Cece could now add another reason she didn’t like angels, their paradoxical and awful body parts. It was in theory a great boon that there was no recoil. It would make aiming easier and allow her to use even stronger blasts to propel the bullets, but still, it unnerved her. She couldn’t help, but squint at the gun in suspicion, wondering if at any moment it might explode. Still it appeared consistent, and it wasn’t like her to look a gift horse in the mouth. She sat in her atelier and tried to ignore the angelic construct, she had work to do.
She was just adding the finishing touches to Eibon’s cane, and she wasn’t going to get distracted now. It had been a difficult piece of work to design, but it had served as a nice break from her more demanding projects, like her revolver. When she finished she had Lotte prepare tea, and she walked towards the door just as the knocking came. She had initially disliked the Eibon, purely out of distrust, but she was beginning to appreciate the punctuality of another knowledge daemon. Never late, and more importantly, never early.
“Good afternoon, Eibon.” She said, feigning cordiality.
“Good to see you as well, Cecilia.” He replied, wearing a grin that Cece hoped was similarly false.
“I just finished your cane, follow me.” She said leading him into the sitting room. Resting on a stand on the coffee table, was a lustrous black cane. The material had a brilliant shine to it, with a miniature skull resting at the head of the cane, in a similar material. Eibon looked mystified at it for a moment.
“What is it made of?” He asked while sitting down.
“Almost the entirety of it has been constructed out of crystalline black sulfur.”
“Black sulfur doesn’t form crystals.” He replied quickly, more out of surprise than haste. It was one of the challenges of making a focus out of it, the most common form of it was a black powdery residue.
“It took a great deal of coercion to align them in a crystal lattice, but I have my ways.”
“Clearly.” He said still slightly stunned, before processing what she had said previously. “What else is it made of?”
“It has a brass core, since I needed something inert to inscribe any additional features.”
“Additional features?”
“Why would you go to an alchemetrix if you weren’t expecting additional features?” She asked rhetorically before continuing. “I used some mercury and manganese inscriptions to increase the speed and strength of any magics, as well as some salt magic to enhance the physical strength of the cane. It’s not exactly built out of sturdiest stuff.”
“How strong is it now?” He asked. He hadn’t expected any of this, but being the daemon king of knowledge had taught him a thing or two about dealing with the unexpected. He assumed it would still be delicate, but wanted to clarify how gentle he would have to be with it.
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“Strong enough to block a blade.” She replied nonchalantly.
“Do you foresee me doing that often in the future?” He joked.
“I suppose you do get to hide behind a shield of corpses generally, don’t you? Nevertheless it’s not a bad feature to have.”
“It’s a luxury to have options.” He replied simply.
“Well I’m sure you’re a very busy man and I’m sure you’re eager to test it out, so don’t let me keep you.” She said, obviously shooing Eibon out of her home.
“Well I know when to take a hint, and I’m eager to test this out.” He said grinning and picking up the cane. To Cece’s relief and to the relief of the pistol she was holding behind a pillow, Eibon did not cast any magic, he simply got up with the staff in hand and bid her adieu. Cece sighed after he exited the door, and disabled the scroll she had taped underneath Eibon’s seat. It used a complex blend of gold and phosphorous magics to detect hostile spells, and to of course eliminate their sources.
Eibon Dubois, was an intelligent man. In his twenty-nine years of life, and his five years of being the king of knowledge, he had learned a lot. Enough to know when someone didn’t trust you in the slightest. One of his many sentries around the city was positioned on her apartment’s balcony, and what they saw, he saw, so he knew she had that gun of hers, but it was alarming watching her body language. People have an ironically difficult time controlling their own body, even the most well trained mages and assassins have a hard time with not giving anything away with their body language. Cecilia Silva on the other hand hadn’t shown the slightest instability, always keeping her hand within reach of the revolver, but never telegraphing it.
“She must possess manual control of her body…” He considered. Knowledge’s boons were varied and extremely useful, but he had always shied away from those that affected the mind too strongly. Call it sentimentality or the realities of being a necromancer, but he knew that the most important and sacred part of a human being is the mind. A corpse can walk with just a borrowed soul and a bit of magic, but it takes a mind to make a person, and he had never wanted to mess with his, beyond a bit of memory enhancement of course. To change the human mind enough to allow that kind of control, was personally horrifying to Eibon.
Cecilia clearly hadn’t had the same reservations, which he respected her for. Knowledge must have been excited to get someone as unhinged as her. Not that he could talk, he wasn’t exactly the height of normalcy. Still he found the girl to be interesting, perhaps even intimidating. It felt shameful to admit to being scared of a child, but she had already displaced him so he figured it wasn’t too humiliating. Especially considering what she must’ve done to become queen at such a young age. He had a hefty amount of souls invested into boons, enough that she either must’ve gone on a murder spree to outpace him, or she wasn’t trading human souls, or both. Most likely both, considering the recent attack on Solastria.
Despite her blatant distrust, he was happy to see that she hadn’t seemed to sabotage the cane in any way. His knowledge of alchemy was admittedly not particularly vast, but based on what he did know he couldn’t find anything sinister. He wasn’t too worried about that though, she seemed more afraid of him than he was of her, and he doubted she would risk something like that, and in the worst case it’s not like it would matter. He couldn’t die anyways, after all.
After testing the focus, he was more than impressed. Up until that point he had generally relied on black sulfur powder that had been tattooed into his skin. It was inefficient since there was so little of the element, but it was a surefire way to contain it, and subtle. So even having it made into a staff or wand would’ve been a fairly good improvement, but instead he had what he could only consider a work of art. He tended to shy away from quantifying magic, since obsessing about numbers was a recipe for disaster, but if he had to guess from feel, his magic was at least twice as efficient, and far more powerful for it. Even if Cecilia Silva didn’t trust him, she had given him something precious, and so he would do his best to return the favor.