Picture Perfect
1278
Once the strange woman in fancy clothes left her workshop in Societas’ headquarters, Ignis slumped onto a couple of stacked crates. After her run in with a dragon, she was still recovering from the extensive healing she'd had to go through afterwards. Amicus had passed out at some point and his unconsciousness added to the engineer's fatigue. After all that, cleaning up and repairing her office/workshop had sapped her remaining strength. Ignis sighed and turned her thoughts about what needed to be done. 1278
The tired enlil didn't even notice her eyes drifting shut. Her body folded on itself and landed on the floor with a dull thud. Even so, her imagination kept going as if she was still awake.
Ignis ran her hand over the page of her notebook as she glanced over the blueprints. A camera would be easy to make albeit intricate and time consuming. She would need to make the main case to hold the mechanisms that did all the work first. The engineer pondered what materials she should use.
Ignis needed something easy to shape and work with. Copper, the avian decided. It was malleable enough to make her task easier and quicker. Next, she needed to make the smaller parts, like the mechanisms that would pass film through the camera and the bulb for flash. The wires would be dahilitium. The strange lady had insisted upon a simple device. The bulb would be a problem. She didn't have any tiny light bulbs in stock.
The avian decided she could just replace it with some clever circuitry and a coil made of dahilitium and copper wire. The rest of the details tumbled by without much thought. Engineering was intuitive for Ignis. She was better off not agonizing over every little part.
Now to get started. Ignis stood and began to rummage around for the desired materials. Most of what remained in her workshop had been organized into crates. Only a few piles of junk remained under her workbench, pushed out of sight for the time being. Ignis had cleared away enough debris and sorted through the mess some demons had left enough to make room for Cora's repairs. Half of her hunt involved more cleaning and organizing, or, just as often, pushing stacks of gears and bundles of wire aside to clear space. There was little to be done about scorch marks and spilled reagents but scrub at them with a rag soaked in a cleaning solution Ignis concocted herself.
Finally, Ignis was ready to start crafting. Humming idly, she used a stick of chalk to mark lines on a sheet of copper. Then, she used a pair of tongs to hold it over a fire the engineer had started in a trashcan; (Ignis had begun to build a basic forge for heating metals, but it was broken during the invasion.) Once the metal was hot, Ignis began to pull, hammer, and bend it into the shape of a rectangular box with the lower half protruding slightly on one side. A few openings were added for other components to fit onto. Then, the still cooling metal was submerged into a barrel of water.
Ignis wasn't much of a blacksmith, but she knew a little about metal work because it was essential to building machines. Perhaps one day she'd learn enough to make armor. With a critical eye, the avian examined her work. She could almost see the smaller parts she was going to build inside this case. A frown flitted across the engineer’s face. If she had more than two days, the enlil could have paid a blacksmith to make the body of the camera for her. It would have been better made.
“Can't be helped,” Ignis mumbled, reminding herself not to get too distracted. There just wasn't time.
Next, she made a cylinder for the lense. The left over metal was cut into smaller pieces to form the shutter. Carefully, deftly, Ignis arranged them to overlap like miniature blinds. Then, she soldered the horizontal edge of each one to thin metal wires. Once the engineer connected these stiff wires to perpendicular wires, they could be moved back and forth.
Ignis groaned, slapping her forehead with a gloved hand. “I should have prepared the film first because it has to soak!”
The enlil on the floor groaned again and mumbled before her eyes fluttered open.
“The film!” She cried, pushing herself up. Ignis stood and dusted herself off. There wasn't time to nap on the floor in her workshop, she needed to get started on that camera.
Hastily, she cleared off a spot on her workbench to prepare the chemicals for the film up soak in. Ignis worked speedily, but with accuracy as she poured different liquids into a glass beaker. She occasionally glanced at some notes she had dug up for reference. The avian didn't really need them due to her photographic memory, but it was reassuring to double check. Finally, Ignis stirred in a bit of dahilitium volantis before sticking a roll of vellum into the solution. The vellum had been trimmed to the proper size. After soaking, the vellum would be rather flexible, almost flimsy, and capable of retaining images from the camera. Ignis put the beaker into a box to protect it from the light.
With this done, she turned her attention to building the basic components of the camera. A few hours of deja vu later, the engineer was hunched over the lense of the camera. She had fitted a metallic cylinder with curved, circular pieces of glass. She held it up to her eye and peered through it. Satisfied, the avian nodded to herself and set it down. A yawn escaped her lips.
Ignoring the wave of sleepiness, the enlil started adding mirrors and prisms to the interior of the metallic case. She used her blow torch to fasten the lense to the main component of the camera and stifled another yawn.
Ignis frowned. She was forgetting something.
“The film!” The engineer dove under her workbench where the box containing the film sat.
Quickly, with a pair of tongs, she picked up the film and wrapped it around a spindle before returning it to the solution and putting it away again.
Satisfied that the camera was almost complete, Ignis sat with her back against the crates she had fallen from earlier. Once she hinged the top to the camera and added the viewfinder, her project would be virtually complete. Adding a power source would be child's play. The enlil was certain she had a few metal tubes filled with dahilitium volantis laying around.
The avian giggled to herself, feeling a little slap happy. Rushing through a job like this normally wasn't her style. Ignis liked to take her time to ensure the more intricate parts of her creations were well made. She doubted that the strange rich lady would realize this camera wasn't her best work, but that was okay. The rich lady wouldn't have appreciated a better made camera anyway. This one would get the job done it was functional l, which would suit her rather practical customer. Ignis was lucky she had enough materials lying around. Half the reason her estimate had been two days as because the avian hadn't been certain she had everything she'd need to build a camera. Dumb luck had allowed her to shorten the process considerably.
Ignis decided she was grateful to be so fortunate as she drifted off to sleep once more. She slumped over, still in her thick apron and gloves. Her mouth hung open slightly and emitted soft snores. This time, even her imagination was sufficiently exhausted.
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