Serenity half wished he knew more about breeding and taming monsters and was half grateful he didn’t. It wasn’t something he’d ever been interested in. Truthfully, he still wasn’t interested. It would have been nice to understand it more and know if what he was seeing here was as good as it seemed, but that was all.
Everyone else seemed impressed, so Serenity supposed that was something. The other people he was with were supposed to be pet and monster store owners, so they probably knew something about the topic.
However impressive the facilities generally were, however, Serenity could tell they weren’t being shown everything. He didn’t think any of the others had noticed that every single one of the “birth and pup development” rooms was next to a room they didn’t enter, but Serenity definitely had. The diversion field that covered each of them helped to keep people from paying attention to them generally, but it was a big glaring sign that said it was interesting to people who could resist its effects and knew what it was. Serenity was definitely interested in anything that Apollyon wanted to hide, especially if it was hidden in plain sight.
They were watching a group of young alilus learn to walk when Serenity decided to make his move. They were cute miniature squirrels despite the lack of a squirrel’s tail and they had everyone’s attention, including their guide.
Serenity was already the person closest to the door into the hidden room, so he took the two steps necessary to reach it, opened the door, and stepped through. It was clear that the only protections on the room were the spells making the door uninteresting; it didn’t even have a lock. Serenity expected that no one would notice he was missing until they left the room; the spell on the door would hide his absence the same way it hid the door itself.
The room beyond the warded door was fairly large. It was lined with small portable cages stacked between the dozen different doors that opened onto the room. The center held three different ritual circles, all permanently inscribed into the floor in tile and metal. At a glance, Serenity couldn’t determine the full details for each of the rituals, but he could tell that only one of them was for summoning. The other two were strange.
One seemed to be set for some kind of empowerment ritual with two participants, but only one was empowered. There were elements Serenity would expect only in a binding circle; Serenity was fairly confident that anyone who used it would be linked in some way, though the specifics would depend on the actual ritual used. If Serenity was confident it was only used for monster taming, that would be one thing, but he wasn’t confident in that. Not after the summoner he’d seen on A’Atla. Perhaps it was used for monster taming, but Serenity doubted that was its only use.
The circle was heavily tainted with Night Fire, while the summoning circle had only traces of the strange Affinity. More than that, the sections that had the heaviest Night Fire taint were the sections that didn’t match what Serenity knew about ritual circles; they semed closer to the adaptations he was thinking about for using essence in rituals. Serenity had the feeling that something a lot like that circle was probably how the summoner he met on A’Atla had his Tier artificially increased. Serenity wasn’t certain he’d have guessed that was what it was for if he hadn’t met the summoner, but the pieces fit together into an unappetizing whole.
In an odd juxtaposition, Serenity could see several cameras spaced around the room, along with a couple of microphones. There were speakers mounted high on one of the walls. The room seemed to be better equipped than some of the videoconference rooms Serenity had used, with the obvious exception of a screen to see the other person. There was nothing he could do about that, so he shrugged to himself and continued with what he was doing.
Serenity made certain to document the mana and essence flows around the circles as well as their physical layout. The second circle’s essence sections were particularly interesting; he could learn a lot from them. Serenity couldn’t change what the circle had been used for, but he could learn from it and use it for something he liked more.
The last ritual circle was the oddest. It had a little more Night Fire present than the summoning circle but far less than the binding ritual circle. At the same time, it looked almost like it was an entirely essence-based ritual. Serenity had no real idea why that would be necessary; while there were some things that truly did seem to be much better when done with essence or even required it, mana was still far easier for him to work with.
He hadn’t actually managed a completely essence-based spell yet, much less a ritual; maybe there was something about it that was truly different?
On the other hand, it was also possible that Apollyon simply preferred using essence. Serenity preferred mana because he was more experienced with it; Apollyon was clearly experienced with essence. Perhaps that was all it was.
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The room was a bust. While it was interesting magically, it didn’t really tell Serenity much about what Apollyon’s goals were. It confirmed where the new demons came from but that was all. Serenity still didn’t know what he planned to do with them; all he could confirm was that he was definitely involved, which he’d already been pretty confident about.
Once he had the room documented sufficiently, Serenity moved back through the door he’d entered from. The tour group had already moved on. He’d taken too long inside the room trying to decipher the three ritual circles even though he’d barely done more than glance at them. With luck, he could catch up; if nothing else, he ought to be able to ask which way the tour group had gone and be led back to them. After all, no one ever really wanted the people being shown around to get loose, no matter who they were. You didn’t have to know you had something to hide to want to keep people where they were supposed to be.
They’d come to the empty “birthing room” from the left, so Serenity went right. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he’d know it if he found it. At least, he thought he would. All he was really after here was information, though if he had the chance to talk to Apollyon he wouldn’t turn it down. What he really needed to know was if he could work with the demon lord; if he could, things would get a lot easier.
Serenity had his doubts that it would work out but he still felt like he had to try. If someone had tried with the Final Reaper before it was too late, maybe things could have been different.
Or maybe he’d have brought ruin to whatever civilization welcomed him.
No, he couldn’t think like that. Serenity rejected the thought. He wasn’t the Final Reaper and there were more chances now. It might have worked then, too; after all, there were places that accepted the undead and weren’t destroyed by outsiders. Just look at Tzintkra; the Necropolis lasted for a long time after Vengeance visited it the first time. Ignore the fact that Tzintkra fell at around the same time that Vengeance started feeling hunted; Vengeance never learned what happened to the planet. All he knew for sure was that he couldn’t find a way to get there.
At first, the hallways Serenity walked through looked like the ones he’d been shown on the tour, sterile-seeming hallways lined by rooms full of happily playing small (and sometimes not so small) demons. The place seemed empty other than the demons, with few humans present. If there were any, they were in rooms Serenity didn’t check.
He passed several possible turns; without a guide, Serenity simply continued forward. After he passed a few corridors, Serenity decided to check out some of the other rooms. He picked one that didn’t have demons in it, then found his way through another lightly warded door into another room with three ritual circles. They were similar to the first set of three but not identical; at a guess, the summoning circle was set up to summon a different type of demon and the other two circles were somehow altered similarly. Perhaps they were set up to work on the type of demon the summoning ritual summoned?
After checking out a few more rooms, it seemed like the building was organized in a sort of hub and spoke pattern. Each “hub” held a trio of ritual circles surrounded by a ring of rooms that held demons that were all of the same type. There didn’t seem to be a clear progression of demon types from ring to ring; instead, if anything, it looked like the ones possible to take as pets were the most common, with the ones that would be used as “tamed monsters” scattered sparsely between them. Serenity’s best guess to the organization was that it wasn’t planned; instead, each new circle was added when Apollyon decided he needed to summon a new type of demon. For some of the more common demons, it might also be when he needed more space to house them before they were shipped off.
Serenity had just stepped into another of the hub rooms when a voice came from a speaker set into the wall.
“Are you looking for something?” The voice was clearly a man’s voice. It sounded puzzled and maybe a little accusatory. Serenity wondered if the voice was Apollyon or simply one of his employees. Whoever it was, it was clearly someone with access to the summoning rooms and whatever electronics were built into them.
Serenity turned to face the camera squarely. “Yes, I am. Are you the person who uses these rooms?” Serenity wasn’t certain he wanted to say the name Apollyon. That was still a guess, after all, even if it was a good one.
“Is that who you’re looking for?” The voice on the other end of the speaker didn’t seem to want to give anything away, even if the answer seemed kind of obvious already.
Serenity shrugged. “I want to talk, and I think we have a lot to talk about. I want to see if we can work something out.”
“Work something out?” The man on the other side of the speaker snorted. “What makes you think that’s possible? I know what you want; you want me to submit to you and do what you say like a good lapdog. That’s what working something out really means, isn’t it? I have to obey your rules?”
There was an element of truth in that, in that there were things that Serenity wasn’t willing to yield on. At the same time, that wasn’t the point. “The point is to reach an agreement we can both live with. Yes, that means you’ll have to obey some rules you may not like. It may also mean I have to put up with some things I’d rather not, but that’s what compromise is like.”
For one thing, Serenity suspected Apollyon would want to continue summoning demons. Serenity was pretty sure that was a bad idea, but at the same time he was also fairly confident that there were enough out there now that trying to get rid of them was a fool’s game. He’d simply become aware of them too late. He’d been too busy with things happening elsewhere, whether that was other worlds or on A’Atla, to realize what was happening in his own back yard.