Chapter 5: Gears, Cogs, and A Spot of Tea

## Synopis

Short Summary:

Nicholas, the CEO of NB Designs, goes through a day of life. Including living in the steamptunk town of Metallica and working at his corporation. He goes to work on a bus with legs with his rival Thomas Ford and goes through wormholes to get to the city, where he works in a building with a bulge and a spike. This is but an ordinary situation. Sit down and imagine the scenery in the steampunk village of Metallica.

Original Chapter:

Oberon 52C was an incredibly complex planet. Similar to the Earth we know, it was spherical and had its gravity, however, the solar system it resided in, Omega 52C, had its unique effect: physics. The Omega 52C Solar System was known as the solar system of mysteries. The solar system was called this due to the large variety of landscapes on the planets.

For example, a nearby planet, Kepler 52C, was known to have a high amount of mountains made of copper, and Swirl 52C, which had oceans of a liquid that had the taste of soda, but the nutritional value of water, which was farmed by a company called Acoc Aloc, which distributed the fluid around Oberon 52C. That's for the other planets, but what about Oberon 52C? What made this planet so unique? After all, if it existed in a universe filled with abnormalities and things that really shouldn't exist, like lakes of soda and mountains of copper, then what did Oberon 52C have to boast? Besides its half-and-half crust structure. Most of the abnormalities happened on the Dryland and were profited by many companies to create services and products.

For example, Zero-Grav Trampoline Park used the Senza Peso crater as a base for its park, allowing the people inside to bounce in a gravity-free area. Or perhaps the Plastic-Sliding Tubes or PST Park, which used the naturally occurring metal hills arranged in different patterns to make a one-of-a-kind theme park. But let's talk about one specific place, around 1,000 miles from New Cliffland. This place was called Metallica, and the best word to describe it would be . . . steampunk. Metallica was an extraordinary example of the abnormalities on Oberon 52C, but to the people who lived inside it: it was a home. And it was home to an inventor, and not any normal one, an extraordinary one. He was known from his home city to the stretches of the Blue Zone as he was the one who remade the 42nd generation of the Whitesnake, Disc, and Silvers systems, among other things. Nicholas had made huge increases in the systems' developments. More efficient travel, safer structures, rapid response lanes for emergencies, mass transit, and even managed to discover a new way to involve electromagnetism and the cars to make them travel twice the speed. And one of his favorite hobbies was making small inventions. This man was named Nicholas ( Nikola ) Brunel, and he lived in a teapot.

Nicholas was the CEO of NB Designs, which was a company that made anything that was requested of it. He designed many things. Appliances, vehicles, tools, and even structures. His favorite genre was steampunk, as he had grown up all around it, right in the center of Metallica. His house was not incredibly big but unique in its own right. He had designed it in the shape of a teapot. He came up with this design when he was creating his house. He couldn't figure out what theme he should make his house in, so he spun a wheel with 1,000 options.

The first five times, the teapot showed up. The next ten, teapot again. So he decided to build his house like a teapot. After brushing his teeth and eating a quick breakfast of Sweet-Plant-Washers, he got ready to go to work. He grabbed his suitcase near the front of the door and quickly made a mug of coffee using a Giruek machine. He pulled on a tab on the briefcase, causing two belt-like pieces of material to slide out before attaching themselves to the bottom of the suitcase, making it a backpack.

He picked up his phone from the front table and exited his house, locking the door behind him. The city outside was marvelous. A huge undergrowth of steampunk-themed structures. Towering structures with unique designs, trains that moved above the people through a pair of legs attached to the bottom, small drones flying around toting coffee from Moondollars and freshly baked carbohydrates from Breadbasket Bread, people moving around sitting on a spider-like perch, and many other things. Many of the people came to Metallica due to injuries that caused disabilities.

Using the technology from the city and the materials they had, they were able to overcome those disabilities. One of those people was Nicholas. When he was ten, he was involved in an accident. While he was working at a machinery shop building a new model of cars, a piece of machinery landed on his legs, crushing them to an unsalvageable state. But he survived. A few days after the incident, he had prosthetics done. Steampunk legs are made of gears, cogs, pipes, pistons, and beams.

Legs that didn't get cramps that could run faster than a spotted land-cat. This incident is what started his dream of becoming an inventor. Back to the story. Nicholas ran up the hill towards a beacon, where many other people were waiting for him. One of those people was his friend Thomas Ford, an inventor with a prosthetic arm. Nicholas considered him as a sort of rival, as they were both incredibly talented engineers with hundreds of patents. Thomas was wearing a green t-shirt with the words Wind Rebel on it.

"Greetings Nicholas!" Thomas stated, waving his flesh hand, his mechanical one holding a thermos of coffee.

"Good morning Thomas," Nicholas said, standing next to him in the line.

"How was your night? I had another invention patented," Thomas said smugly, drinking from his thermos.

"Congratulations," Nicholas said with a smile, "Have you found where you placed your 12-inch screwdriver from a few hundred years ago yet?"

"Oh right, thank you for reminding me," he replied, opening a panel in his arm and typing into a hit. Out of the mechanical arm's forearm, a small piece of paper came out, which he slapped onto his backpack, which was attached to a small plane, and sent away towards what was probably his house. They waited in comfortable silence until the bus arrived ( "trains that moved above the people through a set of legs attached to the bottom" ), trotting to a halt in front of them. It kneeled on its legs and the doors swung open, allowing the people to enter the bus. Thomas and Nicholas stepped into the bus and took seats near the front of the car.

The bus was rather filled with rather well-dressed people. Some were drinking coffee, some were writing and one man in the back was in a meeting, his voice unheard from the rest of them due to the soundproof room he was inside.

The doors closed once everyone was inside and the bus rose as the legs came up to a stand. A mechanical whir sounded from beneath them as the bus began to move, quickly moving out of the district and into different ones. The bus crouched down and rolled through a tunnel, and it came out in a place that was vastly different than the place where they had started. This is because the tunnel was something that Nicholas had invented, called a wormhole tunnel, where distance itself was warped as it moved through the straight tunnel. Once they had come out of the tunnel, they appeared on the outside of a metropolis, with skyscrapers that reached up into the clouds and floating cars zooming through the roads.

The bus stopped once it reached a tall building. It was rather impressive. Certainly not as high as the other buildings but much wider. To the outside, it might've looked like a museum. Oddly shaped, like someone had punched it from the inside, with a seemingly random spike sticking out of the building. But this was the headquarters of Nicholas' Company, the NB Design.

"Well, this is my stop," Nicholas said, getting up and walking out of the boss, finishing the last of his coffee and throwing it out into the trash. He scanned his Golden Diamond Platinum Member card against the receiver that had appeared on the side handle of the door and exited the bus, walking to the building. Ten minutes of passing through security later, he arrived at his office. He checked his watch. 7:55. Perfect timing. It was time for the meeting. He walked and sat down in his chair, his large monitor opened up and a pad came out. He pressed his finger against it and the computer unlocked. He opened up the Dash application and started the meeting. An hour of discussing possible inventions that they could make, the review from the public, their stonks, and how the rest of their stores were doing. Once the meeting was finished, he dusted himself off and exited his office.

The sliding doors parted and locked behind him. The building had wide, open walkways with the plant life around the corners and an open-air view of the one-way glass that made up the ceiling. He walked along the hallway towards the exit, where the elevator was. The elevator, like almost all other things inside the building, was incredibly advanced. It was a pod that was designed to not only travel up and down but also forward and backward, in all 129,600 directions. The elevator consisted of a large glass-walled, metal-bottomed pod with a panel on the wall. The doors closed once he was inside and he swiped on the panel, which displayed multiple options. he pressed the option with the word laboratory, and he was off. Barely two seconds later, he arrived at the heart of the building. Or the bulge that was caused by the big punch. It was a large glass-domed room with many half-made inventions. He spent the morning and afternoon creating designs, working on some ideas that could be developed, and beginning to scrap some others. Once he was decently finished, it was time to go home.

He left the laboratory and got onto the bus again, going back into the steampunk village. If the town was described as captivating during the day, it would be considered incredible and breathtaking during the night. The gears moved as the AI brain of the city rearranged certain buildings so that the next day, the general condition and efficiency of the village were better. The gears turned silently, and the lights showed through the windows. Flying bikes flew overhead, smoke from dinners cooked wafted into the air, and the artificial sun: a large, glowing mass of light in the center of the village that provided light during the night: showed brightly. Once he reached his house, he exited the bus and entered his house. He stepped out of his shoes and replaced his suitcase before eating dinner, showering, and brushing his teeth. Once he finished brushing his teeth and slept, the room began reordering things for the next day.

(c) Kevin and Kenny Yang