Hauff cackled as he stood by the generatron and cranked his big, metal lever.

"Yea, Hauff, I love to see you crank that big old lever of yours so hard," hissed the voluptuous, hooded tauman, fluttering her blue eyelids over the glowing red slits of her eyes. "Keep on cranking. Hell, crank the lever harder if you can!"

"If I can? Hah. Serephinah, don't you ever doubt that I can crank my lever harder and faster than you'd ever expect!" With that, Hauff put all his energy into turning the lever again and again, and it looked like his glowing yellow eyes had almost become red for a moment with stress as he increased his acting speed more and more until he was breathing heavily. The lever was squealing a little due to what seemed to be a lack of grease and as thus adequate lubrication.

"Yea, Hauff, crank it. Crank it, Hauff."

"Sorry, Serephinah, the living wood on my hands is getting really sore," said Hauff. "Plus, I'm worried if I crank any more, I might overdo it. I don't want to irritate my lever, you know?"

Serephinah sighed with a tantalizing huff. "Fine, Hauff, whatever you think is best."

Hauff was frustrated by this. "Think? What I think is best? Who are you to say what I think, Seraphinah? Seraphinah, I know that it's for the best, okay? I built this fucking thing, what did you do?"

"I only supplied the funds," said Seraphinah, surreptitiously feeling herself up by running her hands over her body as if she were wearing a bodycon dress.

"Yes, exactly," said Hauff with an air of aloofness. "Now, can we please focus on the important things?"

"Which are what, again, Hauffy?" she asked, leaning over to him and nearly enclosing him in her clawlike arms, both of which were covered in branches of living wood.

"Um, look outside the window, please, dear."

Seraphinah walked to the glass and squealed. Then, she ran over to Hauff an hugged him tight as a vice with shouts and cheers of joy emanating from her mouth. "It's beautiful! Simply marvelous! A work of art!"

Hauff sighed and pushed her away. "Yes, well, it's also glaringly unstable." He looked out the window himself beholding the awesome beam of light shooting into the sky and through the clouds to Nomachiato's atmosphere. Staring at it hurt his glowing eyes, and felt almost like a lemon was being lightly above his temples and seeping into his brain in a bad way. It pained Hauff, but it was also great to behold. He was thrilled to have made something that didn't break in a rather depressing manner as soon as he tried to activate it. And while he was, as Hauff had demonstrated to Seraphina with his behavior, he was also painfully scrutinizing the perforation. Because that is what he'd made - it wasn't just light. It was a perforation.

One thing Hauff knew very well was the theory of what it was that he had just manifested through his physical efforts - that is to say, Hauff knew certainly what it was that he had built, and with that he knew exactly what it was supposed to be doing, and how it was performing regarding how it was supposed to be doing. From what Hauff analyzed. it was performing at about seventy percent the capacity that it ought to. A manual perforation should've ideally, in Hauff's opinion of best practices, been as clean as an incision made by a medical professional in someone's tauman skin in order to say, perform some sort of a graft. But, instead, Hauff felt that the perforation he'd mechanized had been more like someone took a pin or a needle and jammed it into their skin in order to make a homemade piercing. And that was incredibly disappointing.

Hauff had studied perforations extensively. This had been going on since he had first heard wind of organic perforations.

The organic perforations had been appearing in the dimensional spaces around Nomachiato for at least five centuries, although most occurrences were more recent, within the last five years or so. Over the last five years, perforations had been forming at an increasingly common rate over the lands of Nomachiato. This crescendo of perforations had many troubling implications, though The Order had, thankfully or not, been able to keep most of it a secret from normal public attention.

Perforations were essentially holes in space and time that, as Hauff understood it, allowed for gaps between those that were alive and those things that were either dead, or never alive to begin with. A perforation was, in its essential essence, a bridge between what was presently alive and what was not alive, yet still had consciousness and - in some cases - even a corporeal form.

Being alive held with it many connotations. A corporeal form was the main one, but other than that, there was but still so much more. There was of course the opportunity for use of systems and [skills] that either living or dead had access to, for better or worse, but for living things, time was decidedly finite, whereas it was infinite for those others. The result of this was that, for no other reason other than for a lack of barriers, most things, be they of tauman origin or not, that emerged from perforations were of much higher levels and power abilities than normal living beings with corporeal forms.

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So the things that came out of perforations were super powered. So what? Well, if they had all been benevolent entities, it may have truly been a 'so what' situation where introducing entities from a dimension where life has no meaning would have only added some strange quirks to the world of Nomachiato, without causing its imminent destruction completely by way of assumption and virtue alone. And yet, what Hauff and many other researchers found was that there was a bit of a dearth of magnanimous spirit entities from perforations in comparison to the enormous myriad of horrible creatures and vile villainous entities that often spilled out in a swarm from perforations, which often presented themselves as soft, wet spots in space time but by Hauff's work and preparation now also included the view of an enormous beam of light energy. This was also helpful because, if shit hit the fan Hauff could probably blame everything on a crazy light elemental.

Hauff had been, as far as he'd known, the first to devise a technical device that created a perforation itself, and he was more proud of this than he liked to let on. See, in order to make a manufactured bridge between planes of existence, Hauff had to study natural perforations, which really he'd only stumbled upon by luck.

Natural perforations generally only happened for temporary times before closing back up. This would usually be no more than a couple days, though sometimes larger perforations would take a few weeks, and there was at least one recorded instance of a perforation being open for almost a whole moon cycle, though that perforation was reportedly only as large as the diameter of a thimble.

But, with Hauff's devising, he could control how long the perforation would stay open. And, along with that, it would be as big as he wanted it to be - or, more aptly, Hauff's manufactured perforation would be as big as he could devise, afford and build for it to be. Which apparently was enough to shake the ground below him and send up a beam of light so large and powerful that everyone that Hauff didn't want to see it did indeed see the thing. Which meant that he'd have questions to answer to, didn't it? Hauff groaned inwardly, sensing the implications of all this mess.

"Seraphinah, please just wait for a moment," he said with a pained sigh. "I've got to check on something."

Seraphinah made it clear with her tone that she was disapproving and unhappy that Hauff was leaving, and yet she allowed him to go check without dealing forth any sort of vile retort that could've probably damaged his ego, which was, as even he would admit, remarkably fragile.

And so Hauff walked away from her, only pausing for a moment to notice how beautiful her eyes shone through the living wood on her face. And on he walked, out of the room, not once looking again at the multitude of beasts spilling out of his beam of light as he passed to a long hallway. Hauff tread on the long, ornate rug and looked through a hallway of doors.

Each door was closed, but had a large, guilded seal on it with a letter from Eldenscript. Sometimes, there were two letters, and on the three newest looking doors, there were actually three letters in the sequence.

Hauff groaned. He could never remember which door it was, although he'd been down this hallway all too many times. He flung a few open, but each one looked different and not in the way he needed it to. Yes, there was one with all the sea monsters... he slammed that shut, content to get a little bit of sea spray on his face for a second while shouting at a seagull for but a moment. Then, Hauff continued to look, but he could only find the place where there was ice and strange, stiff birds everywhere, that one place that was only ice and no birds, and yet another place where everything was made out of taffy, where he was greeted by a woman made entirely out of taffy. Finally, though, Hauff found the door he was looking for. The door to his dingy home in Nomachiato.

Hauf walked in through the door and sat at his table, sipping a cup of coffee that he had quickly warmed up with a mechanical flamethrowing attachment. He took a deep breath and sighed. He wondered if anyone had any idea he was up to this skullduggery with the perforation.

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"Would you look at that light beam? It's jumping around erratically, it's like the little fucker's on stimulants!" shouted Omar with a smirk as the beam pulsated in the distance and more strange, vaguely defined entities poured out from the beam. "You know, I think this might've been made by somebody. Let me ask somebody I know what they think. They’re kind of an expert."

"Made by somebody? An expert?" Unit 5a23 looked roboticallly confused. “Is it possible to be an expert on undefined phenomena?”

“Stranger things have happened,” said Lloyd, gesturing to his large, purple claw-hand.

“Why does the light beam look so terrifying all of a sudden??” It was growing. How wide was it going to get? Was this the end of the world?

Omar gestured for Kahli to calm down as he whipped out a small conch and connected to the interlink, which he used as a direct line to the people in uniform that patrolled Gifflenberg - this was of course nothing compared to the Order, these were just civil servants, but they were still figures of authority. "Yes? I've got a serious problem I'm noticing here related to a big beam of light, like a threat to public and indeed private safety. And I need a direct line to Hauff, he’s the only one who might be able to help. I’ll remind you, I’m friends with the mayor.”

It didn't take much finagling for Omar to convince the officers in training to run over, or more aptly to zoom up into the air with their standard issue jetpacks in order to meet everyone and listen to him. This pleased Omar, though he did feel a little guilty.

"Thanks for coming here," said Omar to the officers. "Now, I need you to listen to what I'm saying, as it is deathly important when it comes to success here instead of needless bloodshed."

Kahli swallowed air. Meaningless bloodshed? Was she really allowed to fight?