The Grekurian Deserter had wisely set up shop right across the street from the only cluster of active worksites in the general area, one of which included a tannery, the stink growing nigh-unbearable despite the aforementioned facility having long converted to more modern methods than soaking rawhide in boiling dogshit.
The Grekurian Deserter - unsurprisingly - was a surly, bearded Grekurian that stunk of booze, sweat, and rubber.
Dealing with him was, however, refreshingly straightforward.
“Watchewant?”
“I need the voice modulator on this mask replaced with an Ikesian Type-12 filter mount,” she said.
“Dasit?” he raised an eyebrow… Or rather, the left side of his monobrow.
She nodded, “That’s it.”
“‘Ight, fiddy gelt,” he nodded back.
“Thirty,” she haggled.
“Forty-five,” he haggled back.
“Alright…” she sighed, pulling out the Tablet and retrieving the leftovers of her lunch.
“Forty gelt, plus two half-fresh pierogi.”
“Shit, y’vegot a deal,” he shrugged with a grin, reaching out his calloused hand. “Give the stuff here. The pierogi n’ half the money.”
She did as asked, and in two ravenous bites, the Grekurian swallowed them whole, reaching out his hand again, “Now the masks. An’ a filter, if y’got one.”
Upon Zef’s handing over both the skull-mask and one of the more pristine gas mask she had bought, the Grekurian looked the former over, rattling it around. He inspected it inside out, then disassembled it in a few deft movements, causing the glyph-etched stone within the mask to clatter onto his counter with a terrible cacophony unbefitting such a tiny object. He cautiously handed the stone back, merely handling it causing distorted rubbing noise like sandpaper on rock.
“Ghrm… I’ll’ave’er done in a coupla mins, easy job.”
And have it done in a few minutes, he indeed did. The Grekurian’s hands reached for a combination of hand tools and hacked-together essentech with blinding speed, mercilessly grinding, cutting and chipping away at the craft of both masks. A couple of minutes became the better part of half an hour, and the incessant stench slowly faded into the back of her awareness. Soon, he had done exactly what Zefaris had desired, refitting the skull-mask for a standard Type-12 canister and screwing it in.
Stolen novel; please report.
“That’s… Y’that fits, try ‘er on,” he said, at first squinting at the inside of the mask and shaking it about before he handed it over.
…And indeed, the mask sealed against her face, and she felt the familiar, slight restriction in breathing that came along with breathing through a filter. After a few breaths just to make sure, she left the remaining four silvers on the counter with the words: “Nice work.”
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“We’ve received multiple reports of a rampaging metal monstrosity in the Zubruisk Territory, it’s wrecked a fishing hamlet and killed fourteen that we’re aware of, who knows how many more; are you sure your Dog of War has not broken his leash?” a concerned voice rang across the aetherwave.
“No, Strake is safely in Willowdale,” Strolvath answered. “Even if he had decided to up and split, he wouldn’t just lose control of his machine like that.”
“Well then what of the two other frames?” a question came.
“Hrm… Zero is accounted for, and V-Two… I believe the Pontifex of the Grekurian Reformist Orthodoxy got his hands on it. What they’ve done with it, however, is beyond me. It could very well just be one of the Production First-models, maybe a corrupt engine catalyst, but something tells me this is most likely V-One. Why it would become active again after this long, I don’t know.”
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Grekuria, though healthy, did not stand unwounded and unmarred by the war - she, too, in her immense mercantile power faced upheaval and unrest. The Orthodoxy stood stretched thin as it is, and thus the Inquisition struggled to keep its more radical elements in check.
Halfway across the continent, over fifteen-hundred kilometers eastward, sacred seals were applied to blessed metal and a holy man willingly entombed himself in what he perceived to be a walking sarcophagus.
Halfway across the continent, over fifteen-hundred kilometers eastward, an iron messiah clad in ivory-white and blood-red rained leaden death and holy flame upon the wretched scum who would besmirch the role of protector, the role of Inquisitor. Whensoever the blood of the wicked was spilt upon his sacred armor, so did the holy-man’s righteous zeal grow in proportion and his tomb-to-be remade itself, none of which he questioned, and all of which he wholeheartedly believed to be the work of Iusticia, the apocryphal daughter and successor of Omniudex.
Sacred hymns carried wherever his machine trod, and with them so did the sound of his voice, mighty beyond human reckoning in its own right, now rendered truly inescapable by the walking tank’s speakers.
“THROUGH THIS HOLY MACHINE, I ENACT THE WILL OF THE DIVINE NO MATTER HOW DIM HER VOICE MAY BE.”
“REJOICE, YE MEEK, FOR I AM CHALYBES PONTIFEX.”
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“I’ve performed a rudimentary scrying ritual on Subject ZN. It unraveled before I got the renderer golem in place,” the White-robed Brother said offhandedly to his counterpart as the latter prepared to depart for his grim task inside the Wall.
Sighing, the Black-robed Brother responded, “Doesn’t matter. Anyone capable of affecting real change screws with divination - but you should know that. Wasn’t it you who argued for using the failure ratio of divination as a measure of general societal instability?”
“That is true… Hrm… I wonder how many seers the False Emperor has condemned to death, considering his penchant for scrying and your wall’s nearly impenetrable counter-scrying measures,” the White-robed Brother remarked passive-aggressively.
“You’ll never let that go, will you?” Hedan sighed in exasperation.
“It’s hard to let go when the system is so overbuilt it interferes with scrying even when the Wall at large is down… And when you named it the way you did. Seriously, Psychogenic Basilisk? Basilisks don’t kill you if you look at them.”
“That’s why I called it the “Inverse Psychogenic Basilisk” - at least use the full name if you intend to lambast my naming conventions.”