“Id-id-identif-if-ifuh cherself!” Wire barked through his beard, stuttering and slurring his words as if he was in a rush to finish speaking. His eyes jumped all over, from her face, to her left arm, to the Tablet in her hand, and still, he kept his gun aimed dead-straight at her center of mass. The Swordsman raised the bottle to his mouth, pulled the cork out with his teeth, and took a short swig of the greenish liquid, then put the cork back in. A couple drops of the liquid clung to the stubble of his chin, evaporating into barely-visible wisps of emerald-green Fog as he spoke - slowly, deliberately, calmly. Carefully.

“Now… I won’t ask who you were on the outside, ‘cause it’s frankly better if we don’t know,” he said, gesturing with his sword as punctuation. “I also won’t ask where all your gear is, or why you’ve come to this Exclusion Zone.”

“So you’re the leader, huh?” Zelsys asked, a cocky grin spreading over her face. Even without the context necessary to understand her situation, she couldn’t help but feel amused by the trio.

The Swordsman gave a slow nod, raising the bottle again as he begrudgingly admitted “Only ‘cause I’m the only one with a good enough Aether to distill Viriditas,” swirling it around for punctuation. The inside of the glass fogged up as some of the liquid turned to green Fog and immediately condensed back to liquid, Wire’s right eye twitching towards the bottle as the Swordsman lowered it back down, while he grumbled into his beard. “Viriditas. So that’s what they call it,” she thought.

“That bein’ said, yer clearly in some deep shit if that’s what you’re wearing, look like one o’ the occupiers. So tell me. What can you offer up if we help you get outta here? And trust me, you’ll need our help to get outta here.”

Putting together the context clues as she went, she slowly raised the Tablet. The Swordsman narrowed his eyes as he tried to get a better look at it. He looked into Zelsys’ eyes, back at the tablet, then back at her, blinking a couple times, a mixture of disbelief and faint hope serving to soften his features, if only a bit.

Spliteye and Wire turned to look at him, both confused by the crack in his otherwise calm demeanor. Wire’s confusion was complete and genuine, whereas Spliteye clearly understood something about the situation that Zelsys didn’t, her eye and voice both shuddering as she whispered “This could be our ticket out of this shithole.”

A brief smile crossed the Swordsman’s face, he nodded, and turned to begin walking away, sheathing his sword as he used the bottle to gesture for Zelsys to follow, which she did gladly, albeit cautiously. Spliteye followed closely behind him and Wire just stood there, waiting for Zelsys to catch up, his gun still trained on her. He grew more and more twitchy the closer she got, the muzzle of his rifle noticeably trembling as she passed him. He stood there, waiting to follow until she had caught up with Spliteye. Far enough that he thought he could shoot her in the back faster than she could reach him, if it came to that.

Zelsys noticed Spliteye's gun shake slightly as she approached to walk beside her, the creak of leather gloves betraying an otherwise relaxed posture. A mischievous spark made her want to place the Tablet atop the blonde’s head and use it to measure just how much taller she was, but the mental image was sufficient. For a while the four of them walked down the trail in silence, the Swordsman giving the occasional backwards glances, whilst Spliteye downright stared when she thought Zelsys wasn’t looking. An hour, perhaps two - it wasn’t easy to tell in the monotonous quagmire of this place. The only measure of how far from the living forest’s edge they were was the size, shape, and density of the trees - the closer they got, the more the forest around them turned from a maze of dead wood to something actually reminiscent of a dead forest, though the treeline was still all too dense to see more than a few paces off the footpath.

At some point, Spliteye finally piped up.

“We’re not war criminals, if... That’s what you were thinking,” she said, audibly weighing each word as she spoke it. The foreign inner voice flashed in Zelsys’s head again in response. “Probably the survivors of some lost company,” it said.

“I don’t care,” she lied. “I just need to get out of here.”

Spliteye fell silent at that, seemingly content with such an answer. Once more, the four walked in cautious silence, with only the howling of the winds and the creaking of dead wood to keep them company. They eventually reached the living portion of the forest, the sound of rustling leaves overwhelming the creaking of dead wood. The living forest’s border was outlined by rune-etched marble stones half as tall as her spaced some twenty paces apart. Much like the forest, even the stones themselves were split down the middle - visibly decayed on the dead side of the forest, with the runes nearly worn away on those she could see, while the halves on the living side were overgrown with moss.

They walked alongside the border until the path led them to a gap in it, a stone that had seemingly been shattered into pieces, or perhaps chipped away. The plants around the gap were either completely dead or visibly dying, as if the death of the other side was actively spilling through. They passed over the broken barrier-stone, following the footpath for a few more minutes into the forest as it began to get noticeably dark.

The smell of Viriditas and the sound of bubbling liquid echoed through the trees as the Swordsman disappeared past a sharp left turn, Spliteye walking ahead to join him. Zelsys emerged into a clearing amidst the trees, its centerpiece a large vehicle with two deflated front wheels and broken, rusted tracks, small shrubs growing through the gaps. The transport’s back door had been repurposed as a table stood atop some lumber next to the vehicle, a tarp stretched from between three trees to cover it. There was also a deep firepit with three rounds of lumber placed around it as seating, a makeshift metal grill placed atop the pit itself, on which there sat a large copper pot with some sort of soup bubbling within. However, something else drew Zelsys’ attention.

It was a metal pipe that led from amidst the embers of the firepit to what Zelsys recognized as a repurposed Fog Engine, atop which there sat a befuddling tangle of rune-etched flasks and tubes, held together with wire and pieces of scrap metal. There were two fragments clearly taken from the shattered barrier-stone suspended in the tangle, apparently somehow involved in condensing Viriditas, which ran down the stones and into a tube that led into a half-full bottle on the ground. As Zelsys tried to work out why the engine was involved in this setup, she noticed a number of roughly-welded pipes that led from its exhaust ports to just below a flask, serving as burners to heat its contents of vile, rotting meat, black Fog roiling above it.

“Putrid meat?” Zelsys blurted out, furrowing her brow and tilting her head as she tried to grasp what exactly was going on with the alchemic apparatus. It was clearly multi-purpose, as less than a third of it seemed to be in use, though she didn’t quite understand why rotting meat was being used to produce Viriditas.

The Swordsman - who she didn’t notice had disappeared - stepped out of the transport, no longer wearing his chest-plate and the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to his elbows, green Fog rising from his nostrils, intricate tattoos composed of alchemical symbols covering his forearms from the wrists to the elbows. “It was supposed to be an alkahestry setup, at one point,” he said as he walked towards the alchemic abomination with pride evident in his gait. “Figured out the barrier-stones can turn Nigredo into Viriditas even when in pieces, so I’ve been usin’ it to make loads of the stuff since… As long as we’ve been here, really.”

“Black Fog comes from rotting meat and it’s called Nigredo. Got it,” Zelsys thought, making a mental note of this fact.

“Couple’o months. Four, six, eight. Can’t remember...” Wire muttered from behind, still standing behind Zelsys with his gun pointed at her back. His demeanor was still twitchy and cautious, but he spoke with surprising lucidity. His right eye twitched towards the Swordsman, and he let out a wordless grunt.

With a clap of his hands, the Swordsman replied “Right, gotta purge your system,” as he approached his bearded compatriot. Her curiosity drawn to the scene, Zelsys felt a tap on her shoulder. It was Spliteye, subtly nodding towards the transport vehicle. “Let’s see if we can find some spare clothes that fit,” she said, the implication of something else loud and clear in the way she said it. Zelsys gave a smile and a nod, following after the blonde and watching what the Swordsman was doing out of the corner of her eye. Wire’s gun tracked her with unerring accuracy, yet his eyes looked to the Swordsman.

As she passed by the vehicle, Zelsys took note of what its door was really used for - it was covered in dried blood and fragments of bone, a cleaver of prodigious size sat atop it. It was matte-black with a silver shine to its edge, and somehow the only thing on that door-table that was completely clean of blood. She couldn’t tear her eyes off it until she walked into the transport and its wall did it for her, and she immediately scanned her new surroundings out of instinct.

Where she had expected a cramped and filthy arrangement of as many seats as could fit, she was met with a mostly complete living space for four people - two bunk beds, metal lockers, even a sink, whose faucet connected to an exposed pipe which in turn led to a caged slot in the wall containing a dull-grey gemstone, the word “Aqua” stenciled in blocky blue letters above it. Under the sink, there were five large and eight smaller seal-covered bottles full of pale-green Viriditas, some still bearing barely-legible labels like “Kaiser Pilsner”. Next to them stood two large and five small empty ones, some bearing fresh seals, some plain, and one covered in so many old seals that it was completely opaque. It was corked shut, so perhaps it wasn’t empty.

Modifications to make it more spacious had clearly been done, but even in its default configuration it must’ve been at least bearable. Spliteye opened one of the lockers, its hinges creaking almost loud enough to conceal a pained grunt from Wire.

“What’s up with the bald one?” she asked, watching as Spliteye pulled several things out of the locker, placing them on the lower right bunk. Steel-toed, armored knee-high boots, a pair of trousers, a pair of armored bracers, and several belts of varying sizes. The blonde sighed at the question, looking out the door, then at Zelsys, remaining silent until there came another pained grunt, a quieter one this time. “Rubedo Sickness,” she said. Before Zelsys could ask what that was, the Swordsman’s voice interrupted her thought process.

“Purgation Arts: Rubedo Dissolution!” he exclaimed. Wire’s voice was heard immediately after, but instead of a yell or a grunt it was a very, very long wheeze, as if a large quantity of something gaseous was being expelled out of his mouth - not unlike a deflating balloon.

Spliteye remained silent, letting the sound ring out for a few seconds before she stood up with a sigh, shutting the locker. “Take your pick,” she said with a light gesture at the items laid out as they were, adding on “Feel free to use the bunk as well.” as she passed Zelsys on the way out.

She took a seat on the bunk, placing down the Tablet as she unwrapped the bandages from her feet and legs and shed her cloak, a good portion of the fabric now filthy and tattered. The trousers came first, and to her surprise they were clean - certainly not pristine, but far from the level of filth that the soldiers’ clothes exhibited. “Too small…” she thought as she tried to put them on, the waistband not even wide enough to get halfway up her thighs.

As she pondered whether they could be altered to fit given the tools at hand a faint buzzing static washed over her legs. Having noticed that this feeling typically meant something arcane was at play she tried to pull them up again, and a barely-visible amount of Fog rose from the fabric as they stretched to fit - even though they were slightly loose in some places, and rather tight in others. The waistband in particular had only stretched far enough to fit, and the belt that was inside it hadn’t become even a little longer. “Limitations, limitations...” a thought crossed her mind as she reached for the other belts, trying them one after the other - somehow, they were all too short to tie around her waist, apparently having been cut short near the ends at some point. They were, however, long enough for her to better secure the trousers around her thighs, and that’s what she did.

The boots were all too big, with a substantial amount of empty space around the foot. Nevertheless, she expected they would self-adjust similarly to the trousers, and waited for a few seconds to let the effect take place. Her expectations were met when the buzzing came again and the boot squeezed down and molded itself to fit, accompanied by the squeaking of leather against leather as a small amount of Fog came off it. Even the metal plating deformed with a loud creak, though unlike the leather it didn’t change volume - only its shape - the massive shin-plates having become even bulkier as a result. The last piece was one of the armored bracers, which fit as it was.

It was all in all rather comfortable, enough so that she wasn’t even annoyed at the absence of a shirt. “Binding’s good enough,” she thought, the living forest’s humidity and lack of constant wind having made the ambient temperature quite a bit higher. Her left arm’s wrapped state was much more obvious without the cloak to partly conceal it, but she wasn’t too concerned about it. Just as she finished up, she heard heavy, violent footsteps approaching the transport, followed by three forceful knocks on the wall.

“Y’done?” the Swordsman asked, his voice filled with the same aggression as Wire’s.

“Yeah,” she answered, prompting him to step in and beeline for the sink without giving her so much as a second look. His forearms were drenched in what she at first thought to be blood, but it was far too red. He ducked down under the sink and grabbed the seal-covered bottle, ripping out its cork and placing it to his mouth. Only, he didn’t drink.

He just… Sat there, holding the bottle to his mouth with his left hand while he did strange gestures with the right. The Rubedo coating his forearms was absorbed into his skin, his tattoos having turned the same shade of bright red, two thirds of the way from his elbows to his wrists.

He suddenly balled his hand into a fist as if to crush something, causing him to retch into the bottle as he reached up to hold his nose closed, holding the cork between his fingers. The bottle rang with a sound not unlike someone pouring water down a well, small wisps of bright red Fog escaping his ears.

When the flow stopped he hurriedly corked the bottle shut, coughing up a few puffs of Red Fog. “It gets easier the more y’ do it my ass…” he grumbled, placing the seal-covered bottle back in its place and reaching for a green one. The motion of his arm wafted a small portion of the Red Fog towards her before it could dissipate. It carried the smell of combat, of blood and fear, but also of excitement and exhilaration. The smell of battle and survival. For a moment, it was as she was in the middle of a fight for her life, adrenaline surging and her survivor’s instinct going off. Then, it was over - the Swordsman had very literally snapped her out of it with a snap of his fingers in front of her face.

“And here I was thinkin’ I’d have to purge your system as well. Just the snap usually ain’t enough,” he remarked, taking a seat on the bunk across from her. Zelsys felt his eyes tracing her skin, following her markings with a curious glint to his hardened gaze - a glint almost bright enough to overshadow the undertone of carnal appreciation. She didn’t mind, such things weren’t a one-way street after all.

“Good to see the self-adjustment still works on those,” he continued, gesturing at her trousers. His gaze drifted towards her open fly, a mutter of “...Mostly.” punctuating the action of his eyes snapping upward to Zelsys’ grinning, smug face.

“Before y’say anything, you and I both know this is the kinda shit Rubedo exposure does to someone with a tolerance,” he excused himself and took another swig of Viriditas, some of the redness fading from his tattoos.

She didn’t know that, but she didn’t mind him thinking she did, and so gave a small nod of agreement with that amused grin splayed over her features. Her silvery-white eyes observed the hardened soldier with an equally amused curiosity as she crossed her legs, leaning back in the bunk a bit.

“I don’t recall pure Viriditas being that light a green,” she said smugly, trying to get him to explain more without betraying her own lack of knowledge. She was certain he had fallen for it when he let out a sarcastic chuckle, cleared his throat, and in an exaggerated, patronizing tone began to recite a spiel, gesturing with the bottle as he went.

“Mix together two parts of distilled water, two parts pure Viriditas, and one part Ethanol to produce a most wondrous of concoctions - Liquid Vigor!” recited the Swordsman, chortling at the absurdity of it before he took another swig and his tattoos returned to black. He corked the bottle and put it next to his bunk, a third of its contents still swirling inside. For a brief time they remained quiet, only the rustling of the leaves and the muffled, unintelligible conversation between Spliteye and Wire to break the silence.

Eventually, the Swordsman piped up again. “The Tablet. Mind if I take a look?” he asked.

“I’ve got a couple questions first. Three of them.“

“Shoot.”

“What exactly is Rubedo Sickness?”

A dark chuckle rumbled from his mouth, and he briefly glanced out the door, remarking “So she told you. Too careless with potentially sensitive intel, that one.” before he turned his eyes back towards Zelsys. “Near the tail-end of the war, when things were really getting bad, our squad and a couple others were issued an experimental combat drug based on Rubedo and Ignis, called Victory Wash. Our Captain told us to not touch it unless our lives were on the line, and eventually, that time came. We’d just settled down for the night on our way back to some fort behind the front line, Sigmund on first watch.”

He stared off into the middle-distance for a moment, reaching down to grab the bottle and taking a short sip, exhaling some of it through his nose as a sigh of Fog before he put the bottle back down and re-establishing eye contact, his gaze as hard as steel and as cold as ice.

“They came in the night, or so he said. Three squads of Grekurians, with sleep gas and those horrible scatter-guns of theirs, probably intending to capture us. We’d given Sig our squad’s bottle of Victory Wash to safeguard, and so he downed the whole thing before the gas could knock him out.”

The Swordsman fell silent again, half-whispering his next words.

“When we woke, we found him... Curled up amidst Grekurian corpses, only bloody tatters left of his uniform, skin charred and shrink-wrapped around little more than bone as if he’d burned up every ounce of fat in his body. The burn scars are still there, but it’s the colossal Rubedo overdose that he never recovered from. His body somehow produces a huge amount of the stuff in stressful situations, but he can’t metabolize it so he just seizes up.”

“I’ve recovered just fine, thank you very much,” Sigmund’s voice rasped from just beyond the doorway, completely calm and lucid. “How long has he been there?” Zelsys wondered, instinctively shooting a glare out the door. His head poked out from past the door-frame, a warm smile shifting the mass of wires that was his facial hair. “Sorry to interrupt. Just wanted to tell you the soup’s ready,” he said to the two of them, before focusing his attention on the Swordsman. “And don’t you go saying I ‘never recovered’, the last time I pushed through the seizure on my own.”

“It took you twenty minutes,” the Swordsman shot back.

“And you ran off into the trees for an hour the first time you purged me, doubtlessly to spend that time wan-”

“That’s enough out of you,” Spliteye’s cold voice interrupted from out of sight as she yanked on Sigmund’s collar before he could finish the sentence, eliciting a noise not unlike the squawk of a choking chicken. The Swordsman watched it unfold with some amusement before his attention returned to the silver-haired amazon across from him.

“Second question?”

“Why were you out there when you found me?”

“We were huntin’ an animal that had briefly crossed the barrier. All those dead plants ‘round the crossin’ point were just from the creature walkin’ around for a bit, so I figured it had to be a walkin’ Nigredo battery. Probably a mutated bear or somesuch. Third question, then we eat.”

“How’d you leave a butcher’s cleaver sitting in viscera and somehow have it stay clean?”

The Swordsman chuckled, blindsided by the question. “Oh, that thing,” he meandered. “It was the Captain’s, one of those fancy livin’ swords what change shape for the user. I was s’posed to take it as the next in the chain o’ command, but even though my Aether’s good enough to make it change, I ain’t strong enough to use it as a weapon. Speakin’ of stats...”

He looked off towards the cleaver for a moment as his speech trailed off, then looked to Zelsys again. “...Mind if I take a look at the Tablet, check my stats? It’s been a lil’ while.”

Without a second thought she tossed the tablet over to his side, leaning even further back in the bunk until she was functionally laying down. She’d expected to feel the springs, but it was filled with some sort of grainy material instead. A brief grimace flashed across his face and his grip suddenly tightened when he first picked the device up, but after a few seconds she saw the familiar wisps of silver Fog rising from its surface while the projection formed.

Cold. Solid. Heavy. Real marble. It seemed to confirm what the silver-haired amazon promised, but his suspicions about the Tablet’s supposed pre-war origins were dispelled by the buzzing pain that shot up his arm after it had sat in his hand for a few seconds.

A single word materialized in the middle of the Tablet.

SCANNING

It was a familiar pain, one he hadn’t felt since his time in the training camp. Most soldiers thought it was just something lackluster about the first-time process, but he had the education to know better - what the process really was. A tendril of Fog reaching into one’s very soul, for that was the only way to read one’s fundamental attributes accurately.

This Tablet hurt more than the one in the training camp, but that was to be expected. Unlike post-war Tablets, it was made the old way, the way that took hundreds of hours of work by a highly skilled alchemist. The way that couldn’t be mass-produced.

“I bet it even has Fog Storage,” he thought as he watched the word just sit there, feeling the seconds drag on. It was taking too long. All too long. Had it not aged well? At last, the projection flickered to a different one. A sentence in white, and below it two phrases in blue, to signify that they were buttons.

RECORD FORMAT NOT RECOGNIZED REGISTER NEW FORMAT OVERWRITE RECORD

Not a bit of hesitation crossed his mind before he pressed the latter, only to find himself paralyzed by the shooting of buzzing pain a hundred times more intense than anything the Tablets dished out during scans. He felt the edges of his vision fading into silver, then lost consciousness.