Lillene
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Chapter 372 - A Search for Answers
🕑 Added 2022-05-23 22:51:40 +0000 UTCEnjoy!
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Serenity shifted to his Sovereign form, then felt as his sword-self fell to the grass.
Oops. He’d forgotten about that. He’d brought the sword just in case, even though he didn’t really expect to use it … him. Whichever. He should have shifted it to the Sovereign form instead of his human body, shouldn’t he? It would have made more sense, at least if he could manage to move one and not the other.
He wasn’t sure if he could or not; he hadn’t had much luck the last time he tried, but that had been two of the same body. His Sovereign form moved very differently from human and chimera, and he’d been doing fine with either of those and a sword; the sword simply didn’t take much of his attention. He could run one body at a time.
It was worth a try. He could always shift again if it didn’t work, and this way might save problems if someone came by or there were cameras he wasn’t aware of. It shouldn’t be a problem either way; Rissa was able to handle herself. Still, he’d feel better if he could have a presence with her.
Serenity concentrated. Once again, he managed to shift only one of his forms. It was getting easier; he was fairly confident that it also helped to have them not match to begin with. It made it easier to isolate the one he wanted to shift.
He could see Rissa jump a little through both his eyes and his Sovereign’s Eyeless Sight. It was disconcerting and reminded him that he needed to isolate his attention to one body. His human form was already sitting, he laid it down, as though taking a nap. He’d have leaned it against a tree, but the only tree nearby was another of the small ones with a trunk no more than an inch and a half in diameter. It would likely support him, but not well, and it wouldn’t be comfortable.
He’d better explain it to Rissa. :I thought it would be better to leave myself here as well, but I can’t pay attention to both places at once. If you need me, say something and I’ll switch.:
At Rissa’s hesitant nod, Serenity set off towards the warehouse. Hopefully he’d find some interesting magical residue or something else useful.
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Rissa watched Serenity leave. He was still here, physically, but she could tell that his mind was gone. Oh, there were little bits and pieces still monitoring the body he’d left behind, but as for what made Serenity? That was gone with the wisps of darkness and light.
Rissa watched him as he receded into the distance. He looked different than he had before he Tiered up. It was a fairly minor difference, and Rissa wasn’t entirely certain she wasn’t imagining it. Surely there weren’t little motes of light in his darkness? If there were, they were few and far between. She’d have to remember to talk to him about it after they left here.
Once the patch of sentient (if slightly sparkling) darkness disappeared into the warehouse, Rissa glanced over at his other body. He looked like he was sleeping. If only his mind were there; that would be more comforting. But then, if his mind were there, he couldn’t also look through the warehouse.
It was time to do what she’d said she would and look into it from out here.
She had told him she was going to, hadn’t she? She remembered meaning to, but she didn’t remember actually saying it. She must have; that was one of the reasons she’d wanted to stay outside, after all.
She reached into her bag and pulled out a Ziplock bag. Inside the back was a silk bag, lined with lead foil. It wasn’t a perfect magical barrier; nothing was. For all that legends talked about silk being some sort of magic-impervious material, that wasn’t true at all. Silk was a good material to use for certain types of magic. Rissa was fairly confident that the reason for silk’s reputation was simply that the tighter weave in high-grade silk made it harder for things to slip past whatever other protections you put on it.
The true trick was in layering. The more different materials you used, the harder it was for something to slip past them. Materials alone wasn’t enough, either. The bag was very carefully embroidered with a pattern that seemed to make it harder for magic to seep out as long as the pattern was infused with magic periodically.
She needed to remember to ask Serenity if that pattern was what he called a rune. It seemed likely. That would also be a good time to ask if there was a better way to make a secure pouch.
Enough procrastinating. Get on with it.
Rissa wasn’t looking forward to the visions she was about to trigger, but she dumped the clay shard out of the lead-lined silk bag. It fell on the grass with the markings on the underside; without them, there was no obvious way to tell what the pot shard had once been.
Emotions were one of the most useful hooks for psychometry; the fact that she felt them all the time made it work particularly well for her, even if it was an ability that her mother dismissed as “not worthy of an Oracle”. Rissa didn’t care about that; the important thing was how useful it was, not whether or not it was “important enough” to use.
Rissa tucked the pouch back in her bag then set her fingers on the small fragment of vase. The world disappeared around her.
She felt the anger and eventual fear of the trapped spirit before it died.
The joy as it found a perfect host. Looking at Serenity through its eyes as it compared him to Rube made it obvious not only just how physically fit he was but how well his body handled magic. The spirit’s joy tried to trap her, but she pushed to move on, move back.
Rube was no more than a flash of interest and curiosity.
Darkness and silence preceded him, but it didn’t last long. Right before the darkness was a moment of imperfectly-hidden excitement from outside; before that, a different kind of darkness.
A darkness where people came and went, yet it was on the other side of a barrier. It was not so hidden as the complete darkness right before Rube.
Rissa flashed backwards in time. The primary feeling from those outside the vase was the boredom of routine, while inside the vase was only a vast tired patience with no expectation of relief. A flash of something Rissa could only call hope caught Rissa’s mental eye and she slowed down the rewinding to watch.
Anticipation and excitement. Confusion and more than a bit of exhaustion flashed by and Rissa watched the scene from the beginning. She could telly hat this was no longer simply psychometry; whatever it was that made her an “oracle” had kicked in and she watched from above instead of simply “seeing” what the vase knew.
A group of oddly-dressed people gathered in a dusty area; two of the men wore khakis and the sort of a large hat that Rissa thought of as being out of century-old movies about the British in Egypt, while the rest were dressed in clothes that were one step above rags. Maybe two. None of the clothing seemed modern; she didn’t see a single t-shirt. They were all either swarthy or deeply tanned; while the two in khakis seemed a little paler, that could easily have been less sun exposure instead of a naturally paler complexion.
Before she could look for anything else that would narrow down the time period or location better, the action started with her point of view shifting to the ground. There was a partially-excavated building with a ruined wall; next to the ruined wall, Rissa could see the top portion of what looked like a wooden chest of some sort. The bottle half was still buried in something that looked like a pale brown dried mud, but the entire top was visible and about two inches down the side. It was clear that the lid lifted up on the hinges at the back.
Rissa was confident people were speaking to each other, but she couldn’t hear anything. That happened fairly frequently; she’d usually only get vision or sound, not both.
One of the two men in khakis knelt on the mud in front of the chest and seemed to play with the latch. He said something and one of the workmen passed him a chisel. Rissa thought he was going to gently clean out some mud blocking it or something, but instead he set it against the latch and gave it a hard smack.
A piece of the latch broke. He fished it out of the way and set it to one side. Rissa’s view followed it, and she got a good look at a broken ring of metal that looked like it had been welded into a solid piece. Was that a lock of some sort?
If it was, it was clearly one that wasn’t meant to be opened.
Rissa’s viewpoint moved back to the latch. She could see scores on the latch from the chisel; the now-broken ring of metal was definitely there to prevent the lid from opening.
If this was an ancient buried city, the scene had to be either a long time ago or an illegitimate expedition. Rissa couldn’t believe that modern archeologists would be so careless about damaging what they were excavating. With the clothing and tools Rissa saw, she was guessing it was probably the first. She’d heard that some early expeditions were essentially grave robbers, and while this didn’t seem to be a grave, they also didn’t seem to be interested in preserving everything the way they found it.
The man working on the latch finally got it to flip out of the way. He immediately tried to lift the lid, only to find out that it was stuck. A little work at the edges with the chisel later, he’d cleared enough mud out of the crevices and hinges to force the lid open.
Rissa saw one of the hinges crumple as it opened.
Her internal wincing at the destruction of history vanished when she saw the contents of the crate. It held rows upon rows of vases similar to the one the djinn (demon?) occupied. After a moment of shock, Rissa tried to estimate how many were in the box.
There were somewhere around thirty or forty on the top layer. Rissa could tell there was at least one layer below, because she could see where the tops of vases stuck up between the ones she could see on top. It was impossible to see if there were more below that, but she could see that while the box was clear at the top, mud had seeped in enough to cover the ones below the top layer.
Her vision zoomed in on one of the vases on the top layer. It looked very much like all of the others, but she got a good look at it.
The seal was intact.
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Serenity stared at the boxes sitting on the table. There were three of them, each about the size of a box that would hold paper. They had traces of mana reminiscent of the mana of the vase. As he looked into the boxes, Serenity had thought he’d caught a glimpse of the strange hidden mana; unfortunately, the trace was slight enough he was only mostly certain it had been there. The other mana overpowered anything else that was there.
It was clear that if the boxes had held vases like the one Rube found, they’d held them for months or more likely years. It was also clear that they were empty and had been emptied in the warehouse; Serenity didn’t understand why whoever took them didn’t take the boxes to make them easier to carry if nothing else. The packing material was mostly on the table, but some of it was still in the boxes. Maybe whoever took the vases didn’t want to carry it? Or maybe they weren’t taken all at once?
Serenity badly wanted to shift to human form to get information from the boxes, but after seeing the mess, he didn’t want any security camera to see him near it. That wasn’t an option.
Worse, as a Sovereign, he saw using Eyeless Sight. He couldn’t even see if there were labels on the boxes.
He flowed over and around them, annoyed, trying to figure out a better option when it occurred to him that he was missing something. He was a Sovereign of Potential. Nothing he’d seen said that he could do stuff with that Potential directly, but he did have shapeshifting and he did have the Magitech Affinity. Why couldn’t he just add the same sort of vision to his Sovereign form that his Chimera form had? It might be a bit odd fitting it into a form made mostly of wisps of darkness, but so what?
It was worth a try.
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Author's Note: Serenity needs to spend more time with his Magitech Affinity if he really wants to get that much out of it. Still, using it to influence an ability he already has that he knows can be influenced by his memories and beliefs ought to be possible, right?
