The cape was just the first of many parts necessary to hide his identity, of course. He made sure to shape it in such a way that it would simply hang loosely over his right side, as opposed to the loose, long sleeve on his left. He printed a large number of long fabric pieces, which he had Vezkig and the Marksman help him wrap around Apeiron and tie shut with pieces of tough, faux-leather string. With its grippers retracted and fully wrapped up, it looked like a large box, and Armless took advantage of his by contorting his arm over his head and pointing the muzzle of the gun downwards, so that it sat across his back like a large box. The “box” was then further secured in place by tying three braids of three strings around his torso, and tying those to the loops around the “box”.
A third segment was printed and stitched to the main body of the cloak around the right armhole, covering up the remainder of Armless’ body and making it truly look like he was just missing an arm and carrying a sizeable box on his back. He added a number of simple pockets on the inside of the left sleeve and the outside of the cloak, for the simple reason that pockets are a good thing to have. The final piece to complete the disguise was several long, bandage-like wraps, which would be coiled in two layers around his body to serve as a last line of concealment.
The whole process took nearly two hours, but now he wouldn’t be recognizable as anything more than an overdressed, particularly bulky builder-caste that couldn’t afford a new arm. Rika distanced herself from the printer while he worked, muttering “Fuckin’ sparks n’ nanofilament all over the place…” as she did so, her grasp of such terminology earning her a squinty-eyed glare from Vezkig.
By the time Armless was finished designing and printing the individual parts of his disguise, the others had half-emptied Nesgon’s fridge, each taking a meal for themselves. The old dragon happily obliged them with a sort of parental generosity, repeatedly encouraging them with statements like “It’s a waste to risk letting it go bad,” and “They’ll just refill it the moment we leave anyway.”
Who “they” referred to was anyone’s guess, but Armless figured the old man was referring to his subordinates. When those whose help he would need - chiefly Vezkig - were finished eating, he picked up all the pieces of dark-grey fabric and faux-leather string, scooping them up under his left arm. He brought them to the sofa, dropped them on the table, and beckoned Vezkig to get up. “Come on. I’ll need an extra pair of hands,” he said, shooting the Marksman a look with “or two.”
He had initially intended to ask Rika for help, since she was large enough that she could easily reach any part of his upper body without stretching, but her apparent dislike for 3D-printers made him reconsider poking the giant.
Nevertheless, at the first signs of the others struggling she walked over and joined in. She provided much-needed brute strength in wrangling the tough fabric into the appropriate shape and tying truly ironclad knots to make the outfit hold its shape. The hood flipped up and his mask to conceal his face, Armless stepped back and began moving around, testing how the disguise limited his range of movement. The loose-fitting design allowed him to mostly move unimpeded, and effectively obscured his silhouette.
“You look like a disfigured caravan trader, nobody will even remember you,” the Word-bearer commented while the last knots were being tied.
“Good,” Armless nodded, “in that case I should be able to walk the streets just fine like this. However, how do I get to the surface without attracting undue attention?”
He wanted to experience the fort town as it was without the Ecclesiarch’s presence, as he was certain that its inhabitants would act at least slightly differently without who had been described as little more than a petty tyrant to stifle them.
This time, chiefly to Nesgon’s surprise, the Word-bearer piped up. “There’s a smaller elevator that leads to a tunnel carved into the canyon walls. You can get onto the upper walkways from there. Elevator’s three entrances up and across from this side, I’ll show you the path,” he rattled off, as though he had thoroughly memorized it. His response to the intrigued, questioning look he received from the old dragon was “What? I had to learn the patrol routes if I wanted to get that walker out of here.”
A short-lived, cautious laugh rumbled from Nesgon’s throat. “Ah, so that was you,” he mused, “you should’ve seen the tantrum he threw when we had to tell him the thing was gone. We thought it just up and walked out.”
Armless suspected “he” was referring to the Ecclesiarch, and a cackle-like laugh from the Word-bearer confirmed that suspicion. Nesgon posed a question, more curious than interrogatory.
“Where’d you hide it?”
“At the bottom of the westward cargo shaft, in the rainwater pit.”
“That is… Clever,” Nesgon admitted before turning his attention back to Armless, ever-patient in his anticipation of seeing the fort-town through the eyes of an everyman. “Right, I suppose I should get up. Casement, on,” the dragon said, the second half a monotone command. A brief pulse of white light pulsed through the dark-grey fibers of his suit’s musculature, its structure snapping shut around his arms and legs first. The torso piece closed much more smoothly than it opened, Vezkig having reconnected the modular musculature having been reconnected to the exoskeleton after he replaced the old fibers. Before he got up, he looked around the room and addressed all present with “I presume you don’t want to spend the next few days sitting down here, so just stick to the bars, avoid the games, and you won’t be risking anything.”
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The suit no longer whined when the old dragon moved his limbs, and the constant strain was gone from his movements. He looked more relaxed. Too relaxed, in fact, and he clearly made an active effort to stiffen his stride when he walked up to the door and made it open with a swipe of his hand.
When Nesgon stepped through the holoshroud, he turned to one of his guards and flatly stated “Stay here, I will return,” with the emphasis on “I,” as though to imply he would dispose of Armless and his compatriots. The guards both nodded, and the group continued on to walk a few dozen meters up the tunnel and to the other side, then entering into one of the side passages that disappeared in a downward slope after a few meters. The tunnel leveled out quickly, and had a sharp rightward bend after a few dozen meters. After that it was two to three more minutes of walking through a straight section, which smoothly transitioned from a rough and cave-like oval to a smooth rectangle, still easily large enough to accommodate even the largest of warriors. The elevator was as promised at the end of the tunnel passage, once again easily large enough to accommodate several warriors. As such, the group had no issue fitting into the elevator, and its powerful mechanism swiftly spirited them to the highest levels of the canyon-fortress, the hidden pathways which most of its inhabitants didn’t even know existed. The ascent was nevertheless longer than the descent on the elevator’s larger cousin, as it was taking them nearly halfway up the mountain, zipping past dimly-lit passageways every fifty meters or so. The sheer infrastructure of the fortress’s secret passageways was impressive to say the least, and Armless could only wonder what a bad idea it would be to go against any reasonably well-organized force on this home turf.
The cabin lurched to a stop at the mouth of a tunnel, similar to the one they’d stepped into it from, lit by a combination of electric lights on the walls and small windows in the left-hand wall. Filing out of the elevator one by one, Nesgon led them down the tunnel for a few minutes, until it transitioned to a staircase, which led into a square room, a crossroads. It was connected to many tunnels, but more importantly, had another, smaller staircase to the leftmost side, right up against the outer wall. It only went down a few meters, a single floor perhaps, and at the bottom, there was a metal and polymer door with a hololens scanner next to it. Nesgon walked down, waved his hand in front of it, and gestured for the others to follow when the door’s mechanism began whining under its own weight. Locking bolts around the frame disengaged with audible thunking sounds, and the door slowly slid aside, revealing the back room of a bar, populated by precisely no-one and furnished with no more than a large table, chairs, and a pile of stimmix bottles on that table. There was an old mechanized door at the other side of the room, a simple keypad on its frame. He stopped Armless briefly, and handed him a weighty pouch made of particularly tough faux-leather, held closed. “Should last a few rounds of drinks,” he rasped. There was no need for further instruction, as they could already hear and feel the music vibrating through the polymer structure. Armless gave Nesgon a thumbs-up and slipped into the back room, followed by his companions. Nesgon simply stated “I will contact you when the time comes,” before pressing the manual door close button and disappearing up the stairs. The door shut much faster than it had opened.
They knew it would raise suspicion if they just all entered the bar at once, and so, they waited and chose who would go first. In the end, it was the Word-bearer who chose to go first. “Between the scars, the lilac scales, and me not acting like a self-important sycophant, nobody will recognize me,” he said. And so, the others stepped away to ensure they were out of sight when he opened the door, and just like that, he entered the bar, the sound of the music and the chatter of the patrons leaking in as he did so. Then, it was the Marksman, then Rika. They were nobodies from a town with no name, there was no way anyone would recognize them. Vezkig accompanied Armless, sticking close by.
When he entered the bar, he could immediately pinpoint the location of his comrades. Rika and the Marksman had taken up seats at one of the empty tables all the way at the other side of the massive L-shaped room, in the corner. The Word-bearer had taken up a seat at an empty table next to Rika’s, and was sipping from a steaming mug of some dark beverage. The bar itself was large enough to host perhaps over a hundred people easily, with seating options of all sizes and weight capacities, and even three separate doors to the kitchen, one of which was behind the bar counter. The counter occupied two thirds of the back wall, and not only were there various high-grade looking stimmix bottles behind it, there were several stimmix synthesizer machines, one of which appeared to be brand new and looked like the offspring of a coffee machine, a fridge, and a black monolith, the words “Katana-ZZ3” embossed in silver above a hololens that perpetually projected a screen and a keyboard. It had three trays, each with three spouts. Vezkig had skittered off to a short, circular table surrounded by nearly a dozen stools, and was listening in on the conversations of the eight other thinker-castes and interjecting with his own points. He seemed especially smug when one of the other other thinkers questioned the possibility of cybernetic enhancements in thinkers due to their lack of lazarus organs, but he managed to remain quiet.
The music permeated everything thanks to the bar’s superior sound system, and Armless found himself bobbing his head to the rhythm of a synthwave song that sang about a woman who carried herself like she was a loaded gun.
He walked up to the bar, taking a seat on one of the stools and knocking on the counter with his wrapped-up left hand. The nearest bartender was a lanky builder-caste, clad in a simplistic shirt and trousers in tan colors, his scales a brownish color, broken up by simplistic blue markings and thorn-like growths on the sides of his humanoid face.
“Look at you, sure look like you could use a drink alright. What can I getchya? No disallowed items today, since the big boss is out for the time being,” the bartender said, his demeanor friendly and upbeat. He either genuinely enjoyed what he did, or he was a rather good actor.
“There’s a viscous, light pink type of stimmix that almost nobody likes,” Armless began, and within seconds, there was a bottle in front of him.
“That’ll be two chits. A refined palate, eh?” the bartender said.
Armless gave a simple nod, and, having assumed the pouch that Nesgon gave him contained currency, he placed it on the counter and began undoing the string. It contained a large number of rectangular chits made from polished black stone, surprisingly heavy for their size. The bartender quickly scooped up the two chits Armless put on the counter, which confirmed his assumption of their nature as currency.
He grabbed the bottle, unscrewed the lid with his index and thumb, and took a long sip.
“This isn’t the theocratic hellhole I expected,” he thought.