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((Triple Monday -- Page 1 of 3))
‘Garovel, are you being serious?’ said Hector. ‘You’re NOT useless! How could you even think that?!’

‘I wonder.’

Hector couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The reaper had done so much for him. He had to know that, right?

‘I’m not trying to sound depressed or pessimistic,’ said Garovel. ‘Rather, it’s the opposite.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Hector, c’mon. You’ve kinda been on a tear, lately. If I don’t start working harder to step my game up, then you’re probably just gonna leave me in the dust.’

‘I...’ Was that really how Garovel saw things? What was he even supposed to say to something like that?

‘It’s a GOOD thing, is what I’m saying. I want to make sure that I’m not holding you back.’

Holy shit. That might have been the most flattering thing anyone had ever said to him. ‘I... you’re not... Garovel, that’s not true.’

‘Oh, shut up. Yes, it is. Anyway, forget about it.’

‘What the--?! How am I supposed to forget about it?!’

‘I dunno. Maybe I shouldn’t have even brought it up. Point is, we need to stay focused on our objective. Also, there’s a highway coming up soon, so you should probably adjust your platform so that you don’t squash any of the cars or the people inside them.’

That was a good idea.

Hector wondered briefly if he could make his iron move seamlessly around a group of cars in motion. He felt like he could, but something about the notion of experimenting with other people’s lives struck him as something he probably shouldn’t do.

Instead, he came up with a much safer experiment, something he’d been wanting to try for a while now.

As soon as he sensed the highway that Garovel was talking about, Hector slowed the pace of his iron, much to Zeff’s expressed chagrin. Hector eliminated most of the platform below them, keeping only a comparatively thin layer for everyone to continue riding on and four tall legs.

His work was suddenly much more akin to a giant, moving table.

The shift in weight caused a bit of turbulence, which seemed to alarm the others, rather understandably, but Hector got it under control.

He wanted to eliminate the legs entirely. He wanted the platform to simply float, like one of his cubes in orbit.

It was similar, in theory, but the weight differential made for quite the leap in difficulty. The larger the mass, the more impact gravity had on his work--and therefore, the more he needed to counter its effects. With just an iron platform, that was straightforward enough, but there were people here, too, and they were weighing the platform down in different places. The same kind of “balance” that he used for his cubes in orbit had to be greatly adjusted here.

And Diego certainly wasn’t helping, what with the way he was walking around, talking to everyone without a care in the world. The man probably had to get up close so that they could hear him over the wind, but still, at the moment, Hector was finding it rather obnoxious.