All the Dust that Falls

Chapter 254: Design and Conquer

It took me several hours, but I eventually got all of the trash cleared away inside the manor. That wasn't to say I was done, though. Not by a very, very long shot. Still, there were no longer random bits of broken furniture, dirt, and animal parts scattered around the house in a disordered fashion. I'd removed all the dust, but there were still stains in the rocks on the walls and imperfections on the floors, not to mention the disaster outside.

Going through, I started with the floor. Obviously, it was the most important part. Using my laser, I buffed out any imperfections and reapplied a fresh coat of Protective Coating. After I got it all looking nice, I just sealed the whole thing. This way, I wouldn't have to deal with repairing damage very often, and I could just vacuum the dust off of it. Besides, exercising my new skill would make it much more useful in the future. And with all of the debris I had consumed, I had plenty of energy to run my still rather inefficient skill for quite a long time.

Though I sealed the floor in most of the rooms, I left the grand hall alone for the moment. That would require major repairs to fix the damage done by whatever the apparent magic circle had been doing. Instead, I moved on to the walls. This was relatively easy by comparison. Most of the time, I could just sanitize away any bloodstains, and there were no issues. I did manage to save exactly three wall hangings, which I thought looked rather nice.

One was a field of flowers. Another was a painting of a tree, and the third was that of a mountain and some sort of angelic being hovering above it. The rest were all lost causes. Sometimes, they were just destroyed and ripped apart or stained with various fluids that I couldn't get out without destroying the fabric. Some of them were just depicting very gross things that were not fit to be displayed anyway. So those I tucked away to turn into energy when necessary.

There was very little furniture left as well, not to mention that most of the glass windows had also been broken, so I went about replacing those. Making glass windows a bit more complicated than expected. Fusing together glass shards in my dustbin just didn't cut it. The only thing that I had that was see-through was my protective coating. But once I sprayed it on a mold of the window made with my Air Manipulation, I couldn't exactly move it, no matter how hard I tried. This matched with my earlier tests. I just hoped that it would last as I didn’t have time to do a good stability test.

The best way I had to move it was to reabsorb it into my dustbin and then expel it. My Void Manipulation, while very potent, didn't have the level of dexterity necessary to position it, so it took me several minutes for each window to perfectly line up the corners to match the window casings. But once I did, I had a practically unbreakable and invisible window. In fact, my sensors could barely pick up the fact that there was anything besides an open space before me. I supposed it did look a little odd. It looked like we just had no windows, as even light didn't get refracted through the clear material, but perhaps it would be kind of special.

After the third or fourth attempt, I figured it would work fairly well if I could form the mold in the air exactly where the window would be. The only issue then was plugging up the small gaps the air left between the window and frame. But that simply required a second pass. With my laser being able to harden the coating quickly at the right settings, I was soon zipping through the manor once more, filling in every window.

After every window was repaired, I took a small roll backward to examine my work. The mansion was in relatively good shape now. There weren't any major issues with it besides the massive crater in the entryway and the still rather chaotic-looking outside. But inside was livable. Except it didn't have any furniture.

I wasn't sure I'd be able to fix that, though. I supposed maybe I could craft furniture, but that was going to be tricky. I'd made plenty of small things in my dustbin, but full-on furniture? It would certainly be a larger project, not to mention a more time-consuming one. Perhaps I could leverage my new skills there as well. But for now, I had to focus on the task at hand. Instead, I thought about focusing on the outside areas.

I zoomed outside and repeated my cleaning process, removing any sort of organic material or shaving it off with a laser. Sometimes, just spraying things with my Spray Bottle and removing it with my Mop was more efficient. While I worked, I purified the air as well. My sensors had already indicated a high concentration of unpleasant compounds in the air before I started working. Plus, all of the melted rock and lasering seemed to create some odd fumes. But with my filters running on full blast, I quickly cycled the air through them, removing any impurities.

I did the same outside, and I was surprised by how much pollen was floating in the air. I guess spring really was coming. Once the outside of the manor was all polished and looking fancy, I looked at some of the wooden sections and realized that they needed a new coat of paint. Now, that was an issue. I ran through my options. I didn't think I had any ability to make paint. That meant I might have to make a stop somewhere soon.

Glancing around, I realized the outer wall still needed to be fixed, but it probably could wait. The living conditions for my humans were far more important. So, leaving the manor for the first time in hours, I went to the shopping district in search of buckets of paint.

***

The sun was just peeking over the horizon when I finally found something suitable: a large warehouse full of buckets of colored liquid. I followed some of the workers from that warehouse to a shop that was just opening up as the sun peeked over the horizon. When one of the doors was open, I turned perpendicular to the ground and slipped through the crack. I just barely managed to make it inside. The inside of the store was full of colored placards depicting what the paint would look like when it was dried.

My scanners picked up a rather impressive variety of shades, from bright pink to dusky green to some weird yellow-brown that I was fairly sure I had cleaned up earlier as a stain.

I marveled at the selection of colors available. I spent a decent amount of time just analyzing them, using my mental models to picture those colors in our new house. Eventually, after plenty of consideration, I decided on a brilliant red for the majority of the house. It would work quite nicely with the white marble floors. Just for fun, I decided to also pick up some lustrous gold for accents and filigree. A few spots required some green and blue as well, so I zipped through the aisles, looking for those colors.

Just as I was about to grab a can of red, I realized something. I didn't have a way to pay for this. Worse, even if I did, I was supposed to be keeping a low profile. How was I supposed to make a purchase?

Disappointment filled me. I'd have to wait and show them to Beatrice later. She would be able to arrange for delivery and payment. I grabbed a few of the sample paint chips to show her.

Still, hopefully, she wouldn't mind that I couldn't actually finish painting the manor before everyone arrived. Realizing the flaw in my plans, I was disappointed in myself for choosing to leave to go look at the paint selection before I had finished cleaning everything I could. I gave myself a very light scolding as I zipped back to the manor, soaring over the streets to get there quicker and save time.

Luckily, I’d gotten everything major finished. We still needed furniture, and I had to fix the crater in the main hall. But all those could wait a little bit until the grounds were in a better condition. I took a lot of the leftover grass seeds I had and began to fire them out of my dustbin in a light arc, spraying them all across where I wanted the lawn to be.

I made sure that everything was densely enough populated that the grass could grow successfully, yet not so dense that it would choke itself out. I worked on planting some flowers, too. I tried not to borrow too many from the neighbors. And then, in the back, I took out one of my apples that I had stored. The magical embers floated off of it and landed in the grass, glowing softly as they sunk into the ground. Carefully, I split it into appropriate chunks and buried them in a row along the back wall.

That would look nice, I thought, picturing several years from now when a nice section of apple trees would be growing up the wall. I wondered if their offspring would glow the same way. I was sure it would look pretty cool if they did. Realizing that my time was now almost up, I returned to the manor's entry hall and took a closer look at the crater.

I wouldn't simply be able to patch them up with a little bit of leftovers. I would need to find whatever quarry this marble came from, see if there was any more stone, and use that. Otherwise, it wouldn't match. Either that or I needed to replace the entire floor. Looking at the marble, I didn't really want to do it. I did like the look of it. I wasn't as impressed with the workmanship as I was with the floors back in the castle, but it would be a shame to waste all of it. I supposed I could improve it, but I waffled back and forth. Either way, they could wait for now. I'd have to do a patch job and then probably replace it later. That seemed to be good enough. Still, I would need to go get some marble, at least somewhat matched. Otherwise, it would look atrocious.

Carefully, I took in as much detail as my sensors could possibly manage, waiting a full five minutes for the scan to perfectly map out the entire set of runes in the circle. Once I had a perfect model, I left to go find some marble. In the meantime, I dedicated a decent amount of my processing power to decoding the symbols.

They weren't runes that I was familiar with, and I had read a lot of runes. It was almost as if this was a completely different runic language. The patterns were similar, though they reminded me of how summoning circles were written in the mages' textbooks in the castle. The same sort of sentence structure, even if the letters and words were completely different. It also is very much incomplete, with only the outer ring being completely represented. The inner ring was completely gone, and only 30% of the second ring remained.

The outer ring, I was fairly certain, was simply a protection hoarding, and likely that was the only reason it survived and contained the blast. I didn't know enough about these characters to determine what had been summoned, sadly. Still, I would keep at it and keep my eyes open for anything similar. Perhaps I should let Beatrice take a look at it and see if she could figure out what was going on. Perhaps her insight would be useful before I completely destroyed it.