carl@fire

Mina prepared herself to beg for Carl not to surrender himself, but she needn't have bothered.

"What's going on?" Carl called to her as he sped at an incredibly unsafe speed along the very not-clear road which abutted against the city wall.

"It must be my mother!" Mina called back. "She's discovered that I intend to leave the city! Those steamcars belong to the Royal Guard! We should be faster than them, but if the gates have been sealed, there's no way out of the city!"

Carl's face contorted, and an expression of anger grew on his face.

Then, to her surprise, he reached his arm around her shoulders and hugged her to him. He spun the wheel with one hand in an obviously-practiced motion, curving their steamcar's path around another of the Royal Guard's vehicles as it suddenly emerged out of a street on the right.

Had he not held on to her, she realized, she would certainly have been flung out of the steamcar and been captured.

"Wait, you're a princess here?" Carl asked, as though such an act of heroism wasn't even worthy of mentioning.

"I thought you'd said you knew?" Mina said, her mind in shambles as the man she thought she'd known continued to gain new depths.

"No, that was something else!" Carl called. He clutched her tighter to him as he made an even sharper cut to avoid two of the Royal Guard's steamcars, again preventing her from being captured.

Who is he?

"Fourth princess of the Charus Kingdom, Isemeine Charus," Mina said, her mouth next to his ear as he watched the road ahead of him without even blinking. "You truly were unaware?"

"Stop, or we will be forced to shoot you!" warned the captain, sounding farther behind them.

"Not a clue!" said Carl, dodging around a wooden stall as they reached the section of the street which served as a marketplace.

He… He's truly helped me this whole time while not even aware of my identity? Simply because I required his aid? The thought gave her an even more intense version of that same warm feeling in her chest that she'd been pressing down on and avoiding. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she'd believed that his help was only the result of knowing that she was a princess.

Outworlders loved princesses for some reason, as she knew all too well.

Mina stomped down hard on all of those thoughts and kicked them away. She had to focus! "We must come up with a plan to escape!" she said. An idea came forth after seeing so many similar occurrences over the course of the day. "The main gate is just up ahead. Can you cut through it with your spear?"

The steamcar careened around the left side of a stall then around to the right side of an abandoned cart and through a narrow gap between a pair of stalls.

"Probably?" Carl responded, seeming curiously uncertain. "Maybe we shouldn't wait for the gate, though?"

"What?" Mina asked, the reply seeming to make no sense.

"I mean, there's gonna be tons of—Let me just try it," Carl said, interrupting himself halfway through his explanation. The steamcar began to slow at an alarming rate, and the sound of gunfire erupted behind them.

Mina nestled her head lower on Carl's shoulder in response, her military training taking over and causing her to try reducing the available target area of her body. She felt her heart pounding mightily in her chest. She'd never been shot at before!

Carl released the wheel with his hand and began steering with his leg in order to pull his spear out of the air again with his now-free hand.

Mina's mind stopped working at the masterful new steering technique he'd so casually employed.

After another moment, he removed his hand from around her. "Keep your head down!" he called before he dove out the side of the steamcar.

Mina stared for a moment. When she realized her steamcar was still moving, she scrambled to the driver's seat to take control, trying to keep her head down in case one of the soldiers had poor aim.

Even though she knew they did not. The requirements for remaining in the Royal Guard were very strict, after all.

She pulled the wheel hard to the right, circling around another wooden cart. When she looked ahead past it, there was a wall of guardsman in front with steamcars behind them, blocking off the area surrounding the main gate entirely. Her eyes widened as she realized what Carl had meant, and she continued around the cart.

When Carl came into view once more, she watched as bullets continued to strike him, seemingly to no effect. With everything that had happened already, this was one of the least surprising—

A colossal amount of water shot out of the tip of his spear, carving away an equally gigantic hole in the wall and a shallow path in the dirt. The path stretched into the distance along the flat field outside until it went out of sight.

Mina couldn't properly manage any further burdens on her mind. It was too much. She began ignoring them instead. "Perfect!" she shouted to the now-crouching Carl she pulled her steamcar up just behind him. "Get in!"

She glanced to her left as he came around the side of the steamcar. The entirety of the Royal Guard, it seemed, was after her on this night. At least a dozen steamcars were moving steadily closer, though the captain in front was now holding his fist high in the air in order to stop any subsequent round of gunfire from striking her. They'd be upon her in…

"Remain where you are!" shouted the captain.

She glanced to her right. Carl had both feet inside her steamcar.

She pressed the go pedal down nearly all the way.

The steamcar that she'd spent dozens upon dozens of hours meticulously modifying, studying, and even wheedling old Balan to inscribe glyphs upon, zoomed forward instantly, jerking her back in her seat.

Mechanics were a very reliable thing given that sufficient time was dedicated to that end, and Mina had spent quite a lot of time on reliability. She knew how most steamcars tended to break down after a year or two, and she knew all reasons why such deterioration occurred. She'd taken every precaution to ensure that her steamcar would never suffer the same fate or fail her if she ever needed it.

And it hadn't. Her careful planning, individual testing of part durability, and continuous redesigning of any aspect of the vehicle which had seemed capable of even the smallest possible chance of failure that she could imagine finally bore fruit.

The force pressing her into the seat was immense. Her tires should have shredded themselves. The instant release of the pressure from the boiler into the turbine should have caused it to explode out the engine compartment. The condenser should not have been able to retain nearly enough steam for the vehicle to remain in motion for as long as it could.

Many things should have been impossible according to what she knew of mechanics and thermodynamics.

The careful study and application of magical theory had shored up these issues when she was unable to solve them to her satisfaction with the sciences. She could not cast the spells she needed, but she lived in a castle full of mages who were quite capable of doing so.

Her steamcar was impossibly fast compared to every other one she'd ever seen. She brought that speed to bear for the first time herself now, moving along the path that Carl had somehow created with his magical spear at a speed she imagined must be faster than anyone had ever seen previously.

She grinned widely. A slight turn of the wheel sent them bouncing up over the slight edge of the path in the soil, heading along the grassy field towards the main road where they would be able to drive faster and have better sense of direction.

Mina turned to Carl, the man who had made her freedom possible. "We've done it!" she shouted in excitement. "We've ma