Editing City Series:Volume5b Chapter15 (section)

===Beretta’s Journal===

I am writing this in our second-story room before dinner. I’ve been exhausted all day. And I made Rosetta cry earlier, so it’s been a real disaster. But I was most worried about how to go about things with Rose Francisca, so I’m glad I’ve successfully learned to play the part of the delinquent daughter who gets in fights with her violent mother.

I thought I would ask her about the Attesor Project, but she only talked about the legend of the Bourgogne Giant and laughed at me for being so superstitious.

She seems to believe that Jack McWild came here to do some mining. She also won’t tell me anything about him. That’s why I gave up on getting anything out of that tightlipped woman. Starting last week, I’ve been chopping firewood around the village and asking for information or permission to borrow things as payment, but man, my whole body has gotten a real workout-…no, I mean there is a lot to learn from this village.

To search for the Attesor Project lab like usual, I took a truck out into the mountains this morning and checked a number of things on the map. The map Phillip gave me is pretty useless so deep in the mountains. It shows the roads and rivers, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the height differences.

So recently I’ve been looking into the things people have told me about the mountain climbing trails around here or the shrine on the closest mountain peak. If you ascend the mountain using the road going through the center of the village, it splits into a road descending toward the river below and one climbing up the mountain. Going up takes you to the peak with the shrine. Going down connects to the mountain pass that leads up from Autun.

That mountain pass is a crucial route connecting Autun in the east with Nevers in the west. The right side of the pass is a rock wall standing about 20 yards tall and the left side is a majestic view of a tall conifer forest.

Climbing the pass while looking at the rock wall on the right and entering one of the branching paths into the forest on the left has been part of my daily schedule lately. Today, I finally managed to drive 20 miles away from Herlde. If I go any further than that, I won’t be able to make it back in the same day.

The mountain with the shrine near Herlde has a table of rock sticking out partway up the slope. It’s shaped something like a cake cut in half. Going by eye, I estimate the table is about 50 yards tall. According to the villagers, the only way to reach that table is to climb down from the shrine at the peak.

The table is hidden from the mountain pass by the conifer forest on the left, so you can’t see it from there. A natural wall hides that natural wonder made from the flowing river and the rock.

On the way back, I brought some fish to the bald, bearded, and buff mayor to thank him for letting me borrow the truck, but I saw something interesting there. He took me to an underground storeroom he has up on the mountain.

Bourgogne always had a lot of ruins and I’m pretty sure they had even found some holes connecting to the Tomb of the Mother of a Thousand Pharaohs. That storeroom had been created from one such hole and it mostly contained a bunch of barrels and wooden boxes roughly lined up, but there was a Heavy Barrel in the back. It was a female model and I knew its exact model number.

HLT-001X XX-HL. In other words, it was the heavy land combat version of the prototype female Heavy Barrel called Sourire.

Grazie had been based off of it and only five had been built before World War One. It had a beautiful cream-colored body. It apparently had such high power output that none of the pathetic female Knight Strikers at the time could handle it.

According to the mayor, a black dragon descended almost all the way to the village during World War One around a quarter of a century before. Its territory had apparently been disturbed by the war.

That Heavy Barrel had apparently appeared out of nowhere and drove it back.

The Barrel that had fought off the black dragon remained here in the land that had developed the strongest Barrel. A man and a girl had been Write Bringing into the Barrel. The mayor had seen them get out because he alone had remained in the village. They had used the Over Emblem so much they used up all of their Phlogiston, so they left it behind.

“Until we return, only show this Heavy Barrel to people you can trust.”

That was all they said before walking toward the mountain and never returning. This apparently all happened close to the end of the war.

“Have you not shown this to my mother? Don’t you trust her?”

“I feel like I would only be bothering her.”

Rose Francisca must have been popular for a very long time. But we’re talking about my ancestor here, so no surprise, right? The mayor said he had only ever shown Sourire to his parents, his son, and to Jack McWild.

Jack McWild stayed in this village for about three months just as the war ended and then he left for Paris, bringing Rose Francisca with him. The mayor showed him Sourire the night before he left.

“I will eventually find the girl who was Write Bringing into this Barrel. No matter how long it takes, I will find her in her proper form.”

That was all he had said on the matter.

But the mayor told me he wants me to take the Barrel to the foot of the mountain.

He says France needs any weapon it can get these days. There are apparently several villages at the foot of the Morvan Mountains where the Resistance gathers. He wants me to take Sourire there. Jack McWild did not keep his promise from 25 years before, but his daughter had shown up. The mayor felt that was some kind of sign.

It makes me sort of sad. Both that the mayor is thinking of abandoning that old promise and that the Heavy Barrel that had protected people from the black dragon would be used to fight and kill people. That isn’t right, is it?

I told him to let me think about it and then I asked him about Jack McWild (who he thinks is my father). But before he answered, he asked me this:

“Are you pursuing the legend of the Morvan Giant too?”

A few years ago, an adventurer had shown up and asked a lot of question, but the mayor had not trusted him and had not told him anything. But instead of complaining, that adventurer had listened to the obvious falsehoods the ignorant villagers had told him and left satisfied.

That adventurer must have been M. Schrier. If he had seen that Barrel that fought off the black dragon, he would surely have linked it to the strongest Barrel of the Attesor Project.

But I doubt he would have written that in his Death Techno Compilation. Jack McWild had told him how dangerous the Attesor Project was, so he had needed to write about it as no more than some amusing rumor. He may really have wanted to investigate the project, but he had prioritized his promise with Jack McWild.

Maybe this was destiny. Those two promises had allowed this all to remain a secret for so long. The mayor had promised to keep Sourire a secret and M. Schrier had sealed off his data and stopped searching for more to keep his promise with Jack McWild.

Then he had left that with me – well, a fictional representation of him had – and I had arrived here due to being Rose Francisca’s family.

But if that Sourire was used in the Attesor Project, then surely some other identical models would have come to Bourgogne as well, right? R&D would never be done with just the one Barrel. You would have at least one more for spare parts and parallel studies.

Where had that gone?

After discussing all that with the mayor, I returned home. That’s when I got in an argument with Rose Francisca.

That was only a problem because it escalated to the point of throwing things and then Rosetta came in. A plate one of us had thrown – probably me, if I’m being honest – hit her right smack in the forehead and broke. She just looked surprised at first, but then the tears welled up and she started bawling.

You better believe I panicked.

But I was also pleasantly surprised to find she could cry over things like that.

<It is just before 7:10 PM.>

I checked over my map and everything before dinner. I also need to read through the Attesor Project lab location investigation documents that France sent me in M. Schrier’s name and then I need to guess at the lab’s location for myself.

But since France sent me all this, M. Schrier must really have figured all this out when he visited here in ’39.