The next few days were a flurry of activity. While construction crews worked around the clock to repair the collapsed parts of the hotel, Roy, Bastion, and Ben hauled materials over to the boathouse.

  They started with anything that looked good for a bludgeoning weapon. Brass curtain rods with the curtains still attached, dragged down the hallway like oversized dusters. Long and sturdy, they could easily outrange most foes in a melee. Thick hardwood table legs, already club-shaped. Tarnished silver candlesticks, small enough to duel-wield and deceptively heavy. Even bedposts carved into flamingo heads, sharp on one side and blunt on the other, just like a war-pick.

  All this and more joined the growing heap in W’s workshop.

  “Crushing weapons, huh?” said W. as she examined the growing pile. “The simplest option would be to take some of these table legs, coat them in fake blood, and drive a few rusty nails through them. That kind of pain-and-fear theming could stun a gator-man for a few seconds per hit.”

  She glanced at Roy, who was admiring the now fully silver-painted brigandine laid out on the table. “To match your theme, I could try making something heavier,” she said, “but my smithing setup here is... minimal.”

  W. gestured toward her foam anvil and inflatable hammer. The latter looked like a carnival prize and bore several patches. “Smithing tools are normally heavy, but these ones work even though they’re light. If I didn’t have to worry about portability, I’d have a whole fantasy dwarven forge to get anything that looks even lightly metal-ish to act like it. If I had that, I could probably even get things to behave like magical metals, mithril, meteorite, orichalcum…”

  “Ooo, I like the sound of that,” Roy pictured himself fully invulnerable, a walking tank charging into enemies without fear, or flying with armor that sparkled in the sky.

  He spent an indeterminate amount of time staring off into space until Bastion prodded him in the arm.

  “Ow”.

  “Roy. The crushing weapons. Which one do you want?” asked W.

  “Oh, right. Sorry, W. I was thinking.”

  “No problem. The creative process is like that sometimes.”

  Roy turned his mind to the matter at hand. He thought of maces, mauls, and morning stars. Blackjacks, war hammers, and tomahawks.

  A chain weapon or flail might be useful in the swamp, where footing is unstable, but those weapons required expert-level skill, and Roy had never practiced with them.

  Anything that relied on piercing damage was a bad idea; the gator-men would regenerate from stab wounds instantly. That ruled out maces and morning stars.

  He needed raw impact. Something heavy enough to break bones through thick hides. A two-handed weapon would offer range as well as weight. That'd let him keep his distance from their snapping jaws.

  The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that he needed something capable of shattering multiple bones at once. Something really big and really heavy.

  There was a reason giant weapons were only seen in fiction—adding more weight made things unwieldy faster than you expected. He looked at W’s hammer and anvil, and had an idea.

  “How heavy does that inflatable hammer feel, right as it makes contact with the anvil?

  She smiled, immediately catching on. “As heavy as a real hammer of that size. I have to wear a blacksmith outfit and do some practice swings to build up to it. Without the resonance, it’d snap my wrists.”

  “Perfect,” Roy said. “If you can get hold of some more of the foam your anvil’s made of, I’d like a maul. A big one. Paint it so it looks like a brick from a castle.”

  “A castle, you say…leave it to me.”

  Roy and Bastion went back to the hotel and helped Ben load up crates with anything that looked like it might be useful for theming the hovercraft: brass bar fittings, wrought iron chandeliers, and antiques from display cases. Right now, commemorating the past came a distant second to securing the future.

  They salvaged a cast-iron fireplace complete with its own bellows, along with carbonised fire guards and bags of coal that made Bastion scowl.

  A bug zapper from the back door of a disused kitchen, coated with a thick layer of grease.

  A dull copper bathroom boiler, so heavy that they had to roll it down the stairs.

  Broken ceiling fans, missing their blades, but perfect for the random spinning contraptions required by the steampunk aesthetic.

  Their best find was a grandfather clock. A perfect source of gears, pendulums, and brass weights. Beneath the clock face was a portal-like doorway.

  “If we were in a story, this would be a portal to another world,” said Bastion.

  Roy had to try it, of course. But behind the little door, he found only more gears.

  “Would you have gone through?” Ben asked. “If there was one, I mean?”

  “No,” said Roy. “What if it took me to a world without magic? That’d suck so bad.”

  Ben did most of the heavy lifting until they reached the edges of the hotel grounds and his theme stopped working. Then Roy took over, hauling crates across the lawn one by one while Bastion helped him to keep them balanced.

  W. worked fast. Every time they dropped off a crate, she was doing something new. When they brought the first one, they found her spraying Roy’s armor with a coat of metallic blue.

  Roy watched her: mask, gloves, crop top, and shorts, leaning over the armor, working the spray gun like a pro.

  By the time they returned with the next crate, the paint had already dried and been artfully scratched.

  “Aaand, done,” she said. “I know I said I'd replace the straps with leather, but Velcro fastens way better. So I just glued a thin layer of leather on top of that. It didn't need to be anything particularly high quality, so I just went with genuine leather."

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "Genuine?” Roy asked. “That doesn't sound like low quality.”

  "It's actually the second worst grade of leather there is, just above bonded, which is literally scraps glued together.”

  “That’s Roy’s armor done then?” asked Bastion.

  “I think so. I considered making detachable shoe covers to mimic steel sabatons—painted plastic with articulated toes, but I don’t have the tools for that.”

  “No problem, said Roy.” Keeping his footing in the swamps would be hard enough already.

  After their third trip, Roy was presented with a new weapon.

  “This was a rush job,” said W, “So let me know if I need to change anything.”

  If this was a rush job, he couldn’t imagine what taking her time would have looked like. The weapon was beautiful: a miniature castle on a stick, with tall flat sides, crenelated edges, and four corner towers.

  “I made it from some styrofoam packaging and a curtain rail. I call it the Castle Maul.”

  “It’s perfect,” said Roy. “I can’t wait to try it out.”

  “And I haven’t forgotten you, Bastion. Your duster turned out very nicely.”

  She presented him with a camel-brown coat, aged to look like the genuine article. It bore leather epaulets and had curtain pulls with brass hooks for fasteners.

  Bastion immediately tried it on, spinning on the spot to admire the way the fabric moved around him. “How did you make it look so authentic?”

  “Mostly with brown shoe polish.” W. pointed to a table of darkened cloths and nail brushes. “I also scorched the edge with a candle and used sandpaper to fray the ends a little. I did similar things to the rest of the leather armor. Now there’s just the hovercraft, and it's going to take all three of us to get it ready.”

  Roy and Bastion geared up, hoping for some resonance to help with the rest of the lifting.

  The moment Roy strapped the brigandine into place, he felt it.

  “Oh. Ohhhhhhhh.”

  “That, good huh?” said Bastion. “I didn’t feel that way with the duster.”

  “Yeah.” It was all he could say. He felt as though he’d been drinking warm, flat soda his whole life and had just taken his first sparkling, ice-cold sip. Like he’d been living vicariously through a character on a tiny screen, and now he’d finally become that character.

  He wasn’t doing anything knightly, nor was he standing in a castle courtyard, but the baseline resonance just from wearing the costume felt great. Every movement was easier, and the armor seemed to weigh nothing at all.

  It made the rest of the work go faster. Before long, they had the hovercraft coated with gears and brass plating. They ripped out the original engines and replaced them with an old fireplace bashed together with a bathroom boiler.

  Then they loaded it up with food, bottled water, and sacks of coal. Their goal was to travel light, which was a balancing act when it came to fuel. They needed enough for a decent range, but not so much that they’d burn through most of it just trying to get up to speed. There was probably a formula for it, but no one knew how well the steam engine would actually run.

  The weight limit came up again when it was time to load the Castle Maul.

  Roy grabbed the handle, intending to drag it behind him, and found he couldn’t move it at all.

  “Hnnngh.”

  Bastion laughed. “I’ve got to try this for myself. If you can’t move it, I can only imagine how heavy it feels.”

  He gripped the handle, grunting as he pulled, and managed to drag it a few inches across the ground.

  “Whoa,” said Bastion, only just stopping himself from staggering backwards. “What, did you blast your morning workout so hard you’ve got nothing left? I can’t remember ever being stronger than you before.”

  “It’s his theme,” W. realized. “Roy’s armor is making the foam heavier, but he doesn’t have the resonance to lift it.”

  “So I’d have to charge in with my sword first to build up, then go back for the maul?” That sounded far more situational than he wanted, and he doubted the gator-men would do him the courtesy of waiting around while he ran back to the hovercraft to switch weapons.

  “Hmm. Wait, I’ve got it.” W. pulled a large piece of fabric from a crate. A brightly colored, segmented sphere with a hole in the bottom. It fit over the miniature castle perfectly.

  “Keep it covered, and it’ll be like it has no theme at all. Without that, it’s just a light block of foam. This way you can carry it with you easily, then pull off the cover when you have enough resonance to swing it.”

  “Why did you have that fabric anyway?” asked Bastion.

  ”It was my first attempt at a hovercraft part. Kind of a prototype.”

  “Which part?” Bastion asked.

  “It has to stay a secret until you use it. The surprise is part of the theme. Trust me, it’ll work better this way. Only open that compartment if you really need to.”

  Bastion frowned. “How will we know if we need it if we don’t know what it is?”

  “If you’re about to die, then you open the lid.” She tapped a plastic cooler bolted onto the floor of the hovercraft.

  She stepped back and clapped her hands. “Okay. Time for the tour. So, the lift fans blow air down to fill the plastic skirt, and the rear fan blows air backwards for propulsion. All of that’s now powered by the furnace.” She tapped her fingers against the fireplace.

  “You steer with the handlebars and twist them forward for acceleration. That’s not how it used to work, but the old steering yoke was too rusted to move, and I got the new one from a motorcycle. Acceleration isn’t like you’d expect either, since it now depends on how hot the steam engine gets. I already lit the furnace, so you can try it out.

  “The lever for the lift fans is on the left-hand side, and the emergency stop is the red button on the right, where you’ll also find a switch for the bilge pump in case the top layer takes on too much water. Got it?”

  “I think so,” said Roy, taking the helmsman’s seat and pulling the lever.

  There was a jittery tremor as the steam engine roared to life, followed by a low vibration that thrummed through the deck. The whole craft shuddered from side to side for a few moments— then, with a whoosh of steam and a deep chuff from the engine, it lurched upwards.

  Roy had often imagined what flying would feel like. Either being buffeted by the wind as he rocketed upwards, or a dreamlike floatiness as he ignored gravity.

  This felt like neither. Instead, the sensation was of something vibrating beneath him, like the moment an elevator starts moving, but stretched out indefinitely.

  “Lift fans on. Get in, Bastion.”

  “What do you mean ‘lift fans on?’ We’re not going right now, are we?”

  “We sure are. We’ve got no time to lose.”

  “And who said you get to drive, anyway?”

  “I sat in the seat first, and someone has to be the gunner. You’re way better at that than me.”

  “That flattery isn’t going to make me feel any better when I have to start shovelling coal,” he complained, as he climbed onto the deck and looked up at the small plume of steam rising over the rear fan.

  “Good luck," said W. “Maybe we’ll run into each other again.”

  “I hope so,” said Roy. “And thanks again for all your help, W. We couldn’t have done any of this without you.”

  “Oh damn. I just thought, I didn’t make you guys hats or helmets. I got so caught up in the hovercraft and everything you brought me…”

  “No worries,” Roy said. “We’ll find something along the way. I’ve got a good feeling about this trip.”

  Roy twisted the throttle, and a shudder went through the deck. A burst of steam erupted from the makeshift chimney, and shallow water rippled around them. At first the acceleration was sluggish, but within a few seconds the hovercraft surged forward, gaining speed with surprising ease.

  He looked back over his shoulder to see W. waving as Bay town shrank behind them. He raised his own hand to say goodbye before returning it to the handlebars to keep them from drifting.

  The swamp opened up before them: wide, unpredictable, and waiting.