Knocker King/To Sir withLove
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
An Angerdog/Knocker king Tag-Team Lucha Libre story. Click the img links for the Pro and Epilogues respectivly (Warning, huge, awesome images)
Sharkhead Isle has a lot going for it in the industrial sector as long as you're not a miner. Industrial espionage. Strike-breaking. High-grade weapons shipment hijacking. You name it, and there's probably someone dreaming about stealing, inventing, or detonating it. This also means a lot of gear on Sharkhead gets broken. Bones and bolts alike take a beating. There are meat-doctors for the wounded.
For the broken there are places like this small metal-shop overlooking the Pit. Places you can bring your gear, however unstable or legally questionable, and get it repaired. People pay good money for people smart enough to fix hyper-tech and with enough common sense to keep that kind of ability on the download. Shops like this one dot the entire island. Unobtrusive little workshops stuffed to the gills with illegal super-rigs that keep the Rogue Isles going round and round and round.
This particular shop doesn't have a sign. Doesn't have a billboard. There's a pole over the door. Hung from the pole is a massive gear from one of the drilling machines. The teeth have been filed down blunt. The gear has been coated and polished and sprayed until it shines a burnished brass. A giant cog marks this shop. A strange calling card in an underworld economy that runs on the new and the daring.
The sign says to the knowing: Bring me your forgotten and your wondrous. We remember what they were.
Lets go inside, shall we?
Into the halls of the Knocker King…
There's a stereo system wired into the rafters here. It's blaring some local college radio station from half-way across the world that mixes it's beat with the sound of the hammer and the welding-torch. There are shelves on the walls, racks on the floor and suspended creations hanging from the ceilings from chains that all vibrate with every strike and every knock against whatever is on the workbench tonight. It's loud work in the Knockershop.
Far in the back there's a large metal table and a stool. Strewn across the shiney expanse are small Clockwork gears, dismembered arms from Mech-men. Wings ripped off of Sky-Raider jump packs. Forgotten and defeated remnants. Things that can be reborn if you apply a wrench and a torch and a little imagination to them. Things that can sing again if you wrap a dream around them and rivet it up tight and solid again.
Perched ON the table is a man in a leather apron and a welding mask. Long ears poke out from the smoked-glass and steel protective faceguard. Red hair and swirling tattoos crawl around the skin that does show from the heavy leather apron and work-pant combo. Knocker is working. Welding something together. Giving it a dream again. Giving it a little purpose in a world that says it shouldn't work.
But it looks like he's about to take a break. The tools are set down. The gear-laden clockwork arm is set back on the work-table. A heavy voice echos inside the mask to someone we haven't seen yet.
"Hey, Dum-bot. Get me the #42 smithing hammer…."
And the thing unseen is heard. It's heavy. It's lumbering. It goes around a corner into the maze of racks and shelves….and something else comes around the corner with a package in hand. It looms over Knocker. It casts a shadow over his work, which snaps the Artisan out of his reverie…..
"The HAMMER you stupid Tweedle. The HAMMER. I need a bloody MALLET for this part and…"
This is where the 'something' drops it's package on the table.
It's a bouqet of roses.
It has a card. The card reads: "Love and Kisses: Masa."
This is where Knocker very slowly turns around and looks at the 'something' that just delivered a hate-o-gram with a sinking feeling that can only be expressed as a deep certainty that the day has suddenly taken a turn for the worst.
The something is a Cannon Prince.
Knocker doesn't move for a long while. It's a stare down between mechanic and 9 foot tall whirling electrical gear terror that has, against all odds, has gotten into the Knocker King's inner sanctum.
Knocker flips the welding mask up, staring his guest face to ocular sensor, and speaks with the firm conviction of those driven so far past the shores of terror that they are now skittering in the tides of madness.
"You're not Tweedle."
The affirmation to this obvious truth was the snicker-snak of energy along a rusted fist as it connects with face. Knocker flew off the table and hit the far wall of the workshop trailing sparks, gears, and blood like a red and white bottle-rocket. Tools and shelves and bottles full of arcane bot-grease clatter and scatter to the floor with the force of a body hitting steel. The Red-tattooed engineer splayed against the wall and slid, slowly, to the ground as the workshop stopped vibrating with the force of impact.
The Cannon Prince looked at it's fist with some consternation. It was a massive machine, a whirling impossibility that existed to protect and propagate. Technically it shouldn't even BE here, but something was itching the back of it's copper-wire mentality. A small little rune glimmered on the back of it's skull casing. Giving small little commands to beat small little men into small bloody smears.
Who was it to argue? They were good orders. The shop was full of metal. Once the little red fleshling was dead, it could convert the shop into a Clockwork factory, and spread the machinations of the Lord King into Sharkhead.
Today was a good day.
Knocker was trying to pull himself out of the depths of his scattered oil and grease gun rack while the Prince pondered purpose. This wasn't easy. Hitting the grease-rack at high speeds had burst several tubes of bot-lube, spilled some half-open jugs of oil, and shattered several glass jars that had labels ranging from "Jabberwock Spit" to "Nightmare Ichor: Save for a special occasion.". The confused and mildly concussed fae managed several false starts before getting to his very slippery feet and eyeing the approaching Clockwork Prince.
"This is the worst valentine I've ever gotten…and that includes the one that was actually a mailbomb…"
Knocker ran. Ran slipping and sliding into his racks of forgotten and abandoned projects that no one else wanted, or no one else understood. The Prince followed with a ponderous gait, trailing sparks and leaving searing marks where it trod on the greasy footprints the changeling had left behind. It was so simple. Just step on the little red man and the workshop was his. Stomp stomp stomp! It would be FUN….said the little rune in the head. The Clockwork King would be so pleased…and then it could make lots of little clockwork.
Machines shouldn't have biological clocks. Then again: Had anyone ever told the Clockwork that?
The Knocker King limped past his racks and his work. Past his scrap and his steel. There's not much that's effective against a one ton electrical automaton when you're only 5'10 and built like a broomstick. Knocker was not super. He was just….smart. Which isn't much help when you're heavily concussed and covered in magical machine grease.
It does help when a giant hand slams through a shelving unit and grabs you however. Like a greased pig, Knocker flew out of the Cannon-Prince's steely grip and slid across the floor towards the door of his shop.
"Come back human. The sooner you are finished the sooner I can begin the wonderful family work for my Lord and his Consort Masabakes."
…that didn't sound right, even to the Prince. But he wrote it off as enthusiasm. Knocker wrote it off as just plain –creepy-.
"Go screw yerself into a lightsocket you over-grown Rockem-Sockem."
The fae pulled himself off the ground and propped up against a tool-rack.
"I've BUILT bigger than you, but I'll be damned if I've made anything stupider than you. At least –my- bots are only remote controlled…."
Fear is the mind killer. Knocker HAD been running scared. But he was starting to level out. He was fighting a machine. Knockers were the lords of the cogs and the widgets. Messiahs to clockwork, gods to gears. This wasn't any different. The Prince had stopped, eyeing the small red fae with the same kind of look a cow would give a solitary Piranha.
It knew something had shifted.
"At least anything I've made stands on it's own bolts and doesn't bow knee to anyone but -me-."
Knocker started to swear. It wasn't just swearing. Most of the swears you and I know involve organic, sweaty things. These kinds of swears were coated in grease and rust. They sparked, they ground metal dust out of the souls of all things mechanical and stripped their gears of the will to live. Knockers swore in ways that could make HAL 9000 feel as powerful as a toaster. They could swear in ways that would inspire motor-bikes to take flight. They promised the death of Iron and the renewal of Steel if the machine obeyed.
The Knocker king called for the Cannon Prince to bow in the tongue of the mill and the engine and the forge and the Wrathful gods and men who gave birth to their power.
While the Clockwork were not strictly machine, the Cannon Prince felt his knee give way in a bow, for a split second, to the legacy of the Knocker King's threats and promises of a mechanized perfection by any means necessary.
This was the moment the King needed. There was a grab from the desk, and a whir of an arm. The Cannon Prince looked up from it's bow in time to see a monkey wrench the size of a small child buzzsawing through the air with all the fury a creator has ever felt towards a creation that has misbehaved.
This is where our fight ends.
With a wrench embedded deep in the armored workings of a mortally wounded Prince.
With a knocker prying a rune-riddled panel off the back of it's skull.
With the sound of a smelting crucible melting down the tainted metal for use again somewhere else.
With the sound of a prince being re-wired and dis-assembled.
With the song of the hammer and the whir of the gear as creation begins again…in a little shop, somewhere on Sharkhead Isle…
