ꙮ In among Annarr’s possessions, you found some maps - ruins, not quite -near- Queenstown, but close enough on a fast train, where he’d done some digging, and spent some time.
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- Yazhn Ravhi, the Hierophant
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#hunter
has had some free time, what with not being terribly involved in the Iron Chef prep, and decided to take a small trip out of town to see what the area housing the keys looked like.
ꙮ The train crew recognise you but in the double-take kind of way; something about the way you’re walking, the way you comport yourself, makes them politely and professionally keep their distance. But the train is comfortable, and fast, and it’s not too far away – a handful of towers, close together, piercing the ground, with a much, much more recent train station in easy walking distance thereto.
gives a nod as he eventually departs, giving the maps a once over before stepping out into the savannah with purpose.
ꙮ One of the towers is just a total dud; it was picked over probably generations ago. The one next to it, though? That one had an absurdly complex mechanism locking one of its central doors that only Annarr managed to find the right counterplay to, so that tower was his stomping grounds.
may not have those specific memories floating around in his head, but the notes are the next best thing. Glad he’s got a head start on figuring out how to unlock it, at least.
ꙮ There’s this one, specific, tricky bit that really takes some snap reflexes - give me a Burning, DC 4?
- Aurelius invoked their 🔴burning gnosis [d4] -> 3.
- Aurelius spent 1 Arete and now has 2 remaining.
- Aurelius invoked their 🔴burning gnosis [d4] -> 1.
ꙮ You dart your hand out and hit the right button in the nick of time-! You feel like, for anyone else, that would have been… well, impossible, maybe. Something about your body remembers this path. A smooth black metal door slides open, slowly. ⁂
: “Hmm…”
ꙮ It looks like a place where things were built, once. Dominating the space is the wrecked hulk of what was once– it’s difficult to say. Every machine the Beast has is part of something larger - a prime mover, water, steam, or muscle - and every surface bears witness to how it was made: file marks, scraping, casting flash, chatter. The machine in this room is smooth, sleek, and was made to make smooth things; there are unfinished machined parts on a metal shelf that someone – possibly Annarr, or maybe he found them this way – carefully categorized, impossibly intricate, with curves and crenelations even Zaedulf would have struggled to accomplish at scale, rather than bespoke and with the use of gnosis. Core components of it have long since melted together under unimaginable heat and strain, it’s far beyond repair - but you know that this once was a shrine to competent craftsmanship.
: “How in the world did THAT happen, is Beast’s problem that a bomb’s gunna get dropped on it…?”
inspects the machine for a while, until determining that’s it’s right and proper fucked, then moves over to look at the parts it was producing to look at them in a bit more detail. Weapon work… probably not, maybe for some kind of vehicle or another machine?
ꙮ Infrastructure, it looks like. A bunch of very complicated elaborate mechanisms that you can’t really guess at the purpose of, and in fact, in some handwriting that bears an alarming resemblance to your own, there’s a page full of notes and hypotheses and finally a big, final, scrawled “man, what the fuck?” taking up the bottom fourth to a third of the page. But they look identical - whatever it was, someone needed a whole bunch of ‘em.
: “Illuminating.”
glances around the room - does the room take up the entirety of the structure, or were parts of it sectioned off behind doors or floors?
ꙮ This room takes up most of this floor, but not all of it, and specifically there’s a door off to the side that’s being held open with one of the complicated elaborate mechanisms now that whoever - almost certainly Annarr - got it open in the first place. An ignoble purpose for such a mechanism, but at least it found a purpose in the end?
: “Most things can be used as a wedge if you try hard enough, yeah.”
slips on through the doorway.
ꙮ It’s– not living quarters, exactly, but there’s a shitty little bed in a corner of the space, so clearly he must have spent some time here. There’s a desk along one wall, with a bunch more of his papers in neat, organised little piles on it. On the walls, there’s a bunch of pictures, in silvered tones – faded, and then clearly processed by some chemical means to bring their image forward again, somehow. The process was not without loss of detail - but a number of the pictures are of what must have been the tower complex, before whatever befell it befell it, gleaming and bright, new-made and proud. There are many others, in the near distance, in the image – and definitely no ruins where those others would be, relative to these towers, now.
ꙮ On the desk is a black sphere with little irregular lines carved into it, curves and right-angles.
: “Wait, pictures? Have we seen anything implying they have photography here? I feel like that would have come up.”
ꙮ They don’t look like alarmingly-detailed, aged beyond belief, and then chemically blurred in the process of restoration sketches, at any rate. And it’s not something you’ve seen on the Beast in the modern day, no.
: “Interesting…”
ꙮ Indeed.
: “So, Beast is old as fuck and not going through little looped cycles at least.” He scratches at his chin while starting at the pictures for a bit, before finally moving open to inspect the spherical device.
ꙮ Two things:
ꙮ It starts to glow and whirr, a little, as you approach, and,
ꙮ It’s definitely a fiend.
tilts his head slightly. Looks really mechanical for a fiend.
ꙮ It wiggles, slightly. How does a sphere wiggle?
: “Sometimes spheres [Intensify], it’s not that odd.”
ꙮ I guess you’re right.
reaches forward and pokes it.
ꙮ You poke it, and it reacts, vividly - a ripple of red activation spreading from where your finger touched it, and then more, intense, whirring - and then the light abruptly switches from Danger Red to Proper Activation Blue, and [Wiggling Intensifies Further].
: “So, what’s you’re purpose and function?”
ꙮ It starts unfolding - propping itself up on little legs made of its carapace. Its limbs are thick steel wire, with eyes threaded on and along the wire every now and then. It’s humming to itself, pleasantly, as it sets up, unfolding more and more, bracing itself against the desk, aligning all of its eyes in a particular direction, checking focus, testing.
: “That looks more fiend-y, yes, but.”
ꙮ It beeps at you, gently irate, to get out of the way a little.
makes a shrugging motion and steps to the side…?
ꙮ The fiend trills, joyously, and light - and gnosis - begin pouring out from its many eyes, focusing on somewhere behind where you’re standing.
glances back over his shoulder.
ꙮ Behind you, where the fiend is projecting its gnosis, stands– well, it’s not you, obviously. For one thing, you’re standing where you’re standing, you’re pretty confident of that. For another, the other you is– sketchlike, a little cartoonish. Not caricature, but details are suggested more than filled-in. The ears are still, utterly, non-wiggly, though.
says, “Hey, there, me from the future. Or. Well. Not me, I don’t think. I get the impression that, whoever you are, you won’t be me any more, so I can’t address you by name, so– oh, yeah, I know. Hey, Hunter. It’s nice to sort of kind of get to say hello.”
: “Oh, you’re a recording device, okay.”
chuckles. In -response-. “A -little- bit fancier than that. I’m very good at what I do. I bet– I hope– haha. No, I know that you are, too.” He scratches behind one tragically nonresponsive ear. “So, uh. As far as explanation of why I went to all of this effort goes– and I wanted to make sure you knew this, but I also wanted to make sure nobody else did– when the Queen did what she did, I saw… I’m not quite sure how to put it into words. I saw the whole of me, from the outside. From the start to the end.” ⁂
raises an eyebrow. “(Primitive AI? Has the fiend scan your mind and then dupe it? Huh.)” He taps at the side of his cheek in thought while listening.
: “And I knew that the end wasn’t too far off…? But I also saw that it both was and wasn’t the end of me, because I knew that someone - that you’d - pick up where I left off, which made it all… easier. Not easy, exactly? But definitely different.”
starts pacing around, a little - it looks like he’s constrained to within a specific radius, so he’s sort of walking in a tight circle. “Shit, what do I want to say. Is it weird if I tell you I hope you find whatever kills me and kick its ass for me, knowing that it’s also basically responsible for you coming into existence? I don’t know. Maybe it’s -not- awful and you’re on good terms with it, but on the off chance that you’re not, kick its ass for me if you get the chance. Tell… Jae and Zaya know what they need to know, actually. Or they will when it’s time.” He frowns, turns to look, somehow, at Aurelius. “Right, tell Midra that Alistair is hopelessly in love with him and that I think they’d make a cute couple and that I want him to be happy, he’s not gonna hear that from me while I’m alive, he’d die on the spot. Mmm. Oh! Strictly speaking it’s pointless, because you’re talking to a fiendogram, but… could you tell me your name?”
mouths the words ‘fiendogram’, before looking towards the display lenses. “It’s Aurelius.”
: “Listen, I– I know ‘fiendogram’ sucks, come up with a better name, you’ll have time to.” A pause. “Aurelius. I like it.” He smiles. “You already found my secretest stash, which means you’ve almost definitely been through my stuff at my place and at Zaed’s. Anything you find there that you want or could make use of is yours. Same goes for here. Uh. There’s a secret compartment -under- the lid of the desk, I bet your fingers will remember where the catch for it is.” A pause. “You got any questions for me? I’m not really confident how good the fiend’s resolution of me will be, but I mean. I’d rather try and fail than not have tried at all.”
: “Well, getting the big things out of the way first… what was important enough to relay to me in secret that you didn’t want anyone else hearing?”
: “…honestly, and this feels pretty selfish, just that I knew I was going to die and get replaced. Even Jae didn’t know I knew that, I don’t think. That, and I wanted something that sort of kind of calls itself me to get to see the look on my face when I open up the secret compartment.”
: “Ah, hm. Fair enough.”
glances around the room again, then move over towards the desk and runs a hand underneath it.
ꙮ Yeah, it’s right there where you expected it to be. There’s a satisfying ‘click’ and then a false bottom drops out of the surface, and slides out; there’s a bunch of thin stacked black metal plates with silvered etchings.
pulls them out of the hutch, before spreading them out on top of the table.
ꙮ Glancing at the plates, you realise that if you put them together the right way, it’s an elaborately detailed, if definitely incomplete, map of the Deepforge and its major entrances - it’s labyrinthine beyond imagining, but Annarr managed to chart a couple very plausibly-safe paths from the surface to– well, the parts where the map stops, where the various charted paths converge. Some sort of central area, labeled ‘???’ and “there’s more to explore, here”.
looks on, arms crossed, proudly.
: “Huh. Guess when they said the forge hadn’t been fully explored and mapped out they were wrong? Weird thing to keep secret though.”
: “In fairness, it was a Secret Project. Who knows, there might have been something absolutely wild down there to stake Clan claim on. Still might be. Although I kind of doubt it. Although, there’s definitely -something- my drone-fiends could never get past, no matter what I did. Always wanted to go and see it myself, never got the chance. I hope you can.”
: “Yeah, that’s not immediately next on the list, but the event after that on the docket.”
: “Aw, fuck yeah.”
: “All signs are currently points towards some kind of Fiend-Mother though and not cool loot, though.”
: “I don’t know, exciting new knowledge its its own kind of cool loot. Do we still believe that?” He sounds… hopeful.
: “Y’know, fair enough. I don’t imagine you’d gotten the hints so that’d probably have been more surprising for you.”
: “I think the full me probably would have– well. I don’t know. People always said I don’t react to things the way they expect me to. But that just makes sense to me? The fiends come from somewhere, the Endjinn came from somewhere.”
: “Yeah.”
traces in finger down one of the pathways leading from the outside to the heart of the deepforge in thought. “So were the photographs in here too, along with those keys, or did you pull them out of somewhere else?”
: “‘photographs’, huh? Fuckin’ wild that there’s a word for ‘em and that you know it.” He laughs, a little wistfully, like he wishes– well. “I found them in– there were some weird safes gnosis-locked to the gills here that looked… pristine, compared to everything else. Had a bunch of those pictures, and some papers that had degraded past any hope of saving, and the boxes I left on the desk at Zaed’s, which. Good fuckin’ luck with those, I tried everything I could.”
: “Oh, yeah, Got ‘em both open and spent.”
: “Whaaaat the fuuuuck.”
: “How!?”
: “But yeah I have a lot of outside of context knowledge that it seems like… is supposed to be regulated to… what did they call them here? Not juevos, that’s eggs… whatever the hell they were calling Heroes with a spanish j sound -“
: “You’re not gunna believe this but they’re actually like. Tied to specific… hm. Not people. Souls, I guess? And if you have the matching one, you just flip the latch and bam, key inside.”
looks like he would slump over into a full elbows-on-desk, head-in-hands double facepalm but his parameters preclude that, so he just sighs really, really dramatically.
: “Yeah, imagine our surprise when the kushtaka with us just casually popped one open.”
: “The hell is a kushtaka?”
: “Extremely furry otter metahuman looking guys from another plane of existance.”
: “Wild.”
delivers that in just the most utter deadpan.
: “Yeah.”
nods.
: “So, okay. Air tight lock box surrounded by paper degraded past the point of functionality that’s… interesting. Wonder why a visual record of this place was so important. Were they making more than just fancy pipes? … Obviously they were making more than just fancy pipes, there was only one machine.”
: “(Also good job on touching them up without even knowing what the hell they were?)”
: “Not surrounded by, the paper was -in- the box, and it was still fucked up beyond all recognition. The pictures are on– I don’t know. It’s not paper, at any rate. Figured out a way to make the images more visible, again, though. We didn’t even totally fuck up any of the images, although we ended up taking little strips off the sides that looked like they mattered the least, on one or two of ‘em. We were careful.” Again, a proud smile.
: “As for why…? I don’t know, your guess is kind of definitionally at least as good as mine. Maybe they were just proud of what they built. Wanted… someone, somewhen, to know about it.” And you feel, you think, like Annarr could relate to that.
: “Oh the papers were inside too - fuck that’s old.”
: “Yeaaaaah.”
: “Must have been right after the split, or maybe even presundering… would that even make sense? … Maybe, Samudra had the city under the ice… huh.”
gives Aurelius a Weird Look but, hey– it sounds like the data’s useful, in some way, to him, so that’s nice.
ꙮ The image of Annarr is, slowly but surely, losing more and more detail.
: “Yeah that’s probably too much to go into.”
: “Any wild theories on why the Beast might start losing Moons Suddenly, Without Warning, At An Alarming Rate by the by?”
frowns, deeply.
: “…I had a crazy theory that the moons were somehow– why nothing like Zaed’s ship ever worked. That they were keeping something in or keeping something out. If something’s happening to them, then, uh, hmm. Not how I wanted to test that theory, honestly.”
: “A seal that was fucking with gravity???”
shrugs. “It ever strike you as weird that you can always see basically the same stars no matter where you are on the Beast? ‘cause it struck me as weird, and everyone looked at me like I was crazy for thinking it was weird. But, like… why should it work that way, that makes no actual sense.”
: “If the sky’s that fucking weird, who knows what else is going on. And if that is normal, then… other things don’t make sense.” He shrugs.
: “Hadn’t really paid that much attention to it but… does the rails actually go far enough out that it would matter? … Has anyone ever circumnavigated the Beast before?”
: “‘Beast might have a false skybox.’ Salme’s gunna fucking love that one.”
: “Yeah. Like… Auxanyr? No matter where you go, you look up and she’s right there. The Reach is basically all the ass way on the other side of the world, practically. It’s fucking weird!”
pauses. Grins. “Who’s Salme?”
: “Oh, fuck. I didn’t realize the planet was that small. Okay yeah that’s super fucked and not normal. Cool, false skybox it is.”
: “Partner in heroics.”
grins more. Just… grins. “Aww, good for you.” He seemed happy that this future version of him ALSO THINKS THE SAME THINGS ARE WEIRD, but he seems even happier, now.
: “Did you keep the containers you found the pictures in?”
scowls and shakes his head. “They basically evaporated when I was able to undo the gnosis on ‘em, sorry.”
: “No biggie.”
: “Hmm what else.”
: “…Honestly nothing else comes to mind.”
: “That naginata wasn't haunted when you made it, right?“
blinks, squints, -peers-. “Why’re you talking all weird all of a sudden? Anyways, if it was, the ghost was very polite and never bothered me any, but I don’t think so.”
: “Cool, didn't think so but figured I'd ask while we were here.“
: “Wait, what do you mean, haunted.”
: “Uh…”
: “I mean it's possessed by the ghost of east asian dynasty's past. Which, I guess, is On Brand for the Beast, at least...?“
: “Huh. Neat.” He scrunches up his face, although the details are getting as muddled as the photographs are, even after Annarr’s careful restoration. “Gonna explain the weird accent you’re putting on and taking off, or would my batteries run out first?” He grins, a little.
rolls a shrug. “I’m haunted by the ghost of a dumbass.”
laughs. He just laughs. “What the fuck. Alright.”
: “Yeah. I mean I guess it’s interesting but it’s kind of a whole Thing and you look like a newspaper cartoon character now, so, yeah.”
takes a deep breath. “Alright, then. Hey, dumbass ghost. Be good to Aurelius, alright?” He grins crookedly, and flickers slightly.
: “Sure.“
: “Good.” He flickers again, frowns. “Ugh, that doesn’t feel…” He looks up, looks Aurelius in the eye, and holds out his fist for a fistbump.
nods slightly, reaching out with one of his own fist. “Anything else you need to get off your chest while we’re here?”
puts all the last of his coherence into the fistbump, voice losing its clarity. “Nah. Nah, I’m good. I hope this helped, somehow. I hope you’re having a good time, bein–“
ꙮ The fiend whirs, the eyes dim, and it gently scuttles in on itself until it’s a sphere again, with the last of its power.
taps at the side of his cheek in thought, then nods to himself and glances around the room. He scoops up the map first, then what’s left of the notes, then the pictures, before picking the fiend up and stowing everything way. He then takes another look around the room, then the larger area and others floors, to make sure nothing else interesting way hiding away.
ꙮ Doesn’t seem like it.
takes a couple samples of whatever it was the machine was built to make on the way back out of the tower, making sure to lock up behind him, then makes for the train station. On the ride back to Queenstown, he spends some time carefully analyzing the handwriting left on the notes he found for a while, before eventually pulling out some of the Beast’s low quality paper and penning a note to Midra. This letter eventually goes into a sealed envelope, backdated roughly four months. Once this train arrives, he immediately makes for the post office to deliver the letter, then makes for Zaedulf’s workshop. Here, the fiend containing the memory of Annarr is left along with a note about how one might go around resupplying it with power, before he leaves to regroup with the rest of his Clan.