The 9th & 10th of Aggrave, Year 373 P.R.F. (High Lunar Cycle)

  The Cetimos Ministry of Summoning’s Testing and Isolation Facility #2, on the outskirts of Drebos Altimas

  With a significant portion of our packing done, for our upcoming departure, all five us had made our long way back up the stairs and then down the interior ramp again within the tower, returning to those passages deep underneath where I had first been escorted after being summoned to this world. A place of reinforced doors, heavy stone construction, and a heavier atmosphere. Between that and the discomfort I had felt during and since our lunch break, I wasn’t necessarily feeling as upbeat and chipper as I had been at the start of our packing efforts.

  But apparently, the armory we needed to pull supplies from were tucked away in these halls.

  Working together, Lady Elutria and Rudolpho opened one of those heavily-reinforced doors, one otherwise nondescript and identical to its peers. Even as Lady Elutria was still pulling the door wide and Rudolpho was still working at quieting one of the several protective wards, Hesra had already begun moving to enter the room beyond with Master Thomas close on her heels. I started to follow them as well, but Lady Elutria waved me back. I took it to mean that I wouldn’t be allowed inside, but as Lady Elutria muttered one last incantation, a final sigil flared to brilliance, hidden within the patterned tile floor just inside the doorway, then died out.

  “Apologies Secia, but some of the wards are keyed specifically to prevent summons from gaining access to the armory without permission,” said a smiling Rudolpho. Lady Elutria didn’t bother to say anything at all, merely gesturing that I should now follow. With the recent conversation about their Tests, and where this armory was located, I found myself wondering if Lady Elutria was now deliberately trying to provoke me, despite seemingly inviting me to stand within an arm’s reach of a large quantity of weapons.

  The interior might properly be described as a single room, but only in the most technical sense. If the ceiling had been any higher than the hallway we’d just entered from, I might have been tempted to describe it as “cavernous”. The armory was extensive, with multiple racks of both a variety of different kinds of weapons and multiple types of armor, grouped by section and aligned in rows. The walls themselves were no simple flat surface but regularly punctuated by large alcoves, each seemingly devoted to one purpose or another. Some seemed like preparatory areas, with benches, arming dummies, and rows of lockers.

  Other alcoves were set up like miniature workshops, with workbenches and tools specialized to a variety of crafts, from fletching to leatherworking to glass etching. There were even a pair of alcoves each organized around a small forge. The forges were built to different scales; one for the heavier work of shaping steel and mithril, and one for comparatively more delicate work such as working copper or drawing gold wire.

  The racks of equipment suitable for arming a small company of soldiers may have dominated the foreground, but once I noticed the workshops, I had eyes for nothing else. It was all I could do not to break into a run, as I made a beeline for what appeared to be some kind of compact alchemy lab. I’ve always been a sucker for a pretty alembic, and this one had a beaut on full display. And while friends had commented that they found the typical range of an alchemist’s glasswares to be an impenetrable chaos, I had always found them comfortably familiar and straightforward. Yet as I continued to draw closer to the workstation, I spotted perhaps three shapes completely unknown to me, tucked in and among the dozens of pieces carefully arranged across multiple surfaces, ready at need. The idea of puzzling out their purposes and discovering their uses had my eyes metaphorically sparkling. Heaven!

  “Secia?” called out Hesra, questioningly, from somewhere lost among the central equipment racks.

  “Yes?”

  “Where are you? Please return and join us. Come back to the center aisle, and you should be able to find us.”

  Well, that’s frustrating. Torn, I struggled to decide what to do. I really would enjoy the chance to examine how they’ve laid out these workspaces, but I know that they must be waiting on me. Reluctantly, I began to turn back towards the group, when…

  “Secia!” This time, it was an impatient Lady Elutria shouting for me.

  She’s feeling impatient? Well, I could be impatient, too. My head felt hard, tense, my emotions more raw in a way that I wasn’t accustomed to. With a disdainful flick of my tail, I began striding determinedly towards the alchemy setup. No longer hurried by excitement, but a slower, more deliberate march.

  “Secia! Hurry up!” she called again.

  “I’m over here!” I called back, trying to keep my tone as even as I could.

  Now Master Thomas raised his voice, confused. “Are you lost?”

  “Nope! I’m looking at something.”

  “Secia, if you’ve found a weapon that might suit you,” now came Hesra again, “That’s one of the reasons why we’re here. We just want to…”

  I interrupted with “Not weapons. Alchemy! You can come find me if you want.”

  I think that began to provoke another outburst from Lady Elutria, only for someone to intervene before she got started. Maybe? I wasn’t able to make out any proper words, so I’m not entirely sure what I had heard. I didn’t really care, anyway.

  *…*

  Okay, fine. I wanted not to care, but maybe I cared just a little, despite myself. Regardless, I had reached the alcove I had been seeking and could now examine the alchemy paraphernalia up close. I tried to provoke myself into once again feeling that sense of enrapture towards the alembic that had initially so enchanted me, but I couldn’t quite put my heart into it. My focus was too scattered, maybe. If I could just stop caring for a few minutes about the others in the room, I’m sure I would be able to find that feeling again. Instead, I just got more and more annoyed, at my failures to feel what I wanted to feel, to not be perfectly in control of my own self, to be able to think and feel and do what I want, when I want.

  Fine. If joy and elation were currently beyond my reach, I had other choices, other options. I turned my focus to the other tools of alchemy scattered across the workbenches set against all three walls of this alcove. I was sure I had seen three different items of glassware, that even at a distance looked distinctly unfamiliar to me. So exactly which ones were they? Pouring all of myself, my focus, into examining them in detail and puzzling out what I could sounded like an excellent idea.

  It was harder than it should have been. One, I was sure, had been to the far left, and sitting far enough forward to be have given me an unobstructed view of it from a distance. Two moderately tall glass chimneys of similar but not identical proportions, rising from a large glass bulb, with several small copper fittings. Valves, I had thought, but I hadn’t quite been able to make out the details clearly enough from that far away. It had reminded me slightly of equipment I had used in the past to separate the more potent liquid components of a mana potion from those of weaker effect. Doing so not only produced a more superior mana potion, but the unused remainder was also left untainted to produce a much more watered down version with, in addition to the superior potion, instead of simply wasting the leftovers. But I’d never seen a design with two chimneys, and I was curious as to what it could be intended for.

  And then as I was searching hard through the various apparatus lined up on that left side of the workspace, seeing several “almosts” but all only of the single-chimney design I already knew, I recognized one particular copper fitting by its odd s-bend and it all clicked. There was no two-chimney variant on this table. I had been fooled by forced perspective. Two of the single-chimney designs had been similar enough in appearance and sat side-by-side, with the slightly smaller one just happening to sit behind the larger, at least from the angle I had been approaching from. In my excitement I had mistaken them for being all of a single piece.

  I stood there for a few moments, trying to not let my disappointment get the better of me. Fine, I was mistaken. Mistakes happen. But just because I had gotten the wrong idea once, didn’t mean that there couldn’t still be two others that were just as excitingly unfamiliar new tools to examine. Focus. Just focus. The second unfamiliar piece; what exactly had caught my eye? Where should I look to spot it again?

  Which of course is when I heard the others approaching from behind me. To turn and face them now or wait until they speak to me first, that is the next question…

  The sound of footsteps stopped close by, but I didn’t hear them immediately say anything, either. As the moment stretched, I tried to continue my visual search of the workshop, but was struggling to meaningfully focus on what I was seeing as I waited for their next move. It was Hesra who finally broke their silence, but not in a way I expected.

  “Okay, that’s just plain adorable.”

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  Wait, what? Startled, I spun around, furious, ready to chew her out but too angry to find coherent words for my displeasure.

  They stood there in an uneven line across the entrance to this alcove, and looked as surprised by me as I was by them. They also looked far more relaxed about things than I was expecting. But apparently enough of my feelings showed in my face for Hesra to raise her hands placatingly, and Rudolpho actually dropped his customary smile altogether, looking concerned.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend,” Hesra offered. The steely engineer shrugged slightly as she explained, “I’m not often one to think something is particularly cute. But, your tail, the way it was so forcefully swishing back and forth in varying loops… I don’t think we had realized yet just how passionate you are about alchemy. What do you think of the setup here? It’s not a full, proper alchemy lab, of course. Just something to mix up treatments to keep the gear in this room in good condition, or to prepare various coatings to aid with particularly unusual threats. But still, do you like it?”

  If my tail had been lashing, it hadn’t been motivated by any rosier emotions on my part. I might still lack confidence in my ability to glare in a particularly devastating way, but her implication that they had found my anger “cute” in any sens at all certainly had me narrowing my eyes even further as she spoke. But all of her words were unexpected to begin with, and her sudden request for my perspective on their workspace left me in a more confused place.

  I still wanted to rage and scream, but that was easier for me to imagine doing when I had assumed this was inevitably going to be some kind of angry confrontation anyway. Their calm, relaxed attitudes so little matched my own, I just… Instead of giving me the excuse I needed to explode, I found me warring with myself about whether to still blow up or to express my honest opinion about their alchemy lab in reply to Hesra’s question. The whole thing was just so ludicrous. I wanted to give up the whole question of “what to say” and just stomp and yell and break things, except none of that felt like me. I’ve never been the sort of person to throw a tantrum. Especially over what? Why was I even so angry in the first place? What had they done, to deserve that from me? To force them to deal with my feelings?

  Paralyzed with indecision, I gritted my teeth and just… froze, I guess. I lost track of my own thoughts, let alone the outside world, as I was battered by emotions I didn’t understand and didn’t know how to deal with.

  Suddenly, the world snapped back into focus for me. But everything looked grayer, seemed more shadowed and distant. My limbs were leaden and heavy. The fury that had so energized me was gone, missing, and where it went I neither knew nor cared. I didn’t care about anything anymore. I felt a brief pang of worry about how little I cared about anything, but that too was swiftly muffled and dwindled until it too become nothing of significance to me.

  While I’ve been prone to get lost in thought in the past, and in this case I had no objective sense of how much time had actually elapsed since Hesra had finished speaking, it didn’t really look like I’d missed anything. Somehow I seemed to have gone from enraged to uncaring in less time than it took to snap one’s fingers. I wasn’t sure how that had happened. But I also didn’t care.

  ”I didn’t want to touch anything without permission, so I’m not really sure. Alchemy is one of several crafting arts I’m proficient in, and I was mostly curious to see how your equipment and applications of alchemy compares to those I know. Still, of the alembics it has been stocked with, I did think this one was particularly pretty.”

  Hesra looked at me oddly, but Rudolpho was all smiles again. “Oh ho? We won’t be able to take any of these tools with us; we’re not permitted to remove them from this facility. Do you think you could provide us with a few samples of your own alchemy yet today, before we depart? For that matter, are there any other crafts here you could demonstrate? What tools or materials are you missing?”

  But Lady Elutria chose to interject before I could speak. “No Rudolpho. Not today.”

  Her noblewoman’s expression firmly in place again, I wasn’t sure how to read her objection. Just earlier today, I had been itching for the chance to make something new again. It had been a small wish, lost among more than a few other concerns. And reminded me of my own workshop and tools, the one’s I’d had no opportunity to bring with me when I had been summoned to this world. Now, though, with Rudolpho’s open-ended “make anything I’d like”, I was struggling to find any inspiration for an actual project I could complete. Or wanted to work on.

  “I know I was the one who suggested assessing Secia’s skills in the field in the first place, but her skills as an artisan needs to be part of her assessment as well. Asking her to display her artistry empty-handed in the wild isn’t a fair basis to judge by. And there’s truly no proper set of tools we could be allowed to bring with us. So if not today, when? Are we delaying our departure?”

  “We’ll still leave tomorrow. We can borrow a true, proper laboratory for her to use after we’ve arrived back in the city. Hesra said it herself - however high quality this equipment might be, overall it’s quite limited in its actual scope. Forcing her to work within these constraints isn’t much better than asking her to work empty-handed in the woods.”

  Rudolpho was clearly skeptical of this reasoning. “That’s not impossible, but it’ll be much easier to convince a master craftsman to lend us the use of his domain if we could present him with an existing example or two of Secia’s own craftsmanship.”

  “There’s no need. I can secure the appropriate workspaces for her assessment regardless.”

  “But surely there’s no harm in…”

  “I said ‘no’, Rudolpho.”

  He frowned, but lapsed into silence. I didn’t really feel strongly either way. I looked to Hesra and Master Thomas’s reactions. Master Thomas looked like he wanted to argue as well, but maybe wasn’t sure what to say. Whatever Hesra felt about this wasn’t apparent on her face. Maybe she didn’t care any more than I did.

  When no one raised any further challenges to her decision, Lady Elutria didn’t look triumphant or comment further. It was expected of us, natural. The decision had always been hers. Instead, she turned back to me. “You’ll need a weapon. Something you can defend yourself with if you had to, at a minimum. Armor, too, if you’d like some.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s more than a few to choose between, obviously. Let us know what might work best for you, and we can help you to narrow it down, ease you in finding the right fit.”

  “I prefer to fight with a staff, when I have to. Something about shoulder-high for me would work well. Something sturdy, with enough heft that a strike will have some force behind it, but I favor quick blows and movements over a heavy swing. One of my favorites had some matten vine bark woven through the leather grip, to keep it from slipping when wet or greasy.”

  “As one should expect from an artisan; how very precise. I’ve never heard of ‘matten vines’, but I’m sure we can find you something.” She gave an approving nod, and began to lead us back among the various racks of equipment. We all followed her, of course. What else would we have done?

  *****

  For the second time, I awoke in the bedroom that had been lent to me, to a sky showing the early light of false dawn but without a visible sun in the sky. A few things were different this time, though. In one corner, close to the door, leaned a polished wooden staff. A steel cap with small traceries of brass around the rim graced either end. The original leather wrapping for the staff's grip had been a particularly heavy, thickly-cut affair. A quality choice, but one that had left the staff just a touch broader than I could comfortably hold in my hands, risking it slipping from my fingers in an actual fight. I had replaced it yesterday with a different kind of leather, something that I could wrap tighter and thinner to better suit me. It hadn’t been much of an alteration, but Rudolpho had seemed a bit happier that I had completed even so small a project.

  I was also hungry, but certainly not starving. This time I’d eaten dinner last night, even if I had taken it back to my bedroom to eat in private. I'm not sure how polite that was of me, but I'd preferred that over risking sharing another awkward meal with the others, the way lunch had been.

  Third, that feeling of being stretched and wooden, that pervasive grayness to the world, had followed me all the way into the evening. When the unfamiliar stars had begun to appear in the sky, I hadn’t really felt anything at all. Checking myself this morning… I don’t think I feel quite so gray? At least not in the same way. It’s hard to tell if things seem a little washed out and dim at the moment because of something about me, or just because there’s so little light in the sky. I'm probably not so gray at all this morning, is my best guess. Where that had all come from in the first place, I still wasn’t sure, but I don’t think it had left me again altogether, either.

  But it was hard to take the time to really sort through that just now, because fourth, someone kept insistently knocking on my door. “Secia? It’s time to get up. We’ll be heading out soon.”

  I rose and went to the door, collecting my new staff along the way. “I’m awake, Hesra.” I answered her as softly as she had called to me. I wasn’t quite sure why we were keeping our voices so quiet, if everyone was supposed to be awake now, but it’s not as if I was having trouble hearing her.

  “Good morning, Secia. We’re giving our packs one last look, just to be sure we haven’t forgotten anything. Master Thomas has already prepared us something warm to eat, once we’re on the road.”

  Not long thereafter, all five of us were gathered in a new hallway, packs shouldered, a hall reached via a completely different stairway down from the roof, that had remained hidden until now. Unlike any other part of the tower I’d seen, this corridor was twice the width and three times the height of the other hallways, with colorful banners hung along the walls. They were neither uniform in the cut of their fabric nor in the imagery that adorned them, although none of them depicted anything I found identifiable. Each one prominently centered a single symbol of one sort or another, but they were abstract shapes that meant nothing to me.

  I had plenty of time to examine them, as I had nothing better to do while I waited for them to open the massive gate at the far end of the hall. Opening the armory may have required both Lady Elutria and Rudolpho, but apparently this portal was barred by locks that need all four of them working together to open.

  It seemingly wasn’t a quick process, and I’d been hearing various thumps, clicks, and similar noises for a while now. So it wasn’t a particular noise that suddenly drew my attention back to the gate, but rather a change in the air. Even on the rooftop patio, the air might have been fresher, but had been untouched by even a breeze. Now, however, a constant stream of air was rushing gently across my face.

  Waiting for Rudolpho's nod, just in case there still remained any wards keyed just to me, I stood ready. But not this time, it seemed. The four mages were all smiles as they led me out into the open air. I had barely traveled ten feet outside, before I was overwhelmed by the need to just stop and take it all in.

  We still were high up the side of a mountain, and the nearby ground was more stones and shrubbery than a proper forest. But I could see trees nearby both above and below me, in places where the ground wasn't quite so steep. Packed earth shifted slightly and yielded to my feet in a way that stone floors never would, and my ears discovered something else that had been missing from within the tower - birdsong. Deeply I inhaled, while feeling the breeze gently tickling my short fur in places where it was exposed, such as my face, tail, and the backs of my hands. And as I felt myself relaxing, truly relaxing, the sun itself finally started to peek above the mountain summit looming over me.