Siempre Elvanera stood perfectly upright as he gazed out through an enormous glass window that allowed enough early evening sunlight into his bedroom that he felt no need to use the ceiling lantern. His stern face, chiseled into a permanent frown by year after year of dissatisfaction, was thus cast into a cool blue shade that highlighted the prominent cheekbones that gave his eyes a perpetually sunken look and suggested an eternally sullen mood to all who saw the fifty-something-year-old man.

Just over 3 miles below the airship he begrudgingly called home was Elvanera Island. From this position, directly above Neighborhood 8, he could see the vast majority of the island and even a good bit of the perpetually tempestuous Lake Wavemake surrounding it. If he had been a more sentimental man, capable of appreciating the stunning view he had the privilege of waking up to every morning, then perhaps he would have been able to find more gratification from the life he had been given no choice but to lead.

But he was not a sentimental man. In his youth, shortly after achieving level 10 and gaining his first Ability, a stroke of misfortune had resulted in an experiment with said Ability going haywire, which had resulted in the unintentional deaths of 20,000 people and the collapse of the city he had once called home. Nearly three decades later, he still felt no remorse for his actions because he considered the data gained from the incident more valuable in the grand scheme of things than the lives he had claimed to obtain it. Because of this cold and generally unsympathetic nature, he was unable to enjoy the view and thus hated it for the imprisonment he believed it to represent.

He looked down at Neighborhood 8. Aside from 3,000-feet-tall walls that denoted the edges of the region, it was invisible—with Weathermaker, the individual responsible for controlling the weather throughout Elvanera Island, having already completely drowned the place in fog. All was proceeding according to schedule.

Glancing at the clock, he nodded in approval—which was the closest gesture he had to a smile. In less than 24 hours, he would set foot on land for the first time in almost a year. Siempre felt that this was the closest he had been to experiencing excitement in quite some time. Tomorrow was going to be fun.

He grabbed a hundred-sided die out from one of the two breast pockets in the loose-fitting lab coat he always wore to hide the deformities resulting from decades of self-experimentation and tossed it up into the air.

“Truthseeker Dice: I will escape this plantation at some point during the coming month.”

The die landed on the freshly waxed hardwood floor with a light clatter and bounced a few times before finally landing on 72. He stooped down, a task made difficult by his artificially elongated spine—which was about twice as long as it should have been, given the length of his limbs—and picked up the dice.

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Seventy-two percent. That was his probability of success according to the unbiased amalgamation of all the information he had collected throughout his life. Presuming that the information he had collected on the plantation and all its security measures was accurate, that made for respectable odds. He had asked the dice this question every month for the past 7 years, but this was the first time he had ever rolled anything higher than a 60. He placed his dice back into his right breast pocket, thus completing the Opus he had just used.

He rolled the dice a few more times that evening, asking that same hundred-sided die various questions to help determine which specific strategies would have the highest probabilities of success. Each question was asked in a whisper to ensure that none of the several dozen maids or butlers that served him would catch wind of his intentions.

♦

Midday patted his gorging belly as he finished the last of his feast and started back towards the cabin with the Elvanerean Ring in one pocket and about a hundred Devil Peppercorn beads in the other. It was true that he still had yet to recover his sense of taste, but the animalistic satisfaction of putting food in his stomach was still somewhat satisfying in of itself—even with rain pelting him from above.

The flooding was getting to the point of absurdity. The heaviness of the rain, as in how much fell in a given timeframe, had more or less stabilized by then, but that by no means meant that the ground it was pouring down upon had done the same. Previously small puddles were already starting to coalesce into larger ponds and, at the rate things were going, the point where a boat would be required to traverse the terrain in any meaningful way was only a few days away at the most.

Not that it especially mattered. He knew from past conversations that, due to the geography of the area, the old growth was perpetually flooded anyways. He had never been to a swamp before, but he knew what they were well enough to know that the place he was going could more-or-less be described as one. Seeing as he currently lacked the physical prowess to reliably climb trees, which was how Romulo traversed the region, it was pretty much a given that he would need some sort of boat to traverse the place.

But that was a task best left for the future. He was confident that, even with his limited talent for woodworking, it would be possible to build a raft big enough for just one person in the time he had left before Siempre Elvanera’s arrival, but that making anything substantially larger would require more tools and time than were available. It was best then, he decided, to save the task for when he could recruit the help of his fellow ‘bodyguards’ to build a more substantial vessel that could carry the whole crew simultaneously.

In the meantime, he decided that the best thing he could do was head back to the cabin and ask Romulo as many questions about the old growth as possible. The more information he had about the area, the more valued an otherwise physically weak and unskilled individual like himself would within among the other bodyguards which, at least according to Mulberry, already had multiple level 15 individuals in their ranks. He understood that keeping up with people like that—all of which were probably a great deal stronger than the best hunters from his village—on the basis of anything besides knowledge was impossible for a normal person like himself.

And so, with that thought in mind, he trudged back through the mud toward the cabin.