#it's called the clockwork conductors au

[curiositykilledtheradiostar]

*slams hands down on the table* STEAMPUNK SUBMAS AU

[brawltogethernow]

Neutral Element - Still a Ghost Piloting Starlight

Yeah I’m still doing that genderswap in-spite-of-a-nail AU. Installment Masterlist | Length: 1k; Tarvek&the gang

The modifications made by Agatha and Gil and Tarveka mean Tarveka doesn’t look much like Tinka anymore. She would be difficult to mistake for any Muse, at this point.

…The three of them might have gotten a bit carried away in the heat of the moment, actually.

Agatha gave the clank “hair”, very much in quotes, during the period at the end when Tarveka was out, apparently after a quick but meaningful nudge from Violetta, in the form of a tangle of wires extending from the skull plate. They glimmer burnt electrum auburn with fiber optics. The whole mess extends barely past her shoulders at its longest point. It should theoretically fall flat, but loose charge makes the fibers twine around her head and among each other like she’s an electric medusa, so she’s tied a low tail. After months of fussing with wigs, it’s…actually nice.

When Agatha tells her she rationalized it by engineering them to act as a dump for power overflow, Tarveka is expecting significant energy use to warm the auburn to bright white-blue. Instead, the first time she arcs power between her palm zappers in front of a mirror, the wires deepen to cherry red. Which is, which is, uh.

Agatha got dragged off to fix another crisis, of which the castle has infinite, but Gil is hovering anxious-excitedly while Tarveka runs the body through its paces, scientific interest too strong to respect that they’re kind of fighting. Neither Agatha nor Gil ever even met Tarveka back when she had a mop of barely tamable red hair, so she has no idea how much of this was on purpose, and she isn’t sure how to ask. The color, maybe, from deductions based off Anevke, but not all siblings resemble each other as strongly as they do in her family. But then, Gil has been a warm weight snuggled up against her mind, Agatha a reassuring pressure thrumming through the bones she doesn’t have. Maybe they could just tell.

The doll-like porcelain look of her eyes has been replaced with stylish matte surfaces, with a glowing ring in each sclera marking out a false iris. The two rings of tiny recessed bulbs are hooked into the same system as the “hair” wires, meaning they go from amber-orange to bloody carmine, too. That’s probably going to unsettle people.

…She can work with that.

To complete the tally, the lightning her palms can generate is purple now.

“Why?” she demands.

Gil blinks at her. “I don’t know? Agatha and I were tinkering, and I found this workaround, and it was more efficient. I can show you, if you want?” She blinks at Tarveka with frustrating guilelessness, then blanks out staring absently at her chromed hands. “Some of the fundamental principles are very intriguing, actually….” she mutters distractedly.

Gil is an uncultured barbarian. And, alright, in the interest of being fair, even native Europans rarely delve as deeply into their own history as Tarveka has. So there’s probably no way Gil has any idea what purple lightning is reminiscent of.

And the conductors are even better hidden now to boot, damn her ham-handed and overly forward brilliant ingenuity.

“Do you realize what this means?” Tarveka says mildly instead of turning her voice up all the way and screaming like she kind of wants to, flexing her clockwork arms. “It means my house colors are going to clash with me again. I could finally wear them without worrying about making myself look like a bright red hazard sign, and now you’ve robbed that from me.” She zaps violet lightning between pinched fingertips, enough to make her clothes flutter but not enough to damage them. “You even managed to make it worse! Which I would have expected to be beyond even you.” She pulls a haughty grimace, and trusts the improved subtlety of her expressions to let the girl in on the joke.

“Not bad, Princess Useless,” says Violetta, appearing from nowhere. “It’s very you. Overwrought and affected, I mean.

Tarveka shoves at her. She dodges. “But alright, listen,” she says, doing an unnecessary twirl to get out of Tarveka’s reach. “You’ve been through an entire body change now and you still have them, so I have to ask. Why do you still wear your old pince-nez? It’s not like you need them.”

Tarveka is glad she can’t flush anymore. “At first they were decorative. Now they just make me feel more like myself.” She adjusts them. “Is that so wrong? Besides, when I’m not wearing them I keep trying to fiddle with them anyway and hitting myself in the face.” She sarcastically makes the Translyvania Standard Lab Safety hand signal for ‘Clank Is Harmlessly Defective’.

“They leave scorch marks on your nose every time you zap someone,” says Violetta, making the hand sign for ‘Defective Clank Is Harmful to Itself’.

“We fixed that!” cuts in Gil, waving her hands excitedly. “They should totally not do that now. They may jump off your nose a bit, but just smack them back down.”

Tarveka stares at her. “You want me to smack myself in the face?”

“What? No, I did not say that. Sturmvoraus….”

Tarveka turns and calls over her shoulder, “Agatha, Zengil just told me to smack myself in the face!”

A distracted voice from the distance: “Be nice!”

Gil pouts. Too easy.

 *

Agatha presents Tarveka with gauntlets cobbled together from spare leather and loose parts. “To ground the charge in your hands, see? I mean, the work we already did will handle the bulk of that, but this is a failsafe….” She busies herself strapping them onto the delicate working of planes and joints that make up Tarveka’s hands. “Now you can zap things without ruining your clothes.” She gives her a meaningful look, explaining with the power of one deeply exasperated gaze that she knows all about the perils of clothes getting ruined.

The gloves don’t look like much (actually, they look kind of like she stuck her hands in a garbage can and this is what clung to them when she drew them out), but Agatha made them, and Tarveka would cherish them for that even if they didn’t plainly work damn well. And oh, they do.

 *

“Hey,” says Moloch, consideringly and with no small amount of trepidation. “You don’t think that now she can shock things without ruining her fancy outfits she’s going to get zap-happy, do you?”

Violetta is silent for a long, slow moment. Then she grips Moloch bracingly on the shoulder. He sweats; Moloch hates being reassured, because it means there’s something to be reassured about.

“Invest in rubber clothes,” Violetta says to him solemnly.

Then she vanishes. Smoke Knights — even Violetta — are into drama.

Moloch sighs. Deeply and from the heart.

In the distance, Tarveka experimentally electrocutes a velvet curtain. The Castle begins squawking chidingly as the princess, briefly, cackles.

About time I got out the part that describes the last part of this lineup. “But Brawl,” you say, "what about the part that explains why this happens at all --” SHHH, I say, pressing one finger not at all gently to your lips, I’m getting to it, if you’re reading this on Tumblr it’s a non-linear experience in nebulous nonsense, I’m sorry but at least we’re all in this together.