Chapter Text
Blessed bloody night. There had to be a better way.
The diminutive itinerant, wrench in hand, had his head buried in an engine compartment. This world was so different from his own, but the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. At the very least, finding a way to get around in those places between the crystals was crucial. He had relied on someone the first time he had visited that Sea of Clouds place and he wasn’t about to rely on people every time he had to reach somewhere high.
His answer had been this. He called it an 'Avigyre' and it was simple. If you could screw things into solids, then spin the screw fast and wide enough and you could screw it into the air, too. The machine had been through about three attempts before he added the differential and the second, reversed ‘screwblades’ as he called them, and it had stopped spinning out of control and dropping out of the air. Those test runs had hurt, but Nifutt the Even-Handed had sat laughing in the wreckage each time, delighting in the sensation - a side effect of his particular ‘Echo’ gift. He hadn’t been put off.
That had been two months ago. One month ago, he had used the pure wind crystal from inside it to try and break an air-based ward that he and his friends had tried to pass. It had felt worth it, and the combination of crystals that let the thing fold into a little pocket of space so he could carry it around hadn’t been affected, after all, that ward had been in the way of something important, he thought. A way home…
But the bearded wonder had gone home, and learned something. He had tried to attune the alien gadget to the crystals of his world, expecting to see a new line of the inscrutible symbols appearing, but instead, one of the already extant lines he hadn’t dared to test flashed instead. Later, after his friends had left, he had tested it, and found that that line was the attunement for Crystarium… and it had been in his gadget all along. He had used the gadget to try teleporting to one of the lines he recognised as ones he had made appear when attuning to the crystals on that other world - the ‘source’ they kept calling it - and with a gut-wrenching feeling, he had felt himself ripped along the lifestream, and back out in that alien world again.
He had immediately tried to go back to the Crystarium, and of course… it hadn’t worked. Despairing that he was once again trapped in this alien world, that was how Nifutt had come to try to distract himself in the most dwarven way he knew how… tinkering. He was trying to find a way to get the thing to be able to steer through the clouds with a less hard-to-come-by power source than the flawless wind crystals. The distraction worked perfectly. He was no longer infuriated about being trapped…
“Go drink a Sulphur spring you sodding useless can of shite!” That’s right. As he tossed the wrench at the shaft of his Avigyre, then kicked its wheel strut so hard it broke a toe, making him grin with the pleasure he felt instead of pain, it was clear the Dwarf had managed to make himself perfectly distracted by making himself infuriated by another thing.