The vessel resembled a tanker in general shape alone. Unlike those vessels, it was constructed in a borderline baroque style, and the iconography of the Twin Churches abounded wherever it could fit. Countless guns, harpoons, and armaments of other sorts that Krahe didn’t quite recognize bristled from its hull. A huge wheel revolved in the middle, its diameter amounting to one-third of the vessel’s length. With seven spokes, it clearly imitated the world-wheel in design. Like the world-wheel, its interior sections were also hidden from view — she could only glimpse the eldritch mechanisms making up the wheel’s beneath-deck sections.
Despite the absence of any crew, the great ship moved ahead, slowly but continuously accelerating by a means unseen to Krahe. She came to wonder how long it would take the ponderous thing to traverse the vast expanse, and as if in response, its wheel began revolving faster, and in turn, the ship also began accelerating at a faster rate. When she lost focus, however, the ship began losing speed. Thus, Krahe made her way to the prow. There, she sat down, and honed her full focus towards her goal. Sauer’s home.
The wheel-ship’s prow split the sea of acid without any resistance, and before long, the vessel reached such a velocity that it should have been thrown out of the sea — but instead, it simply rose above the waves and pressed on regardless. It was then, just about able to see overboard from where she sat, that Krahe realized the ship was completely surrounded by a barrier, one that shared a property with wards in that it only became visible when actively deflecting something, revealing itself to be a mosaic shell of golden light. The sea grew uneasy, stirring and crashing. Waves rose up from the sea to smash against the hull, but the wheel-ship tore through them as if they weren’t even there. From ten, to twenty, to fifty and a hundred meters tall, the sea threw tsunamis in Krahe’s way. Flashes, like lightning, erupted within the waves, illuminating shapes that she couldn’t quite grasp. Even still, the ship cut through, because she willed it to do so.
The further she pushed, the more she began to hear things that didn’t belong. Originating from nowhere and everywhere at once, strange singing carried across the fathomless deep, devoid of words, somewhere between the sound of a human voice and the hiss of a speaker. At times it faded, distorted, or began to sound blown-out. She could almost make out words within the sound, almost. Underneath it flowed the sound of an organ, countless notes in rapid sequence, yet forming a smooth and sublime melody. The sounds of waves crashing against the hull, alongside the thumping of the ship’s machinery, made up a percussive layer, seemingly by pure coincidence. A sense of tense seriousness pervaded the song, but its constant, unerring pace also held within it a machine-like certainty.
Gradually, over the course of hours or perhaps days, the great ship traversed the vast blackness. Waves were joined by storms that appeared from nowhere and vanished just as abruptly, and chthonian monsters of all kinds beset her during her journey, and yet, never once did the ship falter upon its course. Even the flesh, bone, metal and stone of countless titans yielded before the vessel’s golden barrier.
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The music yielded to something else. The sounds of footfalls, of tools rattling, even what sounded like a ventilator. Then, came the voices, fractured and frayed, but still mostly coherent.
“...ifting. She’s surfacing. How is that possible?! Cognitive pressure…enormous…growing at a geometric rate. We have no choice…pull…”
She recognized this voice as Firminus.
High Grafter Fidelia’s voice responded: “Nonsense. Spin up units two through four. Plug their diagnostic and input cables into unit one’s auxiliary ports in alternating pairs. I will handle the recalibration.”
The music grew louder and more frantic, and with each passing moment, the obstacles in Krahe’s way lessened. The ship ceased accelerating, and moments later, it ran aground. In the moments of final approach, Krahe saw a beach of glimmering, blue-glowing sand with man-sized rocks of the same blue, glass-like material scattered about. But then, the ship tore straight past the beach and ran up an enormous dune, soaring through the air, and in all directions, an endless desert of glowing glass stretched. The ship came down upon a particular spot, smashing down exactly next to a mashup of things Krahe recognized. It was the yawning crater that remained of Sanctuary, New Dixie, and at its bottom was Sauer’s hut, somehow. The glass desert now made sense.
All of this bizarre scenery, however, didn’t take her aback, and neither did the fact she was entirely unaffected by the rough landing.
No, it was the fact Sauer was there, looking up at her.
At once unnerved and irresistibly curious, Krahe slid down the wall of the crater. He looked… Right. Everything was there. Even the way he held himself was right, the seemingly lazy stance and squinted eyes that concealed a monowire-sharp mind, surpassing even operatives chromed to the gills while only having the absolute bare bones nerve interface chips.
Short, grey hair, slicked back. Pale skin, untouched by the sun, bearing few wrinkles. Clothes in a style of techwear so old it had gone back in and out of fashion thrice over while Sauer had been wearing it. Everything short of the surroundings was on point.
The old man looked her up and down. His grey-blue eyes cut through her like a hot knife through butter.
“So that time has come, has it?” he said.
“You… Should not be here,” replied Krahe.
“Another of your contingencies. In case you couldn’t find me. You convinced me to implant a hypno-engram of myself — how you achieved this, I don’t know. I, the engram, alongside the memory of my implantation, have been locked away until now. But now that this echo of me is active… It will not last long. Your subconscious mind will erase ‘me’ soon enough, assuming something else doesn’t devour me first. Perhaps the monstrous raven, or your shadow. You really should be aware that there are other things in here beyond your self-identity, girl.”
Krahe’s thoughts ran rampage. An engram container would have to be entirely separate from a living brain, but with her Moravec Transferred brain, it was possible to connect it more directly while retaining a safe degree of separation until the engram was needed. She hadn’t used such outmoded technology — its points of appeal didn’t fit her use case. The only reason to use it in the modern day was for cases like this, to lay in wait and activate when certain prerequisites were met, such as a deep-insertion sleeper agent hearing an activation phrase.