Vol. 3 Chap. 140 Upright Young Lady

Vol. 3 Chap. 140 Upright Young Lady

It was an oddly quiet moment. The PMC soldiers were sharp and Level Three. The recording talismans, plural, covering the waiting room were pumping out Level Four Power. The Blessing of the Silent Forest could handle it. He wasnt leaking a speck of energy, and besides. If something did pierce his shroud of unnoticibility, he had a perfect identity lined up.

Sergeant Truth Medici, Starbrite PMC, seconded from Harban. Still waiting on that back pay.

The mercenaries were not-quite-lounging. Knowing they were being watched kept them from being too casual. Even so, there was a limit to how performatively tense they were willing to be for hours a day when buried in an armored bunker inside a volcano.

Sharon, the merc with a hot date jumped to her feet grinning as the doors to the Prototype Lab opened. Truth knew he had a split second to dive through the door and had exploded into motion the instant it had started to swing open. He was in the air before he got a look at the fellows face. As a result, he looked like an outraged leopard as he flew through the doorway.

The guy, Mr. Hot Date, Mr. He wont walk right ever again, and will get weird around oranges, was average. Totally meh. Not out of shape, but not really in shape. Not handsome, not ugly. Just meh. And yet, Starbrite had told Truth he was so hideous, women recoiled at the sight of him.

Feeling distinctly bloody minded, Truth landed in the Prototype Lab on all fours. And froze there. Incisive was giving him a gentle reminder. This was a building with High Levels in it. High Levels stationed in strategic locations. The Prototype Lab might just be such a strategic location. Given all the fixed defenses outside.

The room was very long, a hundred meters or so, filled with long black-stone-topped work tables. The back wall was not lit, but the rest of the room was washed in blinding light from big overhead lighting arrays. In the center of the front quarter of the room was an oblong box, about three meters long, two meters across and a meter and a half high.

He hadnt the faintest clue what he was looking at. Truth took a lot of pleasure in his talisman maintenance skills, but they were never intended for high-magic applications. Carriages, building maintenance, city maintenance, street lights, locks, climate control, scry devices, that was his area of skill. The daily necessities of people and cities.

The long box was not that.

It appeared to be made out of, or at least covered by, a dark gold material. His first guess was Orichalcum, but if thats what it was, then it was plated and a bare micron thick. There probably wasnt that much Orichalcum in the world. Which did give rise to the question of what could possibly be underneath that would justify coating it in one of the worlds most expensive metals.

The answer appeared to be talismans. And amulets. And cartouches, carved gems, implanted fetishes, spell formations, spell restrictions, astrological alignment elements inscribed for purposes unknown, all combined in ways he had never seen before. There were even pictures on it. Or one big picture with lots of little elements. The longer he looked at it, the less he understood.

There were logics to talisman design. Not a logic but logics. It all depended on what you were trying to do, and different manufacturers had different ways of going about it. A lot of companies ripped of Starbrites designs, for better or worse. Mostly just changing things up enough to keep Legal happy. This only kind of seemed to follow any of the logics he understood.

Each talisman made a degree of sense, even if he didnt know what it did. It was just that, when you stacked a few thousand systems on top of each other, trying to figure out what they did while crouched on all fours on the polished concrete floor is a bit of a challenge. And when he squinted and let his eyes go a little burry, it really did look like a kids idea of a grownup lying on their back.

Truth was very curious to see what it looked like from the top. The longer he looked at it, the more the word coffin came to mind. Then, from some ancient depth, the word sarcophagus.

Up on the gantry now, with a view of the whole lab. Longer than some sports fields, and about as wide across. The chest had pride of place near the entrance, but there was an entire production facility in here, with hooded alchemist furnaces burning next to the searing lights over a gem carvers table. Everywhere, in beautiful arrays were the tiny tools the very best talisman designers got to use. A production facility for the best in the world.

Truth could name each of those tools, tell you roughly how they were used, but had never touched one. Those were for talisman designers. For the builders and makers of things. He was only ever going to be trusted with maintaining things. Simple things. If he worked very hard and proved himself. It was the very highest a rat could climb, according to his highschool.

Im looking down on you, you bastards. Im looking down at you all, and you dont even know why or how. Call me a fool. Call me an idiot. But Im still climbing. Looking at the sky and moving up. And you? You dont even know youre in a well.

The chest was yes it was a sarcophagus, or it looked like one at any rate. The magical technology built into it drew a human form. Rough, stylized, but filled with subtle meaning. A man, Truth saw. Long beard, white hair, deep eyes. Haunted eyes, perhaps, or eyes that had seen many, many things. A broad forehead that remembered too much. Thin. Painfully thin. The rich robes colored with precious gems carved into talismans and spell components seemed to drape over bird bones. Thin sticks of fingers grew on the slender branches of the figures arms.

Maybe it was the color, the dark gold of the Orichalcum, but the figure looked sick. There was a wariness in those eyes too. Truth knew that look. Its how people got when they were hit a lot and werent allowed to hit back. Not unable. Not allowed. Truth had seen that look in the mirror often enough.

He didnt look at the picture on the box for very long. For some reason, that seemed dangerous. For roughly the same reason he didnt look too long at the senior sitting on the dias. An alert person, in Truths experience, could feel the weight of anothers eyes on them. Nobody got to be a high level by being nice, Starbrite support or not. The senior would feel his attention if he let it linger. And he had an unpleasant feeling that, whoever was depicted on the box, they could do the same.

He crept along the scaffolding, looking down on the laboratory. They were fabricating components for the chest, and nothing else. Research happened elsewhere. This was a pure production facility. He kept coming back to the height of the place. Why? Its not like there was a big door to the exterior. He glared at the ceiling, not far from him here. Nothing that suggested it wasnt solid rock. Rock with, likely, lava burning at a thousand degrees or more on the other side of it.

So why was it so damn tall in here?

As he made his way towards the back wall, he noticed there were fewer and fewer technicians at work. The ones that were here all seemed to face the front of the room, looking towards that senior sitting near the door.

There was a protrusion on the black wall. A semi-circle extended into the room three meters deep. It was covered in lead curse tablets. Truth could tell what they were from tens of meters away. The repression and viciousness of the spells made his skin crawl. He could only imagine what it was doing to the people who worked near them. The protrusion ran all the way up to the ceiling, winding into a cube of four meters on a side. Each side, top and bottom included, was shingled in even more curse tablets.

Just looking at the thing felt disgusting. Whatever was under the curse tablets was something vile, something that needed to be not just sealed, but broken. Too busy hurting to cause mischief. Truth rated Merkovahs Macerating Juicer enchantment as more elegant, but for concentrated malice, it wasnt a patch on this monumental atrocity.

It also didnt make a lick of sense. It was the only thing tall enough to justify the high ceiling, and it clearly didnt exist under the mountain naturally. The lead would melt for one thing. No, this was all purpose built. Someone designed the base, designed this room and then installed this pillar of concentrated misery. For some reason. He wasnt going to figure it out from next to the wall. There was a cross-room gantry. He crawled out over it.

As he moved, he noticed the lead tablets at the front of the cube seemed to shiver now and again. Too slow for breathing, but they came very regularly. The soft lead muffled the clattering. Over and over. Slow and very steady.

He got to the middle of the cross beam and looked over. From this angle, the curses looked like the scales of a serpent, extending down from the box and covering its long body. The box, from the front looked like a face. A young ladys face. The curses on the tablet seemed to shimmer and blur- the faces eyes blinked.

*Looking very fit for a dead man, Sergeant Medici. It seems youve been, heh, well, these last few years.*