After retrieving the parts Vezkig deemed necessary, the trek back to the bar passed without any significant incidents. During the elevator ride back up, Vezkig gave Armless a few strange looks before he finally piped up with a statement of “Fucked up how you don’t recognize that big ‘ol machine either.”
The human tilted his head downward ever so slightly to look at the engineer, then looked back up while he ruminated on the strange object.
“Everything down there felt at least vaguely familiar, except for that thing. Like some sort of… Spherical hole in what’s left of my memory… It’s got a full terminal, and going by the fact it’s in the medbay it probably has to do with body modification, so I wager it must be some sort of elaborate operation chamber, or some sort of forge for new modules,” he thought aloud throughout the remainder of the elevator ride.
“I’d love to use it on the old man, but the only way I know to do this is by hand. Didya know those datacables can double as endoscopy tendrils in a pinch? They’re kinda slow and I fuckin’ hate how it feels usin’ em, though,” Vezkig responded as they walked out of the elevator and headed through the tunnels towards the bar’s back door.
The lizard was nervous. Not his usual sense of anxiety, there was a methodical, collected undercurrent to the tension in how he stood atop the hoverslate. He’d taken far more than he truly needed to perform the operation, that much was clear, most likely as insurance in case one of the parts didn’t quite fit properly or broke.
Red-eye visibly pondered what Vezkig said, furrowing his brow and giving the tinkerer a few strange looks, as though he wanted to ask a question but wasn’t sure if he should.
They reached the door, armless swiped his hand against the hololens, and they waited for the locking lugs to disengage and the mechanism to begin opening.
“Endosco-what?” Red-eye finally rumbled.
“It’s when y’ stick mechanical tentacles tipped with tools into someone instead of cuttin’ ‘em open to minimize collateral damage. Nearly impossible without the proper equipment since y’ can’t see shit without adding sensors to the tendrils. I’ll need to do a lot of work in a lot of different spots, so doin’ it the old way would just kill the old man.”
It sounded like explaining what he was going to do helped calm Vezkig’s nerves, and Armless suspected that was the reason Red-eye had asked such a question, despite his own distinct lack of interest in the nitty-gritty of body modification.
The door whined open, and they were greeted with an entirely unsurprising image. Nesgon was still in his chair, having drained seven more bottles in the meantime and filled the blood bucket another third of the way. The others were still sitting around the table, and the sound of the door opening meant their collective gaze had been focused on the doorway for a good while by the time it opened and the trio walked through. There was a rectangular, black-stone case on the table, surrounded by the remaining stimmix bottles. A faint grin crossed the old man’s pained visage as his eyes fell upon the pile of parts atop the second hoverslate.
“You plan on stuffing me with all that?” he half-jokingly asked as he looked to Vezkig.
“If it’s necessary,” the tinkerer responded with a sense of forced detachment.
If his face wasn’t covered by scales, the color would’ve begun to drain from Nesgon’s face. He’d never seen Vezkig this serious, none of them had. They’d seen him nerve-wracked, panicking, anxious, even entirely dissociated from reality, but never this clinically cold.
“So what now? I presume you need me to lay on a medical slate for this. We can have one wheeled in.”
Vezkig looked him over, squinted, thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No, I think it should be fine as is. I’d rather not risk movin’ you, so just sit still fer me,” he said as he dug through the pile of miscellaneous parts to find a narrow, rectangular polymer case, opening it with a practiced familiarity. It clicked open near the top revealing six epipens, with small transparent windows to show the amount of liquid left inside. Three had a translucent mint-green, whilst three had pitch-black. He took one of each between the fingers of his left hand, reached into his jumpsuit to recover the hoverslate remote, and held it out to Red-eye with the simple words “Just do what I say when I say it, y’know how these work. Get me to his chest.”
Red-eye gave the remote a look and did as asked, though somewhat mechanically as compared to the practiced smoothness Vezkig exhibited when he took direct control of a hoverslate.
The engineer stepped off the slate and onto Nesgon’s folded-out chestplate, his relatively insignificant weight not sufficient to make the armored dragon move an inch. Vezkig uncapped both of the epipens, and unceremoniously jabbed their flat tips against the old man’s chest, pressing down with surprising force until a faint hissing noise echoed and the liquid began to enter the old dragon’s body. He briefly grinned in pain, but it was barely noticeable. Once he was sure they were empty, he put the epipens on the table. “Y’should start goin’ numb in three… Two…”
“Now. Like static, then nothing,” the old man rattled, his speech slightly slurred, but also relieved. An ominous blackness traced the bulging veins on his chest, spreading out from the injection site. Vezkig didn’t bat an eye, and as such the others assumed the effect wasn’t something going wrong.
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“Good. Red-eye, switch frequency to the highest setting and move the other slate to me, please.”
Red-eye did as asked again. Vezkig set the case of epipens down on the table, then began going through the pile of parts and setting them out on the table. His eyes flickered to the case, ever so briefly. As he sorted his tools, he piped up with “Your old gun’s in that case, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not locked?”
“Err… No, I unlocked it when I had it brought in.”
“Good. Rika, couldya open it and dismantle the gun please? I just need the ammo plume.”
Rika gave a simple nod, and did as asked. The black-stone case, massive as it was, had an ornamental button on its top. She pressed it and the case opened, the top panel splitting into two and sliding out of the way to expose the weapon inside. It was a large, one-handed gun, so large in fact that nobody smaller than a particularly large Warrior could reasonably wield it, even as a rifle. Even Rika had to put a bit of elbow grease into lifting the thing out of its case, as she underestimated its actual weight. With a loud thud she set it down on the table and took to removing the appropriate parts to access the ammo plume, relief in the gun’s relatively standard internal design evident in her features as she did so.
The gun itself was silver, and gold, and gemstones, its design perfectly consistent to Nesgon’s own armor. It had a golden wing on either side, each feather engraved individually and different enough that it was clear they were added over the course of a longer time. The remainder of the adornments almost looked like the craftsman was trying to reproduce the appearance of an overgrown, truly ancient weapon like the Marksman’s rifle, with flowing curves and a beak-like casing over the muzzle.
A loud click echoed, and an audible metallic hum filled the room. Rika’s eyes went wide, and ever so carefully, she extracted the weapon’s ammo plume. It was a glimmering, feather-like piece of silvery metal that seemed to shift and shimmer before one’s very eyes, as though it were breathing. Alive.
It sang aloud with the most minute of movements, and slipped out of Rika’s tenuous grasp within seconds. Click-clacking against the table, it slid and rolled towards Nesgon, only stopping at the edge of the table just before it would’ve fallen to the ground.
“The metal knows,” Nesgon whispered. The engineer nodded, picked it up, and set it back down so it was in line with the other parts.
The old man’s tired eyes turned to Armless. “This’ll probably th- take a while, and you’ve things to do as the temh- hgeck- temporary ruler. One of the Deserter Chaplains asked to meet you at the Town Hall.”
The eyes of his companions sat upon him, waiting for a response. Neither Rika nor the Marksman had any intention of leaving the back room as of yet, still somewhat apprehensive towards the idea of facing the townsfolk before things have a chance to settle down.
The Skull-faced Man nodded in agreement with the Old Dragon, and took his next steps towards a new tomorrow. The One-eyed Gunman followed in his wake, an inverted ghost of his former self.
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The moment Armless left the back room, he had to fend off individuals - mostly Builders and Warriors - trying to offer worship or ask for divine wisdom. Over and over he had to reiterate that he was just a man not to be worshipped, and always the response was reluctant. The “perpetrators” were the same people who had maintained the Ecclesiarch’s shrines even while he was gone, those who were so dependent upon having an idol to worship they couldn’t function without one.
The Deserter Chaplain in question - the same Warrior who’d asked for his men to be allowed to stay - caught him up on the affairs of the town and its day to day operation, much of which was wrenching resources out of the people of the town and the small number of frontier towns in the region, of which there were three including the town he’d come from. One was agriculturally focused, whilst the other was described as a glorified nomad camp.
In the end, the vast majority of what he would’ve had to attend to fell through, as the Deserters allowed the formerly mind-enslaved diggers to simply walk free, many of which were in the process of forming a caravan and gathering supplies from donations, whilst a significant minority of the diggers chose to stay in Canyontown and try to find work there.
To call his duties mind-numbing would’ve been an understatement.
He sat on the Ecclesiarch’s throne with Red-eye to his right and the Deserter Chaplain to his left, presiding over minor interpersonal disputes and deciding things like how much of the town gunsmith’s output could be put up for private sale and how much would need to be requisitioned to arm the newly-forming militia.
The most exciting part of his work was watching the citizen council discussing the possible candidates for a long-term leader, which he quickly disrupted by very clearly stating that he didn’t want to serve as the primary leader for any extended period of time if it could be helped, and that in his opinion Nesgon was a preferable choice. When a few of the Thinkers doubted Nesgon’s survival of heavy void energy exposure, he simply explained the fact of the matter as it was, or at least as he understood it. Sat upon that throne, he made sure to divert extra power into his voicebox and speak in an appropriately grandiose manner, his voice resounding all throughout the Town Hall.
After all, it was only for the good of the town. He trusted Nesgon, and so did the townsfolk. The only doubt to be dispelled was upon whether the old man would survive.
“The Old Dragon will live,” he proclaimed.
One of the Thinkers piped up again, questioning “My apologies for doubting your judgement, but how would such a feat be achieved? As we understand it, more than momentary exposure to the cursed light is lethal in all cases, unless the individual’s blessing was already exceptionally weak. Even if the Old Dragon could have survived exposure, we fear that your power may have damaged the organic portion of his body beyond repair.”
Armless nodded to acknowledge the question, once more projecting his voice throughout the hall, this time in a less grandiose manner however. He heard a very faint chuckle echo from under Red-eye’s mask at the Thinker’s proclamation of the universal lethality of void energy exposure. Barely a whisper, but it was there. They both recognized the skeptic as one of the Thinkers they saw debating with Vezkig at the bar.
“A piece of what you would know as blacktech will bind his broken body together and turn the very fire that burned away his blessing into new life. It will take time, however.”
The Thinker paused, pondering the answer, then looked back up at Armless.
“How long?”
To that, he didn’t have an answer.
“We shall see.”