was going to make me want to hang both of them on a spit over chuffing fire chubs. However, I was going to make this work. Whether they liked it or not. All of were going to have to compromise to have this adventure and getting them to compromise was going to be an adventure in and of itself.
And it was going to take days.
And that was not really a bad thing.
The longer we waited, the better the environment outside of Montpelier was going to be. We were going to venture outside the colony before we really ought. The cover of us being teenagers and going nuts within the settlement was a good cover. We would have to pick out forays carefully and prepare. The first time going there was going to need to just test getting Tristan there and to put in a cache of supplies. Who knows how deep that cave went.
To gather that cache of supplies was going to take time. Especially if we wanted to be subtle about the gathering.
So, as we parted, Tobias and I, and Tristan and I, started what I liked to called bickerments. These were bickering little arguments that never escalated to fighting, but would go on for a while bickering and grumping. I knew Tobias was smart enough to see the inevitable. However, like Churchill said about Americans, he would try everything else before doing the right thing. Tristan was going to be difficult in another way. He was going to accept he needed an external augmentation to participate. It was going to have to be some form of exoskeleton: chairs and stairs still had a beef, even in the 22nd century.
We were going to have to fab it. He was going to have to participate in the fabbing. If he did not, he was going to resent the augmentation more than he already was going to. That meant getting him to come around as quickly as possible or else we were going to take forever to even get started. Someone else was going to eventually find the cave and while that would be almost certainly be after the snap winter was over, it was going to be best to get started before the skies cleared.
So, we tinked our bickerments. We fought and argued and bickered. I cajoled and asked and pushed and virtually yelled. Eventually, sloggingly, even as Tobias and I gathered some supplies. Even has I met with Tristan regularly and in person, I dragged them around to where they agreed. It was not an exercise in patience. It was an exercise in absolute Gibraltar stubbornness. With a small dash of diplomacy. A very small dash.
Three weeks later, much longer than I wanted, we met at the gate. The skies were still a muggy, muddy dark gray at the height of noon. However, we were not there at noon. We were there before dawn. And we were ready.