Jade shifted on the couch, still wrapped in the depths of a deep sleep. In the dream she was having she was standing on the top floor of a stone tower crested on a tall hill while a dramatic thunderstorm crashed and banged outside. For reasons she couldn't understand, the blacksmith was wearing a long white coat, a thick pair of glasses and standing next to a huge table tied to a winch and with a metal rod pointed upwards like an accusatory finger. Dream logic had put her in the company of the mech they'd stolen from the dwarven ruins laid out on the table and, inexplicably, Mr Ivan, the hunchbacked shopkeeper who tended his store in her hometown of Solshire.
"Crank the winch!" She yelled in a wild voice she didn't quite recognize. "The storm approaches it's zenith!"
"Yes mistress!" Called Ivan enthusiastically, raising the table with the lever and a strength she didn't know the old man had.
Time seemed to stretch into hours before the table reached the hole in the ceiling of the tower. Jade surprised herself by throwing up her arms and calling to the weather as if to goad it into action. A moment later a deafening crack and a blinding flash of light struck the table as if in answer to the blacksmith's cry. At her frenzied instructions Ivan lowered the table back down, bringing with it the reek of hot tin and ozone and, almost too low to hear, the low thudding of a bass-drum from somewhere in the chest of the mechanical man.
"Yes!" She cried. "Yes! It's alive! HE'S ALIVE!"
The golem turned its head at the sound of it's creators voice, and sat up on the table with an oily creak. Jade made a hysterical giggling noise and grasped its over-sized shoulder plates. Her mouth fell open in a gape as the golem opened its own to speak.
"Mommy?"
Jade frowned, Eve's voice, not the golem.
"Jade? Jade? JADE!"
Abruptly the dream melted away, the blacksmith awoke to find herself sitting up on the couch and grasping the younger woman's lapels as though she were conducting an interrogation. Eve waved a hand in front of her face and tried again.
"Jade?"
"What? What?"
"It sounded like you were caught in a nightmare or something, were you?"
Jade relaxed her grip on her companion's clothes before making her answer.
"No, it was something worse."
"What?"
"I think I might possibly maybe be considering having children."
.....
Meanwhile Leo arrived at the tavern Rufus had directed him to. The mercenary drew himself up and stepped through the door.