Sitting to the side of the arena at the judge’s table, Christopher breathes a sigh of relief and allows himself to feel elated as his First Assistant exits the floor. Mercuria won, she didn’t kill Frank, and the fight provided Christopher with a wealth of data on the man’s abilities and demeanor.
The Warden grins through his graying mustache as he soaks in the atmosphere of Mercuria’s victory. The audience of Stave guardsmen, rangers, and stewards, is certainly enthused, their earlier confusion and mild distaste at Mercuria’s apparent falling for crude illusions gone. Crossing half of the arena in an instant to grapple, slam, and nearly kill the Prince in one explosive sequence did much to alleviate their confusion. That’s good for Christopher, because how Mercuria is perceived reflects on him by extension.
Oliver Rednav and Alexander Geist hooted and hollered when Mercuria finally won, and now Alexander is trying to explain his interpretation of what he thinks happened. Christopher is glad he seems pretty close to the money. Elric Watanabe has stuck by Christopher’s side for now, but Mason Kuridin has already rejoined the Prince and his retinue, who have reunited away from the arena floor.
Before he joins them, Christopher turns to his Liaison.
“So, let me get two things clear - when did Prince Frank make you aware of his visit, and what intention did he declare to you?”
“I was given no warning, sir Warden, the Prince simply appeared at our doorstep bearing a royal decree endorsing this visit, for the purpose of purchasing the Vimitech weapons our Facility is so known for,” replies Elric, his tone easygoing and relaxed, resisting the urge to slip into conspiracy Christopher is himself feeling now.
“And you think that’s all legitimate? You looked at the seals?” asks Christopher, making an effort not to look or sound suspicious in case the Prince or his entourage might be glancing over. Regardless of his appearance, they will deduce that Christopher is conferring with the Liaison about the present issue, but the Warden does not want to convey the unease and suspicion he feels about Frank so openly.
“To me, Frank seemed a regular sort, a perhaps eccentric royal finding his own path to assisting the monarchy or the realm despite never being crowned king. His surrounding himself with warriors and oddities seemed, perhaps, an effort to make himself seem more macho and adventurous than he is. But now, in retrospect, I don’t know what to make of him. The seals looked legitimate to me, and to that machine you gave me.”
“I see, thank you. May I see the documents?”
“I have them here,” says Elric, and withdraws two scrolls of parchment from his inner coat pocket.
Christopher takes the offered scrolls, scanning them fairly quickly. The first is a bureaucratic declaration of Frank and his entourage’s mission here. It says, in far too many words in Chrstopher’s opinion, that they intend to appraise the Vimitech designs here and acquire - purchase - whatever is deemed most effective for their mission - which isn’t specified.
He notes, with distaste, that Vimitech devices that might require the expertise of a particular person or ability to maintain or replicate, would be acquired alongside that critical person.
Christopher hopes that Frank doesn’t decide that he or Alexander are too critical in the creation or upkeep of whatever his inscrutable mission needs.
The second is a royal edict that declares Frank and his entourage members of an institution or group called the Intellectual Arborists, which is apparently some sort of long-term investment management group. Christopher has never heard of them, but they are, according to this scroll, endowed with certain rights and allowances on top of whatever royal privilege Prince Frank would normally be entitled to. In particular, it demands the Prince be made privy to “any and all schemes”, which Christopher chuckles at. How could that possibly be enforced?
“I know, right? It’s like a line I would give a royal caricature in a parody play,” comments Elric.
Christopher quirks an eyebrow beneath his metal visor, looking up at Elric. His Liaison is uncannily observant and intuitive, something he’s always speculated is guided by some sort of hidden ability. It makes him glad Elric is on his side.
“Indeed… Unless they have a mind reader. I haven’t noticed anything like that, though.”
“I’m glad you’re keeping an eye out. Shall we proceed to the Prince?”
“Yes. I’m going to attempt to wring something conclusive out of him soon, but if he remains squirrely, I have to leave him to you. I have an Expedition to prepare us for, and we’ve already spent so much time away from the true threat, whatever it is,” Christopher responds.
Elric nods, and the two stand to reunite with Prince Frank and his entourage. Alexander and Oliver trail behind. Ko Adrilius is murmuring heatedly in Frank’s ear, but he straightens out before Christopher enters earshot.
“Well fought, Your Highness. Your Vimworks are very impressive, very intriguing. How did you manage to fool Mercuria with such, and I mean no offense, rudimentary illusory constructs?”
“Aha, thank you, and none taken. An Illusionist only reveals his secrets when it’s dramatically poignant, though. Mercuria did tell me to relay the riddle I was going to give her as a hint to you, though.”
“Go ahead,” says Christopher. Cultural etiquette differs by region, but within Reillynd, it is generally considered rude to give someone a riddle unprompted.
“A stuck fly sees the face of approaching doom in every droplet of moisture atop the web. An orchard may resemble a forest, but searching for discrepancies within every detail can make one blind to the devil in aggregate.”
If that’s what Frank came up with ahead of time for the duel he clearly had arranged previously to incite, Christopher thinks it is a pretty poor riddle. If he had come up with it on the spot, though, he thinks it’s okay. He analyzes it a dozen times in a half of a moment, imagining how Mercuria might be confused or misdirected into vulnerability by various false interpretations.
“I see. I wonder how Mercuria might have interpreted that,” he says.
“Oh, if I have to ponder for one more moment what might have been, my poor heart will break. I lost! Quickly, let us resume my original business here.”
“Of course. And, to be clear, you’re here on the behalf of an organization called the Intellectual Arborists, to purchase Vimitech designs you need for a quest of yours?”
“Ah, yes, you’ve had a moment to examine my documents. Yes, I represent the Intellectual Arborists, and my mission beyond this place is at their sanction.”
“I see. Who are these Arborists? Why are they to be given all these allowances, and are they given the same privileges elsewhere?”
“The Intellectual Arborists - and yes, I’m aware of how pretentious that name is, aha - are a long-term intellectual investment group. Frankly, I’m surprised someone like yourself hasn’t encountered us before, but there are ebbs and flows in our activity. We invest in promising ventures, institutions, and individuals, ones we see the promise of future innovation from. These investments grow as they may, hopefully bearing fruit, and we come to collect decades down the line. I wasn’t among those who helped guide the establishment of the Depleted Lands Stave Facility, but I’m here, all these decades later, to collect on their behalf.”
“And you’ve come to collect Vimitech for a particular mission, yes? Would you be able to tell me what that is, so I might better advise your acquisition?”
“I can’t go into specifics here, but I’d be happy to go into detail later, away from prying ears. Speaking of getting away, I’m afraid my bout will wholly distract me from paying due attention to our tour of this lovely facility, and I will be retiring to the guest quarters. May we resume tomorrow?”
“Of course, Your Highness,” replies Elric, bowing.
Christopher inwardly sighs in relief as he and his team bid Frank the customary pleasantries and say goodbye for now. The Frank problem has yet to be solved, but at least for now, he can redirect his focus towards the impending Expedition.
First, though, he must reconvene with Mercuria. Though he’s proud of the teleportation network they’ve established, he prefers to take the stairs, and arrives at her training chamber minutes later to hear the sounds of ongoing combat through the reinforced walls. He adjusts the settings on his Vimitech visor with a skillful invocation of external Vimworks, and then the wall is fully transparent to him.
All 7 of Christopher’s specialized training golems are active at maximum settings, drawing heavy currents of Vim from the Vimitech conduits hidden within various ports of the reinforced chamber. They move and fight in extraordinary, exaggerated ways, using their enhanced bodies to perform esoteric feats of movement not dissimilar to Mercuria’s own fighting style. Mercuria was fighting a sort of caster manipulator in Frank, but now she faces 7 berserker warriors like herself, and Christopher notes that she is avoiding the use of her Deonid Eyes.
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The battle chamber is pockmarked with scrapes and craters, evidence of both the trouble Mercuria has been having, and the devastation she wreaks upon her foes when operating without the limitations of a classical duel.
She bounds from a bottom corner to the opposing ceiling corner, and then towards a different bottom corner adjacent to that. With each twisting, flipping leap, she gains a little distance on her multiple pursuers, who sometimes stumble or fail to compensate for the momentum imparted by their own leaps, with the rigidity of their bodies.
When she’s given herself enough breathing room this way, she looks back, taking in her pursuers at normal speed, and moves, mostly on instinct. Unable to time her attacks and movements so impeccably without the aid of her Eyes, she instead opts to perform a spinning leap wherein her body and sword become as big and obstructive a weapon as possible, and she clips a pair of the golems in midair as she flies through the pack of them.
A golem’s head and torso are scattered in two different directions, and another golem’s chest is impacted by Mercuria’s Vim-hardened elbow and sent flying to dash against the chamber wall before she twists into a landing on the other side of the chamber. The remaining 5 golems complete their leap, re-adjust, and the cycle begins anew. Several moments later, the two injured golems begin their regenerative processes, smoothing out their chassis where they are dented or attract lost appendages back to their stumps. Christopher is pretty proud of his work on these golems, even if the regenerative processes are damaged so often that he needs to maintain them at least once a month.
The time is worth it, to keep Mercuria somewhat occupied and in top form. Christopher knows this bout will go on until Mercuria has rendered each of her regenerating opponents incapacitated simultaneously, which he predicts will take a few more minutes, so he occupies most of his mind with theoreticals about the Expedition as he waits and idly watches.
What is the nature of the hidden threat of the Depleted Lands? Has a bordering Beastman Tribe come to infest his region as a staging ground, or have the Aclon Union taken a scientific interest in it?
Gnomes could be skulking about, tunneling below ground or arriving by way of their flying machines, hatching some scheme. Low-Vim environments pose a titillating engineering problem that he imagines they would be enticed by.
The other tunneling races - Kobolds, Drow, Dwarves, and Green-skins - could all be here for reasons ranging from fairly benign to typically malicious. Even if it were the Dwarves, whom he has a professional respect for as artisans and engineers, he would be forced to enact great and terrible vengeance upon them for disappearing his Staves, assuming harm had fallen upon them.
Mercuria begins to seize the momentum more conclusively, spending several moments exchanging blows with the golems on ground level, dismembering a pair of them, before bounding away. She relies on her instincts and other senses to supplement her sense of timing and awareness in the absence of her Deonid time dilation, and she seems to be growing more adept at it with every exchange.
She is preparing for another bout with Prince Frank, having noted that he can exploit the altered perception granted by her Deonid heritage to make illusions that cost him little but still appear real to her alone. Christopher fears her intuition may be correct, and their conflict with the Prince will drag on, into a real scenario with no rules.
Christopher isn’t a strong believer in neither fate nor coincidence, and the timing and preparedness of Frank’s arrival troubles him. If Frank’s Intellectual Arborists are legitimate and have deep roots in the Depleted Lands Staves, could an informant still remain, connected to them, informing them about the brewing trouble and Expedition here?
Will Frank try to tag along? Is that his mission? Does he seek glory and death amongst the Depleted Land Staves, or is he here to find it against them?
Mercuria is severing limbs and smashing chassis every several seconds, now, moving with wide, exaggerated arcs and more force than she would apply otherwise, compensating for her lack of ability to properly control her own hyperspeed movement by simply making it too broad and obtrusive to avoid or miss.
Internally, Christopher mopes. He accepted the position of Warden of the Depleted Land Staves precisely because he thought he could avoid the constant conspiracy and petty mortal scheming that his and Mercuria’s meteoric rise constantly attracted, but it seems that attention is doomed to follow him here.
Is it possible that Frank knows the truth of his powers? No, surely not. Anyone who knew has long since died, and to outsiders, Christopher merely appears as an exceptionally talented and intelligent engineer and logistician. One could make the deduction that his accomplishments are aided by some sort of enhanced cognition, but surely they could never guess at the true machinations that give him an edge.
If Frank or his Arborists had their eyes on Christopher’s power, or if they had come to disrupt his work here any more than they already have, he would have no choice but to revert to the same unsavory acts that brought him and Mercuria so far to begin with - ruthless scheming, and decisive aggression. He has a mind to begin arranging it now, to remove Frank as a problem before he can bring yet more problems to Christopher’s little island of peace.
But not yet… Not while his own position was so precarious. Perhaps after he has thwarted whatever threat lies amidst the wasteland, will he have the capital to purge the royal influence once and for all, if that turns out to be necessary.
Mercuria stands amidst a pile of scattered golem parts, huffing and puffing. Her armor is scored with dents and scratches, her face sweaty and her hair disheveled. Her opponents lie around her in pieces, slowly sliding together to fight again - not quickly enough for her to dart out and deactivate them with a finger to their difficulty interfaces, one by one. They still regenerate fully, but stand sentinel, motionless, rather than attacking again.
Mercuria walks out, unsurprised to see Christopher standing there.
“Good approach. It wouldn’t have worked with the rules of the duel, but you won anyway,” he comments.
“Right. No one has ever exploited the Eyes like that before, so I figured it apt to fix it right away. Did he give you the riddle?”
“Yes. And based on that, and what I observed in the battle, he was somehow arranging his illusory constructs such that your accelerated perception transformed their minimal details into a complete picture that was indistinguishable from the real thing, to you. To us, they looked pretty minimal, but the minute detail they did have, perceived more frequently and more deeply than the rest of us could manage, somehow appeared real to you. I don’t know how he managed that, but it was clearly economical for him.”
“That doesn’t make much sense to me,” Mercuria grumbles.
“I have my own doubts as well. It could be another misdirection.”
“When will we be rid of him? What is he here for?”
“I don’t kn0w. He says he’s here as part of this long-spanning investment organization, the Intellectual Arborists, and that they had a hand in the foundation of this Facility. He’s here for weapons and tools to aid in his mission, but he still hasn’t told me what that is. He agreed to talk about how I might better help him, though, so hopefully that can clarify things,” Christopher muses.
“Or he could place more misdirections ahead of you. I don’t think he’s a real person. Let’s kill him,” she suggests.
“Not yet, not in my position. We came here to avoid scrutiny, remember? A Prince disappearing under mysterious circumstances under our care will only remind the powers that be that they should be paying close attention to us. If we could send him away or misdirect him ourselves, that would be ideal.”
“So boring,” Mercuria complains.
“That’s the game,” Christopher reminds her. She bares her upper teeth at him like a freaky monster or petulant child.
“When we’re done here, we’ll have a real deployment, right? Somewhere dangerous, with something to do?”
“Yes. Eventually, we’ll have it all. The world unraveling at our whim, revealing its secrets, with no mystery or challenge unavailable to us. No more bureaucracy, no more politics, only power, only intellect, only adventure. I await it as eagerly as you do, my friend.”
“I know. I’ll play along.”
“Good. You may be the only one I can rely upon now,” Christopher rumbles gravely.
“Just like the old days,” Mercuria smiles.
Mercuria retakes her place in Christopher’s shadow, and the Warden resumes his preparations for Expedition, hurrying as much as he is able to compensate for their distraction.
Additional supplies must be withdrawn from storage or teleported in. Weapons and systems must be taken out of a state of maintenance and readied for active use. The Staves of various ranks and roles must be prepared for their roles on Expedition or in maintaining the Facility in absence of most of its personnel. Most annoyingly, various rituals and traditions must be observed, offerings made to various Spirits and Gods from whom the Staves seek to have their efforts blessed or ignored by.
Christopher orchestrates it all, delegating to his staff where necessary and appropriate, spending hours in his office or personally touring the Facility, meeting the Staves he will be Expeditioning with and addressing their concerns. He attends the rituals he is so skeptical of - he is aware of the objective existence of Spirits and Gods, but rigorous application of scientific observation has assured him that they are literally not present in the Depleted Lands. If that’s what it’ll take to assure the Staves that this Expedition isn’t doomed by fate, though, he will abide tradition.
All the while, Prince Frank continues his stay, extending from days to weeks as the Expedition draws nearer. He does seek Christopher’s input on various Vimitech pieces he has his eyes on, but still insists on obfuscating his true mission - instead, he mentions the need to prepare Reillynd for ‘the next age’ of progression and conflict. Sure, that’s a noble goal in Christopher’s eyes, but where specifically will the Prince go with his new toys, and what will he do?
When Elric and the Prince arrive at his office one day and inform Christopher of the Prince’s request to accompany the Expedition, he is not surprised. Frank claims to be obligated to protect the Kingdom of Reillynd in the face of suspected foreign intervention, but Christopher sees through it. This was part of his plan to begin with, to follow them out here. While Christopher has been logisticizing the Expedition, Frank has been doing networking amongst the Staves of his own, and cannot easily be denied his request to tag along.
The situation is not ideal, but it can be leveraged in his favor. If Frank is actually an ally, all the better - but if he is an enemy, it would be considerably less suspicious for him to disappear tagging along a dangerous Expedition into the hostile Depleted Lands. Christopher’s contingencies deepen and multiply.