The rest of his time was spent tussling in bed with Cleo or talking to Jake, Manas and Damascus about anything they were working on. He quickly discovered that Jake was blessed with both awful luck and a gift for invention and had a mindset that was far less based around destruction and utility like Laurence’s was. He wanted to be a creator that truly bettered the lives of the people around him, and it showed in everything he did. He created incubators for weak newborn children, tweaked heating systems to be more efficient and even had a pet project of making truly instantaneous travel. It was something that neither Manas nor Laurence were really capable of thinking like, so they could n to help but find it intriguing.
Day after day they would spend talking about all the odd things being made in the mountain, and Laurence would realise how many little things he had not focussed on within his path of Creation. He was solid in all respects, but these small chats reminded that he was in no way perfect, and still had a long way to go to even becoming close to perfect.
Still, he was happy, and Cleo was there for as many waking moments as she could to share in that happiness. In some ways they were inseparable. Laurence could not work out what had changed about them, but since he had come home they had become closer than ever.
After a month of living like he had, Laurence finally grasped using his left arm in combat once more, freeing up much of his time for the one thing he had become obsessed with, Jake’s project.
“So what exactly is it?” Cleo said one afternoon, gingerly stepping over cables to get to the odd ring in front of them. The cables spread everywhere, crisscrossing over each other seemingly without end. “I can see that it’s some kind of ring, but what does it do?”
“That’s pretty simple actually,” Jake said, his mouth half full with a sandwich. “It’s supposed to let people travel to and from it without being bound to a specific multidimensional location. There should be a second ring of the same size, maybe smaller if you don’t intend to send a person through... That’s an idea actually, I could make smaller portals for parcels and the like. It would only make the stabilisation equations slightly more awkward because the power supply would have to fit in a smaller place. It could be done though...” Jake ran over to a sheet of parchment and quickly began scribbling all over it, drawing rings of various sizes with different mathematical equations and lists of materials by each one.
“What?” Cleo said, looking to Laurence for help.
“Sorry, Jake does that. He gets easily sidetracked when he’s obsessed with something. It’s pretty simple in concept though. You see the two rings?” he pointed to the ring by Cleo’s feet and one ten meters away. “In theory, if you dropped something through one ring it would come out of the other side, no matter how far away each ring was from their partner”.
“So it would work like the gates?”
“Exactly, except it would be movable. It would work like the steles, but if we could either make it small enough that you could carry it, or make it change sizes at will... Jake!” Laurence shouted.
“What? I’m trying to work out how to minimise power draw on a wormhole”.
“Think about a way to perhaps change the size of a portal to match its counterpart”.
Jake dropped his pen against the desk and smacked his hand against his forehead. “Of course! That would mean I wouldn’t have to worry about minimising the power, just some way to throttle it for the smaller modes!”
Laurence turned back to Cleo and smiled, “Sorry, it can become mighty distracting sometimes. As far as I know there is no record of anyone ever trying to make a portable portal, a portable gate if you will. Wheat you’re watching is the potential for a new Myriad Manifestation. It’s amazing”.
“I can follow most of it, it’s just the fact that you not finishing your sentences kind of makes me lose the trail of what’s going on”. Cleo hugged him from behind, “I want to know everything about what you do, Law. I don’t want you to feel like you have to leave anything out”.
Laurence could smell her, that sweet scent that made his heart race and reminded him of fruit. It swam around him for days and became stronger every time Cleo came close. For some reason he had never really noticed it before, but now he could not take his mind off it. Off her. She was imprinted on his mind with every action, with every movement. The way her burning copper hair curled round her shoulders in the ponytail she favoured, how her lightning-blue eyes sparkled in the sunlight, even how her pale skin made her seem almost otherworldly. There was so much about her that Laurence simply had no way of not thinking about, but her scent was something that stuck out more than anything else. It was something that stayed with him even when she was out of sight, something that he loathed to ever really happen. He felt more obsessed with the young woman who had so desperately hunted to find him than any object he had ever made. Even his obsession with making himself whole again came second fiddle to her.
Wordlessly, Laurence wrapped his arms around Cleo and held her close, not saying a word while the scratches of Jim’s pencil echoed around the workshop. After several minutes they broke free and Laurence smiled softly at Cleo’s blushing cheeks. “I never said it, but thank you for looking for me Cleo”.
“I didn’t want you to be dead,” she whispered. “I couldn’t let you be. I finally found someone who I could actually let myself care about and I didn’t want you to be gone”. She gripped the corner of his shirt tightly. “I still don’t”.
“Don’t worry, Cleo. I’m here to stay”.
“Good”.
“Guys, thank you! I’ve got so many ideas! I just need to work on the casing of the...” Jake stopped as he ran up to the two of them. “I’m interrupting something aren’t I?”
“It’s fine Jake. We had just about finished talking back here anyway. Tell me about the casing issue”. Laurence smiled and began looking over the plans that Jake had begun.
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