Once the council meeting took an hour-long recess, he quietly returned to the back room of the Bar, taking the long way around through the town’s highest walkways to get to the other side of the canyon and into the hidden tunnels without being spotted. In this endeavor, Red-eye’s existing knowledge of Canyontown’s walkways proved invaluable, as otherwise Armless would’ve had to pathfind using his mental map.
They entered the back room quietly, so as not to disturb the operation they assumed to be in progress, but were met with Vezkig waiting for them with a pair of pink stimmix bottles in one hand, and a half-empty bottle of green in the other. His apron, hands, and face were covered in blood. The scanner lens in his left eye continuously blinked red every second. Seven cables of varying thickness trailed from within his jumpsuit, connected to ports on the side of his torso. The other ends of three disappeared into the gaping wound that was the split between Nesgon’s meat and machine halves, whilst a fourth had been inserted into one of the larger veins in his upper left arm. Two others had been entered into various spots on the meat half of his torso, and the last one was in the side of his neck.
More tubes were jabbed into various spots on his body, some connected to half-full jury-rigged epipens, some connected to strange modules, while one was quite literally just a bottle of stimmix hooked up like an IV drip, the bottle itself hung by strings from one of the ceiling lamps. The tools on the table were in organized disarray, half of them completely bloodied. In the gaping hole of his chest, a bulbous assembly of half-disassembled modules surrounding the ammo plume had been stuffed, tubes and cables winding from it and into the surrounding flesh.
Vezkig hadn’t moved the two hoverslates, and they still floated there perfectly level with Nesgon’s folded-out chestplate.
Nesgon didn’t seem bothered by the state of affairs in the slightest, in fact he had a mostly empty bottle in his cybernetic right hand. Rika was gone, whilst the Marksman had moved to her seat and was tinkering with the old man’s gun in-between observing the operation with a surprisingly eager curiosity.
Armless asked the fateful question after he took the first sip of his stimmix, and Vezkig began immediately rattling out a response, half speaking and half sighing. At first he thought it was irritation that colored the engineer’s voice, but it was simply the tension and exhaustion of the operation, which seemed to have been going on mostly uninterrupted since he left for the Town Hall - no less than fifteen hours, if his internal clock was anything to go by.
“I don’t fuckin’ know how long it’ll take!”
The tinkerer took a long sip, inhaling as he did so.
“There haven’t been any complications yet, so at best I’d say another… I’d give it another day, day and a half if I’m to clean up some of the smaller issues. He’s more machine than man, which helps, but his insides are a mess.”
Another sip.
“It’s like the old man aged a millennium for every decade since his lazarus organ got damaged.”
“Two days. Is that enough time?”
“That’s plenty, aye.”
“Good.
“Some Thinker dipshit in the council wanted a number, don’t he?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
“Kept givin’ me dirty looks when we first came to the bar. Went for the ad-hom when I busted his argument once. Might as well’ve spat in my face.”
Armless let out an audible chuckle.
“Right, back to work,” Vezkig said. He finished the bottle, crushed it in his hand, and dropped it to the floor. He stretched, vented a puff of steam from his back, and walked back to Nesgon to continue in his laborious task.
The pair stuck around for a few more minutes watching him painstakingly maneuvering unseen tendrils inside the Old Dragon’s body, then departed some twenty minutes before the council’s recess would end so they would be back in the Town Hall before the meeting continued.
“Once more, I apologize for questioning you, but are there any news as to the timeframe of when you expect the Old Dragon to be… Restored?” the Skeptical Thinker questioned again.
“Two days.”
“That’s… Fast. If I may be honest, we expected three days at the absolute least, possibly weeks. Are you certain in this estimate?”
“He will not be at his best, but the Old Dragon shall be able to walk amongst you, yes.”
It was as though the entire council let out a collective sigh of relief, and much of the tension suddenly dissipated. The discussion continued, but from what his sensors could pick up, choices for the new Ruler were quickly swaying from some of the oldest non-Elders towards Nesgon.
Hours more passed, and the council meeting eventually disbanded for the day. A day passed, and over the course of its span Armless and Red-eye intermittently visited the bar’s back room in equal parts to take a break from work and for updates on the Old Dragon’s state. As gory and messy as it was, Vezkig’s very literal backroom surgery continued to progress without complications.
For once, there was no wrench in the works.
“Just this once, everything works out,” he thought.
----------------------------------------
Orsha had spent several hours settling into his chambers, an opulent suite built into the greater structure with parts that were manually tooled from high-grade printed stocks, rather than printed as finished products. It reminded him of the Ecclesiarch’s office, as luxurious as it all was, only much less garish.
A ceiling twice as tall as he was, at least ten meters. Elaborate frescos on the ceiling, depicting the Heretic and his Seven Archdrakes striking down one of the Great Old Ones and splitting its crystalline heart among themselves. Half for the Heretic, the other half for the Seven. He recognized the imagery for what it was, an ancient myth, and those depicted within it had no more meaning to him than faces in a crowd.
Polished wood, stone, polymer, a high-security door, an entire separate room just for sitting around doing nothing, the whole thing felt like one of the old archive pictures of human living spaces that had been labeled as “apartments”.
It was nice. It was very nice. And he hated it.
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He didn’t belong here. Of the accommodations he was provided, the one he valued most was the automated armor rack, with its myriad robotic arms and tools. It could take off or put on his casement in the span of less than a minute, even replace the old synthfiber mucle bundles. The other upside was the number of windows and even a large balcony in the… Time-wasting room? Lounging room? Lounging room.
Orsha felt a nearly palpable relief as each piece of his casement was removed by the armor rack, having spent over a day inside the mangled suit, his wounds having been disinfected with aggressive agents that burned even on normal skin. He felt constrained and nearly naked the first time they made him change into nothing more than a printed pressure-suit, but he had quickly come to appreciate the secure comfort it provided.
As he walked out of the rack and into the lounging room, he spotted the personal printer and queued up a new pressure-suit to be printed. The machine’s hololens flash-scanned him, and it got to work.
The lounging room was filled with large sofas, a heavily padded chair, even an authentic coffee table - large enough to be a dinner table if the legs were longer. There were two different stimmix synthesizers up against one of the walls, a refrigerator, and a number of appliances he didn’t recognize at all besides the fact he’d seen them in archived images of human living spaces.
With little more than a touch to open the balcony doors and a step to cross the holoshrouded precipice, he found his senses bombarded with the vision of a great city. Somehow, the Igrons had managed to harness human 3D-printers and traditional building techniques in unison to create a metropolis of towering structures. The room he was in had to be at least ten floors above-ground, which would’ve been impossible without the greater technologies that weren’t available to frontier colonists even before the great isolation.
He hadn’t seen anything of the oasis-city besides its gigantic walls up until then, and he felt grief at the sight of densely-packed, prefabbed buildings split up into districts, whilst great towers similar to the one he was in dotted the city at regular intervals, totaling seven in number across the entire city. The city’s squares and streets were interspersed with heavy vegetation, artificial ponds, and the soft white of rainbloom flowers on rooftop gardens.
He grieved for the souls who lived in this city, who had never seen the beauty he saw at that very moment through their own eyes, unmuddied by the blessings of their rulers.
He grieved, for there was something within him that knew of the coming carnage.
For nearly two hours, Orsha stood on the balcony and took in the beauty of the city, the sights alone enough to take his mind off the everpresent pain, both that of his injuries and his implants. He used his hololens eye to take many pictures as the sun began to set, and soon afterward he retreated from the balcony.
Orsha fell asleep in the lounging room chair, as he found the bed to be far too soft to be comfortable. He dreamt of lilac flowers, and cried in his sleep.
The sound of the buzzer at his door woke him up. Groggily, Orsha walked over to the front door and opened it. It was one of the High Chaplains, dressed in full casement, polished to perfection. The chaplain looked him up and down, and their ever-collected voice echoed from their helmet.
“My apologies for the disturbance sir, but your presence is required to oversee an execution.”
“Execution?”
“It appears one of the Warriors chosen for the exile-town task force was loyal to the heretics and had been planning on sabotaging the rovers. He was caught and will be executed for treason in the coming hours.”
“...Give me ten minutes to get into my armor.”
A simple nod was his response.
It took him around two minutes to change into his new pressure-suit, and he felt it squeezing a small amount of blood out of his chest wounds. It took another three to get his armor on properly, which the armor rack had patched up with the unsightly black of structural foam overlaid with a printed metal plate shaped to fit over the gash and bolted onto the original.
It would have to do, for the time being.
The High Chaplain proceeded to lead him through the tower’s winding hallways and staircases, tiny windows in the ancient walls serving as the only context for how high above-ground they were at any given moment. If he were to wager, they stopped descending at the third floor, where he was led into a smaller, less opulent meeting room, much more utilitarian in form. A large table, a door to an adjacent kitchen for the servants, and an ornamental double-door leading to the outside - likely to a balcony.
Besides one of his High Chaplains, three of the nobles were present with one of their own guards each. The Big Sister, the Machinist, and the Thin One.
The Big Sister looked personally upset by the “sudden” betrayal of a seemingly loyal warrior, the Machinist exuded a solemn, but calm and collected aura with his hands behind his back, while the Thin One was… Giddy. He was looking forward to a spectacle, and Orsha wouldn’t have been surprised if the lanky bastard had brought a basket of rotten meat-onions to toss at the convict.
“All present, very well.” the Big Sister rumbled, looking over the four of them.
“It appears we’ve failed to appropriately veto the loyalty of your future forces. We must apologize for calling you to join us in presiding over the execution, but it would be bad for appearances if you weren’t present,” the Machinist added on. There was not a drop of emotion in his tone or body language as he delivered the apology.
The Thin One, ever eager to feel included in a conversation, chimed in with an annoyed comment of his own. “Can’t believe we had to drag out the old beheading axe, lethal void energy exposure has never failed!”
“It also never left behind a presentable-enough corpse to bury,” the Big Sister spat in retort, an angered growl bleeding through her social mask for but a split-second. Long enough to shut her little brother up.
Orsha felt no inclination towards simply watching the siblings interact. “When is it taking place?” he asked in the plainest terms possible.
“As soon as possible. The plan was to wait until the scheduled time and leave the traitor chained on the gallows to be appropriately humiliated until then, but ah… How shall I say this…” the Big Sister trailed off, only for the Machinist to cut in with a flat statement of “He’s using the gallows as a speaking stage.”
The Thin One exclaimed “Utterly manic! He just won’t stop cackling and proclaiming portents of doom, even after we excised his markings to shut down his blessing!”
Orsha nodded.
“Then we are in agreement. Let’s get this over with.”
The Big sister and Machinist reciprocated, whilst the Thin One muttered “Yes.” under his breath. The eldest of the four present approached the balcony doors, waved her hand in front of the hololens, and waited for them to open. As with many similar doors they were separated from the other side by a holoshroud, though the thundering sound of the crowd intercut with a cackling voice still bled through.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
They passed through the shroud with the Big Sister in front, Orsha to her right, the Machinist to her left, and the Thin One to the Machinist’s left. He found himself upon a large, opulent balcony, with a veritable lake of bodies far below, surrounding an elevated gallows. On one side there was a pristine, white polymer chopping block with a large bucket of the same make next to it, whilst the other side simply had a platform to which a Warrior had been chained, his arms and head restrained with solid metal stocks.
He had light green scales and deep, weeping wounds where his markings would’ve been. The traitor’s facial structure reminded him of Rika.
The weight made him hunch over, but only barely, only enough that he couldn’t quite look up without uncomfortably twisting about.
And still, he stood there, his face plastered with a toothy grin, his eyes shining with an utterly careless joy only attainable by a dead man walking. And as he stood there, he belted out proclamations with such raw force that he tore his vocal chords and spat blood with every word.
When they stepped out onto the balcony, the traitor stopped his maniacal cackling and locked eyes with each of them in turn. His grin somehow grew even wider when his gaze fell upon Orsha’s face, and he continued belting with renewed vitality.
“I am no more than a preacher of the free man’s gospel, my purpose has been fulfilled! You can’t kill me in a way that matters! You’ve sent death unto the homes of friends to the Serpent of the South, now he and his shall choke the blessings from your inbred bones and swallow your empire of dirt whole!”
Clang.
Before he could even see it happening, the Big Sister unholstered her personal weapon and obliterated the traitor’s head and a significant chunk of his chest. She was shuddering.