Chapter Forty-Six - Railgun (Technically more of a coilgun, but it fires toast, so your semantics don't matter here)

Emily couldn’t decide what to stare at more. Her newest sister, who was standing to one side, lips trembling, eyes filled with unshed tears, and little hands shaking, or the very large, very dangerous looking thing sitting on the table just in front of her.

A tiny sniffle made her mind up and she swooped in to hug Maple. “Hey, hey, it’s okay, it’s okay,” she said. “No crying, you’re fine. You are fine, right? You’re not hurt anywhere?”

Maple shook her head into Emily’s shoulder.

“Hey Boss, what’s going on?” Teddy asked as she stomped into the room.

“Give us a minute, Teddy,” Emily said. For most of her sisters, having more sisters around would probably be a comfort, but she suspected that wasn’t the case for Maple.

“Oh, alright, Boss,” Teddy said.

Emily waited a bit, gave Maple a squeeze, then held her out in front of her. “Are you okay?” she asked.

Maple wiped her nose with the sleeve of her lab coat. “I’m okay,” she said before snorting. “But.. but you’re going to be angry at me?” It was a question, somehow.

“No, I’m not,” Emily said. “Probably. Did you do anything to hurt your sisters? Did you hurt yourself? Did you hurt anyone else? No? Okay, then I’m officially not angry at you.”

Maple tried on a smile, but her lips were too wobbly. Emily reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out some napkins. She’d learned recently that she could never have enough napkins on her. She used it to rub at Maple’s face. There was some grease there, somehow, and not the edible sort.

“Okay, so why don’t you tell me what happened?”

Maple swallowed. “Sister Trinity said that the toaster here was broken, and it was. They were playing games, and I wanted to be a bit alone, so I decided to fix the toaster, and then I wanted to make it better and then... I don’t know, I just started adding things to it.”

“And this is the end result?” Emily asked.

Maple nodded. “You’re not mad?” she asked, as if to make sure.

“I promise I’m not,” Emily said.

Maple walked closer to the table, then pulled the... “toaster” off of it. The toaster had a stock made of bent tin from... cans? The actual toaster part was near the back, with the little handle on the side. Coat-hangers formed a rudimentary handle beneath and the entire thing had a long barrel made of cans bent into a rough oval shape with copper wires wrapped around them. There was a crank on the left side of the toaster, and some gearing inside of it whose purpose Emily could only guess at.

She tried to figure it out. It couldn’t be that complex, but it almost felt as if her eyes were sliding off of the mechanical parts, or maybe she just couldn’t focus.

Which had a bit of a cold sweat forming on her back. “Maple. Can you do me a favour and show me your skills?”

“I only have one,” Maple said. But she obliged, a familiar box appearing before her.

“And, um, this is my main stats page,” Maple said. A second box appeared next to the first.

“That seems... like a very useful skill Maple. I’m sure that you’ll be able to help us all a ton. That is, if that's what you want to do,” Emily said. She knew she’d hit the nail on the head when Maple’s eyes lit up and she smiled big and proud. Personally, Emily was a little horrified. That was a very open-ended gadgeteering skill.

She needed advice, and at the moment the only expert she had was--

“Hey, Boss, what’s going... oh, that’s neat,” Sam said as she stepped into the room.

“Sam. Just who I was thinking of.” Emily stood up straighter. “What do you know about gadgeteers?”

Sam wasn’t a fool. Far from it. She glanced at Emily, then Maple with her very large... whatever it was. “Not as much as I should,” Sam said. “Hey, Maple, is that a bomb?”

Maple shook her head and focused on the floor. “It’s a toaster,” she said.

“That’s an awful complex looking toaster. How does it work?”

Maple lit up again. “It’s easy! You put the bread here, in these slots, then you pull back on this handle.” Maple pulled back on the little handle next to the toaster. It took a few tries to catch. “Then you spin this to charge the toaster.” Maple started to spin the crank, as fast as she could. A display--from a clock?--popped up, numbers rising until they hit one hundred. The entire toaster was humming by then, a very dangerous, low hum. The interior glowed, illuminating Maple’s excited face. “Then you point the end at the person you want to toast, and you wait for it to pop out!”

She aimed at the far end of the room, and they all waited with baited breath.

Just as Emily was about to speak up, the toaster fired.

Ding!

Emily jumped as a burst of warm air filled the room. It smelled like warm bread. A few of the things on the table shifted back from the pressure, but that was it.

“Alright,” Sam said. “That was interesting. How does it make the toast... uh, go?”

“There’s coils,” Maple said. She pointed with one hand at the copper wires around the barrel. “It makes the toast go.”

“But toast isn't magnetic,” Sam said.

Maple blinked. “It’s not?” She looked at her toaster gun. “But then why does it land butter-side down?”

Emily decided that she had more pressing issues than worrying about toast. “Sam, what do we do?”

“Well, obviously we test it with some toast in it.”

“Sam,” Emily said.

Sam shrugged. “She’s a gadgeteer. If I had to guess, she can make stuff from scrap. That seems pretty good. Better than if she needed something really specific to work with.”

“What are the limits here?”

Sam frowned. “I don’t know. You’d need to ask an expert. But I think the gadgeteer either has a material limit, which then allows them to make anything out of that material, or nearly anything, or there’s a product limit. Like they can only make one thing, or one kind of thing, but they can use anything to make that. There was this one guy that could make laser pistols with soda bottles and a few double-a batteries.”

“Oh, I could do that,” Maple said. “But I’d need some glass, and maybe a few coat hangers. Oh, and chewing gum and glue and some cardboard. Crayons to make it pretty.”

Emily nodded slowly. “Right, we’re testing the toaster first.” She needed to see if the thing actually worked, then she’d decide what to do after that. “Sam, can you find some rope and a few bits of... something to hold that up? I don’t want Maple holding it while it fires, just in case.”

“Safety is important,” Maple agreed.

“Yes, it is,” Emily said.

She grabbed the toaster--which was still quite hot, a fact that disturbed her--then carried it out of the back of the train. Somehow, along the way, she gained a trail of little sisters and one Alea Iacta, all of whom were curious about what was going on and what the big machine in her hands was.

Trinity was sent on a bread-finding mission, which she did with alacrity, and Sam sat up a few chairs on the tracks before the train so that they could put the toaster down and angle it along the length of the tunnel.

It was about as good a testing space as they could manage on short notice.

Maple was the one to set the experiment up. She shyly took two pieces of bread from Trinity and placed them into the slits on top of the toaster. Then she pressed down the handle and spun the crank on the side.

“It’s going to fire!” Maple said before rushing back to hide behind Emily.

Everyone watched as the machine hummed and rattled atop the chair holding it in place.

Ding!

Emily stumbled back, her ears popping as a burst of air whumped its way through the tunnel.

In the far, far distance, she heard something crack. Then she noticed the twin trails left in the air. They were vaguely toast-shaped.

“Well, it works,” Sam said.

“Thank you,” Maple replied.

“Hey, there’s a problem,” Trinity said.

Everyone turned to her.

“How do you eat the toast if it’s all the way over there?”

***