"And there was me thinking you were fast asleep!" announced a voice from directly behind him.
Gee Tee nearly jumped out of his skin, scattering the tattered scraps of parchment everywhere as he leapt up and turned to face... TANK!
"You scared the living daylights out of me!" he yelled.
"Wouldn't have happened had you been asleep, getting the valuable rest that you so need. Would it?"
Just glaring, having been caught red handed, the master mantra maker tried to compose his thoughts.
"What on earth is it that you're doing here at this late hour?" he babbled.
"I've come to help you with the most dangerous part of your very ILLEGAL endeavour," replied the rugby playing dragon.
"How on earth...?" started the old shopkeeper, before giving up. There and then he decided he really didn't want to know how the youngster knew about the splicing. For the very first time, he started to consider that he was too old for all of this skulduggery business.
"Do you need me to catch you up?"
Jumping into another oversized chair, and then scooting over to the desk where his boss was working, Tank ventured,
"You've taken apart a series of mantras, pulling individual pieces from each, and now you plan on splicing them together to craft one almighty, life changing mantra?"
Gee Tee nodded.
"So what's the mantra for exactly? It must be something important to warrant this much sneaking about."
Smiling, the master mantra maker was secretly pleased that the young dragon still didn't know the purpose of the soon-to-be-crafted mantra.
"It will, I hope, negate whatever magic the nagas are using, and will temporarily stun them."
"Nice," said Tank nodding approvingly. "What kind of range will it have?"
Here was the bit that Gee Tee had dreaded talking to even himself about. (He talked to himself quite often in fact, like everyone else, when he thought he was alone.)
"Currently, only a very small one," announced the downcast dragon.
Tank took note of his friend's disappointment.
'No doubt he thought it was going to save the world, and it just might do that, but not if it only has a very small area of effect. I wonder if there's any way we can change all that?'
Sitting opposite each other, each keeping their own counsel, one racked his brains as to just how he'd been caught out, while the other tried hard to find the very last piece of the puzzle.
After a mind numbing few minutes of silence, Tank shouted,
"I'VE GOT IT!"
"Got what, youngster?"
"I know how we can apply it to the entire world!"
Gee Tee sat up straight in his chair, totally attentive, totally focused, ready to hear what his young employee had to say.
"We channel it through the telepathic newspaper nodes. The reach from those telepathic boosters covers nearly the entire earth's surface. What little isn't covered will almost certainly not have nagas up to no good in it."
A faint glimmer, a tiny spark burst into being, somewhere deep inside the old dragon.
"It does sound a little preposterous," he cautioned, "but it certainly has potential."
Tank decided he was going to quit there. The last line was almost certainly as much praise as he was ever likely to get. For him, it couldn't get any better than that.
"If we're going to do this, there's one more thing we'll need to make the mantra compatible with the telepathic nodes," muttered the old shopkeeper, heading for the door, urging his young friend to follow. "I seem to recall a seventeenth century dragon call to arms spell that was able to be broadcast across the entire node network, in the form of a scroll, somewhere in the shop. If we can find it, we can remove the broadcast section to add to the mantra we're splicing together. If we get it right, the mantra should work as you've suggested. Good thinking by the way." And that was it. Heading off to the far corner of the shop, leaving Tank stunned by his last words, the master mantra maker's muttering echoed throughout the bookcases.
Shaking his head clear, Tank thought about what his friend had just said. Not the compliment, but about where the mantra was located, having seen it not so long ago. Sifting through his memories, it didn't take long to find. Without bothering to tell the old shopkeeper that he was hunting in the wrong place, Tank followed the shop counter along, past the entrance to the dead end that led to the secret vault, turned left and then right, walked to the end of the aisle, turned left again and started rifling through a shelf full of scrolls, all neatly rolled up, tied tight with different coloured ribbons. Knowing he was looking for a green one narrowed it down to six scrolls. Unfurling the second one, he could see he'd hit the jackpot.
"I'VE GOT IT!" he shouted over the bookshelves and across the shop floor.
Indecipherable spluttering and mumbling from the other side of the Emporium echoed back up the aisle as he headed back towards the workshop. Reaching the counter entrance at exactly the same time as his employer, the old dragon looked harried and harassed.
"That was the next place I was going to look," remarked the old dragon, totally straight faced, before walking past Tank and taking his place back at the table.
Following his friend back into the workshop, Tank opened out the scroll on the table in front of them.
"Hmmm... this is the right one. And I think it should do exactly what's required. Right then, let's get on and take it apart."
And they did. It took the best part of three hours to carefully dissect the words, the energy and the willpower. For the most part, Tank watched in awe as the master mantra maker lived up to his name, using a solid gold scalpel with a diamond encrusted edge to neatly carve up some of the scroll and peel away the occasional word or letter. The craftsmanship was outstanding, with the young rugby playing dragon never having seen anything quite like it. Discarding the unused part of the mantra on the workshop floor, Gee Tee sat back, his face baked in sweat, looking pale and more than a little worn out. Tank pleaded with him to rest but, stubbornly, he wouldn't hear of it. So after a huge mug of hot charcoal, well... more like a huge mug of marshmallows sprinkled with charcoal, the two of them sat side by side, about to perform a very dangerous and very illegal act. Cautiously, they laid out the pieces of the mantra they were trying to splice together, all in the order they needed to be to channel the magical energy most efficiently. In all, there were nine pieces of the puzzle. It was going to be tough. Gee Tee had already told Tank the most pieces he'd ever heard of being spliced together was seven, and that was by some ancient dragon over a thousand years ago, who was some kind of mystical mantra guru. Naturally, Tank was more than a little nervous. With the pieces laid out, the master mantra maker carefully retrieved the huge glass jar from somewhere underneath his desk. It was the one from the vault, full to the brim with glistening laminium rivets.
"Wow!" exclaimed Tank.
"Wow indeed, youngster."
"They're all laminium?"
Gee Tee nodded.
"How many are there?"
"Three or four thousand, give or take."
Not for the first time today, Tank was mesmerised, not just by the number of rivets, but by the actual amount of laminium. It was huge and must have been worth a fortune. It was probably the same in total as the amount which made up a laminium ball. That was a lot.