Jarv returned to the base an hour later carrying a bag with the door chime and a large box containing a TV under one arm.

He put his burdens down on the steps outside the base and drew his dagger.

He willed his defenses down as the dagger nicked the back of his hand, trying to concentrate on bleeding.

The cut in his skin started venting a plume of dense black smoke. Jarv panicked for a second before forcing the token responsible down.

The smoke dispersed without doing anything troubling, and a trickle of red ran down his skin. He wiped at it and used it to open the facility door.

He walked down the main corridor, looking into rooms as he passed in search of Eind. He was about to call the man's name when he heard noises from the far end of the base.

"Finish it. And don't make any mistakes. I'll know if you try and fuck me."

Jarv lowered his packages to the floor and took several quiet steps towards the ritual room.

Just what are you doing, Eind, Jarv thought.

The voice had been Paumi's, and below that he could hear someone quietly crying, presumably Eind. He checked a few more rooms, but saw no trace of Indrie. He started to get a bad feeling.

"Stop. I saw that. What are you doing."

"It's the next ph- the next phase-," the crier was saying. Definitely Eind.

Jarv crept down the corridor and paused outside the ritual room door, placing his fingertips against the wood.

He felt into his soul, picking out the sensory token he'd acquired during his ascent in Dun'galgogh. The Setae of Nix-nix-chittalias-desth.

Just holding the soul token was enough to enhance his hearing, with a draw so light it wouldn't exhaust the token, but when he pushed it the fragment could grant him a fraction of Nix-nix's full senses, turning the vibrations it picked up into an awareness of pressure and movement in his surroundings.

He activated it now, feeling it flare to full life before falling back into dormancy. In that instant he got a full picture of his surroundings.

He felt the insects moving above the false ceiling of the basement. He saw blurry impressions of the staff and residents in the building above, sleeping, sitting, moving around. He understood the situation unfolding in the ritual room.

One figure crouched in the far corner, huddled over with their hands on the ground. This was the person crying. Eind.

Another figure sat at the back, but closer to the door, their hands flat against the floor on either side of them. By process of elimination, that had to be Indrie.

Finally there was a small shape standing just inside the door, facing the others. Paumi, still occupying the rabbit doll.

Somehow Paumi had corraled Eind and Indrie into the ritual room and was forcing Eind to do something.

Had he done it with threats? Was someone with more authority coming to back him up?

There was only one easy way to find out. Jarv pushed down on the handle and burst through the door.

Eind looked up first, shock in his face, his eyes red from tears.

Indrie was the first to speak, calling a warning.

"Look out, Paumi's got a gun."

The rabbit doll turned on Jarv. He brandished a small black metal pistol in two paws, one hooked around the trigger.

Guns were the primary side-arms in this realm. Part chemical, part mechanical, they were essentially very powerful rock-throwers. It was another case of the natives of this world taking a ridiculous concept –an explosion in a metal tube that threw a rock– and honing it to a ludicrous level.

They didn't have the versatility or maximum power potential of a carbine, but they could still fire fast, far, and were powerful enough to act as a ranged stabbing weapon against an unarmored opponent.

"I'm sorry," Eind called mournfully. "He had it hidden in his bedding. He said he was tired."

Paumi backed away slowly, putting his back at the wall so he could keep everyone in his field of view.

"Excellent, just who I wanted to see," he said, pointing the gun towards Jarv.

"It's alright," Jarv said, glancing at Eind, then down at the diagram he'd been drawing.

The circle was set up for a soul surgery ritual, but the detail work on it was sloppy.

Not sloppy, sabotaged.

The way it had been set up, the focus would be off center. Instead of the energy being pumped into the middle of the diagram as with a normal soul surgery, it would be knocked off course, and flow up through the outer ring.

"I think I see what's happening here," he said.

"What's happening is they're going to undo your madness," Paumi said. He waved the gun at Eind, the weapon waggling wildly in his loose grip.

"Change of plans," he said to Eind. "I'll take Messim instead. I think I'll enjoy having all those big fragments he's walking around with."

"That's not happening, Paumi," Jarv said.

"I decide what's happening."

Jarv took a deep breath, set his face in a cheerfull expression and started walking towards Paumi.

"Stay back!" Paumi said, swinging the gun around to point at him.

Jarv held out his hands and started snapping his fingers together as he walked.

Paumi's paw depressed the gun's trigger and fired two shots. Both bullets skipped off Jarv's forehead with a burst of metallic sparks.

Jarv was carrying three soul tokens that he considered defensive.

His first line of defense was the Mugos Scales, which would deflect glancing sword and knife blows without fully activating, and fully block more powerful attacks once before going dormant. That one had just managed to stop the bullets, but fell dark immediately, fading to inactivity.

His second line of defense was the Blood of Nix-nix-chittalias-desth. It was better for all concerned if that was never needed.

His third defense, the Mugos Liver, could weaken and purge poisons, but that wasn't relevant for a firefight.

If Paumi had managed to fire another round of shots they might all have been in trouble, but Jarv had approached to within grappling range.

He kicked the gun out of Paumi's weak grip and grabbed him by the ears, hoisting him up. The gun clattered across the room and Paumi flailed uselessly, trying to pry itself loose.

"You two okay?" Jarv asked, glancing at the others.

Indrie stood up and brushed herself off, then left the room without speaking.

Eind stood as well, wiping his nose.

"Good job with the diagram," Jarv said.

"I was desperate," Eind said. "I don't know if it would have worked."

"Paumi was trying to get you to operate on Indri, so you changed it so it would wash him out instead," Jarv concluded.

Eind nodded.

"It would have worked," Jarv said, then added, "When you've cleaned up, there's some stuff at the entrance you need to set up."

Eind followed Jarv out into the hallway immediately, still sniffling, but forcing himself to work through it.

Together they started unpacking the TV and door chime, tossing the packing materials into a corner of the kitchen, Eind reading the small instruction book that had been packaged with the TV apparently for free.

It took some explaining for Eind to grasp Jarv's vision of where the new things would fit, but eventually he understood where the door chime and TV were needed.

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Indrie appeared in the corridor while they were working. She was carrying a briefcase and jacket as she left through the front door, running some errand.

Jarv had a basic understanding of the function of the two new artifacts, but he didn't feel comfortable trying to set them up. He was no engineer. Even his understanding of draurcraftyc devices was limited, for all his experience with the ritual side of the practice.

Eind didn't have any such misgivings. He knew a little more about the devices of Earth than Jarv, and provided he had specific instructions to follow, he was happy to press switches and connect wires.

Together they stuck the door chime to the ceiling above the main entrance, and set the TV up on a cabinet in the main office. When they activated it, the illusory space failed to appear, instead they got a solid plane of blue, but Jarv was confident Eind would be able to resolve the problem in time.

They were still trying to make it work, Eind pressing switches and Jarv providing advice from his desk, when they heard the false voice of the door chime call from the corridor.

Ding. "Welcome home!"

Jarv sat up and looked at the office door. It's working.

A second later Indrie opened the office door.

"That's irritating," she said, not looking up at either of them.

Jarv didn't know if she was talking about the door chime, which he found quite charming, or the TV, which however irritating would be invaluable in their information gathering.

She sat at her desk and began going through papers from her briefcase. After several minutes, she turned to them, a parchment letter in her hands.

"We have a letter from the hierarchy. Orders for Captain Messim," she said, looking up at Jarv. "We're to begin construction of the Ogrigg gate immediately. It must be active on the 16th of Harven to receive an imperial delegation."

"And today is the 9th," Jarv said, woodenly.

"Six days isn't long enough," Eind said.

"We weren't meant to start preparations until you arrived," Indrie said. "We were focused on making connections and cultivating assets."

"We'll need suppliers for the material components of the gate," Jarv said. "Who are our connections and assets?"

"That would be a question for our cultural liason."

"Damn. I don't suppose he kept notes?"

"I'm sure I've seen him writing, but his desk is empty. I'm not sure where he kept any written records, if he did."

"We're not going to get them out of him now," Jarv said.

"It's almost as if you shouldn't have executed him on arrival."

"If he wasn't keeping records then it's more like he was preparing to hold his information hostage to sabotage me," Jarv countered. "If he really was helping the mission, if he was really a patriot, he'd help us despite being dead. But I don't think he will."

"Maybe he hid his notes?" Eind suggested.

Jarv nodded slowly. "I'll search the base. Eind, you go interrogate him to see if you can get anything on what he's been doing for the last five weeks."

"You understand that I'm not a trained interrogator," Eind said.

"No, you're a natural."

Jarv started tearing through the base with the energy of a Bel'thani hog scenting a corpseshroom.

He started with the sleeping area, then the kitchen and office, checking every space that was conceivably big enough to hold a folder or journal.

He didn't turn up any notes or hidden documentation, but when he was searching the kitchen area he found something both less and more alarming. A carbine buried in a sack of flour.

He dusted the item off and returned to the office, setting the Drek'thelamagny weapon down on his desk.

The carbine was shaped like the basket hilt of a sword. A vertical handle, surrounded by a tightly woven half-orb of silver and black iron filigree. There was no blade to the weapon. Instead, the hilt had a hole in the front about the diameter of a coin, into which a short brass rod was inserted.

It was the standard design for all ranged sidearms used in the Empire, or at least all the ones that worked on draurcraftyc principles. The rod would be prepared with one or more violent soul tokens, and they could be activated by a trigger mechanism in the hilt.

Even the simplest of carbine billets were expensive, and the weapon was only usually given to officers and specialized troops. Paumi had obviously been neither.

"That's not supposed to be here," Indrie said, catching sight of the weapon as Jarv sunk into his chair. "We're not supposed to risk exposing our crafts to the natives."

"I think it's even more not supposed to be here than I think," Jarv said.

Indrie gave him the kind of slow, humouring nod she might offer to a confused elderly relative, then turned back to her work.

Jarv pulled the brass billet from the carbine and lay it on the desk. It was about a finger long, and tapered to a flat edge at the end to improve its accuracy. They were often etched with characters that described their origin and contents, but this one was shiny-blank.

Jarv pulled out his journal. He felt along the top of the pages for a marker he'd slipped in near the back, and flipped it open.

The book opened on a pre-sketched diagram, a large circle, with draurcraftyc focusing symbols lining the edge and two inner circles at the center, joined like linked rings.

The delving ritual wasn't anywhere close to the complexity of the tokenization or surgery rituals, or even icon blending. Any modest energy field would do to power it, and it would work without special preparation.

Delving was typically used to examine the contents of items, so the diagram didn't need to be large, and Jarv had been using this one for years without modification.

He placed the billet on the larger of the internal circles and sat back to wait.

It only took a few seconds before color began to swirl inside the second circle, a flat image appeared; a representation of the top token housed in the rod. An arrow clutched in the claws of a kestrel.

The image of the bird alternated between two positions, giving the crude impression that it was flapping its wings.

The Flight fragment was a complex token normally used to impart range and motion to whatever the billet was actually loaded with. Sometimes it was a flock of birds, sometimes a well-seasoned trebuchet stone. The kestrel-arrow combination wasn't unusual.

Jarv touched a symbol at the edge of the delving diagram and let a smudge of energy bubble at his finger tip, dismissing the image.

He frowned as he saw the second token appear. A bone-white spear whose blade was nearly half the length of the shaft, tapering down to a needle point. The Sharpness of a Titanete Spear.

Some kind of sharpness was a standard armor piercing addition to officers' carbines. The material used here was not standard. A titanete weapon seasoned enough to be harvested for sharpness was more than just expensive, it was rare. Finding the materials for this one billet had been a months-long quest for someone.

Jarv pulsed energy at the control symbol, and waited for the next token to appear.

The last symbol was almost underwhelming.

A ten-pointed star appeared in the circle, glowing yellow-white to the point it was painful to look at, even as an image on the page.

Light.

Light tokens were tricky to harvest, but not especially rare or expensive. Carbines that fired bursts of cutting or burning light weren't rare, but they were situational.

A carbine housing a powerful light source could be tapped weakly multiple times before sending the token powering it inactive, so they were useful for rapid-fire weapons. Alternatively they could be discharged in one long-duration burst, which provided an advantage in tracking targets, or perhaps cutting through large or numerous enemies.

Its use on the same billet as a Titanete Sharpness was perplexing.

If it had been a weapon of assassination, Jarv would have expected the third token to be the acid or venom of some creature. If it was meant as a handheld artilliary –plausible given the strength of the spear fragment– it would have held a source of mass like a boulder, or something explosive.

It was frustrating that he couldn't extrapolate the weapon's intended use from its construction. Maybe he should have spent more time studying artifice.

He touched energy to the diagram and waited to see if there were any more components, but the ritual rotated back to the first Flight fragment. He moved the billet off the diagram and closed his journal.

He moved the billet to his ritualized lockbox, locking it away while he put the empty carbine in his desk drawer.

He was tempted to just tokenize the billet and claim the components for himself, but he was reluctant without knowing what it was for.

Was it something of Paumi's, slipped to him to be used against Jarv somehow? Or was it something prepared by the hierarchy for a future mission they'd expect him to see through.

It was impossible to know whose contingency it was, unless they could get an answer out of Paumi somehow...

He was still thinking about it when Eind staggered back into the office. For some reason he had spots of purple ink covering his face.

"Did you get anything?" Jarv asked.

Eind slumped into an office chair, taking a handkerchief from his pocket and wiping it across his forehead.

"I think he has an address book hidden somewhere," Paumi said. "He just kept saying, you'll never find it, you'll never find it. And he kept taunting me with water-related puns."

Jarv scratched at his cheek. "I checked the bathroom. It wasn't there."

"Did you check the toilet cistern?" Indrie asked, spinning to face him.

He looked at her, lifting his eyebrows. "I did." After a second he slapped his hands onto the desk. "We don't have time to quest out wherever he hid his records. We don't know there'd be anything useful there anyway. We have six days to build the endpoint of an Ogrigg gate, and we have to rely on our own contacts and resources to do it."

"We should have a strategy meeting," Indrie said, brushing her hair back behind her back.

"Yes. Let's have a strategy dinner," Jarv said. "Eind. Got any restaurants you can recommend?"

Eind did.