“By whose hand, if not my own? Whose fault, if not mine?”

Wren, By Painters' Grace, Act III, Scene I

“I think that could have gone worse.”

Drew looks up from his task to stare incredulously at Sylva’s smiling face. His friend has always been positive, often to what he would consider an obnoxious degree, but this is something else. “Really, Sylva?” he says, gesturing to the pile of smoking metal he has spent the past hour digging through. “Our sentinel is toast, our mechanic just quit, and I’m pretty sure the fumes from the fire gave us all brain damage. On top of all that, we lost the championship. In what way could this whole situation have gone any worse than the way it did?”

Sylva shrugs, the smile sliding from her face. “Well, someone could have died.”

Drew grits his teeth and nods. “Yeah, you’ve got a point there,” he concedes. He plunges his hands back into the ruins of the last year of his life, searching for something, anything salvageable, but once again only manages to turn up unrecognizable hunks of metal, the paint almost entirely burnt away. As the official team strategist, he’s not one to shy away from the idea of losing. Every time they lose, it is simply an opportunity to grow and get stronger. That said, they’ve never had a loss quite this devastating.

“So,” he says, more to distract himself from what he is doing than anything else, “How’s our fearless leader dealing with all of this?”

“Oh, you know,” Sylva says vaguely. From a nearby room, there is the unmistakable sound of someone screaming in anger, punching a solid object, and immediately getting hurt due to punching a solid object. “Wendy is coping in her own way,” she says, raising her voice to be heard over the increasingly loud and inventive cursing issuing from elsewhere within the building.

“Fair enough,” Drew says, smiling humorlessly. He pulls his hands out of the wreckage and strips the gloves from his sweaty hands, then sits back and stares at the nest of girders above. “What are we going to do, Sylva?”

“Come on, Drew, it’ll be ok,” Sylva says, sitting down cross-legged next to him and slinging an arm around his back. “You’ll think of something.”

Drew snorts. “In case you haven’t noticed, my ideas didn’t exactly help us out today.”

“I still trust you. Wendy will too, once she’s gotten this out of her system.”

“Sylva, we don’t even have a mechanic.”

“So we find a new one. This city is crawling with them.”

“This city is crawling with artists like you, not mechanics,” Drew corrects, stabbing a finger at Sylva. “That was our mistake with our last hire.”

Sylva squeezes his shoulders. “The Creator will send us someone, Drew, I can feel it. Just you watch. They’re going to be awesome.”

“Really?” Drew says, smiling in spite of himself. “What’s the person that your god sends us going to be like?”

“Well,” Sylva says, putting her fingers to her chin, “Our mechanic will be as confident as Wendy, but actually able to take care of themselves, and as strong as you, but without being a sourpuss. They’re going to be so sociable and have so many ideas that they’ll give me a run for my money.”

“Really? Are they going to come with a pony, too?”

“Hush, Drew. We’re going to find a mechanic, and they’re going to be every bit as strong, awesome, and confident as I say.”

Drew turns to look at Sylva’s grinning face, and as always, he finds himself feeling a little better. “You know what? You’re right. We’re going to find someone exactly like that.”