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.