A New Gadget

Another assignment complete.

Exhausted, Gretchen slowly trudged to her room in the Twilight Legion's Chapter House. She took great care to set aside her weaponry and satchel on the dresser. They needed to tuned up after the most recent excursion. The 'Blast' function on her multilauncher had been completely expended. Which was a first.

But it wasn't surprising considering the amount of abominations they had had to exterminate in the small town of Nicodemus. That effort had been made much easier with the usage of The Schmetterling.

A flying contraption called an auto-gyro which the mad scientist had worked on for weeks. Putting together the parts which extreme care and snapping at anyone who attempted to disturb her work for anything less than an emergency. Sure, they could've bought it directly from Smith & Robards fully assembled for full price. But that was a ridiculous notion considering they had an engineer as part of Grand Island chapter's coterie.

With Doctor Johnson flying The Schmetterling and Gretchen in the passenger seat with her multilauncher, the monsters and men assaulting Nicodemus were quickly slain in quite the fiery display. Gretchen had thoroughly enjoyed the chaos of bombing the earth below in the effort to save the town. The fire and smoke from her multilauncher invention gave her sense of pride and exhilaration that she hadn't known before joining the Twilight Legion.

Her exhaustion was also from her mind racing at hundreds of miles an hour. Even now, while she attempted to rest her tired and weary body. Thoughts of death and fear permeated her mind from what she truly believed was a near-death experience.

Doc Johnson had piloted The Schmetterling into a tight turn during a fight as to give Gretchen a better angle on the enemies below. In doing so the auto-gyro had flown around the town's water tower and the windwill nearby. The doctor quickly turned with ease around them. But the proximity to the structures filled the German woman with a flash of fear in that moment that had continued to plague her psyche the entire trip back to Grand Island.

Gretchen lay on her bed, an arm over her tired eyes. She just couldn't get over how easy dying could've been.

What if she had died?

That would've meant her life's effort of furthering her research and experiments with ghost rock and eventually getting to the Maze would be wasted. All of the work she'd put into her gadgets all for naught. It wasn't like she'd be able to come back like all those other evil bastards they'd offed in the past.

Becoming a Harrowed wasn't just something you could 'do'. It just happened at random. And with her luck, it wasn't likely. Her job nowadays was preventing the evils of the Hunting Grounds and all of the supernatural occurrences from spreading. To prevent abominations and manitou from raising fear amongst the common folk who had barely any knowledge of just how REAL they were.

Eventually her eyes grew heavy with sleep. And for a few moments seemed to catch the weary woman off guard.

----

Gretchen awoke with a start, sitting straight up in her bed.

A nightmare of death. Her life ending right then and there. No fanfare. Hell, not even the people she worked with on a consistent basis seemed to care.

That nagging sense of terror in her chest hadn't left her.

Gretchen stretched, her back and shoulders popping. There was already a feeling of stiffness in her body from the last few days of work. She felt antsy and her mind seemed to race with faint concepts of new devices. She needed to busy her hands and mind with something. Her sleep schedule was very inconsistent anyways. So leaving for her workshop in the middle of the night wouldn't be unheard of to everyone else who resided in the chapter house.

Getting out of bed, Gretchen put on her well-worn coat. She slung the straps of her multilauncher and satchel across her chest and shoulders with ease. Leaving her room, the woman set the multiple locks on her door. She then triple checked each one. No one was going to get into her sleeping quarters. Not without her permission.

Feeling satisfied, Gretchen gave a pleased nod before turning to depart for her destination.

---

It didn't take long for the mad scientist to arrive at her workshop close to the edge of Grand Island.

Or at least that's what she liked to call it. In reality it wasn't much more than a large glorified shed with an area in which The Schmetterling was parked. There were patches of twisted barbed wire around the perimeter. In addition there were the several sloppily hand painted warning signs pegged into the dirt.

“ACHTUNG!” “WARNING! EXPLOSIVES IN THE AREA” “STAY OUT.”

Those were a few examples of signage. It was unsurprising if you considered how severe Gretchen's paranoia was. During the day a person could see patches of land with faded marks of fire and small explosions. Evidence of the disturbed woman's destructive hobbies and experiments.

Her demeanor changed to one of easiness the instant her eyes rested on her self-proclaimed sanctuary. A safe place that, in her mind, no common person would want to approach. She smiled to herself and opened to door, stepping inside the workshop.

Inside was obviously the workspace of an inventor. A large wooden table that seemed to be the main workspace. Other smaller tables had sets of tools and there were shelves with dinged up boxes. In each there were a menagerie of bolts, scrap, etc. A random assortment of metal that could be machined into what she would require. Setting down her multilauncher on one of the smaller tables, Gretchen sat down on a wooden stool. She hummed with no sense of rhythm as she reached for a pile of scratch paper that rested on the edge of the main work table.

A pencil now clutched in her fingers flew across the paper. Bits of eraser scattered the page along with pencil shavings.

Her blue eyes were locked onto the spread out pieces of paper, wide with intensity as she worked. It was like she was possessed. Intent on the task of designing a new device.

As the hours passed, Gretchen would not leave her seat. Intense chatter filled the workshop as the German talked to herself.

“It took me zhis long to reali- Nein.... vould need a different size coil...” “Staying alive should be... “ “Until zhe time comes...”

---

Dawn broke after a long night. As the sun peeked through the cracks in the wood, there air was still. Not a single sound of pencil scratching feverishly against paper. On the ground lay crumpled up scraps of discarded concepts. Failures in the eyes of the scientist.

The only thing was the telltale sound of snoring.

The blonde's head rested on her left arm. Her right hand still loosely holding a worn down nub of a pencil in her fingers. Mouth open slightly as she obviously seemed to have passed out at some point during the night.

Underneath her right hand, barely in contact with the pencil tip, lay what looked like basic designs for a gun-like device that could be held in one hand. A pistol shaped grip.

The only readable text on the paper not covered by pencil shavings or sleeping scientists read:

“MediGel Suture Gun”