(Turning out to be a busy day for me, it seems.)
Team Shift Happens
Previous Chapters:
Send It! - Stage 8 Drive and Camp
“Curiosity” - Collab with Knugcab and Elizipeazie
“The Investigation” - Collab with Elizipeazie and Interior
“We Need Water” - Collab with Elizipeazie
“Drunken Karaoke” - Collab with SurrealCereal
A Team Goes Home / Ideas Brewing in Camp - Stage 9 Drive and Camp
“A Little Shakedown Run” - Collab with Elizipeazie
Mirrors Made From Bumpers / A Vivid Purple Glow / Time to Eat - Stage 9 Camp
The Magistrate Arrives / “Are those bullet holes?” - Stage 9 Camp
Making Donuts / Speed Demon / Arrival in Camp - Stage 10 Drive and Camp
Garda Winn Campsite, 3 Sun
Jayde smiled as Janne agreed to let him fix the windshield, not quite realizing what Janne’s plan was as he brought Andreas over to watch. Jayde started by carefully peeling the layers of duct tape off of the windshield to see how bad the damage was, then grimaced as he realized some of the glass had gone missing in the time between the initial crash and now finally having a chance to repair it. “I’ll be back in a moment,” Jayde said, before wandering back over to the Bricksley, grabbing one of the empty purple glass bottles out of the back of the truck, deliberately breaking it and collecting up all of the pieces, smashing them further as he added them to a small clay bowl. He then walked back over to the van with a bowl full of glass fragments in one hand and his walking staff in the other. By then, Andreas was standing next to Janne, arguing about how this “Demons and Dragons shit” didn’t exist.
Jayde looked at the cracked windshield, then at his bowl of glass shards, and made a decision to break the top three inches of the windshield further, all the way across the van.
“What the fuck are you doing!?” Andreas yelled. “You’re making it worse!”
“Will you just trust me?” Jayde replied.
Janne smirked, watching as Jayde picked up the pieces of the now-freshly-mangled windshield and added them to his bowl. Jayde sighed, held his bowl of glass fragments in his left hand and his staff in his right, and quietly spoke an incantation. Within seconds, the clear glass added to the top of the bowl started to sizzle as it melted, then vanished in an instant, reappearing in the cracks of the windshield as glowing orange lines that rapidly faded to being clear again. Then, with another quiet incantation, the purple glass melted, vanished as well, and reappeared, now thoroughly mixed with the original clear glass for the top three inches of the windshield, giving it a slightly-purple sun-tint. Like before, the top few inches of window remained glowing for a few seconds, fading rapidly into the new purple-tinted top of the windshield.
“What the fuck is this shit!?” Andreas shouted. “That’s not normal!”
“You have faced Dyre, literal werewolves from your folklore, driven through the Rift itself to get here, to a world that is clearly not your own, traveling alongside beings that aren’t all human, and you’re freaked out over a little repair spell?” Jayde asked, remaining calm, but explaining his own surprise that the windshield repair was the thing that freaked out Andreas. “Not to mention when I cleaned out the interior of your van with a spell. You’d think I just waved Dyre bones around with that reaction.”
“How the fuck did you do this?” Andreas asked, in a cross between a confused, irritated, and concerned tone of voice.
“Do you want the technical explanation, or the magical one?” Jayde responded.
“Both! How does a bowl of glass dust become a fixed windshield?”
Jayde smiled. “The technical side of things is easy. I heated up glass until it was molten, then applied it to all of the cracks to seal them. If you look just right, you’ll see little lines where the window was cracked. The thing is, I can make full repairs of things if the whole object is there. So, I have no issue putting tires back together, or, for another example, patching an oil pan. In both of those situations, nothing has been lost. However, when pieces go missing, I have to add material to equal out the mix. I’d suspect there’s little glass bits from here, going all the way back to when someone drove into a Dyre. From the magical side of things, I had to use a carefully-applied heat spell to melt glass, a translocation spell to move the molten glass into the cracks, and a cooling spell so that the molten glass wouldn’t make a mess. The second spell, which fixed the top bit of the window, had to also melt and mix the glass together up there. Otherwise, you’d have purple lines running through the window. If I had clear glass readily available, I would have just used that instead, it would have been easier.”
“I still really don’t like it,” Andreas said.
“You’re afraid of Team Blazers, and you’re afraid of a little bit of useful magic,” Janne said. “That’s perfectly reasonable.”
“I’m not afraid, damn it!” Andreas snapped.
“Janne, it’s okay. Not everyone likes or trusts magic. I’ve dealt with this a lot,” Jayde replied.
“He just won’t admit that he believes in it, that’s the problem,” Janne quipped.
“The real problem,” Andreas said, “is that we’ve lost track of Marie.”
Jayde closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “Marie is passed out drunk in the back of the van.”
“How did… No. No, I don’t even want to know how you know that,” Andreas muttered.
(OOC: @Knugcab did give me permission to borrow his characters. I hope I got them right.)