Kistaria actually felt a nervous lump in her throat as she raised the lantern, to glide less than blindly into the antechamber. But still shadows clung to dusty worktables scattered with broken and discarded tools.
Unidentifiable projects lay in heaps and scrapbins, under moth-eaten tarps and in halfway opened crates. Everything she came across was either bent, torn, or damaged in some way. Which brought to light more than the few tidbits she had gleaned from 'friendly conversation'.
Sex wasn't a taboo subject for Kistaria, but only useful as a tool to gather information. The apprentices of Caldeus certainly wanted to indulge their twisted desires with her. But as they were obvious booklickers of the Master Engineer, all were rebuffed with obvious distaste.
It was a chance encounter with one of the second tier of mages; men who answered only to the Counsel, that had set her on the path to really discover the agendas prior to her arrival.
The Counsel, the lesser counsel, even the apprentices who had been but babes and toddlers at the time...
Were refugees of another planet.
Some terrible cataclysm had begun to warp the population, and in desperation the Magus and the Engineer Corps had constructed a giant magnetic rail tube. And then from the very fabric of the cosmos torn another planet so similar to their own with another half of the magnetic causeway constructed on the surface.
They had evacuated with terrible casualties, hundreds of lives ended or dragged screaming back into the seething maelstrom of mindless hate.
Upon arrival, the twisting bubble platform was locked in place, and the center electromagnets powered down. With the switch thrown, those left on the planet were overrun, life a final scrabble for survival.
At this point the mages, in their arrogance she suspected, split off from the rest of the survivors and began to dig the city they were in today.
At first, they had kept up their devices of war, but as the first couple of years passed, began to see a decline in needing to keep a stockpile of armanents.
At the sixth year, the storehouse had been locked up and sealed off, while the use of technology and science intermixed became forbidden.
Forward two more years to today, where a perfect example of why technomagery was banned is now snooping around their archived warehouse of mass destruction.
Of course, time and the elements had been unkind. Rust, water corrosion, and the general disrepair were rampant. Even the sealed crates once they were opened revealed tangled jumbles of broken junk and smashed tools.
A total waste.
With a defeated sigh, Kista sat down on a wobbly stool, and pondered where to go from there. Because as it was standing, her entire mission to break in to the workhouse and rise to the top had.. was going to fall off the stool!
A little annoyed as she was suddenly pitched backwards, Kistaria growled and stood up to dust herself off. Before giving the stool a little kick with her good foot. Only to be perplexed at the hollow ringing sound that echoed forth when the stool came into contact with the floor.
Stone didn't make that sound. So with a twist, she pulled back the rug at the edge of the table. And found out she'd been sitting on the edge of a locked trapdoor.
Another twisting flex of her metal hands. Another crystal key. And Kista found herself exploring a previously-unknown Pandora's Box within the secret-shrouded workshop.
This, she marveled, was truly the sight she had been waiting for. Repeating rifles. Large cannon tubes. Strange hand-sized spheres with little rings at the top of a pin sticking out of it. Some sort of thrown weaponry perhaps?
She danced her fingers around the Armory like a child rummaging in a candy store, a sort of manic glee in her eyes.
Sure, a lot of the exposed or concealed mechanics were beyond her primitive experience. But here and there she got a glimpse of familiarity: a safety catch here, a reloading clip lever there.
But the true catch of the day was behind a final lock, a basic padlock she just twisted off with a shriek of metal, her mechanae hands tearing the inferior seal apart with a quick jerk.
This final vault left her in awe, as several dozen armor suits sat lurking in their own alcoves. But there was something odd about them, each one was clearly hollow, but it seemed improbable that a person could command the machine in such a limited space.
A bit of probing with a wrench proved mild suspicions. These were no battle suits, these were automatons! Her eyes wide as saucers, she now recognized the primitive housing for one clear thing in use today; the boiler mechanics for several early doors, the steam power for several processing pistons that reduced mining ore to fine powder so it could be smelted and the metals gleaned from its molten stone mixture.
A quartet of these self-same boilers fueling the 'Munchers', the behemoth drilling vehicles that were hollowing out the new residential area.
So why did they pull them out? Kista had to wonder, and sat on one that had been tumbled out of its recessed wall point when the boilerworks had been stripped.
Ease of building she surmised after noting they had been carefully removed from the machines. As if one day when the need arose they could be upgraded or replaced.
But why go to such great lengths if only to seal them up forever? She thought back to the crappy lock that had been on this door, the obvious lack of going to intense trouble to conceal it like they had the workshop and the weapons cache in the first place.
They must have intended to re-engage them at some point, before the old metalworks was just plain and simply bricked up from view forever. At least until Kista's... unscrupulous actions. A regret she could live with comfortably now.
As she sat there, a devious thought emerged. She had no clear idea of how the memory core of such a hulking monstrosity functioned... but her malevolent new ability that has secured such a definitive trove of firepower was at her disposal came into play once more.
Removing her giddily swishing posterior from the face-down mechanical monster, she twisted her metal digits into the war automaton. And simply let herself Become the Machine.
This machine was clearly more intricate than anything she's come into contact with above this floor, and far more complex than she had expected. She almost marveled at the craftsmanship, before getting down to business.
The level of decay on these machines was a lot less noticable, as they had been sealed just as the weaponry had. Sealed for almost a decade with no motion or movement to bother them.
The boiler, she had to concentrate on the boiler. Gritting teeth, forced herself to the task at hand. And failed miserably.
She just couldn't summon into the ether something that detailed, and while only a little defeated was so much closer to victory now. So she gathered up her tools, shielded her lantern's face.. and stealthily crept up the stairwell towards her 'brick' wall.
A cheek pressed up against it found no passerby in the corridor. So she quickly made her escape out. She was barely in the hallway for a few precious seconds before a quiet scraping noise found her in most auspicious company.
“Ah, hello little Kissa. I'm surprized to see you here. Have you been treated well as Caldeus' Assistant?”
She began to say something along the lines of yes to the Head of the Magus Counsel - Calcimer, buthe just nodded his head and carried on the conversation... with himself.
“Of course you have. Well, Kissa, it was nice talking with you...” He stopped for a moment, dug into his robes, and produced a large sliver of the lavender crystal chamber she'd been 'recovered' from.
“This material you were locked up in, it has a lot of secrets. Just like this place...” He tapped his cane against the floor, not ten feet away from her false alcove wall.
“Well, Kiss. Be well, and I'm sure we'll meet again.”
And with that, he was off and down the hallway.
Her first reaction was to label him a doddering old fool. Second was disbelief in his obvious... well knowledge of more than he should know.
The most eerie shock as she puzzled over him however was how he knew her -real- name and nickname. Not the one she'd adopted when she realized the world wasn't the one she had crawled out of the remnants below her feet of.
HOW?! It was impossible of course. But he'd made it clear that however much he actually knew mattered little. He clearly wasn't going to get involved.. otherwise the guards would have dragged her off to be ended in a hallway somewhere.
But why? It wasn't too late to stop her plans, but she had to know. So she decided a little trip to where it all began was in order.
