Pellex looked over the “armory” with disgust. He had been roughly woken up and led through what felt like several miles of hallways to this room, and after being unceremoniously shoved inside, was locked in.

Pellex wasn’t sure why he was tasked with this. If they needed a prisoner to do the absolutely vital work of keeping gear maintained, then “Julian’s Eagles”, the group that had a massive termite nest of a base, definite [Artificer] work in certain areas, and a leader who had access to ithium and used it as a badge, didn’t have anyone more suited to the job. Pellex didn’t like that. It didn’t make sense. Maybe they simply had a well-trained individual who had clear directions to follow, but just wasn’t an [Artificer], but that still didn’t explain why they didn’t have anyone in a more fitting class.

The reason Pellex was so sure that he wasn’t being used as a properly-classed arder’s vacation is that the armory had very clearly never been maintained. There were cobwebs all over, items lay in piles on the ground, and those items were rusted and cracked. There were benches and tools, but they were all out of date or broken.

Sighing, Pellex picked a cogpistol out of the pile and inspected it. This one wasn’t in terrible shape, but was completely inoperable, due to the trigger having been crushed flat against the gun’s handle. Pellex was very interested in finding out how that had happened. After a furtive glance to check if the guard had come inside, Pellex sent his thi into his newest skill, feeling it use his power to form a link with the construct as darkness flooded his vision.

Towering gears churned all around him, the insides of a great machine grinding away at their individual functions. Pellex looked around, searching for an end, but the spinning machinery extended into the horizon and far beyond. He glanced down and saw the cogpistol in his hand, but it was far more than what appeared in reality.

Phantom gears ticked with the ones inside the construct, the chain of cogs fading into the darkness a few feet out. Pellex waved the gun around, and the gears moved with it, passing through his body quite easily. Though it felt oddly viscous and slow, Pellex could still feel his thi draining from him at an alarming pace, so he focused on the cogpistol’s trigger, and instantly, the phantom gears connected to that seemed to grow. Reaching out, Pellex touched the largest of them, and was swallowed by a new vision.

The mountain pass had a fantastic view, and would have been beautiful, in other circumstances. Unfortunately, these were not other circumstances, and the dead bodies covering the ground rather spoiled the scene. The cogpistol was pulled from a holster by a desperate arder, and the bulky phi-foundation pirate squeezed off two shots before the other side returned fire and she was forced to duck. The sounds were faint, distorted, and, though sight was far better, there were still glitches on the edge of vision, fuzzy bits obscuring parts of the view. Once the shooting stopped, she quickly returned to a firing position and tried to aim. Her valiant efforts were unfortunately ruined when a shot pinged off the rock next to her, and in a panic, she fired on instinct, pulling too hard, and crushing the trigger with her focused Physical stats. This was observed in perfect detail, despite the fairly distanced viewpoint. Time seemed to slow down as it happened, everything focusing on this event. Every last fold of the trigger’s metal as it bent under the strain was unique, and those differences were known. Noticing that she had ruined her weapon and not thinking straight, she threw- and Pellex was forced back into reality. A quick check confirmed that his thi reserves were completely empty.

What had that… been? The infinite machine, the phantom gears, the scene he watched. The latter made some sense, at least. Pellex had focused on the trigger, and he had seen an important event in its history, though the clarity of the vision, though weak in areas, surprised him. Pellex was better used to [Foresight], which was more knowledge than theatre, mere glimpses of the future somehow containing what needed to be known. With this… Pellex knew there was far more knowledge available in these scenes, but he would have to learn to find it himself, in [Cogsight].

Feeling a notification at the edge of his senses, Pellex brought the box up.

Class Skill [Cogsight] has advanced!

It is now Bronze Grade II!

Thi cost reduced to 19 per second!

Interesting. The gap between Bronze Grade I and II was different for every skill, but it could sometimes be used as a benchmark for how future progression would go. Those that just required use, and didn’t have much in the way of nuance, would typically take a few uses to get acclimated to the skill before advancing. Others would advance right pretty much right away, and then stubbornly refuse to change without deeper exploration of what the skill could do. Pellex had just spent the entirety of his First Echelon-level thi reserves using [Cogsight], so it could quite easily be either.

His train of thought was interrupted by a knock on the door. It proved to be breakfast, basic stew in a crude bowl, but from the pot of a Second Echelon [Culinarian]. Talking to Holia last night after the arders had left, Pellex had been able to learn a few more things. She had been on a Zolnre-Vokit flight just a few weeks ago, though there hadn’t been any guard members to put up a resistance. One of the arders had recognized her and she had been brought to Julian, who assigned her to cooking for the pirates, and apparently the prisoners as well. Holia and Pellex had kept the conversation firmly on such relatively innocuous topics, fearing possible observation, but Pellex was hoping that he would have the materials to counter that problem here. Finishing eating what was one of the best meals of his life, despite its simplicity, Pellex noted that he had regenerated enough thi to test his other new skill.

With a quick pulse of thi, [Metalshape] turned the trigger soft in Pellex’s fingers, and a lot of practice on clay finally paid off as he quickly and easily shaped the metal. It was kind of funny, in a way, the things he had done to prepare for a relatively normal life as an [Artificer], that simply didn’t apply to his current situation. He didn’t have the easy access to thi necessary to practice constantly, at least not after spending his entire reserves in one go, his studies of the other [Artificer] trees and his carefully plotted progression thrown out the window with a single choice. Even so, he much preferred this.

The trigger was back to a functioning shape, and [Metalshape] deactivated. Taking the casing off and inspecting the internals, Pellex was quite pleased with his situation. To be sure, he planned to escape as soon as possible, but he had always wanted to be an adventurer. Everyone heard the stories growing up; Korlin, besting the Unbasilisk and opening the first of the Three Gates; Unli, her village destroyed when she was a child by the Infernal Maestro Roun, working for years to gather power before tearing him from his dark organ and freeing his thralls from undeath; Tzek, plunging the Pearlescent Ziggurats into the Orelic Ocean to save his people from the passage of the Zephyrous Arks; Loru, preacher of Divinity and first to be Enlightened; Pellex had admired them, but had always been too practical to seriously think of trying to follow their example.

His parents had taken him to Zolnre’s Backwoods once, giving out water purifiers and basic thi-heaters to the slum’s occupants, and Pellex had never forgotten how many of them were adventurers. Rusty swords and cheap cogpistols at their sides, low-level magic flashing around their fingertips, missing fingers, toes, sometimes whole limbs. For every hundred adventurers that made it into legends, there were a million that… didn’t. Too scared, too weak, too poor, and, most especially, too unlucky. Unlucky in party members, unlucky in quest assignments, unlucky in combat, unlucky in the times they lived in. There hadn’t been a dark lord or unstoppable monster in the Peacejoined States since High Adjudicator Eor last judged, two hundred years ago.

Thus, Pellex had set his sights a bit lower. He came from a long line of [Artificers], and he had inherited their love of a different sort of adventure. Searching through the mysteries of the universe was a grand quest, and Pellex loved it. He had always wondered, though, whether if he became a good enough [Artificer], if he would be able to go on adventures. Fight bandits and monsters, uncover long lost relics from dead civilizations, travel beyond the Peacejoined States, learn the fate of the Lost Continent, meet a Facet, open the last of the Three Gates and learn what lay beyond – In short, take the journey of discovery outside of the [Artificer]’s lab. He had dismissed it as a childish fantasy, but he was already on the first step. How many more would he be able to take?

Pellex still wouldn’t mind escaping to live a quiet life in Zolnre, exploring his powers and plumbing the secrets of the universe from the comforts of his home, but, as he snapped the casing back on the cogpistol and looked over the newly repaired gun, he knew that he had far more exciting things to look forward to.