Ring of the Sun

[Rayse Valentino]

Closed to Ataraxis. All bunnying approved.

The hustle and bustle of the city was a welcome sight after seeing the devastation in Rayse's home town of Knife's Edge. Despite the trials abroad, the people here seemed nauseously ignorant of how close they all were to doom. If Salvar and Alerar were to fall to some would-be Gods, then Corone would be the next likely target.

It was here in Radasanth where Rayse needed the tools to build his empire. With clothes hanging out the windows, the streets filled with market carts and the people carrying various goods around, it was just as lively as The Contractor remembered. The sun was hanging high in the sky in this cloudless day, pouring down unforgiving rays of light. The furnaces in the nearby smithies were roaring, letting a cool stream of steam rise up into the air. Rayse walked down this street without doing much sight-seeing, since he was here on business.

There was a small building in downtown Radasanth. A simple single-story establishment to help the more uneducated residents of the city with their monetary concerns. On the outside, it looked downtrodden with paint tearing around the edges, but once inside it was surprisingly clean and orderly. The waiting area was arranged with comfort in mind, putting peace of mind into everyone who entered. With the padded chairs near the entrance, the cool breeze from the window taking advantage of the westward gusts of air, being inside here instilled a sense of professionalism, and the owner did not neglect to reinforce that feeling with his charm and manners.

Rayse knew the man too well, however, to buy into that nonsense. In actuality, Richard Pembleton was a sarcastic man, and made you feel inferior if you were a close enough associate. Despite it all, he was still a competent businessman who could be relied upon. A rare find in this world of cutthroats. As The Contractor walked into the establishment, he tripped an alarm in the form of a small bell. Closing the door behind him, he heard the footsteps of the well-dressed Pembleton, wearing a fine green velvet suit, walking out of his office with a smile on his face.

The smile quickly faded when he recognized Rayse.

"Why... It's Master Rayse," he said, adjusting his glasses. "What brings you here?"

Rayse crossed his arms, "Master? Are you my butler now? And why are you addressing me like some relative from the countryside?"

Pembleton shook his head, "Maybe it has something to do with you disappearing for several months?!"

After Rayse insisted they step into his office, he explained why he had been gone so long. The office had a small round table with a few chairs around it, Pembleton's desk with a comfortable recliner, several filing cabinets, a couple bookcases, and an ornamental monkey statue that Pembleton claims he received from some indigenous tribe in Concordia.

"Magical sickness?" Pembleton scoffed. "What do you take me for? This is no way to run a business! What was I supposed to do when both of you decided to take a vacation?" He opened up a drawer and picked out some legal documents, nearly throwing them at Rayse as he presented them.

"Look," said Rayse, holding his hands up like he was being arrested. "I'm not as stupid as Teric; I know how the law works. That's precisely the reason why I put his name on The Company's registration. Worst case scenario, I imagine he would simply steal all the money back like a knucklehead. That's fine with me, since I'm just a shareholder on paper and nobody knows of our relation. I could just use the stolen cash to start over again."

Pembleton's jaw dropped. Rayse just accurately described exactly what happened. He recomposed himself, straightened out the wrinkles in his suit, and said, "So, you've heard about it from him then?"

"I came across him, yes. In Salvar." Rayse put his feet up on the desk, which attracted even more ire from Pembleton, and rubbed his chin. "I didn't ask him anything about The Company, and he didn't tell me anything either. That's fine with me." He shrugged and took out a cigarette, lighting it by snapping his fingers together to produce a flame on his thumb.

Pembleton objected, "No! No smoking in here! How many times do I have to tell you? This isn't some sleazy bar of yours!"

Rayse's eyes darted toward Pembleton, his glare burning a hole into the mild-mannered accountant. "With all the money you're holding for me, It might as well be. Don't forget: Teric is the one that trusts you unconditionally. Just because you haven't been dipping into my funds doesn't mean you never will. This place might as well be a shack compared to what it could be."

"Now see here!" Pembleton stood up. "The trouble I went through for you two clowns was more than enough for one lifeti--!"

"Exactly," interrupted Rayse. "You see, I'm thinking a little bigger this time."

Rayse handed Pembleton some papers.

"These are.." he started, looking them over. "Deeds?"

"I made a deal with those trading types in Salvar. I have an opportunity to shape the new underground of the country. Investors have been piling in, and property values have been skyrocketing. Previously worthless real estate has now become a hot commodity. If you want, I can make you a very rich man." Rayse took his feet off the table and stood up, cracking his neck and knuckles as he made for the door. "I'll let you think it over."

"Wait," instructed Pembleton. "You have a letter. It's recent."

Rayse walked back over with interest. He didn't receive much mail due to his covert nature, but the few acquaintances he gave his information to were likely important people. The fact that it was recent meant that maybe he could actually act on whatever was in it. He took the envelope and opened it, looking over the letter.

Rayse wondered, "Lillian? Do I know a Lillian?"

"How should I know!" Pembleton replied, his patience wearing thin at this point.

The Contractor decided to read it over as he walked out, and along the way he remembered someone named Lillian. She was the one he bought that weird spidersilk from. What could she possibly want with him?

[Ataraxis]

The 7th story of the Qu’Ellarin Building was a sorry sight.

Since its occupants had moved in, the peeled wallpapers had been removed and the floorboards had been cleansed from years of grime and negligence, but not much else could be done about its miserly state. The naked walls were made of sheetrock, stained by rain floods and various plumbing leakages, and in various places the gypsum was either notched, caved in or simply missing. The ceilings in some rooms sagged like distended bellies, and thus far they had only avoided collapse by some awe-inspiring miracle of architecture. What is more, even with incessant cleaning, chips of stone or old paint would be found littering the slanted floors every morning, and the sorry few now living there never could find the source of that unspeakably offensive reek.

Today, however, their living situation had become much worse. They were all gathered along the street-facing walls, or more precisely, along the half a dozen windows that had been opened wide. Their lethargic bodies lay flat upon a motley assortment of couches and divans, with a few stools and rocking chairs thrown in for good measure. Their breaths were heavy, and they quite nearly leaked half of their water content in perspiration. A few men and women were equipped with makeshift fans of paper or tissue while the others simply gravitated about the windows in search for that elusive breeze. This was the one of the worst heat hazes to hit Ettermire in years, and the constant smog that hung over the industrial city certainly did not help her citizens survive it any better.

“What are you all doing?” a young girl asked as she came up from the staircase corridor. Barely half of the agonizing crowd had the energy to acknowledge her arrival, and even fewer deigned to even try. The teenager frowned, muttering some foreign obscenity as she padded along the open hallway to reach them, willowy arms laden with what seemed to be grocery bags. “Good grief, is a broken air conditioner really all it takes to turn you into mewling children?”

She set her purchases on the communal table with much difficulty, the wooden counter built too high for a girl of her stature. “Why don’t you just repair it, Pascal? You invented it.”

A gaunt man threw his head back just enough to see her; he blinked lazily, the dark bags under his pale green eyes only furthering her impression of watching a sloth hanging upside-down from a tree branch. “I would, really… but it’s just too hot for science, Lillian.”

“Oh sure, sure,” Lillian said with a clear note of sarcasm as she removed fresh produce from a bag, mostly carrots, tomatoes and celeries, as well as a few golden apples and pears. “Instead, we’ll just get all of our work done at night, right? Sleep is overrated, anyway.”

“Alright, fellows,” the man named Pascal called out as he straightened up from his red, padded chair, the thinly-veiled threat having lit a fire beneath him. “I’ve got a refrigeration apparatus to patch up.” His words of renewed vigor were met with half-hearted acclamations as well as sighs from those who had nagged him to do it hours ago. “By the by, were you able to acquire it? Because if you did, I don’t think you brought enough,” he said tentatively, pointing at the other bag on the counter.

“Oh, no worries. All I have in this are soft iron rods and silicon ingots – did you know there was a professional metallurgist in the marketplace? I invited him to come on board with us.” Lillian hummed a cheery tune as she set dozens of bars and rods on the table: the prospect of adding a new member to this oddest of families always made her cheerful. Moreover, on a purely pragmatic level, having a professional metallurgical engineer would definitely make the process of acquiring rare metals much easier for this eclectic team of researchers. She had great hopes that the man was seriously considering her offer. “In any case, I asked our neighbors from the first floor to bring that up – and speaking of the kindly devils, here they are!”

On cue, the pained groans, huffs and puffs of physically exerted men came from the staircase. Two youths had emerged onto the seventh floor, carrying between them a monster of a barrel. Even from where Pascal stood, the thing reeked of charcoal and sulfur, but the young men did not seem to realize that they had been helping this innocent-looking girl move a keg of black powder. They dropped it once on flat ground, resting their elbows on the barrel top as they caught their breaths.

“Jonathan, Albert, thank you so much for your help!” Lillian exclaimed as she came to meet them. She rewarded them with an amiable hug, one they had no qualm in distorting into something much lewder. Reenergized, they sought to carry the keg the rest of the way, but her outstretched hand stopped them in their tracks. “It’s alright, you can leave it there.”

With a sunny smile, she bent down and caught the barrel by its sides, then lifted it up as if it were no heavier than a pillow. She sauntered into one of the back rooms, where they stored most of their volatile materials, before coming back empty handed and as hale as she had left. “Would you like to stay? I have ingredients for vegetable smoothies, and... oh. Where did they go?”

“You scared them off,” came a gruff voice from the smallest stool in the living room. There, a dwarf was sitting, scratching his clean-shaven chin before combing his mussed up mustache with the tap of an index. “Not sure if it were your ape strength or your god-awful smoothies, though.”

The girl’s eyes fell to the floor, and she seemed terribly upset by the realization. The others looked at the dwarf with disapproving eyes, but all he did was scoff. “That’s too bad… but oh, Jehesir! Have you completed the map, yet?”

“It’s all done, doll: in a few moments, you’ll all be the very first non-dwarves to ever see the layout of the Mines of Kachuk.” Lillian squealed her excitement, and a many of her coworkers joined with her enthusiasm. Jehesir drew to his feet, removing a cardboard tubing from the back of his linen pants. Most of them made a face at that, but the dwarf ignored them as he uncapped the container and removed a roll of yellow tracing paper. He unfurled it on the floor, and they all gathered round to look. “I’ve marked all key choke points and common patrol routes, and of course, the big red X marks my workshop. Structurally weak tunnels are highlighted in green, but the blue ones are those that would bring the whole place down if damaged. Avoid those, will ya?”

“Thanks a lot, Jehesir.” Everything was coming together, at last. Jehesir had told them when he first came here that he had been exiled by his kind because of his heretical ideas: it was nothing religious, but the principle he was said to have violated was one just as sacred. He had designed an automated drill that would improve the efficiency of mining perhaps twenty-fold at the very least, but the machine was rejected by his peers because it would render the hard labor of so many miners obsolete.

The more he had pressed on, the more they had looked down on him, until he was banished from Kachuk. The worst of it all, he told them, was not having to leave his blood behind, but having to abandon his workshop to that ‘bunch of conservative ignoramuses’. Everything that was too heavy for transport was left there, and that included his greatest achievement, a prototype for almost instantaneous travel over long distances. With such pride, he had called it the Ring of the Sun.

And now, they had the means to reach it, and bring it back.

“We only need one more element to make this happen, and that’s your… friend person, the demolitions expert. Rayse, was it?” Jehesir seemed hesitant; he had been very open about his mistrust of outsiders, even of other members of the House of Sora. To him, only one of the House’s four lodges was worthy of his trust, and that was Lodge Vespera: a group of like-minded individuals whose intellect saw past mores and customs. They all looked beyond what has always worked, so as to catch that glimpse of what could. To these people, the sky was never the limit, and that was finally a motto he had no shame in supporting.

“I have faith that he’ll come,” was the girl’s only answer. When prompted why she had so much faith in him by the dwarf, she corrected him. “It’s not in him that my faith lies, per se. It’s in his... receptiveness to my offer.”

Jehesir scoffed again, but this time he looked pleased with her answer. “In Greed we trust, eh?”

[Rayse Valentino]

As Rayse found himself at the gates of Ettermire in his dark sunglasses and his regular black shirt and jeans, the feeling of refreshment was absent at the site of the mechanical city. The smoke from the smithies was replaced by massive plumes of steam rising above factories, the gentle movement of people was now an orderly march of supplies, and the purifying rays of sunlight were covered by the eternal smog in the sky. This was a city of fire, but not the kind of fire that The Contractor represented. It was a beast beyond itself, a monster of mechanization that had no grime or reason. It was no wonder that the drow of Alerar suddenly felt that their borders were too small when they invaded the war-torn Raiaera. It was only by virtue of Alerar's positive relations with Salvar- and thus, the humans, that people like Rayse were even allowed near this place.

"Present your materials," demanded the drow guard.

This was a city that monitored what came in or out, and it dealt with intruders in the harshest way possible. Rayse showed him the passport he acquired from the High Graf in Kachuck during a previous job. Before, he used it to get into Ettermire's famous library to investigate what was happening to Salvar, but now it was a convenient way to get in or out of the city. The guard looked over the passport, noticing the seal of authenticity, and signaled the gatekeepers to stand down.

Before letting him through, he warned, "This pass allows you access to the residential and trade districts. Stay out of the militarized and noble zones. Trespassing or any wanton displays of hostility will result in immediate termination."

It was hard to believe these elves shared a lineage with their tree-loving kind in Raiaera.

"Yeah yeah," waved Rayse, trying hard not to glare at the guard. He hated being told what he could or couldn't do. He put the pass back into his traveling bag and slung it over his shoulder.

His intrigue with the letter was not in how explicit and detailed it was; The letter was very vague but promised fantastic rewards for a completed job. He was being called in as a Demolitions Expert, but the how or where was not mentioned. It was true that Rayse destroyed a mansion within full view of Lillian during a small scuffle between organizations, but she really had no reason to believe he was an expert of anything. She clearly knew more about him than he originally thought. The fact that she couldn't be outright with him in the letter meant that perhaps the object of his employment was far more valuable than his reward. It was only one possibility, but her careful avoidance of the topic lead him to think that way. She could have even intentionally made him think that way in order to secure his employment. There was no use over-thinking it, however.

He followed the instructions in the letter to the designated building, and what a place it was. With most of the windows boarded up, it looked abandoned. After double-checking his directions, he looked back and saw a couple tired-looking youths exit the building. Higher up he could see that his destination, the 7th floor, had the least amount of missing windows and actually had a large row of them opened up to let the breeze in. Walking inside, he immediately noticed the vague scent of sulfur. The floor was cracked in the corners of the entrance building, the walls were stripped bare, and every step he took resounded throughout the emptiness of the lobby. It only served to reinforce the thought that this job wasn't going to be exactly legal.

Finding one of the main staircases, he looked up at the rusty hand rails and the deep grooves on most of the steps. It looked like they had to do all their heavy lifting manually.

"Hey, anyone up there!" he yelled upwards, leaving a few seconds for a response.

The heat of the city did not bother him, but it left him feeling very far from home. It didn't help that he was doing a lot of traveling lately. One of his main grievances was the time he lost traveling around the world. It had been nearly a week since he left Radasanth, and before then it took two weeks to leave Salvar. He would kill for a way to lessen the travel. There were, however, some shortcuts he possessed that made the trips more tolerable. Since his call had received no response, he was about to employ one of them.

The color of his body, his clothes, and the very air around him changed to a deep orange mixed with yellow. His physical body became transparent, and as if a gust of wind blew in, he simply disappeared like the flame of a candle being put out. A fast-moving stream of fire moved up the staircase, scaling seven floors in seconds as it reached the top and reformed Rayse and his belongings in the same way that he disappeared. He took a deep breath, looking around to make sure nobody saw, and continued down a narrow hallway.

This floor was different from the lobby. The bare essentials of a building were here, but nobody bothered to put new wallpaper up or replacing the floorboards. It was however mostly clean except for some tiny scraps, despite the odor of a warehouse. As he turned the corner, he entered a fork that was inhabited by a small, white-haired old man with thick reading glasses. Bent over a thick book, he seemed startled by Rayse's presence and immediately asked who he was and what he was doing here.

The Contractor took off his sunglasses and grinned, "I'm Rayse Valentino, and let me tell you..." He leaned in close to the old man, "This is no way to welcome a guest."

The old man nearly stumbled backwards and sneezed, "Ah! Ah! Ah! Achoo!" He wiped his nose and said, "Don't do that! I get the sniffles when people spook me like that!" He recomposed himself and instructed Rayse to take the right path and hug the right wall until he saw a big room with Lillian in it.

The eccentricity of the man was suspicious. Just what kind of organization was this? They didn't seem to think that any Aleran officials were interested in this place, yet every room he passed was filled with people deep in thought, as if plotting. It didn't occur to him that these people were researchers. He eventually caught sight of Lillian, who looked much different from when he last saw her. She stood out like a leader, and her figure cast a long shadow along the floor from the light outside. As Rayse entered the room, he scanned the room left to right. The first glance was everything to him; It was often an instinct that determined whether or not there was a trap waiting for him. In this case, he got the same feeling when all eyes were on him.

He walked over to Lillian. If this was a fancy hotel, decked out with expensive linens and young maidens ready to give relaxing massages to all its patrons, Rayse would have no problems with it. At the very least they could get rid of the stale smell of metal and powder.

However, since that wasn't the case, he said, "You better have a damn good reason for dragging me out here to this dump."

[Ataraxis]

“Hey, we happen to like this dump,” Lillian retorted with a lighthearted laugh, taking no offense to his harsh opinions or his generally rough demeanor. They were all intellectuals here, from purely theoretical scientists and hands-on engineers to vocational sorcerers and applied dabblers of the metaphysical: by induction, they all required a modicum of perceptiveness to do their work. As such, there was no reason to feel insulted, since they were quite literally the first to observe what a hole their R&D headquarters was.

“Eh,” Jehesir muttered from his spot on the dusty floor, rolling his shoulders in uncommitted disagreement. “It could use more stonework.” He paused, scratching what could have been lice from his mustache. He flicked it behind him, and a clique of couched scholars scattered away like frightened mice. “Oh yeah, and liquor too.”

“Yes, well…” Lillian’s voice trailed off, deciding against a scathing comment – if anything, that would have only spurred him on. The young librarian turned to face Rayse, who was but half a dozen feet away from her. Slightly tan, black hair over his equally black eyes in drooping bangs, hints of tattoos running beneath his black tee shirt… he was just as she remembered him from their encounter in the Bazaar. Perhaps a bit gaunter, she noted, as if he had just recovered from a recent fever or some other like illness. Still, he stood before her tall and confident, with a bit of an irritated twitch to his expression. “I’m glad you could make it so fast. You have impeccable timing.”

His impatience was clearly on the rise, and the teenager deemed it best to satisfy his aggressive curiosity before it got out of hand. Now was not the time for warm welcomes and she would not waste her time trying to butter him up: it was time for business, and the girl went right for the brass tacks. “As outlined in the letter, we require your expertise in architectural and landscape demolition. This is not a personal favor: that would be pointless and naïve of me, as I’m well aware that people aren’t as likely to remember me as I do them. This is, however, a job offering, and a well-paying one at that.”

The glimmer of newfound interest in his eyes told her all she needed: he was ready to hear more, now. “In exchange for your assistance in a retrieval operation, our organization will provide you with sizeable remuneration – that, or a very practical gift basket. I hear you like spices?” Lillian waved her arm about the ramshackle room, breathing in the stale air as an example for Rayse to follow. “You’ve probably realized that’s black powder in the air – and a particularly potent mixture, I might add. We’ll be using it to devise a new, very exclusive type of explosive. Small hint: they’ll be incorporating the same materials you bought from me a few months back.”

She let the revelation stew in his mind for a moment, before adding with a sly smile: “Interested?”

[Rayse Valentino]

Is this what they're trying to pawn off on me? What do I look like, an arsonist? Actually, they might be right. Lillian's ability of perception was unnervingly accurate. Not only did she remember that little sale, but she even figured out what he used it for.

He started worrying that she might be telekinetic, but that thought dissuaded when he remembered Godhand telling him something when he asked about the assault team for that NWO job, "Careful what you say around that little girl. She doesn't forget a thing."

Rayse originally dismissed such a warning, since it sounded so trivial, but maybe now it was starting to make sense. So, maybe she's some super genius. Regardless, if she wasn't telekinetic then she didn't know any of the more important details about Rayse's career.

He took a glance at the barrels organized in one part of the room, then looked back at Lillian, "I didn't come all this way just to say no." The earlier suspicions did not go away. The special explosives were a nice touch, and definitely a good tactic of accommodation considering what she knew about him, but it was not all he was after. There was something more to this, but he couldn't let on about that. While some of it genuine, he feigned interest, "That was indeed some potent silk. If that could be harnessed into a bomb, hell- it would change the state of warfare entirely."

They key to this job would be understanding his employer. From what he could tell, Lillian looked very thin. None of her bones were protruding from the flesh, yet there was no excess to be found anywhere on her body. Whatever equilibrium she was maintaining, it was an unnatural one. Rayse wasn't a big fan with children, either. Being patronized by a teenager didn't sit well with him, but he endured it, and possibly tolerated it because of her apparent intellect. There was also this organization around here, which was highly suspect. They seemed to have no problem basing out of Ettermire, yet they were not on the drow payroll, as far as he knew anyway. Last time he was in the region, he worked with a human who was under the employ of a High Graf. Well, human-looking anyway. He still couldn't make sense of Jame Whitizard-Kaosi's dragon transformation back in the Mines of Kachuck.

In any case, it was time to get down to business. He cracked his neck, pulled out a pack of smokes and lit one up by snapping his fingers and producing a flame on his thumb, that disappeared the moment the cigarette was lit.

Smiling with the cigarette clenched between his teeth, he said, "Lay it on me, boss." He also took a look at the door, expecting Lillian to lead them into a more private conversation.

[Ataraxis]

Lillian’s eyes flickered in alarm at the first sight of fire, but she calmed herself at once. That little flame that came from the snap of his fingers would never ignite the barrel of black powder one room over, something she had only momentarily feared by reflexive association. If anything, that little light would at most clear some of the charcoal and sulfur from the air, as well as a thimble of that mystery stench. Granted, what with the tons of volatile components stored here, nothing could really stop Rayse from burning down their quaint little hovel in Ettermire with the full extent of his pyromanic abilities, if the fancy ever struck him.

It was not hard to guess that the man might have come here with ulterior motives, considering she had only briefly outline the possibility of a reward in her letter, but she had no reason to believe he meant them any harm. On top of that, their common acquaintance in the mercenary Godhand even put them on the same side of the fence, for now. With this in mind, the librarian was able to regain her composure, enough to lead Rayse back into her study with an innocuous smile: at the very least, there was nothing explosive in her quarters for his cigarette to ignite.

After ushering him to the only cherry fauteuil to have kept its stuffing intact, she went to close the door behind them. Instead of sidling around the large mess upon her oaken desk and sitting at her overlarge swiveling chair, she chose to sit next to her guest on a seat that might as well have been recovered from a dumpsite. “Hard to think that someone managing this kind of facility can pay for any job, isn’t it?” she began humorously, chuckling a bit until the warm sound drifted off. “But the truth is, we’ve had to cut corners for essential equipment, the sum of which costs more than this whole building.” While fully aware this was sensible information, she decided to trust him with it. Even if the worst came came to pass, he would be hard-pressed to steal any of their heavy machinery, let alone hock them at the closest pawn shop.

“Sounds like you're all nuts,” Rayse commented with a faint scoff before taking a long drag of his cigarette. After letting it suffuse his lungs, he exhaled a long plume of acrid smoke that rose to the chipped ceiling, and with the same, almost derisive nonchalance, he drew in a second whiff.

“Look… I know it’s ridiculous,” she began out of the blue, turning to face him and meet his dark gaze. “I’ve done business with enough people to know they all thought I was a joke when they first met me. Who wouldn’t? I’m a sixteen-year-old girl, knee-high to a grasshopper, yet I have the gall to tell them some of our projects can solve their century-old problems?” She smiled, as was quickly becoming her habit when she felt anything but joy. Yet, as soon as it faded, her expression hardened, and the fluid reflection in her pale blue eyes became as ice. “But ridiculous as that sounds, it doesn’t make what I say any less true.”

Lillian leaned forward, fingers knit and elbows on her lap. “Clients get their answers. People get paid. We get things done. If you can bear with me, I’ll ensure that doesn’t change.” The chair creaked a long, painful wail as she drew back, her figure straight as a spear as she assumed once more the mantle of Lodge Vespera’s leader. It was something she would always have to do, until the day it became so ingrained in her as to stop being a masquerade – until the day she would have grown enough for her appearance to finally match her position.

“I'm a businessman myself, so I know what it's like. Let's just get to the point.” Somehow, even as dismissive as those words may have first sounded, they had provided her the relief she needed to continue. All she ever really required from those she dealt with was to be taken seriously, and she believed Rayse did, now. Folding her hands upon her lap, Lillian began her mission briefing.

“Jehesir Atgas is a dwarven engineer who was banished from Kachuk because of his unorthodox vision. Long story short, he had to leave anything he couldn’t carry in his workshop, and that includes a prototype he named the Ring of the Sun – a bit of a misnomer, really, as it is powered from solar energy to ambient electromagnetic waves and cosmic radiation. In any case, we need it… but the dwarves of Kachuk are unlikely to let us walk in all willy-nilly to pick things up for a friend who just happens to be a heretic in their eyes.

“That’s why we’ll need stealth, and also why we’ll need you. I’d rather the dwarves not be made aware of our presence, but if they’re about to, I’d like them to be sufficiently distracted… being miners, a strategic tunnel collapse could prove effective without bringing the whole of the mines down. We have a map marking the general location of these key sections, but you’ll have to pinpoint them and place the charges yourself.

“Once we get to his workshop, we’ll need to deactivate the shroud he used to keep his colleagues from snooping around his sanctuary. His workshop will need to be ransacked clean, and then destroyed. When that’s done, the only thing left to do is to escape.” Lillian’s face lit up, as if the whole plan sounded like child’s play to her ears. She hoped Rayse would realize she was not a fool and that she was purposefully withholding key elements of the plan: how they were going to infiltrate the mines,what exactly they would need to do to escape, even what the Ring actually did…

As for why, the reason was simple: Lillian genuinely wanted to hear his expert opinion. She wanted to understand the way he thought, and how he went about his business of arson and demolition. She wanted to learn as much as she could from his methods, because she firmly believed that no insight gained is an insight wasted. Even with everything she knew – everything she memorized, assimilated and understood – the girl had not even come close to breaking the surface of this planet’s pool of knowledge. And so, all too eerily, she watched him with cold and calculating eyes, waiting for his every word and every action to be permanently etched into the living, pulsing stone of her mind.

Unbeknownst to her, the girl’s eyes seemed less and less human as she did so. In fact, they seemed almost machine.

[Rayse Valentino]

Goddamn it, not again.

Back to Kachuck of all places. Why not the land of infinite liquor? The city of never-ending sex? No, she wanted him to go to those blasted mines. If she said as much in the letter, he probably would've burned it up on the spot and erased it from his memory. Rayse was far too invested at this point to back out now, and this laboratory of hers sounded like a veritable gold mine.

He was not a science man, so all this complicated terminology Lillian threw around only served to irritate him. At the very least, he and this Jehesir fellow seemed to share something in common. While he was not exactly banished from Kachuck, he was no friend there. Screwing over a bunch of miners, pissing off an entire bar, and destroying a business. His laundry list of offenses in Kachuck were his worst, bar none. He had the look of a man listening intently, but he was actually chewing on the butt of his cigarette. The only bright side to this was that she wanted to avoid the dwarves as much as he did.

"Nice plan you have there," he complimented, exhaling some smoke into the air. Except the whole part about infiltration and escape. Trivial details, I'm sure. There was something else he remembered. One of the many small, sometimes secret entrances into the mines from the side of the mountains served as an escape route for Jame and himself when they finished their job. To make sure they wouldn't be followed, they collapsed it behind them. Clearly, something like that would be in disuse at this point. If he could open that up, it could not only be used to get in, but out as well. Did he really want to tell her that, though? He wanted to avoid relaying his unfortunate experiences to her. There was no reason to assume she didn't have all this taken care of. "But how the hell do you expect us to carry out an entire workshop out of the mines?"

As for the demolition, if he got some of that black powder he could make it easy as pie. Not to mention a small amount of her highly potent spidersilk. He wouldn't mind if his reward was a massive quantity of that stuff. It was odd for Rayse to think of payment in terms of objects and not cold, hard cash. Maybe he was at the point where he didn't need money as much as he needed resources and manpower. Lillian and him were not at all different in that regard.

[Ataraxis]

Lillian was ecstatic to hear him ask that very question. It might have been a bit childish of her, but she had mostly withheld that piece of information for the opportunity to set up an elaborate revelation. Now, however, was not the time to satisfy his curiosity, but to let it stew until he could take no more of the mystery. That, or until Rayse decided to stop caring – whichever came first. “That’s a very good question… but I’m afraid I’d spoil two other very good ones by answering it. No worries though: we have it covered.”

“How we’re going in and how we’re going out,” the contractor said matter-of-factly, elbows on the armrests and his smouldering cigarette held with assurance between his fingers. He had guessed the other two questions correctly. Lillian frowned, as if her fun had come to too quick an end at the hands of a spoilsport.

“Yeah, alright…” she drawled out unenthusiastically, her manner of speech straying from formal to casual. Lillian stood up with a faint wail of relief from her chair; before straightening up, however, she picked the ashtray from her side of the rickety table separating them and inched it closer to him. The girl did not want any burning ashes touching the dry wood underfoot. “I’ll show you, but before that there’s something else we’d like you to look at.”

When she opened the door of her study, the living room was devoid of life: no one loitered around the windows like moths drawn to flames, no one remained stuck to couches like beached whales. Lillian could, however, hear the rush of footsteps thundering closer, as if a throng of scientists had heard the opening creak of her door. Pascal stood at the helm of the scientists, engineers and varied wizards, the former holding a double-stitched backpack that looked relatively heavy. He stepped forward, heading for the large counter where Lillian had put her bags of groceries and raw materials. Carefully, he set the backpack on it, emptying its contents one by one with the utmost care.

Explosives. There were half a dozen of them, all incomplete prototypes in various stages of fabrication. Some were simple designs, clay gourds filled to the brim with either black powder or tiny white beads of some chemical compound. One, however, was a jelly of some sort, opaque and packed with wood pulp through its glass container. “We’ve been working on these for some time as side-projects,” Pascal began, eyebrows set in a ponderous frown. “They were however never explicitly meant for mines. We wanted to know if they could be used for this operation, though we have our doubts. Still, if you can suggest any modifications…”

Pascal picked up a clay gourd, one of the pair that smelled heavily of sulfur and charcoal: obviously it now contained the new powder Lillian had brought. “This is SCPN-13. It’s not the conventional type of black powder; it was alchemically enhanced to burn even faster and release a larger volume of gas… but we’re afraid it still has too low a decomposition rate in its current form, and thus, proportionately low brisance.”

He set the explosive down, picking up in its stead one of the pair of gourds packed with pearly chemicals. “Here, we have AN-FX7. This one relies on a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil: it has a much higher decomposition rate, and actually detonates at very high velocities. It would be most effective in confined spaces such as tunnels, perhaps even too much… but being a tertiary explosive, an added chemical booster – basically another bomb – is required to ensure that it works as intended.”

Finally, he picked up the glass vial containing the gelatinous wood fibers, a smile crossing his features. It was pride. “And this here is a vial of NCNG-01: this little one was my idea. Through the nitration of cellulose, dissolution in nitroglycerin and the addition of wood pulp and saltpeter, I was able to devise this lightweight explosive. You can mold it by hand and it’s fairly safe, as it cannot explode without a detonator. It’s a slow burner, but still potent and surprisingly cheap to produce.”

Pascal grew quiet, nervous now that he was done with his presentation. While these were all prototypes, their engineers had all been waiting for an opportunity to field test them. Lillian, noticing his squeamishness, turned to Rayse with enquiring eyes. “What do you think? Any potential for our mission?”

[Rayse Valentino]

Rayse was starting to wish he hadn't jammed his cigarette into the ash tray in Lillian's office before leaving it. While it had provided a decent enough calm to go along with this charade, the way the scientists were treating him like some sort of guru was unnerving. It's not that he wasn't as knowledgeable as Lillian thought, since in his military days he routinely killed time by reading books about demolition imported from Alerar. However, these objects were more advanced than what he read. The gears in his mind started working, relating his years of experience in the practical application of explosives and most notably, the black spidersilk he acquired from Lillian.

He put his hand on the clay gourd filled with what he assumed was the modified black powder Lillian mentioned earlier. It still seemed to be in a rather experimental state, but they clearly wanted to see some results from it. What did they call it? SCPN-13? There was no way he would remember that.

Next, he looked at the AN-FX7, or the white-looking mixture. Another completely forgettable name. He thought about it in terms of his own explosives, in which the fuel oil would be replaced by alcohol, but even then it would have a wide area of effect. He felt the eyes of the researchers bearing down upon him, so he looked up and briefly turned his attention to Jehesir, the only dwarf currently in the room. So he's the banished one. The dwarf seemed to be hiding his enthusiasm, which made him stand out compared to the others. Rayse couldn't help but continue feeling as though there was something more to all this, but he put that notion aside.

The Contractor raised his chin and complimented Pascal, "These are some nice bombs you got here, if they perform as you've described."

"Of course," confirmed Pascal. "AN-FX7 in particular performs quite admirably in our small-scale tests, and--"

"This gel," Rayse interrupted, carefully picking up the vial. "Won't it produce a really bad smell?"

"Oh! Well, it's meant for application to cracks and such, so that shouldn't be an issue."

Rayse shook his head, "It is an issue, since I intend to use it as the decoy." The scientists immediately broke out into a discussion amongst themselves, and Jehesir raised a brow. They originally thought that Rayse would use the white mixture for the tunnel collapses, but The Contractor had something else in mind as he continued, "This is a nice arrangement you've got here, but I don't want to win the award for rock displacement. I want something that's smokeless, odorless, and most of all feels like a natural collapse of a mine tunnel. There's no point in using any of this stuff as a decoy if they'll just take a whiff of the air and know it was an explosive."

The researchers were flustered. Rayse was essentially asking for a bomb that wasn't a bomb. Jehesir seemed to agree with Rayse's assessment, while some of the other scientists contended that the miners wouldn't notice the difference. Rayse looked around the room, his eyes focused on everyone's reactions.

Pascal tapped his nose with his forefinger, trying to think of something that matches Rayse's description, "What about acetone peroxide? It's a rather unstable organic compound that's considered impractical for typical mine demolition, however."

The Contractor smiled, "Perfect. It's odorless, smokeless, and I could use some of the gel to stick it on, and some of that popular spidersilk to create a large enough impact for a tunnel collapse with a small amount of the acetone peroxide powder. The silk's high heat capacity would also evaporate all the water by-product."

Pascal, his composure regained and genuinely intrigued, asked, "The blast produced would likely result in a large release of carbon dioxide. Wouldn't they know it was an explosive from that?"

"Nope," replied Rayse quickly. "There are pockets of gas all over the mines. They get to close and start to feel nauseous, they just assume one of these pockets was released. After all, virtually any odorless gas release would reduce the oxygen content of..." Rayse stopped. He was starting to come dangerously close to relating his actual experiences in the mines. It wasn't that he didn't know what he was talking about, but rather that he was speaking without thinking. He remembered his lazy days of falling asleep in one of those books, then going about his day and not thinking about the contents. Even the formations of his own explosives- his spices as he called them, seemed to come to him naturally. There was no way of knowing how much he knew was real. He decided that this was enough analysis. He could use what was given to him, and that's all there was to it. "Enough. I have everything I need."

Pascal quickly lamented, "What about the SCPN-13 and the AN-F--"

The Contractor quickly stepped in, "Stop with the names already! This black stuff is now Pepper. The white stuff is Salt. I'll use some of the Pepper to ignite the Salt for the demolition of the workshop. It's a Salt'n'Pepper bomb!" All of the jaws in the room collectively dropped simultaneously. "The powder and gel combo I'll use with some shot glasses and punch out a hole through the bottom to stick the fuse in, using the gel to seal up the top and stick it to the surface of whatever I'm blowing up. I'm calling it Chili."

Rayse enjoyed this sort of authority he was having over these people, even if it was short-lived. What he wouldn't do for some reliable manpower, and not just a bunch of thugs and mercenaries looking to stab him in the back at the first opportunity.

"What are you all waiting for? I ain't got all day!"

The scientists scrambled to retrieve the materials that Rayse needed, including Lillian to retrieve some of her special black spidersilk, until there was only Jehesir left in the living room.

"You guys don't seem too worried about leaving me alone with your little princess," Rayse remarked.

"Ha!" Jehesir chuckled. "You think you're the bodyguard? Believe me sonny, she's the bodyguard. That girl can take care of herself, and then some."

Rayse already knew that Lillian wasn't normal, so these words didn't come as much of a surprise. A small time later, The Contractor slung his bag over his shoulder and noticed Lillian walking up to him. She didn't appear to be as much of a psychic to him anymore as someone with an otherworldly sense of clairvoyance. Even Rayse wasn't aware that he knew this much about bombs, yet Lillian could see his potential. It didn't seem so unusual anymore that this little girl was the head of the research department.

"You look like you're ready to go," she said observantly. "Are you sure you don't want to rest from your travels first?"

Rayse was already looking at Jehesir's map when she asked. He stuck it into his bag and looked her in the eyes, ready as ever.

Able to guess her excitement at this point, he said, "Sounds like you're eager to show me this how we're going to do this. Let's get this show on the road."

[Ataraxis]

Lillian gave him one of her dollish grins, quite happy to oblige. “You might want to step back a bit.”

The odd warning had thrown the contractor, but he complied nonetheless, as did the rest of the scientists. They had cleared the couches and coffee tables from the living room, even going as far as removing the oriental hearth rug she had imported from Fallien. Soon, the girl stood alone in a bare chamber, feet apart by her shoulder’s length, immobile save for the folds of her dress and cascades of inky hair that wafted lazily in the sultry summer breeze.

Lillian closed her eyes, arms held inches away from her body. A faint breeze picked up within the room, though the source did not come from beyond the windows ajar. The stronger it grew, the more apparent it became that she was the point of origin. With strained deliberation, the girl unsealed her eyes; they were now aglow with an ethereal glimmer, green and blue like mercurial seas of liquid beryl. A sudden tremor ran through the building, answered by wails of old wood and crackling gypsum. Dust fell away from the ceiling in thin streams, and the clanging of cups and saucers came from one room over. The disturbance then quietly petered out, having lasted no longer than a few seconds.

Silence and stillness reigned on the 7th floor of the Qu’Ellarin Building, and for a moment Rayse loosened with a faint sense of disappointment.

Until the very floor sank three feet before the girl. It did not break, did not collapse or even shatter, but simply sank as if through a quicksand, the wooden boards swirling away into unnatural sinkhole. There was now a gaping darkness in the floor, growing larger and larger even as silent lightning crackled in its whirlpool of shadows and sullen clouds. A deep, cold exhale was released from the unfathomable pit, only furthering its ominous sense of terror and hostility.

Upon seeing it, the last thing someone would feel the need to do is to step inside: it was a sentiment that Rayse clearly seemed to share, from the daunted look she saw plastered on his face. That made her all the more enthusiastic to tell him that was exactly what they were about to do.

“Nigh-instantaneous matter transference via artificial wormhole,” Lillian answered Rayse’s unspoken query in a monotonous voice. “Or, in layman’s terms, teleportation. As long as I have a clear picture of my destination, I can connect two points in Althanas through this burrow in the ground… and I’ve already been to Kachuk.”

Lillian sought out his eyes, eventually meeting his gaze without blinking. “Got everything you need?” Rayse answered with only a nod, his dark eyes still intent on the tempestuous portal that had torn through the floor. “Good. Then, let’s begin!”

Ghastly tendrils of light emerged from the darkness, billowing like the crown of a sea anemone. They extended, reaching for Rayse, who recoiled in alarm. “Let it,” Lillian told him dryly, drawing his attention to her. The vines of light had formed a loose cocoon around the young girl, almost spherical in shape. Rayse cursed as she saw her body break apart into brilliant specks, until he realized they were now coursing through the vines as if they were a conduit, drained away by the vortex at their feet.

He was appeased by the knowledge she had not died, and now loosely understood the purpose and mechanics of this magical… aberration. Yet, he could not help but feel apprehensive at following suit. When he realized that a little girl by seven years his junior had undergone the transfer without the least bit of hesitation, however, a sudden surge of testosterone began pumping through his body. He felt his blood boil, and after slinging Pascal’s backpack over his shoulder, he let loose a cathartic war cry.

“Alright, do your worst!”

One moment, he was watching the tendrils speed toward him, and the next he felt himself overwhelmed by a strange sense of numbness. He no longer felt his limbs, no longer had a sense of balance: all he felt was a frigid numbness that grew colder and colder, as well as the sense that what little he could feel of his own self was being crushed and funneled through the eye of a needle.

When he felt his body was whole again, a great chill coursed through his spine, and it left him shivering for a few seconds. Realizing he could see nothing but darkness, he sniffed about: there was dust and dankness in the stale air, and he recognized at once the despairing odor of the Mines of Kachuk. “Cheery choice of a destination… is there any reason why you picked this impenetrable darkness over the hundreds of others here?”

“See for yourself,” she answered with a chuckle, and Rayse complied begrudgingly. Snapping his fingers, her summoned a larger cone of fire from the tip of his thumb, bringing it to bear high overhead to cut a swath through the gloom. It was a vast cavern of rock, with no signs of miners ever having come here to dig and extract whatever veins ran through the stone. Looking behind him, he noticed they were at the foot of a great natural wall, where a rope ladder hung inconspicuously from the top. “A dry pit?”

“Abandoned since it was found, yes. They could find nothing of worth here with their stone-sense, and it was too dangerous to send miners down here to dig their way to the closest mother lode. They chose a faster route instead, leaving this area in the dust… which is why this is the perfect entry point: no one ever comes here.”

Pointing the torch flame in her direction, Rayse noticed that she had already begun to ascend the rope ladder. Before he could say anything, she interrupted his train of thought, rosy lips set in a teasing grin. “I’m wearing pants under my dress – not that I think you’d be interested.”

[Rayse Valentino]

The experience was horrifying. For a brief moment, he thought some beast had consumed him. His body was like some plaything to forces he would never comprehend. However, once it was over, it was like waking up from a nightmare. He felt as thought day had turned to night. The experience was similar to when he was suffering from the magical sickness. He would often wake up at different times, not knowing where he was or how much time had passed. Since this time he knew the answers to these questions, it brought him a bit of relief.

Rayse grimaced at Lillian's remark, "Hmph." If she wasn't so twiggy, and a few years older, he would certainly be looking at her in a different way. All he could see in her was a young, genius Magi. Her little show earlier solidified his view of her as something more than human, something not grounded to the reality inhabited by everyone else. He was more into the older Secret Agent types anyway, like that Villeneuve girl. Still, Rayse was a man, so a part of him did look up.

After scaling the ladder, his little light seemed to pale in comparison to the darkness. Lillian's almost ghostly visage made him feel like he was in another world. He still felt the shock of going from a hot building in the middle of a noisy city to this eerie stillness with its thin air and their breaths being the only sound to keep them company. In a way, it was relaxing. Nobody to bother him, nothing to get in his way. However, this was far from the truth. He was in a dangerous place, and more importantly he had a job to do. Taking out Jehesir's map from the backpack, he tried to use the flame on his thumb to make out the details, but it was uncomfortable. The fire went out for a moment, and then his entire body ignited, covering everything he was touching but the ground. Even the map seemed to be on fire. Lillian seemed distressed for a moment. It was a reaction similar to when Rayse lit his first cigarette in her presence.

"Don't worry," he assured her. "I only burn what I choose to burn."

The human torch illuminated the abandoned dig site. He got a good view of where he was on the map, and where he had to go. It was only a section of the mines, but it covered a route to where the workshop was hidden. The way that the tunnels were carved out in this great mine looked like an ant farm on a map. Countless inter-connected tunnels, forming innumerable ways to get from starting point to destination. However, the deeper the mines went, the less tunnels there were connecting to each other. Soon there were only a few ways to get to somewhere, sometimes only a couple. At the deepest, darkest part of the mines, there was only one way to get in or out. Lesser miners had harrowing thoughts about venturing off that far. Rayse spotted where he had to go, and lead the way. As he entered the tunnel that lead to higher portions of the mines, the ceiling shrunk to only a few feet above his head, and the walls closed in to allow only a meter of walking space. Rayse decided to take another smoke while he had the chance.

Lillian decided to break the silence, "So... where are you from?"

"Knife's Edge," Rayse answered, a response with no emotion as he continued staring at the map while walking.

"Oh..." said Lillian, acutely aware of the fact that the city known as Knife's Edge was nothing more than rubble. "I grew up in Outlander's Quarters in Irrakam. I guess it's sort of similar, since you were surrounded by barren tundra, and I by endless desert. Have you ever been to Fallien?"

Rayse was silent for a moment, but then said in an equally unfeeling tone, "Yes."

It wasn't that the question gave him pause, but that he wasn't really paying attention to what she was saying. Was it because he considered her a child? Because he wasn't interested in her? Maybe he simply didn't like talking about himself. While Lillian was open and friendly, Rayse seemed like a closed book, his ego and sarcasm a shield against those that get too close to him. The girl was starting to see that talking about business was the only thing that got him worked up. She was disappointed and silent until they got to the active part of the mines. They came to a fork in the underground road, both of the directions being lit up by a series of gas lamps alternated along the floor near the walls. The light was bright enough for Rayse to put out his own light, an act that made it look like an old campfire dying down.

Rayse licked his lower lip and and peeled his eyes off the map to face Lillian, "We have to take the left path here, but the right path is the interesting one. A little out of the way, but it's where the first detonation spot is marked."

He saw it like a triangle. While he and Lillian walked along one side, he would set the explosive to go off at the end of the other side. The patrols would walk along the hypotenuse to investigate it, completely avoiding them. Looking further along the map, Rayse saw another place to put a bomb even more out-of-the-way, to be detonated shortly after they reached the workshop, to make the miners think that whatever was going on, it was moving in a certain direction. There was actually a spot at their current location that was indicated as a third explosion point, to be detonated most of the way through the ransacking. This was likely insurance, to throw the dwarves once again on a wild goose chase in case the workshop pillage took too long. In a way, this seemed like the most important charge, so Rayse decided to see if it was indeed a good spot for it. He looked around, staring at the walls and some places with stone supports carved out of stone. These must be the most vulnerable structures. The support did indeed look aged and out of maintenance, so it was an excellent place to plant a bomb.

He crouched down and took off the backpack, putting the map aside and taking out the materials required for the Chili: an insulated container with acetone peroxide, some shot glasses with holes in the bottom, the black spidersilk, and the vials with the special blasting gelatin. Looking through his fuses, he remembered how long each one took to burn through, and picked one of the longest and thickest ones. Three hours... that should be enough time. If this blows and we're not done yet, it'll be a good sign to finish up. Lillian looked on inquisitively, as both a scientist and someone with an eidetic memory. The Contractor got up for a moment and walked close to the stone support, which already looked like it had a crack in it. He stuck out his right hand, lined up his fingers, and pointed it toward the support. A flame started passing through the hand, a bright blue fire that was highly concentrated and barely extended past his fingers. Like a welding torch, he stuck his hand into the pillar slowly, melting the stone he touched. After moving around a bit, he took his hand out to reveal a small opening large enough for something the size of his fist.

Crouching back down on the ground, Rayse stuck the bottom of the fuse through one of the shot glasses, and carefully poured some of the unstable white powder into it. After putting some strands of spidersilk into the glass with the powder, he sealed it up by emptying a vial of gel into his right hand and molding it into the proper shape to cover up the top of the shot glass and fit into the hole he made. He then slowly picked it up and placed it into the hole, wiping his hands thoroughly with a towel.

Grinning, he said, "Looks like our time limit begins..." He snapped his fingers and the fuse was lit. "Now."

[Ataraxis]

The deeper they traveled down the warrens of Kachuk, the higher the ceilings reached and tunnels broadened. The trek through the mines of had progressively become a hike, and Lillian began showing minor signs of strain as the granite underfoot rose in wide strata, forming in her path a natural stairway of stone. The scholarly girl endured it without protest, her hand running along the rough walls in search of handholds to help her bound over the higher steps without slowing down. She watched in awe as Rayse led the way without a grunt or sweat, his easy swagger boasting the confident step of a mountaineer; she would have felt shamed, if not for her belief that a human torch was likely impervious to perspiration.

From the location of the first charge, they had wandered further south, passing two more forks on their way. They had yet to encounter a dwarven miner or any sign that these passageways had once been traveled, save for the brass lamps that lined the walls and the gas conduits that rode underneath. Jehesir had told her that he had chosen this area of the mines because of its dearth of activity and mining endeavors: his hidden workshop was the only thing of note here for miles, a mere blip in this seemingly endless network of interconnecting tunnels.

It was a few more minutes before they reached the second passage that had been highlighted green on Jehesir’s map. Lillian could not understand at first glance why it had been deemed structurally weak: perhaps it was the ridged ceiling, some underlying fissure or some porosity to the mountain’s crust that only one with stone-sense could discern. Rayse, however, already ignited his hand into a blue-hot blowtorch, having already confirmed the dwarven engineer’s judgment with his own observations.

Just as he began to melt the stone, Lillian crouched to browse through the backpack on the floor. She produced a shot glass, a vial of the blasting gelatin and a pouch of the powdered acetone peroxide. Within the space of a few blinks, she had mimicked Rayse’s previous preparation in exactly the same steps and down to the milligram.

“Godhand wasn’t kidding,” Rayse said after watching her work, his hand still sinking into the molten stone like a hot knife through ice. She passed the shot glass to his free hand, and he brought it up to eye level for a closer inspection. “You really do remember everything.”

Lillian afforded him a smile of thanks, but left it at that. “Did you know him before you two worked together?” she enquired a moment later in an effort to change the subject.

“You mean in that one fight between the New World Order and that other clan? What were they called… Imperial?” Rayse still spoke with that inattentive aloofness, but the girl was glad he was at least sparing her more than monosyllabic replies. Rayse had removed his fingers from the smoking gap, so as to let the sweltering heat dissipate and the molten rock cool down before placing the charge. “Didn’t really know the guy before. Heard of him, and someone I know sparred with him once. That’s about it.”

The hollow was cooler now, and he placed the explosive inside with expert care. “That was enough reason for you to join him in a glorified gang war?” Lillian asked with a carefree chuckle.

“I got to rough up some snot-nosed upstarts, pillage their head office and burn half the place down,” Rayse answered with a mild quirk in his brow, after exhaling a slow cloud of smoke. “To me, that’s a Sunday well-spent.”

Lillian smiled again after a moment of musing, agreeing with the contractor full-heartedly. She had been there as well, fighting against that band of self-righteous hypocrites who walked under the banner of Imperial. They claimed to be virtuous for having once stood up against corrupt merchant guilds of old, even though they had been living in squalor the following years, growing fat and wasteful atop their golden palace on the crops and pittance of the villagers they allegedly protected. While she had entered the fray for reason of irreconcilable politics, however, she had to admit to some enjoyment at chasing those corrupt oafs away.

“Not too sure what you were doing there,” Rayse now wondered as an afterthought. “He never told me what you were to the NWO.” The man let the musing hang in the stale cavern air, letting the girl decide whether or not it was a question. Queasy, Lillian decided not to elaborate: she had no intention of letting him know she had co-founded the group with Godhand.

“Alright, let’s light her up.” Rayse’s voice trawled her back from her jumbled thoughts. Lillian drew to her feet, dusting the folds of her dress industriously. The demolitions expert pressed the smoldering end of his cigarette against the slow-fuse, igniting it: the Chili bomb it would detonate by the time they placed the third charge further south and made their way back north, to the location of Jehesir’s secret workshop. Not only would it serve as a later distraction, but it would also announce the start of their race against the clock.

“One more to go,” they said in unison, nodding at one another while picking up their gear.

[Rayse Valentino]

When Rayse thought about NWO and Imperial, he couldn't help but affirm his own views about certain people. In this world, there was the military power of an army, and the power of the individual. To Rayse, sometimes the latter bordered on the former in magnitude. Godhand must have seen this too, and assembled these special people who by their own right could be considered forces of nature. However, NWO soon outgrew its own limitations, and even Godhand could not control the ambitions of the other powerful members. Rayse felt the same way with his uncle, Teric Bloodrose. He did not know what to make of these other super-powered people, a category that he regretfully had to associate with himself as well. It was almost as if the world itself revolved around the actions of these people. Lillian, while not overtly fitting the bill, seemed to Rayse as one of them. Perhaps the key to controlling the world rested in his own diplomacy toward them, but there was no way to be sure.

He called them The Fateless.

Deciding that the cigarette smoke would give him away in the next part of this job, Rayse flicked it against the nearest wall and continued on. The quiet tunnels were quickly becoming dangerous as they were nearing the active part of the mines. They couldn't afford anymore idle conversation. As they arrived at the next bomb location, Rayse studied the map to make sure it was the right place. He looked around, checked out the walls, the supports, and the ceiling. Not wanting to believe it, he went over it all again, but it didn't add up.

"What's wrong?" whispered Lillian, standing up straight and holding her hands behind her hack.

Frustrated, Rayse kept his voice low, "This is no good. The map says this is the next spot, but this shit is too strong. We're supposed to be exploiting structural weaknesses, but there are none here."

Lillian's head tilted, "Why not just use more bombs?"

"Not only would we collapse more than just this part of the tunnel, but it would be obvious that a demolition took place. I don't know what they would do at that point, but our plan would be in jeopardy."

Both of them knew what their only option was, but neither of them liked it. Since Rayse didn't see anything structurally weak along the way here, that means they had to go further up into the active mines and find a spot there. Treading carefully now, they made their way toward the active mines, Rayse eyeing the walls carefully for anything he could use. They eventually reached an area that was well-lit from not only the sides, but the ceiling as well. It smelled less of stale air and more of the dusty scent of mining operations not too far away. The tunnel branched off towards two directions: right and left. The Contractor looked around, and saw that one of the pillars was good enough for demolition. Instructing Lillian to keep watch for patrols, he walked up to the pillar and ignited his hand, standing in front of it as he considered where to make the first incision. However, there was a problem with this. Since there was actual dwarven traffic up here, they would see the fuse hanging out and possibly stop the detonation. Looking around, there didn't appear to be any alternatives, so he had to improvise.

He walked up to the wall and began cutting into it with his molten hot hand. Quickly assembling his materials, he stuck the Chili bomb inside and put his shortest fuse on it. Making some room deeper inside the rock, he put one of his normal alcohol-based mini-molotovs he brought along for the ride and stuck a long fuse on it. He had to arrange the two bombs carefully, so that the alcohol one was behind the Chili one, and that the explosion of the former would propel the latter into the pillar. The timing was tricky, but he was sure this would work as he lit the alcohol-based one. Covering up the spot by welding the rocks back into place with his fiery hand, he poked a hole to let the air through. The small door of rock would cover up the sound of the fuse burning hopefully. The fuse was shorter than the one on the first explosive, but longer than the one on the second. The explosion of this bomb served as a midpoint to their little excavation. Just as he was finishing up, Lillian looked like she was doing jumping jacks, but only the portion that involved the arms. Rayse realized she was telling him that someone was coming, so he quickly packed his things up and ducked back into the tunnel they came from.

The patrolling dwarf stopped in front of the tunnel the duo ran into with suspicion, but it soon faded as he moved on, oblivious to the burning fuse in the wall adjacent to him. Both of the saboteurs sighed in relief, then continued on toward the workshop. Their little stunt made them lose precious time, so they had to move rather quickly along the map. After several minutes, Lillian peeked around the next corner and spotted a patrol. The bored-looking dwarf had a short red beard, a bandanna covering his head and light leather vestments. He carried a lantern with him. They could not advance with him standing there, so they went down a different tunnel. After turning the next corner, they waited.

There was a deep rumbling far away as the second explosive went off, and the dwarven ears sensitive to the shifting stone perked up. The patrol immediately went off to investigate, allowing the duo to slip by unnoticed. Along the way, Rayse spotted a tunnel in one of the branching paths that made him stop. Even though they had to take the other tunnel, this one was quite unique. Rather than gas lamps along the edge of the floor, there were glowing shards embedded into the walls. Giving off a white light, they looked very familiar to him.

Lillian, noticing that Rayse was not keeping up, looked back, "Hmm?"

The Contractor shook his head and caught up to her. His brows lowered in thought as he ran. Those are Light Crystals, and the only one I know who mined those...

[Rayse Valentino]

"Dvoran! Something has happened in one of the tunnels in the abandoned area east of here."

The dwarfish scout was short on breath as he relayed the information. Sitting in a chair carved out of stone, Dvoran was in charge of the mining operations in this area. He wore a striped business shirt with overalls, fancy black shoes and a pipe in his mouth. His gray beard was entirely flat at the end of it, and his dark eyes held the wisdom of experience. Wearing sunglasses, he was admiring the scenery.

Of course, the scenery being that there was a complete botanical garden in this area. With a large Light Crystal in the middle of the ceiling, the stored up sun's rays shown down on the plants below, giving them life. The entire room was filled with greenery, from the grass to the trees. There were even vines along the walls, growing along the ceiling to reach the bountiful light. While it required quite an upkeep in water, Dvoran had no qualms about it, since he practically lived in these mines.

A year ago, Dvoran was the middle-man to the leader of the previous Light Crystal mining site. He guided two potential buyers, Jame Kaosi and Rayse Valentino, to their leader to negotiate a purchase. Unfortunately for him, the two buyers were actually working for The High Graf to recover evidence of this illicit mining operation. After they managed to get incriminating documents and escape the mines, Dvoran received some of it that explained how his leader was actually skimming off the top and robbing the other miners. While this allowed them all to turn on the leader and escape from punishment as they turned him in, they still had to bury the mining site to maintain their monopoly on this unique resource. They had another area that they could use deeper in the mines that wasn't on the papers yet, so they moved there under Dvoran's new leadership. Due to the volatile nature of the Light Crystals when they were charged up, the High Graf could not attempt a new expedition into the previous dangerous area.

The Light Crystals themselves were originally thought to be worthless. They looked like dim white crystals, opaque in appearance and rough to the touch. However, once brought outside into the sunlight, they started glowing. After some experimentation, they discovered that for each hour out in the sun, they would continue glowing for days even in the absence of any light. A cheap, renewable light source became their biggest export, but the desire of the drow in Ettermire to nationalize the resource meant that their scope of operations was limited.

Dvoran continued sitting, waving his hand to shoo the scout away, "Send some of the men around there to investigate."

"It sounded like one of the older tunnels collapsed--"

"Yes yes," interrupted Dvoran. "And if ye don't get out I'll collapse yer head!"

The scout quickly vacated the area, leaving through a narrow entrance to this underground oasis. He passed by another dwarf entering the garden, one with frizzy white hair connected to his beard that poked out in every direction. Wearing thick spectacles and donning a white coat, his brows lowered in anger as he looked at Dvoran.

"Vat are you doing, Dvoran?! Ze collapse is in ze area of the vorkshop! Zey are after it!"

Dvoran started to get fed up and sighed, "Be quiet, Ferrold. Honestly, I don't know why I keep ye around anymore."

"Zat is because I am ze only one who can maintain ze drill!"

Sometimes Jehesir would blindfold a few technologically-minded dwarves and lead them to his lab to serve as assistants, and Ferrold was one of them. When the community of Kachuck wanted to banish Jehesir, some of his colleagues turned on him to save their own skin. Since then, they have all moved on except for Ferrold, who tried to retrace his steps to find the workshop. However, he found that it was hidden somehow. He managed to create a crude version of Jehesir's drill and used it to buy favor with the nearest mining site, Dvoran's, on the condition that he would help him find the lab. Since then, they've had no progress, and Dvoran eventually stopped devoting resources to what was a fruitless cause to him. He was even starting to doubt this workshop even existed.

Dvoran was not amused by Ferrold's visit, "Ye think everything that happens down here is related to that blasted workshop. If yer so concerned, why don't ye go investigate the collapse yerself?"

Ferrold stammered off to do just that.

[Ataraxis]

The area where the collapse occurred was little more than piled tons of rubble. Ferrold could sense the tunnel itself was uncompromised, and that to stones and boulders that clogged the passage in clouds of dust had come loose from the walls and ceilings. They had known of the invisible fissures that ran underneath the bedrock and of the many constrained forces that evolved within the very rock, but the consensus was that though the structure was weak, it would still hold for centuries to come. Many of the congregated miners who were lured her by the ruckus and rumble now cursed at one another, maddened that their judgment had been erroneous. Ferrold, however, knew better than that.

“Zey must be after it,” the dwarven scientist went on in his furious paranoia. “Jehesir vould not let his precious creations go to vaste for so long!” Jehesir vould not let his precious creations go to vaste for so long!” For months, he had looked, turning over every movable stone in Kachuk twice in search of the engineer’s secret workshop.

A year ago, Jehesir had approached him with an offer, buffeting his ego as the engineer told him he was one of the few minds he deemed prodigious enough to work with him. Ferrold had accepted with glee, and did not complain at being blind-folded: he had hoped to surreptitiously remember the route from his quarters to the workshop by use of his stone-sense. It was, unfortunately, and unfruitful endeavor, as the countless twists and turns had made him lose track of his mental map – or at least, that was what he believed at first. Today, he was now certain that Jehesir had scrambled his senses somehow, making it utterly impossible to trace his steps back to that fabled cornucopia of science and technology.

Still, Ferrold had spent months at a time inside it, working under the command of a bona fide genius. Those had been the most intellectually enriching days of his life, but they were brought to a swift end when the dwarven commune decided to exile his employer. He had no intention of following him to the outside world, and so he quickly found himself with no qualms in testifying against Jehesir, hoping to claim the workshop for himself the moment the dwarf he had admired most was gone. Alas, as was wont of all scorned prodigies, Jehesir had left his life’s work shrouded from undeserving eyes as his final act of rebellion. It had been months since his exile, months since Ferrold began working for Dvoran; yet after all this time, not even a hint of its location had revealed itself before him... and he felt himself going mad.

He turned to face the dozen subordinates he had brought along, a ragtag assembly of demolitions miners and fellow scholars alike. They seemed off put by his wild claims, but Dvoran had ordered them to humor him and help with the investigation. Unbeknownst to him, his leader had only shown this consideration to get rid of him, quite certain that Ferrold would waste away hours in the tunnels while playing sleuth. “Spread out! Search ze rubble, ze walls, anything, everything!”

The nervous dwarf roamed the collapse site as well, sniffing at the stale air so intensely he threatened to hyperventilate. He could almost smell it. The air was different at the heart of the rubble, as if its concentration had suddenly shifted during the cave-in. He spat and coughed after getting carried away, but he knew now: the whole place stank of sabotage. “But proof! I need proof!” he screamed out, to the surprise of the miners gathered here. One of Dvoran’s men then walked up to him, a glimmer of confusion in his small, beady eyes. “Have ve proof?”

“Well erh, this was out of the way on a wall… almost missed it, really, but I got a whiff as I passed it.” He extended a thick-gloved hand, and Ferrold saw in the folds of the cured leather a most fascinating piece of evidence. “I think it’s one of those cigarettes, those things some humans supposedly use instead of pipes? Recently lit, too.”

“Bring it to Dvoran,” Ferrold muttered lowly. The dwarf seemed hesitant, but he knew the implications. No foreigners were currently allowed in the Mines of Kachuk, and the presence of something no self-respecting dwarf would ever consider smoking was proof enough of an intruder. With one last look at the debris, he turned on his heels and bolted down the tunnels leading back to the underground gardens.

Ferrold was positively smiling. There was much more to it than a mere intruder, and upon seeing the cigarette butt, Dvoran would know as well. His boss had droned on and on about the operatives that forced him to shut down his most lucrative mining site, and how one of them was an avid smoker of these tobacco rolls. Rayse Valentino might have made him the leader of this operation, but the human had still dealt him a most crippling blow. “Rayse, Rayse… zo nice of you to come back. Dvoran is going to vant to see you.”

He felt it in his heart, a sudden shift in the very stone of the mines. Instants later her felt the tremors in his feet and heard the roar of a rockslide. The miners gathered here were cursing again, and half picked up their gear to head further south. Ferrold, however, was now certain of Rayse’s goal. He was distracting them all, using these explosions as diversions, leading throngs of angry miners away from their destination, away from Jehesir’s workshop, which he knew was hidden somewhere in the north.

Ferrold gathered his men, and north they went as well. Rayse was a cunning man, but he was still just a man: even with a map, no one could navigate these mines better and faster than a dwarf with only greed on his mind.

[Ataraxis]

When the southernmost charge blew, Rayse and Lillian were well on their way to Jehesir’s fabled workshop. The tunnels in the north were derelict things, with not even an ounce of style or architectural flair, only stalagmites and stalactites as well craggy walls hewn roughly from the mountain’s flesh. Rayse lit the way with his flames as there were no gas lamps to be seen, furthering the notion that no dwarf had ever set foot in these recesses of the mines, and Lillian took it as a good sign; after all, the dwarven genius had told her no one had ever come close to his secret den without his invitation. The moment she began to recognize the landscape markers he had given her, such as the teeth-like curtain of limestone along the rock and the rough tapestry of speleothems upon it, Lillian knew they were only steps away from the doorway.

The tunnel ended in a cul-de-sac, as if what miner had dug it decided to up and go with a shrug of their shoulders, leaving it incomplete. Rayse seemed nervous, finding the blind alley unnerving as he knew this was where Jehesir had marked the spot. He looked to the girl at his left in search of an answer, but she ignored his look of concern, too focused upon the dead end. Lillian then walked up to the abutting wall on the left, lilywhite fingers brushing the cold stone until her index stopped on a deep groove.

Smiling, she produced thin rod of silicon, small enough to fit in her palm, and its round edge was protruding with countless metal bittings of varying lengths and sizes. The rod slid into the groove as would a key, and the girl began a sequence of quarter turns, pushes and pulls until a deep click resounded from the dead-end. In seconds, the rock wall seemingly melted away, peeling off like falling sand to reveal a bolted double-door, with a single keyhole in its heart. Rayse sighed in relief, and his confident grin returned as he appraised the towering gate before him.

“Thankfully, we won’t have to blow it open,” Lillian said as she wandered up to him, smirking widely. “No need to estimate how many condiments it would take to blast through these.” She flicked her hand, tapping the rod against the metal instead of sliding it into the keyhole. Eighteen arrhythmic taps brought a shudder to the metal, and the panels groaned as they were pulled open from the inside until it stopped with a resounding clank. “The keyhole was a red herring: if anyone ever happened to use it… they would somehow wake up hours later, miles south of here, covered in fire ale and vomit. According to Jehesir, dwarves never question inebriation.”

Lillian also noticed that an almost imperceptible whirring had come to stop, something that had given her pause. She made her way into the workshop to investigate, but was momentarily blinded by the sudden rush of light. The chamber was vast, and the lofty walls were covered from top to bottom with fragments of crystals that illuminated the whole room. There were rows of immense stone slabs, each an experimental station for the teams that once worked on whichever wild project would seed within Jehesir’s mind on a daily basis. Lillian recognized the prototypal drill lying on one of the plinths, but there were countless other marvels she could not even understand upon first sight.

Lillian turned to face the doorway from the inside, searching the wall on the right for a panel of some sort. She pulled it open, and saw a device hidden within, noticing it was inactive. “We have a problem, Rayse.”

“What is it now?” Rayse shouted after a sigh as he rushed inside to appraise the situation.

“We’re back on the map,” Lillian said hurriedly. “Jehesir’s shroud isn’t just a fake wall. To prevent the dwarves that work with him from ever finding this laboratory on their own, he uses this device to scramble their stone-sense. It’s been active al this time, keeping other dwarves from wandering close here as well… but the whole place is running low on energy. There’s not enough for it anymore. I can’t turn it back on.”

“Then we’ll just have to hurry,” he answered quietly. “Start digging our way out. I’ll place the last charges to blow this joint up.”

A detonation from the west drew their attention: it was the first charge they had placed upon arriving to Kachuk, and it now announced the three-hour mark. While Rayse saw it as a sign to hurry, Lillian sighed in relief: closing her eyes, she began burrowing a tunnel through space, linking Jehesir’s workshop to the their headquarters in the Qu’Ellarin Building.

An ethereal glow escaped from her sealed eyes, and the ground opened up like a swirling sinkhole. Within a minute, the same tendrils of light and energy arced out, and the wormhole had stabilized. Lillian was sweating now, but she wasted no time and dashed to the far end of the room. There waited a great ring of unknown alloy, taller than five men and standing on a pedestal of sorts, and the girl knew this was it. This was the Ring of the Sun.

She knit her fingers, cracking them as her arms stretched outward. Her eyes took on a blood-red taint behind the glow of ether, and she crouched down, picking up the ring by its platform. The three thousand pounds of metal groaned as she roared and lifted the device up, sprinkling dust over the floor as it wobbled upon her willowy arms. With balanced steps, she made her way to the wormhole, dropping the machine at its edge with a great rumble. In the blink of an eye, the glowing tendrils had wrapped about its form, poised to begin its deconstruction on a molecular level.

“Now, to ransack everything else,” she muttered with a huff and a puff, running about the workshop to gather everything small enough to be thrown into the gateway. “How’s it going on your end, Rayse?”

[Rayse Valentino]

A veritable goldmine, he thought. Devices of various intrigue surrounded him, taunting him with their secrets. With everything covered in a thin sheet of dust, the various materials and multi-shaped inventions made him feel like he was in another world. He was momentarily sidetracked, however, with the lighting of the room. Same as the tunnel he saw before, the walls were embedded with Light Crystals, although they were much dimmer than the ones he saw before. He tried desperately to make sense of them. For example, why were they here? Then, it suddenly dawned on him that this is where the discrepancy in Dvoran's finances were. His leader was selling Light Crystals to Jehesir on the sly, and because the delivery was deeper into the mines they were none the wiser.

Relieved that he probably wasn't in some sort of nightmare in which Dvoran and Jehesir were allies, he went along and set up the bombs. Since there was no extraneous variables in detonation, he had the scientists set them up in advance so all he had to do was place them and light the fuses. He put three of them in the centers of the northern, southern, and eastern walls, respectively. They came out of a door that was along the western wall. The explosion from these Salt'n'Pepper bombs meant that this lab would never have eyes set upon it ever again.

He cracked his neck and said, "We're all set baby, now let's clear this place out and get outta here."

Meanwhile, Ferrold had lost half of his expedition force to the third explosion. Insisting that they send some to investigate it, the dwarven researcher was left with only four able dwarves, armed with muskets and ready to shoot any intruders on sight. Ferrold knew that he was going in the right direction. He couldn't explain it, but suddenly his stone-sense had returned to him in force and he the location of the workshop was clear as day to him.

Trying to search for their raison d'être, the Ring of the Sun, Rayse couldn't differentiate it from any other thing in here. All he knew about it was that it used solar energy to... electro... something. It sounded pretty important, but not really in the way that would be useful to him. Maybe for whatever wild inventions they're cooking up at home, but that's about it. It certainly wasn't as interesting as the hole of pure darkness coming from the center of the room. Now that he wasn't in shock from being flung through time and space, his mind was focused on that portal. Near-instantaneous transportation between any two places Lillian had visited? What he wouldn't give to be able to do that. Maybe he could convince her to run errands for him between continents.

Regardless, all he had to do now was strip the place clean of anything that wasn't part of the mines and put them next to that wormhole thing. The way it scooped up all of it like a burrowing spider that spotted its prey never ceased to amaze him. He went to the northern slabs to finish up looking for things they may have missed when he looked back and spotted Lillian moving a large stone cupboard over to the wormhole. That thing must have weighed a few hundred pounds, but Lillian was pushing it along as though it was made of straw. The scene was a little odd, but out of the corner of his eyes he spotted something that made his eyes widen. There were four dwarves standing at the entrance, with their muskets primed and aimed at Lillian.

Armed with only a "Watch out!" from Rayse and a less audible "No! You fools!" from Ferrold in the tunnel, Lillian quickly circled around to the front of the cupboard as the dwarves fired at her. A couple of the bullets hit the stone furniture and fell to the ground harmlessly, but the other two missed their target and kept flying towards the eastern wall, hitting one of the embedded Light Crystals and causing it to burst into an array of sparks. The sparks landed on the bomb, setting it off. Thinking quickly, Rayse made a mad dash towards Lillian and tackled her, both of their bodies turning orange and disappearing into a stream of fire. The wormhole was covered up by the explosion from the bomb, so the stream of fire that was Rayse and Lillian arced along the southern wall and headed for the exit. They flew past the dwarves and glided along the tunnel at high speed until Rayse's ability finally gave out and they found themselves on the ground in a lighted part of the tunnel. The Contractor got up and dusted himself off, leaving a bewildered Lillian on the stone floor. The explosion sent shock waves throughout the mines, alerting anyone in a half-mile radius to their exact location. A force of air blew past them from the blast, but at this distance it was not enough to knock Rayse off his feet.

"Yeah," said Rayse. "That was close."

"What was that?!" questioned Lillian, springing up like a page from a pop-up book with an exasperated expression on her face. She wasn't as much angry as she was utterly confused by what just happened. She felt like she just became a fly, her view like looking through a fish-eye lens, the tunnels of the mine passing by her like a blur before she abruptly ended up here. "How? When? Where? Why?!"

"Will you pipe down?" replied Rayse, noticing that his breathing had become heavy. That last move of his was exhausting. "I don't even know myself. Sometimes you just gotta do it."

Lillian wasn't amused by the double entendre, although maybe she deserved it from her earlier comment about him looking up her skirt. Their little conversation was interrupted by an enraged Ferrold walking out of the dark tunnel.

He screamed at them, "How could you! All zat effort... vasted!" He was surrounded by a semi-transparent sphere of light that shielded him from the explosion. In his hand he held a small orb with a Light Crystal at its center. It was another invention from Jehesir's former workshop that he recreated. "Vat have you done vith it?! Tell me now!"

Ignoring Ferrold, Rayse turned to Lillian, "Well, what are you waiting for? Make another wormhole thing and get us out of here!"

"I can't," she answered with disappointment. "It will take me another hour to have the mental strength to do it again."

"You're kidding me."

Lillian shook her head.

Without warning, Rayse and Lillian were now in a tricky situation. They couldn't go back to the abandoned dig site to hide out, because Rayse blew up the only way into them. Their only choice was somehow getting out of the mines on foot. With their location revealed to just about everyone, and their intentions possibly known as well, that meant that any of their escape paths could become potential death traps as the miners could collapse any of the tunnels on top of them. There was only one option available to them.

"Run!"

[Ataraxis]

Without a moment’s waste, Lillian did just that. There was no time to engage Ferrold: his personal shield device was too troublesome to deal with, and the dwarven patrols would have the time to swarm in and surround them by the end of that fight. Rayse and Lillian turned heels and ran, ducking into the nearest forking tunnel just in time to evade the stone-shattering shots of the angry dwarf’s blunderbuss.

Her legs burned as she sprinted down the widening corridors, with an eye looking back over her shoulder to keep track of the trigger-happy scientist on their tail. Lillian focused her mind while extending her arm backwards, drawing a swift arc with her index finger in the air. A single thread of dark silk shot outward, each end sticking to the foot of two high-rising pillars of limestone. She repeated the process time and again, until the path behind her was riddled with triplines.

Just as Ferrold came into view, Rayse and Lillian broke away from one another to avoid the scatter shots, taking cover behind columns of stone. They heard his shrill gasp as his feet caught the silk threads as if they were wires of steel, and he fell over in a heap of groaning pain, giving the two enough time to run straight for the next connecting tunnel while ignoring his storm of oaths and curses.

Lillian was alas feeling fatigue set in much faster than expected, and she cursed herself for forgoing daily calisthenics: how many times had her life depended on her stamina before, and how many more times would she need to risk death before taking on the healthy habit of exercise? She chided herself for that as she ran down a set of granite stairs, beating herself up over losing the last wormhole during the laboratory’s destruction. Hopefully, it had closed on the other end before any of the rubble could make its way into the seventh floor of the Qu’Ellarin Building… but there was no way of knowing that.

Moreover, her biggest concern was that she would not be able to attempt creating one for another hour, the key word being ‘attempt’: in such a weakened state, she would need three hours of rest for a surefire connection between Kachuk and Ettermire. That had been the time delay between the setting of the first charge and its detonation while they had ransacked the workshop, that is to say the exact amount of respite necessary between the last two wormholes she had created. In these circumstances, however, she truly doubted they would last that long.

“The closest exit is miles from here,” Lillian managed to utter between heavy huffs and puffs, wiping away the beads of sweat over her brows. “Do you know of any alternative?”

“I do,” he answered curtly, from lack of time to elaborate rather than a rude need to snub her. “I’m leading us there, so hang tight and don’t fall behind.”

The clatter of armor and dragging metal thundered closer, looming in like a dangerous storm. The two cursed their luck, knowing they were seconds from rubbing elbows with a heavily-armed patrol of dwarves. “Hold your breath!” was Rayse’s only warning.

He inhaled deep, and exhaled smoke. The white plumes expanded into an obscuring fog, overwhelming the length of the tunnel and hiding their positions to the squad of patrolmen. Their hoary grunts and coughs could be heard, as could the cocking of their flintlocks. They were reticent to fire, however, not knowing whether their own might get caught in the hail of bullets. They called out for their allies in dwarvish, but in that lull of doubt, Lillian had made her move.

Steel rang like an orchestra of gongs, crackling and breaking as if struck by a siege ram. The dwarves cried out as the wind was knocked from their chests, and half a dozen thuds followed the ensuing silence. Metal still scraped the rocky ground with every spastic twitch of the knocked out dwarves, but Lillian called out from the smoke with a series of coughs. “Clear!”

Rayse rushed forward, exiting the shroud of smoke alongside the scholarly girl. He had nearly tripped over the twitching carcasses of two patrollers, but he quickly resumed his hurried pace. Lillian followed next to him, now strangely able to keep up with his gait when she had been fighting for breath only moments ago. It was then that he noticed the scraped skin on her knuckles, and the spray of blood drops that trickled along her phalanges. He looker her in the eye with concern, realizing that the glacial blue of her irises had taken the same hue as the taint on her lilywhite fists… the same hue as the stern gaze of the mercenary Godhand.

“Well shit,” he said with a mixed tone of surprise and amusement. That gargantuan strength of hers had come from him. “This explains that,” he said out loud, though the explanation had come with more questions. Just how did she get his powers? If anything, he was certain Lillian was not the mercenary’s daughter, but then what was she?

Rayse was trawled from his musing when he heard the muffled screams of Ferrold’s strange dwarven accent echo from behind, and they both quickened their sprint. “We might need to plow through some more before we get there…”

“Alright,” she answered coldly to his unspoken question, the blood in her eyes darkening ever so slightly. “I’ll make it quick.”

[Rayse Valentino]

Rayse was only speaking half-truths when he claimed to know the way out of here. From their current position, he had no idea, but if he had some hint of where he was then he could use the one exit he knew. Jame Kaosi and himself had retreated through this exit and closed it behind them, but with all these explosives it wouldn't be a difficult matter to reopen.

It looked like they temporarily lost Ferrold in the wake of their assault, but Rayse felt far more winded than usual. The muscles in his legs ached as he ran, each step sending a message of pain up his spine. He couldn't exactly channel the paragon of strength like some people. Since he felt fine before the workshop blew up, he attributed this pain to his little stunt that saved both of them. Such exertion also carried the extra consequence of weakness in his abilities. In short, he couldn't save them again from a similar circumstance, such as a mine collapse.

As they ran through the tunnels, passing the dimly-hit walls of reddish brown earth, Rayse started to feel nostalgic. The halls they passed through slowly become wider and wider, a sign that they were moving in the general direction of the grand entrance in Kachuck. It was hard to differentiate one tunnel from the next, but he looked around and stopped as he discovered something on the ground. Lillian paused as well, looking behind to discern what caught The Contractor's attention.

Before she could ask, he said, "We're on the right track." On the ground between them was a large scorch mark. Lillian had her own preconceptions about Rayse's history with this place, but it was never so glaringly apparent as now that the man had been here before. The scorch mark was where his bag full of molotovs exploded last time he was here.

His mind was side-tracked by the memory for a moment, but as the two turned the corner into the multi-branching part of the tunnel they quickly stopped in their track as Dvoran stood before them and said, "Hold it!" With several muskets aimed at the two, they were about to do something desperate when Dvoran exclaimed, "I'm not going to shoot! I just want to talk."

Rayse relaxed a little, but his muscles were tensed and ready to move if he saw any of those fingers reach for the trigger, "Nice to see you too, Dvoran."

The tunnel split off into three different paths, and they had to take the left one. Once they were through there, they were home free. Dvoran had taken a guess to their trajectory and he was right, but how did he know it was Rayse?

Waving a cigarette butt in the air, Dvoran lamented, "Never thought I'd see yer face around here again. Ye must have balls of dehlar." He flicked the spent cigarette near Rayse's feet.

The Contractor was trying to figure out why the dwarf didn't just shoot him, but then realized that there had to be something he knew that gave his life value. He relaxed some more, putting on his trademark grin as he looked down on the dwarf. Despite not wanting Lillian to know about any of this, he figured it was too late for discretion.

Rayse shrugged, "Don't know why you'd feel that way. I exposed your corrupt boss." He also noticed Dvoran's fancy attire, "Doesn't look like you're doing too badly there, either."

"Hmph," said Dvoran, taking a drag off the pipe he brought with him. "Ye ruined months' worth of work. Ye put dozens of miners out of work. Worst of all, ye lied to me. A businessman's word is law."

Rayse looked off to the side while Lillian stood blinking somewhat behind him, her eyes as big as dinner plates as she absorbed the information.

"I wasn't kidding when I said that I wanted to make a deal," he replied, looking back at Dvoran. "It was your side that fucked up. Not only did the High Graf know about your little operation, but they had a good way of getting inside. If it wasn't me, it would've been someone else. I ain't gonna walk away out of principle."

Dvoran had heard enough of Rayse's excuses, "Only out for yerself, eh? Let me get to the point: I've had a little nagging little bird poking holes in my brain over some secret workshop I didn't give two pints about. There's only one thing there of any worth to me, and that's the Ring of the Sun. I heard the explosion; Ye wouldn't come out all this just to blow it up. What did ye do with it?"

"Sounds like a lot of effort for some toy," Rayse quipped.

"A toy? Do ye even know what it does? It's instantaneous transportation! If I had my hands on it, I could avoid the costs of smuggling and shipping altogether! I would make millions- no, billions overnight! Where is it?!"

Rayse was stunned. A dark temptation set in, fueled by the same motives as Dvoran. If he had such a device, the logistics issues between Corone and Salvar would be solved completely.

A bruised Ferrold covered in dirt turned the corner and pointed his own musket at Rayse, his finger about to pull the trigger when he saw that Dvoran had cornered the two, "Vat did I tell you! If you listened sooner, we vouldn't be in zis situation!"

Great.

Rayse thought about what he was going to do as Dvoran noticed his changed expression, "Ye didn't know, did ye? Looks like I'm not the only one to get hoodwinked. What say ye? Tell me where it is, and I'll cut ye into the deal."

The Contractor looked at Lillian, his eyes disapproving, and then back at Dvoran with a renewed vigor, "At least let me have a smoke before I go betraying anyone. I don't want to have a bad taste in my mouth."

Dvoran seemed amused and allowed him that request. Rayse went into his bag, which made the almost-panicky Lillian confused since she knew that his smokes were in his pocket.

After fiddling around for a moment, with his hand still in his bag he looked up at Dvoran, "Here, catch." He quickly tossed out a lit tar-based mini-molotov, and as Dvoran caught it he noticed it was lit and looked like some sort of stuffed shot glass.

In a moment, he realized what it was and screamed, "Damn ye!" as he attempted to discard it before it exploded and spread noxious black fumes everywhere.

Muskets went off, dwarves fell over, and Dvoran pulled out a flintlock pistol he had stashed away in his suit, pointing it to where Rayse was as he coughed from breathing in the choking black smoke. He thought he saw The Contractor's figure and shot at it, but saw in horror as the bullet passed through Rayse's forehead. The shot passed through a bullet-shaped funnel of fire that closed up and made the dwarf think that The Contractor was made of fire himself. Rayse stepped forward and brought his face close to Dvoran's, his looming figure descending upon the dwarf like a dark beast of hell.

He smiled, putting his hands on Dvoran's shoulders, "I never want to see you again, Dvoran."

With that, he slammed his fist into Dvoran's stomach and watched him keel over in pain. Knowing that Lillian was only going by where the dwarves were standing due to her eidetic memory, Rayse followed the latest scream and grabbed Lillian's arm in the smoke, pulling her into the leftward tunnel and running. He let go as she took a deep breath, coughing and nearly gagging. The smoke didn't affect Rayse, since he wrapped one of her strings of spidersilk around it. For some reason, that made the entire explosion a part of him, as if the flame he used to light it extended all the way to the blast. This realization played a part in his next decision as they reached a dead end.

"Did we make a wrong turn?!" she asked in shock, still uncertain whether Rayse was still on her side or not. She looked at him and noticed that he was already smoking another cigarette that he lit as they were running.

"No, this is it. Beyond this wall is the exit." He assembled a Chili bomb from his bag hastily, putting in nearly triple the amount of white powder he used for the other bombs. Sticking some strands of spidersilk in it before plugging it up with some gel, he addressed Lillian, "You probably already know this, but your strings seem to make anything they augment magical, right?"

"Well, yes, but in any case we're too close to the blast radius!"

He lit the fuse and put the Chili bomb in his left hand as he crouched down and pulled up his right pant leg, pulling out his knife Kapteyn from its sheath strapped around his ankle.

"Get behind me," he said, holding the knife up with his right hand as he tossed the bomb with his left.

After all this, Lillian decided to believe him. She felt that while her understanding of him was limited, he didn't seem like the suicidal type. The bomb collided with the wall of rock, exploding and sending a fiery torrent that spanned the entire tunnel towards the two. A chill ran down both of their spines as Rayse lifted up his knife and held it out front, the blade pointed in the direction of the coming wave of fire. The fire condensed as it got closed, somehow pulled into a dense flaming cylinder that went into the blade of the knife with ferocity. The Contractor stood his ground as the massive rush of air blew past him, digging his shoes into the floor as he watched the display. White, orange, yellow, and red flowed into the knife's blade, the alternating colors causing him to squint from the brightness. After a few moments, the last of the fire went into the knife, causing it to glow a deep red color. The knife was burning hot, but it was within a range that Rayse could tolerate.

"Magicide?" Lillian asked. "Just tell me next time! You nearly gave me a heart attack!"

Rayse smiled, his expression looking like genuine relief, "I'm Sorry." Lillian was a bit taken back by how sincere that sounded, especially coming from a guy like him. Light flooded the tunnel from the outside, signaling their imminent freedom.

[Ataraxis]

“Search every nook and cranny in the mountainside. Search every hill, every tree, every bush – I don’t care! Do whatever ye need to do, as long as ye find them and bring ‘em to me!”

Dvoran’s stentorian bellow could be heard all the way from the still smoking hole that had now marred the southern versant of Kachuk, to the sparse forested growths that lined the ground half a mile away from the mountain’s base. He had dedicated all of his underlings to this search, though their numbers had become quite scarce, many having dropped half-dead to Rayse’s flames or Lillian’s fists. In the hour and a half that ensued, the two escapees had put as much ground as they could between the mines and themselves, hiding in the shadows and the underbrush, knocking out strays and stragglers whenever possible. The dwarven search party had by then thinned down enough to provide them some respite, and they both stopped to hide in a particularly thorny patch of berberis shrubs.

“You were never planning on telling me what this Ring did, were you?” Rayse whispered out of the blue, his vexation clear in his voice. “Did you think I’d steal it if I knew? I can’t even lift the damn thing!”

“What? I was explaining how it worked, but you were giving me that ‘oh, great, she’s talking mumbo-jumbo techno-babble now’ look halfway through! And if you were that interested, you could have just asked. What does it even matter to you what it does anyway?”

“I’m a businessman! As much as I hate to support something that came from Dvoran, the bearded bastard said it best: that kind of device could save a guy like me millions overnight!”

“Millions?” Lillian repeated skeptically, squinting an eye in the dark. “Godhand told me you worked for the Company, but you make it sound like you’re in charge.”

“I damn well should, since I damn well am,” he murmured with a tone so acerbic he might as well have hissed and spat poison. Lillian was baffled to see Rayse, a man who could keep his cool consistently while under fire, burn up with such intensity over matters of money and logistics. Seeing this, she did not think any less of the man; in fact, she appreciated the flare up, and understood his situation now, as the leader of such a high-standing organization. Lillian had realized that in his shoes, she would have felt equally used… in more ways than one, she could relate to him.

They heard a crackle nearby, and both wondered in chiding regret if they had been bickering too loudly. A long, fretful silence ensued, but nothing came. Lillian wondered if a dwarf had surprised them talking and was keeping quiet in order to get the drop on them both, but she remembered they were not known for being this silent and stealthy. Taking advantage of her unnaturally keen vision at night, she scanned the immediate area, and found no alarming presence. A few hundred feet further, however, she could make out the wayward glints of light crystals illuminating the emerald crowns of distant trees.

“Look. In light of this information, I have no problem revising our previous deal. I think we’d both benefit from that, actually.” She slowly made a move backwards out of the shrubbery, and made a sign for Rayse to follow. “In the meantime, let’s not get caught like second-rate thieves who couldn’t agree on their respective cuts, alright?”

With a low grunt, the contractor agreed and followed suit. They made their way out of the berberis patch at a crawling pace, wary not to disturb the leaves or snap their twig-like branches in their escape. “How long till you can make your next wormhole, anyway?”

“A matter of minutes. It’d be safest to wait another hour, but the risks are… just about negligible at the two-hour mark.”

“Just about? You see, that’s the kind of information I could do without,” Rayse muttered under his breath, sighing as he remembered just how uncomfortable his last foray into a wormhole had been. To think that that had been the safe part made him see the girl as potentially mad – which he realized with great alarm that it was in keeping with the ‘deranged scientist’ vibe he had gotten from her crew.

When he looked up a minute later to be sure he was not about to run headfirst into a tree, Rayse noticed that Lillian had frozen stiff. It was a squint later that he saw the same thing she had, looming closer and closer in stubby strides. “Ah, hell.”

They were Dvoran’s underlings… who had been withdrawing from the search until they came upon the two by pure coincidence. Lillian cursed herself for not realizing that they had put most of their crystals away after giving up, unknowingly shrouding themselves in the darkness and thus from her eyes. The lucky search party circled them, each member bringing their musket to bear. The ominous sound of cocking firearms reached their ears, but Lillian was still not moving. He hissed for her to hurry, to start the process now, even if it were too late.

He had not realized that she had already begun.

He felt the wind pick up, and a tremor in the earth. He could not see her eyes, but the ethereal glow they released were obvious even from behind. Then, the grass and soil opened up before them like a swirling hellmouth, crackling with pulsing arcs of power.

“Jump,” was the only word he heard before she hopped and fell into the abyss. She had not waited for ghastly tendrils to come and break her down into glowing particles. He remembered she had thrown to smaller objects in the laboratory, but his train of thought ended there. The firing of the muskets was almost faster than his transformation into fire – he had avoided becoming a human sieve by a hair’s breadth. The dwarves were baffled, but they were already reloading their weapons.

Just as his body returned to flesh, Rayse’s mind went blank. Ignoring all logic and instinct, he leapt into the chasm below... and even as he vanished, his roar of confusion echoed under the night.

[Ataraxis]

“Never again.”

Rayse was plopped down on the same couch the scientists had been lazing over earlier this day. His eyes were closed, his forehead was beading with sweat and his breath was haggard – it was as if he had just woken up from the worst nightmare one could have in a lifetime. Lillian looked at him with a slant to her eyebrows that could signify passive concern, but her attention was, much like the other gathered scientists there, otherwise focused on the massive ring that now stood proudly in the living room, its crest almost touching the distended ceiling.

The floor there had been reinforced over the months to support its monumental weight, if only to avoid the off chance of it crashing through the wood and falling seven floors down. This, however, would not be its permanent resting spot: once its design would be complete, she would move it again to a more open a spacious outpost beyond the outskirts of Ettermire, out of sight and out of mind.

“Never,” he continued to himself, barely audible to the girl. Had she not known better, she would have thought the contractor ailed with a rather serious sickness, but she knew firsthand just how mentally exhausting travel through a wormhole as an actual body of solid matter could be. From the looks of it, the shock of the aftereffects was at least three times worse than his first time, when he was properly broken down into molecules by the tendrils. “Never again,” she heard him end with a vibrant sense of finitude.

“So, I’m guessing you’d be ecstatic to hear good news at this point?” Rayse’s scoff showed that something like that was obvious enough. “Most relevant to your current situation, then… Jehesir tells me a trip through the Ring is actually quite comfortable in theory – that’s mainly why we needed the Ring in the first place, even with my ability to create a wormhole on my own. Moreover, even if I were to dissect myself, I doubt we would actually be able to reverse-engineer my process, which basically renders the whole idea moot.”

She could see a twofold gleam in his eyes upon hearing those words. The first was unbounded relief, while the second was piqued interest. “Are you implying the revised deal entails my having regular access to this thing?” he managed to ask, the wan look of his face visibly fading as his business instincts took over.

“Not this one per se, but once it’s completed, you can have one of the first finalized products. We’ll provide you with the workforce to build it if necessary, though we’ll have to oversee the whole process then. That is, if you’ll agree to the terms of my side of the deal.”

“Let’s hear it,” Rayse said simply, throwing his head back as he sought to shoo the dizziness away.

“Simply put, a sharing of assets to be later chosen and discussed. That, of course, would revolve around a prior business partnership between the Company and the House of Sora.”

Rayse’s ears perked up at that. “The House? So this whole place is a branch of that?” Realization dawned upon his face, as if he had been wondering how a laboratory of this sort could operate without obstruction from the government. The House was basically a financial mercenary, providing state of the art products and services to countries in need to accelerate their progress. He had heard that the House had been focusing on Salvar lately, due to the events of the civil war there, but they seemed to have enough faculty and facilities to positively affect the development and reconstruction of two countries without a drop in efficiency. To see them as a driving force for both Alerar and Salvar would be exaggerated, but their contributions were without a doubt substantial.

“Yes,” Lillian answered without pomp or flair. “This department is the Aleraran branch of the House of Sora’s Research and Development Society, otherwise known as Lodge Vespera.”

“Well, I know you’re the head here, but can you really make that kind of decision for the House?” Rayse asked without opening his eyes. He was feeling better now, but the ceiling still had the annoying tendency to rotate back and forth a few degrees. It was only a moment later that he registered a collective snort from Pascal and Jehesir. He opened his eyes at that, seeking some explanation from the sixteen-year-old.

“I believe so,” Lillian said matter-of-factly, breaking her far-off gaze to meet Rayse’s dark eyes. “Being the current Matriarch of the House.”

Rayse opened his eyes wide at that, but the surprise lasted only an instant. He remembered that nothing he learned about this girl should ever shock him again, be it her memory, her powers, or even her previously known and newly found positions. This revelation actually made things much easier.

“I accept your terms,” he answered calmly, before adding a final note. “As long as we save the lengthy discussions for after I decide If I’m gonna upchuck my breakfast or not.”

This is part 2 in a series of three HoS quests, as well as a joint HoS/Company PG quest. They are all for the purpose of creating an IC network of gateways between acquired HoS and Company bases, allowing ease of travel for its members and faster shipping. While the Large Rings themselves can technically already work using a previously acquired HoS spoil, it will only be put into effect once the third and final component is acquired.

House of Sora Spoils


The Ring of the Sun - A prototypal device whose function is the creation of a stable wormhole between another ring and itself. While it functions in theory, its energy consumption is massive and cannot continuously function using only the rare Light Crystals found in Kachuk. As such, two other components are required to make the device function as intended. The first is a massive power source (The Stellar Diamond, a House spoil acquired in Empathy for the Stars (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?t=20172)). While Rings can connect to each other with only that, a third component is required for members of the House to use the device from any location in the world: a miniaturization process to create portable rings (which is in the process of acquisition in Bottled Moon (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?t=20535)). Once all three components are acquired, the House will be equipped with a Ring in each of its major IC bases, and the pendants of each member will be upgraded with a miniature ring device that allows them to open a gateway to these Base Rings, and only these Rings. The portable rings will be limited to one use per day.

Jehesir's Workshop - The Lodge Vespera now contains Jehesir's new workshop and all of his old works in progress. For now, this mainly serves to explain any potential storyline plot revolving around one of his prototypes for future HoS quests. Specific prototypes that he currently recovered will still need to be acquired in quests to be used as finalized products by members of the House.

Lillian's Spoils

Once the miniaturization component is obtained, Lillian's HoS pendant will be upgraded to contain a miniaturized ring device. It allows her to create a gateway between herself and any of the inputted, existing HoS base destinations, once per day.

Confirmation of Spoils for the Company

A Ring of the Sun in a location of Rayse's choice in Salvar, and another in a location of Rayse's choice in Corone. They cannot communicate with House Rings directly, as they are mutually locked from each other, though the security measure can be circumvented in dire situations if both parties agreed beforehand.

Confirmation of Rayse's Spoils

Once the miniaturization component is obtained, the miniaturized ring device in Rayse's Honorary pendant (given after the events of this thread) will activate. It allows him to create a gateway between himself and any of the inputted, existing Company base destinations, once per day. It also has the option of requesting access to the Lodge Vespera Ring. If the request is accepted, the pendant will beep, signaling that it is safe to activate it.

New Spices - Rayse has been paid with an arbitrary number of the experimental explosives he used in this thread (exact numbers up to either Rayse or the judge).

[Rayse Valentino]

One week later...

In the lush oasis of Dvoran's room, the owner sat and sipped wine from a glass as he took another drag on his pipe.

His peace was interrupted by Ferrold, who charged in and expressed displeasure at his boss's calm, "Vhy are you so lax? It has been a week and you still haven't found anything about zis Rayse!"

"He'll turn up eventually," replied Dvoran. "A guy like that will make a flashy entrance on the world stage."

"Vat are you, his fan boy now?"

"Mind yer tongue," Dvoran shot back at him. "We're lucky to be alive. Those two... they ain't normal. The only reason he left us alive must've been his way of apologizing for going back on his word a year ago." He put the glass down and looked up at the ceiling, which had vines growing across it. "Once I know what I'm dealing with... I'll get my revenge, don't ye worry."

Meanwhile, Rayse had finally gotten back to Radasanth. As he approached Pembleton's office, he noticed the smirk on the old accountant's face. He didn't seem at all worried about The Contractor's offer anymore.

"What are you so happy about?" asked Rayse when he got into the office.

Crossing his arms, Pembleton declared, "You want operations both here and in Salvar, correct? This means you need accounting in both regions, and I can only be in one region at a time. In order to have correct numbers that aren't outdated, you would have to deliver the proper documents to me within the span of a day. So in summation: This won't work."

Rayse rubbed his chin and stared at Pembleton's wall for a moment, "Both at the same time, eh?" Pembleton's look of glee turned to one of horror. "I think I can manage that."


The Company Spoils

Same as in the previous post, except The Company gains 5 NPC workers in Ettermire (or wherever they'll set up their base of operations for the gateway, assisting The House of Sora primarily and serving as communication between the two PGs), 2 NPC workers trained by The House in Radasanth, and 2 more NPC workers trained by The House in Salvar.

I would need to know about the post-FQ Salvar situation, i.e. the new trading hub, in order to make a decision about placement of The Rings, so I can't make a decision about that at this time.

Rayse's Spoils

Same as in previous post, except the pendant for him will be a modified version of his locket that will look no different, but contain the secret gateway function.

[MetalDrago]

STORY ~ (20/30)

CHARACTER ~ (20/30)

WRITING STYLE ~ (19/30)

Wild Card (4/10) ~

Total Score: 63

Rayse Earns 2800 EXP and 450 GP
Ataraxis earns 3150 EXP and 450 GP

Spoils approved.

[Silence Sei]

EXP-GP was given for this thread a long time ago.