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273 - Facade Obscura, Metropolis Obscura [Sturmblitz]
🕑 Added 2023-07-22 23:51:33 +0000 UTCLater that week…
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Zefaris had reached a point of being able to use the Philosopher’s Eye for hours at a time without issue, and was certain that it wouldn’t be long before she could simply have it open continuously. And then, one day, Victor came along to one of the sect’s libraries where Zefaris had been reading through forgotten manuscripts on glyph arrays, finding that they made a surprising amount of sense. The hard part was visually parsing the array patterns, and she, if anyone, was the best suited to the task, not only thanks to the Philosopher’s Eye. Just the Homunculus Eye alone could handle most of the patterns, and was in fact better-suited to many, due to being able to take in the whole thing all at once. Victor was playing with two Philosopher’s Eyes as if they were toys, rolling them around in his hand.
She immediately noticed the Crow Mask on his face, and he quickly approached the other side of her desk, bending over to rest his elbows on its surface and bring his eyeline in line with hers.
“You still don’t have access to your left eye’s full performance, you know,” came the young man’s voice, tinged with the crow-like timbre of Koschei. “There’s a two-year time lock, and another that only disengages when you clear three dungeons. Seeing as that second one is impossible to fulfill… I’ll just disable it myself.”
Before she could answer, the redhead held out his hand to Zef’s face and uttered: “Manual Release.”
“There. You should be able to set the eye into high gear, so to speak. I’m not sure how heavy the strain is; Koschei’s memory being fuller of holes than Ubul’s back and all… So be careful. But I don’t need to tell you that.”
Zefaris blinked, giving a thought-impulse to the implant, and suddenly found a deluge of visual information flooding into her mind. The Philosopher’s Eye had jumped in performance and intensity to a degree comparable to simply opening the eye when she had first started using it… But the sheer quantity and fidelity of data was astounding, and unlike back then, Zefaris could handle it, at least for short periods.
Another blink, and the eye returned to normal. She rose from her seat and flicked one of her coins into the air, firing a low-powered kinetic beam at it. With a light flash, it reflected and smacked straight into the back of Victor’s head, sending the redhead face-first onto the metal-inlaid cover of an ancient tome.
“That mask isn’t an excuse to play fuck-fuck games. Ask before you do something like that next time. For all you know the eye might have been stuck in its “high gear” and I’d be stuck getting used to it all over again.”
When he got his bearings, Victor tore the mask off his face and hucked it into the floor.
“I apologize, I was testing the reusable version and forgot to take it off,” he said, audibly frustrated over his own actions. “You don’t even notice how it changes your behavior… But that’s part of how it works, I guess. I’ll be more careful. Maybe put a hard time limit on the next iteration, or restrict it to only work inside a specific formation.”
“Uh-huh…” Zefaris trailed off, before calling out to him again. “Hold on, come back here for a moment. How far along are you with handling dragonbone?”
He reached under his right arm, where his Tablet was holstered, and retrieved a small, simplistic bar of the black material, shaped to look as though it had been carved in a simplistic way.
“Small things. I made a needle out of it recently. Why?”
She pulled out a photograph which she had drawn over with two colours of ink - black and white. She gestured to the larger group, done in black.
“Can you do pieces of this size and shape?”
“Sure. Are you having scales for Pentacle made to match Tempesta? I noticed you haven’t had it on you since you went to that gun shop in front of the city hall, what was it called…”
“Collier’s Equalizers, yes.”
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A few days later, Zelsys Newman met with Crovacus Estoras in the latter’s office, a boxy slide projector set up on the governor’s table and aimed at a white projection sheet.
“Several weeks ago, we lost contact with the city of Eberheim,” he said, moving the projector to the first slide. It showed a map of the immediate region, centered on the city. Eberheim was north-east of Rigport’s territory, close to the Grekurian border, and right ontop of a trade route that connected both to Grekuria and Rigport. The city was labeled as a soon-to-be member of the Free Cities Alliance.
“Not only is it a center of trade, but also an industrial hub, and as such, capture of Eberheim and her factories was among the main Grekurian public goals early in the War of Fog. It is now known that all heavy manufacturing had been removed from the city weeks prior to any hostilities, and it was simply surrendered before siege could be laid to it, allowing it to go largely unscathed… Though most of the manufacturing equipment has been lost. Nonetheless, it has become more pivotal than ever, being the primary land trade choke point between FCA member states and Grekuria. Many naval imports that arrive in Rigport also go through Eberheim, due to the extremely unstable, nearly decivilized state of the territories immediately between Wilowdale and Rigport.”
Another click. The projector cycled. A cluster of two smaller municipalities that separated Willowdale and Rigport proper, one each falling under either city-state’s purview. Both were filled out in red and dark-blue crosshatching - the Mevenverton and Whitecliff region respectively. She skimmed the notes in the free spaces of the slide. The town of Mevenverton was marked consumed by the Exclusion Zone, and Keverley could apparently barely be considered a town at this point, relying heavily on imported goods and constantly under threat of locust raiders, possibly offspring of the Willowdale Locust Queen.
