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.