Tales of a Ninja Magician: Of Journeys We Make

Some Reassembly Is Due

"Can I have that zero-mass regulator? I asked for it like fifteen minutes ago and Kenta is working on the singularity field generator so, unless we have a zero-mass regulator in place to stabilize the mass of the singularity–we're all going to collapse the Moon, the Earth, and the whole solar system into a supermassive black hole..." a burly man of a brick-shaped, flat facial features and raggedy clothes, reminding of a fisher from his outfit scratched his scarred, bald head.

"Well, which one of these is a zero-mass regulator?" a woman in rags started losing her cool while staring at an entire drawer that spanned for an entire city's length all filled with identical-looking scrolls. "They store every goddamn thing in those stupid scrolls!"

"We didn't even know what a zero-mass regulator was before those aliens kidnapped us," Kenta, a plain, middle-aged man sighed while sizing up a subtle tube spreading a mysterious, shadowy shroud from inside while luminescent, colorful particles danced inside of it to the hammer that he held in his right hand.

"Are you sure trying to mallet the singularity field generator into place is a good idea?" an old woman with grey hair and one eye that had a gash that kept it closed forever loomed over Kenta with her arms crossed.

"This was a good week to quit drinking. You'd have killed us all," the burly fisher type ran his palm over his face while approaching his fellow engineer and picking the singularity field generator from Kenta's hands. The man turned the tube of hardened glass and plastic around and pointed at tiny holes on the bottom and top of the lids. "You're supposed to fit wires into those. That's how they connect to the larger systems. You don't just hammer them into place..."

"Which brings us back to this goddamn situation over here..." the woman with red hair spread her arms out, pointing at the endless storage supplies of identical-looking scrolls. "How do we tell the wires from the zero-mass regulator?"

"What's... What's going on...?"

"Huh? What do you mean what's going on, Hige?" the red-haired woman turned around, facing the grey-haired and one-eyed woman who just flipped the stub of rye in her mouth, shifting it around over her tongue.

"I didn't say anything. All this silence must have you hearing things," the grey-haired woman shrugged and shook her head. "Told ya an engineer should work in heaps of noise. All this silence in space is so unnatural."

"Dammit, this shouldn't be... So difficult..."

"It really isn't, Kenta. You just find the wires that are the right size and then you slot one end of them into the singularity field generator and the other one into the system you're connecting it to. It's actually really easy when you ignore what you're working on here," the towering engineer said to his colleague.

"That wasn't me, I said nothing, man." Kenta shook his head. "I can connect a few damn wires, thank you very much, it's just that I need to find them first."

"Argh! Stop patronizing me! I'm doing the best I can, it's not like these come with instructions or notes, all of those glyphs are in some stupid moon-people language!" the red-haired woman pulled on her luscious locks while growling at the seemingly infinite storage of scrolls, each containing a different kind of nuts and bolts that it took to complete the project they were working on.

"Calm down... Just focus..."

"I'm trying to!" the red-haired engineer growled out. "You telling me to calm down isn't helping!"

"Hmm... I wonder... Is it just me or do any of you also hear some strange voice?" the scarred engineer rubbed his bald head, looking around while he browsed his workshop for something suspicious.