Construction, throughout human history, was always dominated by certain restrictions. You could construct something swiftly, if you had enough people to work it, they had the skills required, and the resources needed were present. Over time, natural laws were learned and made to work for man rather than against him -- and those altered the equation. Not by rendering the need for people, knowledge, and resources irrelevant, but multiplying those various factors. A mine with a steam drill and a steam powered pump could easily produce far more copper or coal or gold or whatever it was they were trying to pull from the ground than a mine built in prior generations, for instance. Writing allowed skills to be more easily translated to other human beings without the need of direct contact between one person and another.
But through it all, those three restrictions remained.
Tonight, under the gathering twilight of late autumn, in the final year of the 19
th
century, Europe was to see the first time where those restrictions were bent, then broken by the concentrated efforts of supernatural law.
Mina wished she could have watched it from a distance -- rather than being in the choked, confusing mess that was the heart of the city of Timisora during that evening. Later, she was able to reconstruct what she, Lucy, and the rest of the vampires that Dracula had spawned had done -- but at the time, it had been nothing but a series of checklists, broken down into simple tasks. Turn into a wolf here, drag this there, increase your strength and dig, dig, dig. She spent chunks of the evening carrying pieces of concrete, pausing only to get a quick bite to drink from the humans, who were also at work, following Dracula's instructions to the T. There was no time for conversation, just lots of quick smiles and waves and calls for action.
In the end, though, with dawn breaking and all the vampires returning to their human forms at last after taking the shapes of massive moles and huge octopus and even stranger creatures that befitted their role and task for the night's work, Mina and Lucy were able to sit back with everyone else and admire what it was that they had built.
It began in the middle of the city and rose upwards about two stories in height while sprawling quite a distance, the structure had a hunched, low appearance despite being nearly twenty feet tall at its heights. There were several vents that could be shuttered and unshuttered at the drop of a hat -- those vents fed into the collection of tunnels and chambers beneath that were currently filled with every piece of technological equipment that had been left in the city when the Martians had been cleared away. Steam turbines and factory equipment: Equipment for the pressing and folding of metals, equipment for the stamping of molds, and equipment for the sanding and shaping of wood. Those were then connected to barracks rooms, with kitchen areas and common areas, which themselves were located in the center of the underground, tapping into the city's extant sewer system.
Dracula called it his fortress factory.
"Shouldn't we have tried to hide it?" Lucy asked.
"No," George Wells, who was wiping his mouth clean after having taken a swig of water from a canteen, said. "He says that it's entirely against the point to make it hard for the squiddies to see." He sighed.
Lucy and Mina both looked at him quizzically.
George looked at him, then looked down at his canteen, then looked back at the human woman who had handed it to him without thinking.
"Oh...bloody hell, I'm sorry," he said, and the woman blushed and slapped her palm over her face.
"We're all still getting used to this," Mina said, chuckling.
"Who is this we you're talking about?" Lucy said, grinning as she stood and stretched. "The factory will start making weapons -- and the Martians will come and try to smash it. Then we smash them from a secure position. I like it."
"What if they attack during the day?" Mina asked.
"That's why it's built so tough. They can't heat ray through stone like that, not easily," George said. "I saw it's effects in London -- well, so did you..."
Mina nodded. "And they'll need to fight through all the ruined buildings. And the Black Smoke can't get through the shutters."
"I have another means by which we can deal with the Black Smoke -- the shutters need to be able to let in some air, after all," Dracula said from behind Mina. She spun to face him, flushing as she did so. He looked tired but proud of himself, smiling slightly as he examined his construction. "One does not become a head of the Solomonari without learning a few tricks. They called me the Weathermaker at that school for a reason..."
"You can make it rain?" Mina asked.
Dracula inclined his head.
"Now...all of us must get inside. Those flying machines will be coming back soon."
"And what about the humans we captured? The..." Mina paused, while Lucy nodded.
"Those...I have yet to fully determine what has happened to them," Dracula said, frowning. "They're being held in cells that I have had constructed."
The vampires and the humans headed into the fortress. The doors were closed and the electrical lights -- salvaged from the city -- came to life with guttering and winking sounds, the steam engine grumbling noisily from where it had been placed. Mina wasn't precisely sure what the engine was burning...coal, she supposed. She was just happy to be somewhere that felt modern, even if it wasn't precisely comfortable or beautiful. Lucy and her found their rooms first, and once they were sure they knew where they would be sleeping, they experimented with passing through walls. The concrete, alas, was not of the native soil of their homeland and, thus, didn't allow their easy passage. They could sink into the floor, though, which several other vampires used as a means by which to get quickly around the fortress.
Lucy and Mina, though, were both interested in the humans that they had captured from the recycling machines.
Well.
Mina was.
"I think it's terribly obvious what happened to them," Lucy said, sighing as she walked along the corridor with her. "They were held by the Martians, then the Martians made them into little pet Martians, like in the Modern Traveler." She nodded. "Whatever happens, they have the heat rays, and we have not."
Mina gave her friend a sharp look. "You have been talking to Vlade a
lot
, I have realized..."
Lucy huffed. "I have always been this conscientious," she muttered, but Mina could tell her friend, after speaking with Dracula, Lucy had clearly considered certain facts she had taken for granted. Mina couldn't blame her. After all...so had she.
"Do you think it's really that simple?" Mina asked as they came to the cell that they had carved into the stone and the earth of the city, where Dracula stood, waiting, watching. There, through the slitted metal bars of the door, they could see the human servants of the Martians. They were just as hideous as they had seemed when they had been captured: Shapeless gray jumpsuits, bald headed, and midnight black eyes, reflecting the world around them like dark mirrors. They sat mutely in their cell, their knees drawn up to their chests. Dracula turned from the door to Mina and Lucy.
