Wheels of Fire

Fireball's Ingenuity

Two days later, much later than she had hoped, Lucy returned to Magnolia and trudged wearily back to her house on Strawberry Street.

"Leopard-print boots my ass!" she grumbled in simmering anger. She unlocked the door and entered. "I'm home," she called out, smiling to herself as she wanted to hear someone respond "Welcome home" like a happy couple.

Instead, there was silence and a ticking clock.

"Fireball?" she called out worriedly. She looked at the time: ten o'clock in the morning. "He can't be asleep at this hour." She saw the shikibuton folded with the blankets placed neatly on top, just like how he left it every morning. Suddenly, Lucy had a suspicious feeling. "Did he take my bed? Well, I didn't say he couldn't, but..."

Her bed was crisp, blankets tucked up tightly, everything precisely how she left it. She realized that perhaps she should have let him have a real bed, at least for the two nights she was gone. She felt a small bit of shame that she had not thought about that, ignoring her duties as a hostess and treating her guest with honor. Instead, she had shoved Fireball to a mattress on the floor. Although shikibutons were touted as being good for the posture, surely it was not the most comfortable place to sleep. She decided she would not blame him for wanting a soft, raised bed, and maybe she should even offer to take the shikibuton for herself, at least for a day or two.

"So where is he?" Another thought came to her. "Did he decide to stay with Lisanna?" That thought troubled her heart, but she tried to shove the pang aside. "It's fine. After all, I told him to call her if he needed anything. Maybe we ran out of food, so he's staying with them."

Lucy decided to get settled in, unload her supplies, and then head to the guild. Someone there might know where Natsu Dragion went. She unpacked her dirty clothes, including those cursed leopard-print boots that had given her perverted client a hoot. She wished Natsu Dragneel was there so he could burn those shoes. Then Lucy took out the bag of money she received for her mission. It was not much, but it would pay for food that month. She checked her kitchen and made a list of things to buy. She decided to make a shopping trip first before going to the guild.

"I might as well let him have as much time with Lisanna as possible. They are friends, after all."

The back of her throat still felt bitter, but she swallowed down those feelings. They were useless, anyway. Fireball would probably be leaving in a few days.

She had just put her shoes back on when she heard a loud crash outside. Worried, she rushed out and around the corner of the building. In the back was a small area of grass and flowers that usually got ignored, although the landlady kept it mowed and tended. Now, the grass was cluttered with scrap metal, and someone had brought a work bench back there. A person wearing a soldering mask hunched over some metal slabs he was connecting with the blast of a blue-flamed soldering torch. Lucy paused to watch the person at work, melting the steel to connect joints to some sort of metal box. At her approach, the flame went off, the mask was shoved up, and she saw Edo-Natsu grinning with a sweaty face.

"Princess! Look what I'm making," he cried out like an excited child showing off a toy he built all by himself.

Lucy approached with apprehension. She looked at the pieces of twisted metal, a seat that had been ripped out and placed to the side, a steering wheel leaning against a flowering bush, and in the middle of the metal mayhem was a chassis with four wheels.

"A ... car?" she asked in a mix of shock and worry.

"After I ... uh ... borrowed that prototype vehicle," he said awkwardly, yet he moved past that shameful incident, "driving it got me thinking. Earthland cars are a lot like my four-wheeler, but they run on a wizard's magic. However, you guys have lacrima crystals, just like we did. I was looking around town, and I realized that non-wizards can use items with lacrima. They don't need magic within themselves. It's precisely how Edolas did things. So all you need to do is build the car in a way that uses liquefied lacrima rather than an SE-Plug." He held up the box he was soldering. "It's a magic-to-energy converter. This is precisely what my car back home has, although I had to build it from scratch. Isn't it great, though?" he cried out cheerfully. "If this works, I could drive a car here."