Hotel Valhalla [Magnus Chase Series]

Metal In Motion

        By Gonda

  Long before I made barstools for Nabbi’s Tavern, I had a career crafting labor-saving devices. You know the type of thing—push a button, pull a lever,
turn a knob, and ta-da! A machine does your work for you.
  That career turned out to be unbelievably boring.
  Fortunately, destiny steered me in another direction. On an accidental trip to Midgard, I met a human named Rube Goldberg.
  Goldberg, son of Hannah, came up with these crazy contraptions designed to do simple tasks in the most
unnecessarily complicated manner possible.
  The contraptions, known as Rube Goldberg machines, were poetry in motion.
  I took Rube’s concept, ran with it straight back to Nidavellir, and set about making my own creations.
  I repurposed bits and pieces I’d salvaged over the years—a fan, a toy truck, and a pack of dominoes from Midgard, several cat food cans from Vanaheim
(“Freya’s cats ask for it by name!”),
a snow shovel from Niflheim, a coat hanger from my friend Blitzen—you get the idea.
  I welded and soldered, hammered and fired those pieces into a sequence of interconnected parts.
  Altogether, they formed a thing of beauty.
  My first Rube Goldberg machine was designed to light my kiln.

Here’s how it worked:

  A handcrafted silver ball spiraled down a hammered steel track suspended by spun wire from my ceiling.
  The ball landed in a buffed-to- mirror-shine cat food can. The can tipped the ball into another can, which
tipped it into another, and so on through seven cans.
  The final can tipped the ball into the bed of the toy truck. The truck, refitted for a monorail I’d constructed, shot across the floor and tapped the first in a long twisting line of
dominoes that spelled out GONDA.
  The last falling dominoes climbed up a set of stairs engraved with images of famous dwarves.
  The final domino struck the coat hanger, now fortified with an enamel finish, sending it whirling around.
  The coat hanger flicked a switch that turned on the fan. The fan blew
against the snow shovel blade. The shovel fell over and landed on the high end of a seesaw that I had forged myself from bronze and decorated with gemstones.
  The low end flew up and launched another ball—gold this time— clear across the room, where it hit a hammer handed down to me by my ancestors.
  The hammer fell onto the button that starts my kiln and—voila!

The fire lit!

  Would it have been easier just to push the button myself?
       Of course.
  Would pushing the button have been as satisfying? No way.
  You might think I’m crazy for spending so much time and effort on such creations. But to me, metal that moves, moves me.