From the grassland, into wide-open hard desert, a spear-tailed horse or fire and black iron rode side by side with a building-sized, white-shelled engine of obliteration. The landscape passed them by at a breakneck pace, ruins in the distance and mountains in the far east slowly scrolling by. A trail of scarlet smoke followed with the horse’s rider, and none of the beasts which dwelt in the desert dared accost the travelers.
The two imposing figures set down at their next planned stop nearly two hours earlier than planned, and the red-haired puppetmaster began his promised labour of butchering his forr pursuers.
Only, after he brought out the corpses, he reached up to his ear again, and pulled out… Nothing. Furrowing his brow, he tried again, and again, received only a faint ripple through the air for his attempt.
The young man’s eye twitched. He gestured towards his giant puppet, willing its torso to open up as it had done previously. The sa failure took place; he visibly made an attempt to, presumably, retrieve sothing from the puppet’s storage compartnt, and received no response save a faint pulse of iridescent light. Another attempt, this ti, a canister of translucent alloy ca through, with a viscous, lavender-coloured fluid sloshing around inside. His frustration building, he closed his eyes, smiling with a facetious expression as he shook his head in disbelief. He tossed it in his hand a few tis, then telekinetically spiked it into a hard rock protruding from the ground, only for the canister to harmlessly bounce back into the giant puppet’s “mouth” with a crystalline ring. Synthetic sapphire, Krahe guessed. The youth’s frustration abruptly evaporated, and, now deadpan, he looked towards Krahe.
“It seems that my storage units are, so to speak, malfunctioning. Everything I placed into storage after I went through the rose-and-stone bridge will co out without issue, but when it cos to objects I brought with inside my storage units, it seems to depend entirely on how well it conforms to your world. I can access most of my things, but not the ones I need to access. I thought I was overcautious preparing for spatial fold instability zones, only to end up in an even worse situation…” he grumbled resentfully. While he did this, however, he continued to control his puppets, changing plans. One of the smaller units walked over, extruding a strange blade from its right arm, cutting into one of the corpses, while a second puppet dug into the wound with its clawed fingers and pulled it open. Lastly, the white giant raised an arm and sprayed a glob of rcury on the ground, and, one after another, tools ford from the liquid and flew into Zanma’s hands. Krahe could see the exertion in his face, veins bulging on his temples, hair flickering with light and lifting off the ground. She let him be, knowing well that a young man such as him might not enjoy being denied a mont of rugged resourcefulness in an adverse situation. It was only natural.
As if responding to her thoughts, he paused, glancing her way, “If you have suitable tools for dissection, I would appreciate being lended them. I hate to whine, but holding polymorphic alloy in the shape of multiple tools, separate from the proper control chanism, is not easy.”
“Barzai, help our friend fulfill his end of our agreent,” Krahe said, summoning the eidolon in his humanoid form. “You may access any suitable tools in kenoma storage. And, young man, don’t give him any cooked or otherwise prepared at. If he asks for an eyeball or souldregs, that’s fine. A corpse eyeball, I an.”
“Should- should I exercise caution?” Zanma asked, glancing between the approaching raven-goblin and Krahe, who had already moved on to scattering talismans around the campsite.
“Huh? No, it’s fine. He’s forbidden at as a punishnt, but he can extract certain spiritual resources by consuming the eyes of corpses. You register as having a soul to , so I wish to know if these friends have any.”
Barzai stopped off halfway as he ambled over, pecking at one of the cyborgs’ strange radar’modules. He tore out a bulbous mass of slimy grey flesh and hard tissue, swallowed it, and froze. His beak’s outer shell retracted, exposing the teeth within, and he tilted his head, sohow forming a recognizable a grimace of confusion and disgust.
“Souldregs, but no soul. Impurity, but no guilt. Intelligence without consciousness. There is a flavour, but… Not? I don’t understand. Inanimate matter imitating true life while holding antipathy towards the life it imitates, yet not even sufficiently sentient to feel despair in the face of doom. How thoroughly unpleasant. I can use these, but I would rather not.”
Based on the recognition in Zanma’s face, Krahe surmised that Barzai’s judgnt hit ho. She proceeded with securing their campsite while Barzai moved over and started regurgitating various implents, so suited to surgery and others “close-enough” by the eidolon’s judgnt. Scalpels, knives, forceps, tweezers, vessels and capsules. Hamrs. Pliers. He even offered up his own feathers as blades, hardened to gleaming black iron via Stymphalos Flights. They dissolved in a few minutes, but Barzai always had more on offer just in ti. Before long, the redhead’s make-do dissection had beco a demonstration of his extensive psychokinetic abilities, seamlessly blending the use of a puppet, his own hands, and tools floating in mid-air to dismantle the body before him.
Krahe finished setting up the periter well before Zanma completed his corpse dismantling, but she just repeated the process twice more to ensure the periter was as foolproof as possible. That was not to say he was slow by any ans, in fact to the contrary; she had expected to be long finished before him. The young man’s ability to break down bodies and extract cybernetics would have easily landed him a high “augntation reclamation officer” position within any corpo-state. With every passing minute, the pile of modules and various filled vessels next to him grew. He eventually figured out that he could bring certain vessels out of his own storage, and the pile’s growth only accelerated after that. Once she was finished setting, checking, re-checking, reinforcing, and re-re-checking the warding periter, Krahe shoved a slab of stone into place, set a burner, and sat down, pulling out a cigarette while she ward a pot of stew she had stored away before the journey. The comfort of being able to produce smoke without it being a security risk — it was a reward for her hard work.
User Comments
0 comments from readers