5th story:
The remnants of a fortress on Wundagore Mountain:
Crazed and dressed in rags, Forge, in a tunnel, talks to someone invisible, asking if he is gonna talk all day or gonna help. And stop calling him Skitch, his name is Forge!
Of course he knows he – referring to the voice – can’t dig. He’s making a point! The voice thinks he is insane… he is not insane! Forge insists. Paranoid and mildly delusional, yes, these things happen after prolonged solitary confinement.
Yes, he hears voices in his head and talks to them but he knows the voice isn’t real! He defends himself.
He has finally dug himself out of that tunnel. Opening a can of food, he continues that a crazy person wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between--
Suddenly, he notices a giant clockwork machine. He built this place, but he doesn’t recall building that. Entranced, he throws away the food. He can fix it, he decides.
He begins to examine the machine, still talking to nobody. He figures it’s more like a child’s idea built from random pieces of every machine. This is nonsense. Geared clockworks powering giant micro-processors. Computer components running without any current. A hydraulic section without any moving parts. It’s maddening, he admits as he works on it, but beautiful. The components are left recognizable, but nothing fits together in any reasonable way. Nevertheless, he finds a certain logic within the chaos.
He defends himself from the voice that he will fix it in a minute. Right now, he is taking it apart to look at it. However, the voice is right; it is getting tighter. As the room shrinks, Forge figures he’s triggered some kind of defense mechanism. An immune system that’s trying to block him out of the important part. He is not helping, he informs the voice.
Figuring he will probably be crushed to death, he nevertheless begins to work at it and finds the trap stops.
Satisfied, he sees the machine working. He hears an odd noise from one of the parts and gray brain-like matter comes spilling out of the pipe and fills the place. He protests when the voice asks him to fix the giant brain monster and runs. However, he defends himself, he is not running away. He just needs some distance.
He jumps over the brain matter, explaining sometimes the only way to fix a thing is to rig something up, kick it in the @&$ and work around it. He presses a lever, the door closes and the brain matter is enclosed. It’s fixed, he announces happily…
… to suddenly find himself again where he was in the beginning.
“Good deal, Skitch”, someone addresses him. Forge realizes the machine in there was his own brain. More or less, the newcomer agrees. Maybe he was crazy, Forge admits. Maybe, the other man chuckles. Now that Forge fixed himself, Cable - without T-O virus and his left arm weak and withered – asks, as he steps into the light, how does he feel about fixing him?
