Interlude: Neel

Neel flinched. If he had to describe the feeling, he'd say it was like falling asleep only to wake up a moment later. The warmth of the fire made him groggy, he gathered.

The whole thing was a disaster. It was supposed to be a clean and easy job. Bribe a paper worm at the Sreda Detection Core so that he delays an intrusion report, capture a phaser to maybe lure out his Gimmick early, play out the whole spectacle with a friendly Neel-spelled-backwards girl to make him walk to the Azure Dome all by himself, sell him there and don't think too much about what they're going to do with him. Instead, everything went to shit all because he forgot that archers generally need fucking arrows to shoot things.

Now he antagonized a currently unconscious phaser with an unknown Gimmick on his hands. The only way to bring him to azures now is the old way, which entailed carrying a body manually while avoiding any public roads, all of that hoping the blackout herbs won't damage phasers brain enough for him to become a vegetable useless for whatever purposes AD is going to find for him.

The only silver lining he could find is that no matter that even a bribe could only delay the report, no matter if someone was stubborn enough to look for him in the forest during the night - it's enormous and there was no way they were going to just stumble upon him. He made sure not to leave any obvious traces and the local fauna will do a good job at distracting whatever pursuers.

He decided to let himself rest once the blackout root is done boiling, which was supposed to be right about now.

He carefully took off a lid only to see that the liquid had vaporized completely.

He stared at it with utter disbelief. Now that he was paying attention, it was slightly less dark than five minutes ago, and the bonfire itself burned out pretty thoroughly, even though it was better wood than the puny twigs the idiot phaser brought last time.

Neel was tired, sure, but definitely not tired enough to just randomly fall asleep. Was it phaser's Gimmick at work? If so, it made for a pretty shit one, the only consequence being a do-over on a blackout brew.

Something in the nearby bushes moved. Neel got on his feet and tossed a mace to Neel-2, one Neel-backwards shot in the eye. Then everything erupted in chaos.

"Kill a guy with the mace, he's fake!" the supposedly unconscious phaser shouted.

A girl in procs armor took the mace hit with her left hand without flinching, then swiped with a sword twice, cutting a hand holding the mace and then the head.

Armor with kinestatic glyphs wasn't standard procs gear, had to be at least a captain then.

"Fuck," muttered Neel, "okay. Plan B!"

"Wai-" the proc started.

Neel unmade Neel-2, and the world distorted around him. He found himself back in Azure Dome, in a hotel room he booked for a week, right where he made a decision to only go on a venture after the person he illusioned together nods to him this noon. He couldn't count the times this trick took his life out of mortal peril.

"Well, you win some - you lose some," he told himself and went out for a drink.