[sub][color=#666A6E]Content Warning: Topics Pertaining to Suicide[/color][/sub] [center][h1][b]Convergentiarum[/b][/h1] [i][b]Knight World, Segmentum Pacificus, 50 Standard Years Prior to Discovery[/b][/i][/center] Amidst the acrid and murky haze of the vale's lower atmosphere, sheet lightning blossomed and cast an ethereal luminescence through the murk as though daybreak had come once more over the otherwise gloom-shrouded confines of the lowlands. The illumination was all but soundless for its intensity. A good omen, in Heinret's reckoning. Even with such light filtering through it, the industrial murk of the vale obscured vision beyond more than a few meters - but in the distance, the outlines and silhouettes of distant terrain, ridges, and buildings were faintly outlined in the gloom. For a moment it was as though the world had been lain bare, the shadows of its very bones cast in relief. The beleaguered vale-dweller put a hand to his brow and attempted to etch what he could of the distant delineations into his memory. They were being hunted, and the only advantage the Hemogeists had over their pursuers was their admittedly still tenuous and incomplete knowledge of the terrain. The clarifying veil of ethereal light swiftly snapped away, and was soon followed by a sharp, attenuated column of crackling energy close by in the distance. The moment of edifying serenity was sundered by the sharpened, billowing roar of the direct strike - so close to the searing flash that had accompanied it that Heinret immediate knew that the worst had come to pass. A calamitous omen. Direct lightning strikes were rare in the vales outside the industrial settlements, where the massive sprawl would frequently aggregate differential charge at the lowest depths of the seething murk. There were no settlements or permanent structures out here though. For a direct strike to be possible at all- Almost as if in response to the thunderous roar of the polluted gloom, an ear-splitting, bass warhorn bellowed from some monstrous engine, unseen through the smog but close enough that Heinret knew the end was fast approaching. He could not yet hear the monstrous footfalls of the towering mechanical deities over the air currents of the churning fog, but that was all the more terrifying. That meant they were moving slowly, likely formed up in a tightening net around the Hemogeists as they fled. Only the Hemogeists' experience with evading the heightened senses of the god engines kept them from being instantly found out. The deific constructs had sight far superior to any mortal being, and could see a lone serf hiding in dense foliage from more than a kilometer away, even in the darkest passages of the thick smog in the lower atmosphere. Certain precautions and measures were necessary to evade them - which explained much of Heinret's unusual accoutrements. He wore a makeshift, patchwork bodyglove that had been pieced together from insulation foam and heating tape, stained to the color of soot and soaked in the blood of the god engines themselves - reactor coolant, procured from pools of industrial runoff that spilled over with the effluvia of the engines themselves, run down from high in the mountains where the noble Pilot Citadels presided to collect in the lowest, dimmest basins of the lowlands. With a cowl and gas-mask patched over with more foam covering his head, Heinret looked nothing less than some monstrous trash-heap golem. The other members of the Hemogeists were much the same. A band of professional thieves who dared to encroach within the encampments of the god engine pilots whenever they dared respite in the lowlands, they had stolen their share of priceless relics and arcane artifacts from under the noses of the highland nobility for nearly a decade now. They had finally committed one of their profession's cardinal sins with their last effort however - they had stolen something far too precious. The god engines and their pilots had been driven to insensate frenzy when they had discovered its absence, immediately razing the entire settlement they had been encamped by until naught but cinders remained, and then they had begun to scour the surrounding wastes. The Hemogeists' handcrafted bodygloves were effective at concealing them from the gaze of the god engines themselves, but not from their mortal retinues - including skilled coursers who could could seemingly track the Hemogeists as they fled. That was the only thing affording the Hemogeists even the faintest shred of hope. The god engines were moving slowly, dependent on their retinues to spot for them. If the geists could fool and waylay the coursers, escape would still be narrowly possible. Heinret leapt from his the tall formation of boulders he had been perched on to try and spy outline of the pursuers, but the thunderous cacophony of their warhorn had all but given away their position: Too close. Heinret landed in a thick film of rancid muck boiling over with oily dreck and pollutants, where the other six members of the Hemogeists crouched both out of prudence and in utter terror. "What's the point of it sounding off like that? It has to know we'd hear it!" Groused Arnswold, the bulkiest of the Hemogeists with so much bulk he seemed a corpulent ghoul in his own patchwork bodyglove. He was strong enough to bend steel bars and snap iron fixtures with his bare hands - whether by raw cultivated strength or some quirk of mutant physiology, none of the others knew, nor cared. One did not look too uneasily upon mutants, or the suggestion thereof, in the lowlands - rife with its polluted haze as it was. The immense man had a singular, practiced talent for moving silently in spite of his bulk, and snapping victim's necks from behind before so much as a whimper could escape their throat. "They [i]want[/i] us to hear them. They knew we'd pinpoint them from that lightning strike, so they're tryin' to rattle us. Make us panic and make a mistake. They know we're close." Growled Lukler. A wiry man with a spry build, who claimed to have once been an aspirant to the retinue of one of the highland households and armed with great insight into their strengths and weaknesses. "We have to move [i]now.[/i]" Heinret hissed out. "I could see the crest of the Southern line after that bit o' glow. One good slip and we'll be away from here, but they'll figure that out soon if they haven't already. They might get desperate and charge in a line, odds no better than a toss they'd stumble right over us." "We can't move fast enough with this damn relic! It was already practically coming to pieces when we took it!" Exclaimed Marnor, the group's ex-apprentice artificer. He had been on the verge of being sent offworld to study the secrets of the Machine God when scandal had ruined his prospects. Even with what little knowledge he had, on occasion he verged on the aspect of witchery with his insight of the devices they handled - such as the artifact he now cradled in a bundle sack of more insulating foam and heat tape. "If we're going to bolt, we have to stash it." Stashing delicate machinery and components in the lowlands was scarcely any better than violently throwing it into a firepit. The tumultuously hideous weather patterns of the smog, flash-flooding, bizarre atmospheric anomalies and the shifting of the ruined earth itself could taint even the contents of buried watertight containers. The prospect of a ruined payout was still preferable to certain death at the hands of the god engines and their pilots however, and so the rest of the Hemogeists had already begun to cast their gaze about in search of a likely nook to cache their prize in. "Not here." Heinret made a cutting motion with his hand and then jabbed at the sodden muck they crouched in. "This is a spillway. See the wear on these rocks and how mixed the filth is? The flow'll practically form rapids at this spot. We'll ditch it the first mo' we see a good spot." The Hemogeists broke from their cover and ran, taking what care they could to baffle their trail and markings so the pilot coursers could not follow - though wearing their cumbersome bodygloves and with their pursuers within spitting distance, the Hemogeists' methods were more desperate than inspired, and rushed rather than expedient - and made all the slower for their need to preserve their haul. They slogged through the vale at an inconstant pace, making for high ground as far as they dared to get away from the spillway and find drier, stabler terrain to hide their prize in. Their faint lead grew fainter with every moment, until they could hear the distant shouts of the god engines - and the muffled impacts of the god engines' footfalls as they trudged through squalid mud. "Nothin' that big has any business bein' that quiet!" Lukler spat. "I beg to differ..." Arnswold murmurred. "Though speakin' of big things, check there." He jabbed ahead through the haze - to a warren of heaped, twisted foliage and mechanical scrap, all agglomerated and held together with packed and layered mud. A hovel for a local strain of mammalian mutants known as Ambuscades. It was said, in bygone lore, that when the world of Convergentiarum had still been hale and unbesmirched, the Ambuscades were opportunistic ambush predators who built modest lodges atop riverside hills, and would gather logs of wood to push downhill in order to stun or kill other small and medium-sized animals. Their mutant strains were different only in that they had become larger, more aggressive, and fearless of Humans. There were signs of movement in the warren itself. The distant warhorn from the god engine early had doubtlessly unsettled them, though they had been so far distant at the time that they had not abandoned their hard-wrought lodge. "Marnor, split. We'll cover your tracks and lead the god engines over the lodge." Heinret motioned to the bundle-laden man. "With luck the mutants will distract the Coursers if we unsettle them 'nuff." The gambit was nothing fanciful. The Hemogeists simply scattered the remnants of Marnor's trail before then all turning and scrambling over the debris comprising the Ambuscade warren, clawing their way directly over its hump and over the other side. This served to unsettle the Ambuscades somewhat too well. One of the mutant animals reached straight up through the warren's roof with a limb of mattered fur oozing with lesions and ending with razor-serrated claws perfectly shaped for carving up tree stumps and also, conveniently, through Human bone. Easily as long and twice as thick as a Human leg, the mutant limb punched straight up through a sheet of iron scrap metal and then clasped at one of the passing Hemogeist's legs - lopping the appendage off with an effortless snap-clenched motion. None of the remaining geists slowed to assist their stricken member as they fell atop the heap of the warren's roof, howling in anguish as blood stained the edges of their bodyglove while the ambuscades worked themselves into a killing frenzy at the scent of fresh blood. The geists had their distraction. The sounds of the shouting coursers and the footfalls of the god engines receded as they ran across the scene. The Hemogeists convened with Marnor another kilometer ahead, and seized the opportunity to fully baffle their trails before continuing to flee. "We're not in the clear yet. We'll be out of the vale soon, more room to move in, but it'll be open terrain. Harder to shake them on, an' easier for them to follow us through." Lukler indicated. "They'll catch back up soon and we still need to stash the artifact. Heinret, this'll probably be our last chance to look ahead on high ground. See what there is to see." Heinret nodded and scaled up a nearby metal pole jutting up from out of the terrain, perhaps what had once been some manner of waypoint marker or support for helpful device. Managing to balance himself precariously at its tip even in his bulky bodyglove, his scanned the horizon - and was graced with another omen. The heavy, particulate-laden clouds of the lowlands parted ahead of them, revealing the unobstructed night sky of the Eastern mouth of vale. Unstrained starlight beamed down upon the Hemogeists like a noble maiden's smile, constellations twinkling like jewels. Heinret gasped at the sight. It was something he had only seen once before in his life, when he was younger and more foolish still for it. He had a thought to creep through a window of a pilot citadel and make off with whatever he could carry. The highlands, set high above the polluted murk of the lower atmosphere, had seemed tranquil, serene, and utterly idyllic. He had been assured when he had asked innocuously that the cold and snow were not life-threatening, and security at a distance had seemed trivially lax compared to the citadel gates and bulwarks at the base of the mountain where the god engines came and went from their holds. He had not made it far before the thin air had caused him to collapse, leaving him to stare breathless up at the unblemished night sky for hours before he had been found and consigned to indentriture for trespass. The memory of that breathlessness struck Heinret again in that moment as the stars glittered in his eyes. He could only stare on at them, awestruck. His rapt attention was drawn, then, to several of those gleaming lights. They were moving, and far brighter still than the rest. With each passing moment they seemed to grow brighter and closer. At first, Heinret figured it was just some manner of illusion - but then, the other Hemogeists began to call out in startlement as they too saw the descending, luminous rain. It was no illusion. The stars were falling from the void. Turning from mere pinpricks to long, scathing lines of fulminous radiance cutting across the horizon, the stars cut so close through the air that Heinret swore he could have reached up and plucked them out of the sky, if not for that the sound of their passage was but a dull, subdued churn of rushing, burning air. Out of reach. Each of them was wretched in a fiery aura of sputtering, wavering empyrean flames, casting off debris in jagged bursts that released plumes of iridescent plasma as they vented from their parent bodies. The cascade of stars curved and fell into the heavy mists as they broke apart in celestial fire, coming down from whence the Hemogeists had fled and their impacts with the earth casting an echoing groan across the whole of the vale. For several moments, Heinret neither moved nor said anything, still agape and staring into the sky in disbelief. He was peripherally aware that the rest of the Hemogeists were shouting up at him, though their cries seemed muted and faint to him somehow. There was something about the sky. The sky he had only ever seen once before... There. Following in the wake of the preceeding shower of stars, a final ray of celestial light was curving down from on high - falling far shorter than the others had. There was not sputtering aura of flame about it. This was no flawed jewel of the heavens. This one was unmarred and perfect, not so much falling to the stained earth as alighting upon it. It was a sign. An omen. Already the haze of the lower atmosphere had begun to reassert itself, the oppressive gloom once more pouring back in to strangle the skyline and obscure it from view - but in those final moments, Heinret saw precisely where the immaculate star had fallen. "We have our way..." He muttered before hopping down from his perch. The journey took the better part of half an hour. The others Heinret had neither needed nor bothered to persuade to follow, and they made no efforts to baffle their trail. The god engines would be entirely preoccupied with the shattered starfall that had rained practically on top of them - so the Hemogeists hoped without dwelling too long upon it. Their reason gave way to the portents of mythical phenomenon and legend. Come what may, they were now a part of it. When they came upon it, the immaculate star had burnt away the dross of the polluted landscape, leaving only clean, scoured bedrock behind. There was no impact crater, quite. It was simply as though some great, invisible fist had swept away the filth and laid the star gently upon the eroded stone. Only the bedrock immediately beneath the fallen capsule had been dissolved to molten lava upon its arrival, and the raw kinetic force of its impact had pulverized it further into jagged, dusken glass that beamed with a dark, iridescent sheen - and which eerily terminated in a circle less than a meter in diameter. Three jagged spires of stone rose sharply in a wall at the base of which the construct of light had been lain, perhaps the remnants of a streamfall channel that had long been entirely buried in muck until the vessel had descended - for that was what the fallen star was as they approached. A vessel - a silver casket, trimmed with gold and perhaps three by two meters wide, its sides emblazoned with two symbols. The first was the gold-textured impression of an unfamiliar, winged avian creature. Set directly atop it, as though its wings were an underscore, was a set of numerals. [center][h1][b][color=#FFD700]XXI[/color][/b][/h1][/center] The vessel was hollow, with a canopy of armaglass set over a bed of countless thin, nerve-like silvery tendrils. The canopy was cast open. No trace of its contents was evidenced - but the mud-encrusted tracks of several sets of footprints across the otherwise pristine stone, leading back the same way the Hemogeists had come, was telling. Another party had beaten them here, taken the contents of the vessel, and then immediately set off in direction of where the rest of the star shower had fallen upon the vale. Heinret felt a stab of envious annoyance at having been robbed of some grandiose, imagined destiny awaiting him - them - here. Marnor pushed passed Heinret to collapse on his knees in front of the vessel, where he muttered something most peculiar and made an alien gesture with his hands. [sub]"Omnissiah, I understand! The Machine Spirit guards the Knowledge of the Ancients! This is one of your universal truths! I accept your call! I will heed this test!"[/sub] "What are you babbling about?" Arnswold demanded as he came up behind the kneeling Marnor. "What is this thing? Is it valuable? Out with it!" "Valuable - does not begin..." Marnor stuttered for a moment, but composed himself before standing and peering with a more discerning eye at the vessel. "This - friends, this can only be Archeotech. Its value is incalculable. You could buy bondsmanship - no, you could buy a full Barony with this alone. Its contents, whatever they were - that would be worth entire worlds." "Yeah, well, it seems like whatever lucky bastard was chasing us is about to lay their noble-ass mitts on it then!" Scoffed Lukler as he eyed the vessel, equally calculating as he was enraptured by its make. "If I were the same deadites who found this thing after seeing the stars fall, I'd be thinking all of them probably contain treasure just like whatever they took from this." He gestured at the vessel, and then to the muddy tracks. "Only they don't know about the god engines. They're thinkin' they're gonna be the first ones to get all the treasure from the heavens, but it's gonna be the lord pilots get and win everything again and blow everyone that crosses them to pieces. Probably including these sorry bastards." Marnor had approached the vessel more closely now, though still he did not touch it. "Found an interface here." He announced, pointing to the rim of the vessel - where there was a crystalflex pict-screen. There were no evident manual controls of any sort, and the pict-screen was flashing with obvious alarms and alerts, though purely in unhelpfully indecipherable symbols. "Not seeing much of use here. Seeing something that [i]might[/i] reseal the canopy, probably a dummy fail-safe. I would need to take this apart to tell its real worth." Arnswold snorted. "Well I can tell you right now, even I'm not strong enough to move something like this. We'd have to come back with a gantry." "...And I don't think we're gonna get the chance either way, check that." Lukler pointed up towards the jagged edges of the three stone spines rising behind the vessel. From between the sharpened cracks, rancid, fluid ooze was beginning to rapidly dribble over the edges and splatter along the edges of the glassy impact point. With every passing moment, the flow of muck grew almost imperceptibly more voluminous. "This place is gonna be sunk in dross again in just a few hours, especially if this was actually a streamfall channel like I think these raised stones are suggesting." [sub]"...Ritual honors the machine spirit..."[/sub] Marnor muttered, and before anybody could stop him, he hefted the crude sack of insulation foam he had been carrying and, ever so gently, laid it upon the bed of silver tendrils within the vessel. "What are you [i]doing?[/i]" Heinret demanded as the others uttered a mixture of invectives, dismay, and halfway coherent threats. "We still need to stash our prize. This Archeotech is about the only thing that can keep its contents uncontaminated by outside factors - and it is about to get buried in several tons of running mud and dreck. Nobody is going to be able to find it later except for us." Marnor explained. "We seal this up, split and make a clean break, wait for the heat to die down, and then regroup to dig up our prize." "Dig it up? You cracked?" Arnswold growled. "You just said it yourself! TONS of fucking runoff! We'd need a whole damn operations crew for that!" "We'd need that just to move the vessel anyway." Heinret remarked, one hand poised over his gas mask's rebreather in contemplation. "You were serious when you said we'd be able to buy a Barony with this?" "At [i]least[/i] a Barony." Marnor agreed. "Not to mention our prize itself of course." "I think you're all forgetting that a whole bunch of Ambull shit is also happening not far away?" Arnswold spat. "We have NO idea what else has been discovered! It might make this precious little casket worthless in comparison!" "Either that or somebody might be missin' a piece of a set and lookin' for it. Making it more valuable, even if empty." Heinret pointed out. "Either way, this buys us time to get more information on what this is and what it's really worth, along with the trinket we took. And if it's worth even a fraction what you're suggestin'..." He nodded to Marnor. "...Then it'll be worth galling a crew into helping us fetch it back later. This is an unexpected good turn, we can't be wasting it. Seal it." Marnor nodded and pressed a sigil on the vessel's pict-screen. [sub]"Understanding is the True Path to Comprehension. Comprehension is the Key to all Things."[/sub] He subvocalized as the vessel seemed to shift upon itself. The armaglass canopy descended and encapsulated the makeshift foam sack with a rush of atmosphere - just in time for a thick glob of slime to shoot over the edge of one of the rock spines above it and splatter across the armaglass surface. "Time to go." Lukler said, taking several performative steps back while making a sweeping gesture with his arms. "The floodtime comes." Lukler was true to his promise. Less than ten minutes later, the increasingly violent spillage of unsettled ravine mud and sediment had completely buried the sealed vessel, and a river of mountain runoff once again flowed between the raised tips of the stony spires, only now just barely above the tainted waterline. [center][s][b][i]888888888888[/i][/b][/s][/center] "...They don't even cry!" Murmured Claraine as she pinched at the cheek of toddler swaddled in her arms - or at least she tried to. The impassive child's face and their skin may as well have been cast from adamantine for all the give it seemed to have beneath Claraine's fingers, somehow. The child's expression, set in the gaze of their glacial steely-colored eyes, was utterly placid in spite of their circumstances and surroundings. The nomads had attempted to fit the toddler with a mask and filter to spare it the worst degradations of raw exposure to the lower atmosphere's caustic particulates, but the bare-headed babe in a fit of fussy pique had taken the sturdy plasflex mask and simply pulled it apart with both of their comically smaller hands. Its exposure to the unfiltered atmosphere did not seem to be ruining its vigorous disposition however, at least yet. The child was also far, far heavier than they looked at first glance - only Claraine, a mutant with a second set of ears, a grotesquely distended gut, and bulging, cancerous musculature could heft them at all - fittingly, as the nomads had then promptly dismissed the child itself as some form of mutant grown by the ornate vessel they had found it in. Its odd temperament, its weight, its raw physical strength and apparent resilience, and its complete lack of genitalia were all components of mutanthood - even if it was unheard of to see all of those features at once, and in a specimen that was otherwise so seemingly unblemished and unbowed by the twisted anatomical capriciousness of mutation. Which could only mean the child had been fashioned by the pilot lords. "Those other vessels what fell had better not ALSO hold more freakish brats." Grumbled Tenket, the nomad leader, a man in his Summer years who through the ravages of the polluted atmosphere passed readily for one nearly twice his actual age. The treated, waterproofed, and oil-repelling fabric of his ragged outfit was unremarkable to those of his peers, the only sign of his status being the ritual notches gouged off the tips of his ears, adorned with small, unremarkable rings of various metals. The nomad band, numbering perhaps twenty or so individuals of various stock, had hastily extricated the child from its vessel and moved on nearly as swiftly as they had rushed to the starfallen vessel that had contained them. They had counted more than a dozen other fallen stars when the smog had parted, and as their leader had remarked, the more time they spent gawking and gibbering over one find, the less time they had to find the next one before somebody else beat them to it. "I've got a feeling if we can't ransom this one, it won't even be good for eating." Claraine declared. "Skin alone is so hard our teeth'd snap on it." "There's the value right there then, idiot girl!" Tenket scoffed. "We can sew ourselves up a sturdy poncho from its skin! Though I'll still be real and proper mad if all we get out of all this mucking with these voidcraft is some new cloths. Everybody git! Somebody else was bound to have seen them fall, we've gotten git right on them!" Tenket was so preoccupied with driving the band of nomads and the excitement of their new pursuit on that he did not even realize that the band's scouts were overdue by more than ten minutes - and so it came as a complete surprise when the gods themselves and their retinue of bondsmen fell upon them. The bondsmen appeared first, all of them wearing thick leather and fur greatcoats over form-fitting plasflex bodygloves trimmed in red and emblazoned with the heraldry of House Tarantalos - a black-iron tree growing blades as its fruit, set within the center of a cogwheel on a starburst-patterned plaque crossed by a pair of tridents. Each of the bondsmen was armed with flintlock rifles at a glance, though careful examination would reveal the artifice of the pilot houses augmenting them, ornate bronze fittings running the length of the weapon to form a curious choke at their ends and encasing a ribbed power-nodule directly integrated into the body foreward of the trigger-guard. Most of the nomads knew from simple exposure before that these deceptively antiquated rifles were more powerful than even the best handheld las-projector, emitting bursts of bewildering ball-lightning. The maneuver was not so much well-executed as it was simply sudden and without warning, with more than two dozen of the bondsmen rapidly charging out of the fog, each of them covering one of the nomads in turn. All of them were dead silent, forgoing the necessity of issuing demands or shouting imperatives. That was the task of another. A scant second after the first bondsman had charged from the thick obscurity of the fog to accost the nomads, the earth itself had begun to rumble, and very close by, the sound of earth and soil being upheaved and displaced by rapidly sequential, massive footfalls pounded louder than any wardrum and accompanied by the blaring of four tremendous, bass warhorn blasts that seemed to liquefy the innards of the unprepared nomadic band with their intensity. The raw volume and abruptness of the booming horn-calls forced several of the nomads to their hands and knees almost immediately due to the disorientation of the assault to their senses. Charging headlong out of the fog came four tremendous figures. The smaller three, each of them six meters tall, were metal giants with adamantium limbs, armored joints, and an exaggerated hunchbacked profile that saw their mechanical skulls affixed to encapsulated hoods set in the center of their chests rather than atop their shoulders - where instead sat swivel-mounted autocannons. Each of their massive arms ended with a gargantuan weapon of such excessively destructive means that it could only be concluded they had been forged to slay others of their own kind. Massive chainblades longer and thicker than even the doughtiest mutant complimenting massive double-barreled meltacannons that hummed with ominous intensity. The most terrifying aspect of the countenance of the three leading figures was not their vast armored frames or their imposing weaponry, but the manner in which they moved. Their gait, the subtle twist and articulation of each joint, the way in which their heads and optics veered about in their cradles and their feet were set and poised as they braced - all was poised at the nadir of a valley set between the peaks of wholesome life and of unhinged imagination, both impossibly familiar and alive, and yet freakishly foreign and alien at once. Each of the giants was similarly festooned with banners and shield emblems all emblazoned with the heraldry of House Tarantalos, which they somehow managed to bear with some mechanically emulated semblance of perverse pride. Looming beyond and above its three smaller giants came their similarly shaped but proportionally more massive superior, an engine reigning nine meters in height and nearly as wide. In spite of its more heavily armored frame and bulk, its motions were nearly as mimetically uncanny as those of its smaller counterparts - and it managed to halt the momentum of its charge with almost impossible ease, a disgusting sort of almost-mammalian counterbalancing motion evidenced in its stride. The God Engines of the Pilot Knights. Scarcely had the air-sundering warhorns ceased bellowing than the massive Questoris-pattern Knight roared with its warhorn once more, seeming to leer down at the cornered nomads. Almost as if by its unseen imperative, two of the accompanying Armiger-pattern Knights opened fire with the autocannons mounted atop their frames, lines of fire stitching up and around the circular clutch the nomads had huddled into with paralytic fear and disorientation in a mercilessly overdone show of intimidation - with several stray rounds catching fringe members of the group, their bodies bursting into grisly, visceral pieces as the massive autocannon rounds rated to punch through tank armor tore through them instead. A few of the nomads who had not completely abandoned their senses rose from their circle as if to break away and run - only to be met by the surrounding bondsmen, Galvanic rifles raised to the nomads' heads. No warning was issued to those who defied the evident will of the Knights. Those who even dared to suggest they might attempt flight with their demeanor were shot at nearly point-blank range, explosive bolts of crackling energy flash-vaporizing flesh and bone into runny, molten rudiments of organic frailty that billowed with massive plumes of steam as they fell into the lowland muck. The odd dozen survivors understood the message: Move and die. Amongst their number, the starfallen child was sat up, kneels folded and arms set atop them. It silently examined the massive Knight engines with curious and unworried eyes. Several minutes passed as the massive Questoris Knight settled, braced and locked its limbs and joints in place, and went through some manner of cyclic signaling ritual where it crooned with ghostly vox-hails. Eventually its motions ceased entirely, its joints hissing with finality as a hatch along the upper ridge of its hunched, armored framed unfurled with mechanical slickness, and the Pilot Knight emerged from the confines of their engine. One of the Armigers side-stepped with impossibly articulated ease, and then knelt down and permitted the smaller figure to climb down a set of runs from the Questoris frame onto it before leaping in a practiced fashion from its crouched back, onto frame of its thermal lance and then down into the wet sediment below. [center][b][s]888888888888[/s][/b][/center] Austean Aienbek Derecho, Count of Shadowgate, Knight Scion Uhlan of the Second Noble Lance serving at the pleasure of the High King of Convergentiarum, was wroth in his displeasure. He was a patrician in his golden autumnal years - technically older still than the leader of the filthy nomadic dregs he now confronted, though blessed by habitation of the blessed mountain arcologies and augmented with extensive bionics as he was, he could have easily been mistaken for a man in his early thirties, with thick and silken black hair, two sunken bionic optical implants that shivered in their cradles as he cast his gaze between the individual specimens in the pack of thieves he had caught, and skin that was practically ashen in coloration. He wore custom-fitted carapace armor embellished with the crest of his House and festooned with his many superfluous honors, seals, and medals - few of which he cared for having earned, but which the strict, tyrannical protocol of the Royal court instructed that he should bear at all times while in a public setting outside of the chambers of his own estate or within his own court. It was measures such as those very protocols that separated the Count and his peers from the filthy, weak, licentious crowds of serfs and peasantry who wallowed in the lowlands. Honor, pride, and valor through fealty and adherence to a higher order and code. The very fundament and firmament of culture and society, with which the Nobles reigning under the High King were charged with governing and preserving. So that wretched, inbred, half-witted ingrates would [i]dare[/i] to besmirch his repute, and impinge upon the very dignity of his rule, was something that could not be tolerated. Those who threatened the legacy of enlightened noble rule and enrichment of the masses had to be met with the most forcefully proportionate of responses. The fate of these thieves was already sealed - it was simply a matter of extracting truth and satisfaction out of them before dealing with them. "Which of you churlish wretches..." Derecho snarled imperiously down at the group as he clasped he hands behind his back, speaking in the tongue of the low-Convene - a dialect of what would later come to be known as Low Gothic. "...speaks for you all?" "That would be me, mi'lord." Tenket provided. His voice was low and hushed from fear, but clear enough nonetheless. "Stand." Derecho demanded. Tenket obeyed, clambering onto his feet to stand before the Knight Pilot - only for the Count to viciously bring one of his fists around to viciously backhand the decrepit nomad across the face, causing him to almost comically pinwheel about on his feet before falling to the ground again. The Count casually leapt over Tenket's prone form, pivoting around with eerie precision on the slick, muddy surface of the terrain and transferring the momentum of their maneuvering into a brutal kick delivered to Tenket's ribs. "What do you suppose you are doing, thief? I did not give you leave to rest. Stand at once." Derecho spat. Tenket, winded and with their mind practically roiling with panic, could scarcely even contemplate compliance with the demand. "Such impudence! Far too sluggardly! Bondsman." The Count gesticulated to the nearest Bondsman, who snapped to attention with parade-precision. "I charge you to express the extent of my displeasure. Make an example of..." The Count waved a carapace-armored finger across the heads of the assembled nomads even as Tenket struggled to breath and right himself so he could stand. "...That one." The Counter's finger alighted on a young, teenaged boy amongst their ranks. The bondsman immediately snapped their rifle back up and fired, a crackling sphere of ball-lightning briefly charging the youth with an aura of surging radiance that poured through his veins and organs, visible even from beneath his rags, before his chest cavity imploded. Bones, tissue, and interstitial fluid were all transmuted into rapidly flash-vaporizing, wine-colored slop that sprayed and slopped out from the ruined carcass across the shrieking faces and countenances of the remaining nomads. The placid child finally made an expression - their lips quirked in the faintest intimation of a frown as they flicked a globule of oozing, molten gore from their bare chest. They did not otherwise move. The Count, focused entirely on Tenket once more, took no notice of the toddler's abnormal behavior and countenance. "Do you see, you laggardly, putrid excuse of a fool? When I issue an imperative, I expect it to be followed with [i]that[/i] exacting standard of immediacy. Commendable responsiveness, bondsman." The Count nodded ever so faintly at the masked bondsman, who simply snapped a smart salute and stood at attention once more without uttering a single word. Tenket, pure, uncomprehending horror dawning upon his face, finally managed to stagger to an upright position roughly in front of the Count once more. "Now that I seemingly have your attention, thief," Derecho began, "I instruct you to tell me for what purpose you saw fit to abscond with my property, how you learned of its existence, who provided you with the necessary information with which to perform your heist, and of course to effectuate its immediate return to my personage or else in the alternative prepare adequate remuneration for its loss with the sum totality of your worthless life." "...Stole? You think I-" "That one." Derecho pointed at an older woman in the crowd. The bondsman's rifle snapped up immediately once more, the sharpened, whining crackle of its discharge interspersed with terrified screams and wails of the victimized nomads as another one of their number was reducing to a molten, ruinous mound of vaguely humanoid shape. "I will brook no deceit from the likes of you." Derecho remarked briskly. "I will now reiterate my imperatives for your benefit. I instruct you to deliver unto me a full accounting and explanation on the aims of your benighted mind with particularity towards how and by what means you discovered the existence of, and arranged to pilfer, my property. You will reveal the identity of the conspirator who devised this plan, having cast you in the role of their tool, evidenced by your clear inability to have prepared a campaign towards such an end or with such methodology save for the provision of an educated mind." "...The child just fell from the sky, mi'lord. In some manner of voidcraft, mebbe a savior pod of some kind?" Tenket attempted with a pleading tone, gesticulating directly at the serenely countenance child sat amid the terrified and sobbing nomads. "We [i]did[/i] figure it was probably the work of one of some nobility, though I swear we did not know it was yours! We was just there when the pod came down, we fished this one out and came right this way looking to loot the rest what had fallen!" Count Derecho arched a single skeptical brow, his orbital ridge rising above the narrow port of his bionic eyes. "You stole a child...from the debris that made planetfall some time ago?" "Yes, mi'lord! I confess! We would've stripped the pod down for parts, if'n we hadn't thought we needed to rush and loot the rest of them as quick as quick." Derecho turned his gaze finally to the child, giving them an unimpressed appraisal for several moments before turning their attention back to Tenket. "...Mildly interesting if true. How does this pertain to my stolen property, precisely?" Tenket gaped with such genuinely confused bewilderment that there was simply no possibility any rational person would not have immediatedly determined he had no idea what was going on. The Count observed it with the interest of a man dissecting a small amphibian while it was still alive, and then gestured at the child without looking back at them. There was another immediate snapping discharge, which blew the odd child's right arm into dilute vapor and visceral mist, slamming the rest of their body directly down into the ground from the force of the impact and spraying Claraine's despairing face with a thick sheet of blood. The confrontation only lasted until there were no more intact bodies for the Count's bondsmen to shoot at, save for Tenket himself. The Baron rolled his bionic eyes in his skull with and, with a nigh theatrical sigh, ordered Tenket bound and prepared for transport to the Highland Shadowgate Arcology for more intensive interrogation. Before the Count moved to ascend the kneeling Armiger and board the Questoris Knight once more, one of his bondsmen signaled for permission to speak. The Count reversed his motion and nodded expectantly. "My liege. The hemisphere core was not amongst their belongings. Given its delicate state, it must have been handed off to the mastermind shortly after they absconded with it, elsewise it would very shortly deteriorate to uselessness in the present environs." The bondsman gestured to the dense haze of atmospheric pollutants around them. "The only viable alternative would be for them to have sequestered it in some remote cache. Shall we commence an exhaustive search of the vale?" Derecho gave the suggestion serious consideration. It was not lost on him that if the hemisphere core had been stashed in whatever crude dead drop the savages had been able to devise, it was already on the verge of being lost forever. His immediate bondsmen could not be faulted for being unable to find it in time across the vast span of perpetually fog-enshrouded wilderness, and the bondsmen who had originally failed to safeguard it had already paid for their negligence with their lives. Dedicating manpower to such a forlorn task would simply be a waste. He shook his head. "No, though the suggestion is prudent. The assumption that it was handed off to the true culprit is the most likely eventuality. We shall return to Shadowgate at once and commence a purge of the court." The Count mounted up and entered the Knight Questoris, and several minutes later once it had returned to full animation, it and its lance of Armigers hastened away through the murk of the lowlands while the bondsmen formed up into a single-file line and began the considerably slower march back in the same direction - leaving the twenty-odd group of partially vaporized bodies behind in an abandoned heap. [center][b][i][s]888888888888[/s][/i][/b][/center] "Well now. Looks like we missed the show." Calaston crooned as he and his two lackeys came across the corpse pile hours later. Unusually finely adorned for a lowlander, he wore a short, fluid-sloughing gown and poncho over a bodyglove of indifferent patchwork quality that had nonetheless once been of the same make as those worn by Derecho's bondsmen. The balding head beneath his high-quality gas-mask with its built-in vox earpiece still bore long, oily strands of dark hair hung in a wide crown around his skull. "Bodies have already turned and looks like their shit got rifled through pretty thoroughly." His first lackey Ferdrank, an obese man with a wide-brimmed rain-hat reported after peering over the heap with an appraising eye. The second lackey, Tatronda, pulled up her own gas-mask with a motion of habitual practice and inhaled deeply before setting it back in place. "Knights were here. At least a lance. Think they must've had bonders with 'em as well, or at least a couple of guys with galvanics. Can't have been too long ago, maybe a few hours." "Wowie. Not often you see shitheels like this bunch getting a full lance called down on them." Calaston whistled. "." He spun off an abrupt, somewhat spurious phrase in the highland tongue that would later come to be recognized as High Gothic. "Guess that light show we saw from earlier might've drawn 'em here, gotten them killed for whatever it was about." "You really think the nobles were behind the lights, boss?" Ferdrank asked. Calaston shrugged. "Maybe. Hardly matters now. We shouldn't stick around too long, there'll be others coming here same as we did. " All three of them startled as the pile of corpses shifted abruptly. "Ah - whoops, looks like I called it too soon boss!" Ferdrank chortled. "Maybe somebody still has enough of a pulse for us to take it from them?" "You'll be wantin' some quick fieldwork boss?" Tatronda asked as she reached into one of her belt-pouches and produced a plasflex-wrapped bag of worn surgical tools as Ferdrank started to dig through the pile, handily managing to drag dismembered limbs and fused segments molten viscera and hurl them away one piece at a time. "Can't promise the organs will keep, better to do this sort of thing in a sealed environ all clean-like, but I can probably get one or two good bits out of them." "Depends. First let's see if - ah! Profit!" Calaston steepled his hands together with a smile as Ferdrank managed to pull a still-writhing body completely stained with muck and gore out of the heap. They looked to be a completely bald pre-adolescent teenager, though much more than that even he could not quite discern through all the filth. There were no evident injuries or missing bits at any rate. ", lovely. This one is healthy enough for us to march back home!" He laughed as Ferdrank swore and dropped the youth abruptly. "Little shitheel is a lot heavier than they look." Ferdrank hissed. "You're damn right we're marching them back! No way you could pay me to haul this fucker, they must have been feeding 'em rockcrete paste." "You have a name, kid?" Tatronda asked slyly as they produced a switchblade with a wavering sleight of hand, running the tip of the blade across their filth-laden cheek as they stood up. The youth did not answer or move, simply standing up and peering with discernment between each member of the trio and completely failing to react to the knife being dragged across their skin. Tatronda frowned beneath her filter mask. "Guess your name is either gonna be food or marks, stinky." Tatronda muttered darkly as she rounded behind the filth-stained youth and prodded at their back with her dagger. " Let's get moving." Calaston gestured broadly into the softening haze of fog leading Westward into the vale proper - from where Compunctio, the system's star, shone as day broke, even if only to ever-so-briefly lighten the thick perpetual murk of the lowland and increase how far one could see by a few meters. [center][b][i][s]888888888888[/s][/i][/b][/center] "Gotta admit, even by our standards, little mutie here is a strange one." Tatronda remarked. Much later, with the trio having led the youth back to their hideout, several increasingly peculiar things had arisen. It was set in a condemned warehouse in the intermediary ring of the squalid industrial city of Dolor. Technically not condemned in fact, merely labeled as such due to a few well-placed bribes and favors, it was conveniently located to a logistics hub with access to the other city rings where they could rub shoulders with all their different breeds of clientele. The hideout accordingly was well-lit and furnished if not particularly clean, owing to the gang's lackadaisical hygienic priorities. It had atmospheric filtering, airtight seals, and cold running water, which was easily a step up as far as accommodations went anywhere below the highland realms. Once they had hosed the youth down with ditch-water, they had immediately discerned, very clearly, that they had no genitalia. If not for their lack of hair, they would have appeared almost bewilderingly androgynous. When the slavers had tried to place restraints on them, the youth had simply snapped them off. First the economic Plastek ties, and then steel cord, and then finally a set of plasteel manacles that had been made specifically to keep inhumanly strong mutants bound up. Then the trio had attempted to brand the youth with a chattel-mark, only for the superheated brand to simply fail to make any lasting marks on their skin. The youth had not resisted in any way while they tried to bind and brand it, merely breaking through each restraint in turn with casual motion. It had appeared momentarily interested in breaking the plasteel manacles down even further and peering into the locking mechanism, but had cast the twisted metal away after only a few moments. The young figure had otherwise been wholly compliant and passive, allowing the trio to poke and prod at them and to otherwise guide it around without complaint. The skin where the brand had been pressed had not so much as even tanned from the intense heat, and the naked figure had not even seemed to react disfavorably to the attempt beyond treating the slavers with an unimpressed frown. ...For additionally, by all determination, the youth was seemingly mute. "Maybe catatonic?" Tatronda suggested as she casually lobbed a throwing knife directly at the figure's head, only for the weapon to bounce off, its tip slightly deformed from the impact. The youth simply continued to placidly stare at them in response. "You can see this kind of behavior from certain boys and girls who get passed around a bit too much." "Or from people who survive a lot of explosive blasts. Soldiers and miners and the like." Ferdrank contributed, munching on on algae bar. After a moment of thought, they offered it to the naked figure - who simply stared at the bar for a moment with a blank expression, before reaching out and peeling away the wrapper to peer at the printed script on it. "...That doesn't read catatonic to me. That reads [i]simple[/i]. Simple as [i]mud[/i]." Calaston shook their head. "Too dumb for speech and probably can't understand it either. Hey idiot, a grenade is about to blow your ass off! " The youth did not react at all beyond offering the algae bar's wrapper back to Ferdrank, who bemusedly took it. "Ok. Well. Can't chain them to anything, they'll just get up and walk away. Bet they probably won't be able to climb out of the hole though." "Only one way to find out. " Calaston agreed. "We can all get drunk and sleep on what we want to do with it. Pretty sure this little shit is some pilot lord vanity project, that or some Mechanicum experiment. Reeks of their bullshit, albeit with less metal bits than usual. That means it might be worth some marks to the right person." "Think maybe we could train them to respond to commands, like a dog?" Ferdrank attempted to wave the bar wrapper in front of the youth's face enticingly. The figure simply stared at them. "I think it has about as much chance of being able to understand commands as boss here has of teaching it how to speak the Highland Tongue." Tatronda drawled as she collapsed in a nearby chair. "Hey! I resent that!" Calaston quipped back. "My affinity for the Highland tongue is so refined that I can legitimately do business with the nobility! " He rattled off the high tongue segue to and for nobody in particular other than himself and his own vanity, though the youth, for a moment, had cast a cool look of appraisal in the slaver's direction as he did so. "Sure, whatever that all meant." Tatronda groaned. "Last one to call has to chuck this heavy little twit down the hole, one two three not it." "" Calaston remarked expeditiously in the high tongue once more. "Not- shit." Ferdrank swore. The first half of the job proved reasonably easy. Ferdrank simply led the naked youth by the hand towards the edge of the hole that had been knocked in the floor of one of the second floor rooms. When it came to actually throwing them down the hole, things became difficult - as the rotund slaver, even with his considerable mass and muscles, was unable to make the figure budge in the direct of the hole itself once at its lip. Evidently their passivity was not [i]so[/i] pronounced that they were going to let themselves be pushed down. "Fuck me, did you get even heavier?" Ferdrank squinted at the youth with exasperation. "Am I going to have to get a damn shock maul to knock you in with? Come on, dumbo, I don't have time for this today! Could you please just jump in the damn hole?" Much to Ferdrank's surprise, their plaintive request worked, as the naked youth then calmly proceeded to hop backwards straight down the hole. Startled, Ferdrank hesitated for a moment, turning what had just happened over in their head for a few moments. "...It must have picked up on my tone." He muttered to himself as he left the room. [center][b][i][s]888888888888[/s][/i][/b][/center] Time passed. As they had intended to do, the trio of slavers managed to drink themselves to stupor and completely forget about the peculiar oddity they had picked up in the vale wilderness earlier. Days passed by, and inside the enclosed, sealed first-floor storage annex the hole dropped down into, several ill-fortuned future slaves and indentured servants subsisted on dripping water from a single tap left slightly running alongside small insects and vermin that habitually made the mistake of finding their way into the annex. From the moment the youth had appeared amongst their number, the other slaves had immediately taken an intense disliking to it - its peculiar, androgynous anatomy, its disheartening lack of anything resembling so much as a skin blemish, and the fact that it was not bound in the fashion as most of them were, and also most damningly that it and it alone the slavers had seemingly elected not to brand with their chattel mark. What made it all the more infuriating, was that the youth did not appear to desire any form of companionship or connection with any of them. After simply standing beneath the hole above for several minutes, the strange youth had simply walked over to the nearest wall, sat down with their back to it, and calmly watched the other slaves. Day in, day out, scarcely moving save to crane their head and flick their eyes from one end of the annex to the other. They did not ever approach the tap to eek out precious droplets of hydration, and they did not move to challenge any of the others over the privilege to hunt and consume the various vermin that found their way inside. The youth simply sat, and observed. It unsettled the others who, in the confines of the annex, had no means to escape the dreadful sense of bareness, of vulnerability they felt as the strange figure's penetrating stare fell upon them. It only took a few days for Berginanda to decide enough was enough. The slave was naturally tall for his age, was still young and fit, and had been completely forgotten about by the slavers themselves since they had abducted him more than seven standard months ago. It had not taken long for Berginanda to prop himself up as the petty, insufferable king of the dismal annex, and he had ruled it with coercive brutality. The strange youth that had jumped down the hole displeased the slave king. They did not eat or drink, robbing the self-declared petty king of half his coercive influence, and even worse - they said nothing back to Berginanda at all, ever. Not in protest, not to insult or taunt him as some other slaves used to do, and not in response when Berginanda demanded they answer. Having decided it was time to teach the new mutant slave a lesson about their place down in the annex, Berginanda stalked across the room to where the strange youth sat. "You miserable waste of skin." Berginanda scowled. "I don't care if you're dumb or mute, when I talk to you I expect you to show me some respect, and it's clear I'm going to have to teach you some." He reached out with both arms to grab at the sitting figure. The youth, in that moment, stood up - and Berginanda felt suddenly very terribly small. Not merely compared to the youth, who had seemingly grown substantially in the few days they had been in the annex and seemingly was just as tall as Berginanda himself, but also simply from the abrupt immensity of their presence. It was as though Berginanda were suddenly reaching towards some preening predator rather than naked, unarmed slave. Berginanda did not relent, recognizing defiance when he saw it and knowing he could not save face unless he acted. Then, with a calm motion, the tall, androgynous figure reached out and gripped Berginanda by the right side as he moved to grapple the newcomer. With an imperceptible adjustment of their grip, they fractured Berginanda's arm. Berginanda immediately howled with pain, tears welling in his eyes as he began to hyperventilate and gasp for breath. He instinctively tried to pull himself away from the figure's grip, but it was like trying to pull plasteel rods out of rockcrete. Their grasp was as immovable and uncaring as the mountains. Shivering with pain, Berginanda all but collapsed on the spot, still sobbing and choking back spit and snot, with their right arm still gripped tightly by the figure. For several long moments the androgynous figure simply stared and watched as Berginanda writhed, anguished, in their grip. Other slaves in the annex looked on with some mixture of relief and trepidation. The petty tyrant was being dethroned - but perhaps they were about to be replaced by something even worse. At least Berginanda was Human. ...but then, with the faintest of gestures, the androgynous figure released Berginanda's arm, allowing the man to stumble back, still gaping. No longer in pain however - for to Berginanda's own astonishment, his forearm, which he had sworn the mutant had fractured and had been bent at nearly a full ninety-degree angle, was whole once more. The figure had simply gently twisted his forearm back into the correct orientation, and as they released Berginanda his bones had seemingly been remade whole. Even the pain was rapidly receding - though the memory of it would linger. "Witch! Mutant freak!" Berginanda shouted, though now his tone was one of fear rather than denigration. The androgynous figure simply stared, and after several long moments, simply sat back down once more while Berginanda skulked away in confused shame. Another several days passed. Actual hair emerged and grew at an explosive rate from the seeming mutant's scalp - long, black, wavy hair. By the third day is reached down to their shoulders. By then, the slavers returned. The sliding cargo door set against on end of the annex was opened, and both Calaston and Ferdrank marched in. Raising an eyebrow, Calaston gestured towards the androgynous figure. "Looks like they've hit their mutant growth spurt. Imagine if we had let them have actually food? Their head would be scraping the ceiling. " "You sure about using this one, boss? We couldn't even brand them." Ferdrank whined. " Yes. That's the best part. Just look at their skin. It's fucking flawless, no brand will help sell it for this. Not even going to need a wig now. Making me feel a little self-conscious." Calaston rubbed with some awkwardly at his own balding cranium, from which only a few tresses of hair still hung around the ridged. "Well? Come on, dummy, we've not got all day." He began to reach for the shock maul he had brought with him to goad the slaves with, but much to his relief the androgynous slave - who was now the same height as Calaston himself and in no way mistakable for a mere child - moved to follow them. "Wait." Growled a voice from the dark. Calaston turned as Berginanda emerged from the dark. "That thing is not just a Mutant. It is a witch! It has to be destroyed." Calaston and Ferdrank shared a glance before guffawing. "Good one, slave." Ferdrank chortled. "There haven't been witches on Convergentiarum in millenia. Not since the Harrowing." "Just look at them!" Berginanda insisted, jabbing as the androgynous figure. "They're unnatural!" "Yeah, they're definitely a mutant or something." Calaston admittedly in an unbothered tone. "But honestly this one is tame compared to some stuff the Mechanicum makes. You remember the last doctrine war?" "Why is it you're even sayin' this, meat?" Ferdrank challenged, drumming his fingers on the haft of his own shock maul, still hanging on his belt. "Not like this one could've even fucked you in the ass with how bothered you are." "It broke my arm, and then...healed it immediately! Like it had never happened!" Berginanda scowled before calling out into the dark. "You all saw it happen! Tell them!" None of the other slaves secluded in the annex moved to the larger slave's aid however, much to Calaston and Ferdrank's impatience. Berginanda did not relent however. "This one simply is not worth the risk-" He began. "They're worth plenty more than you, dimwit. Unlike some other slaves, they do what they're told, they don't cause trouble, and they don't give us any backtalk." Calaston interjected as he unfastened his shock maul. "And they're a damn deal worth more than [i]you'll[/i] ever be!" He lunged forward and jabbed at Berginanda with the maul, causing a cascade of energy to course through the slave's body, sending them crashing to the ground while convulsing uncontrollably. "Here's what a break is [i]actually[/i] like, meat." Ferdrank taunted as he strode over and stepped on the stricken slave's arm - affixing it in place before then raising his boot and stomping down viciously, once, twice, three times. Every stomp was accompanied by the sinuous, snapping sound of muscles and flesh tearing, and once Ferdrank stepped away, Berginanda's maimed arm was a bruised, swollen, and misshapen mess. The abused slave could not even scream properly, still writhing and convulsing on the ground as Calaston continued to press the end of their shock maul into Berginanda's gut. "Now think about what you've done." Calaston spat as he returned the shock maul to his belt. "Come on, let's go. We're burning time here." He and Ferdrank began to move towards the annex door, but halted when they saw the androgynous figure simply standing and staring down at Berginanda's broken body. An expression had finally broken its way across their face - dismay. Neither of the slavers saw it. "Hey, you too, dumbo." Ferdrank said with exasperation, unholstering their own shock maul and prodding the androgynous figure in the back without switching it on. The naked figure turned to the slaver, their appalled look still evident on their face - but it faded a scant moment later, returning to the serene and untroubled look they had been wearing since the slavers had first pulled them from the pile of corpses in the vale. They willfully followed the slavers out of the annex, pausing only to cast a single placid look back through the sliding door as Calaston hauled it shut to peer at Berginanda's prone form. [center][b][i][s]888888888888[/s][/i][/b][/center] "Right, so here's the plan." Tatronda had joined them in one of the storerooms, which was filled with racks of old clothing. They had sat the androgynous figure down in front of a dressing table and started to look them over critically. "I've got some noble prat coming down from the Highlands who has expressed an interest in our stock. He's being coy about it, so I figure he's looking for a new concubine or consort or whatever. I've intimated that we handle and trade in only the best stock, and this idiot is just oozing with marks - so we dress this one up, make it look real pretty, and get rid of them for a fat payout." Tatronda sniffed. "Noble won't be happy that their new plaything has no bits on it." She jabbed at the androgynous figure's completely smooth and featureless groin. "Well that'll be on them for failing to specify what they actually wanted, yeah? " Calaston indicated dismissively. "All we need to do is take their money and split, lay low until they forget about it, and live like the nobility themselves in the meantime. There is one tiny detail however. I'm also going to need to dress up real good.