Fleur and Margarette were both recruited for this and all five went off to the equipment and training room, and were joined by the rest of the party about 15 minutes later. Marvin and Rory were the first to enter as Ernest was asking Sebastian about the merits of having a bird verses a mammal for a companion when he ran into the brick wall known as Marvin’s back.

“Oi, what did you-,” began Ernest’s complaint at the sudden impact, before looking around Marvin’s shoulders and continuing a different thought and landing on his knees, “do to our precious healer!”

As Jean and Luke were modifying the words to an old poem to describe Rachel’s new looks, the men in the hero’s party were looking with expressions varying from wounded to baffled. For stood before them was their healer, with short hair under a beret, a button down blouse with leather vest and leather arm bracers, bell-bottom trousers, and hero-style combat boots.

As Jean and Luke finish up, the Other exclaims and snaps his fingers waving them over to a corner of a display, which he taps on. It opens up and the three get into a minor heated discussion before Luke turns around and says to the group, “And the final piece~”

Jean walks over to Rachel and places a pair of large sunglasses with an extra bar about three-quarters of a centimeter above the nosepiece on her as she looks bewildered.

“Inject some mana into it,” he says softly with a wink, “but try to not let the others know what you see.”

She does and opens her eyes wide before blinking a few times and looking around. Shortly after she slides them slightly down her nose to look over the top and at the rest of the group. “So, do you think this would work for a disguise?”

“I-“ Rory starts out, “I have to admit that this is definitely unexpected.”

“Why!” moans Ernest, rolling on the floor, “Why would you take her from us!”

“Well,” Marvin finally says, “It looks comfortable? Probably?”

The Other sidles up next to Rory and Marvin and says in a low, slightly threatening tone, “Try a bit harder to compliment her would you~ I have this nice riding crop I could give her that I enchanted to heal wounds and stamina by hitting the target, so unless you want to open up to a new fetish~”

As Rory and Marvin break out in a cold sweat at the thought they both manage to get out some variation of “It looks good on you.”

“Gentlemen, I’ll leave you to Sebastian. I have some armaments I want your healer to try out,” the Other says, then points towards a crate found under the now open display. “Fleur~ if you could grab this crate please~.”

“Very well. Margarette, help with the other side and we’ll head into the training room.”

As Rachel, Margarette, Fleur, and the Other get set up in the training room and shut the door, Rory says to Marvin without looking over his shoulder, “I feel like there is something wrong about the words ‘healer’ and ‘armaments’ being in the same sentence.”

“You’re right,” replies Marvin, just before hearing a muffled explosion from the training room. “But somehow I wonder if it’s necessarily wrong in this instance.”

“It would probably be best,” says Sebastian, “to leave the speculation for later, as just what she was wearing before probably cost more than your sword, hero.”

Ernest, finally picking himself up off the ground, says, “That get-up costs more than a national grade sword? How do you figure that?”

“Quite simply actually. Gentlemen!” Sebastian says in his stage voice. “Welcome to the best and most notorious armory you will ever lay eyes on! The least expensive item in this place could feed the King for a month!”

Thanks to the stage acting, the Hero’s party conveniently overlooks the fact there are more ways to feed the King than just by selling the weapons displayed.

“I find that hard to believe though,” replies Rory. “You have daggers and arrows in here, they can’t be that expensive. And Rachel had that pair of sunglasses, that was just an accessory right?”

As Luke and Jean hurriedly shake their heads at Sebastian, pantomiming silence in their own ways, Marvin cuts in.

“No matter how I see it,” Marvin says, walking over to a seemingly simple steel hunter’s knife, “I could buy a hundred of these if I subjugated a treant and still have enough left over for a month of lodging with meals.”

“Of all things, that’s the knife you pick up,” replies Sebastian. “No eye for metal and, well honestly I’ll forgive your lack of perception on the magic for all of these items. Have you ever heard of demonsteel? Of course you have, but you’ve never seen it before. Put just a tiny amount of mana into that blade. Too much and some very bad things happen. Also, point it away from your face and everyone else.”

Quirking his eyebrows, Marvin does as asked and finds he is now wielding a red longsword the height of Sebastian. As Marvin is about to touch the phantom blade, Sebastian yells at him to stop and instead hold the edge of the blade perpendicular to the floor, as he takes out a spherical lump of metal the size of his fist.

“Just so you know,” Sebastian says, dropping the metal lump from about a handbreadth over the blade, which cleanly slices it in twain. “The scariest thing about this particular demonsteel is not the sharpness to cut through adamantine, but the ability to drain the life-force of men to feed the demon inside. Not women though, curiously enough, which is probably why this was known as the Succubus Blade about two hundred years ago.”

“So,” Ernest cuts in. “How do you turn it back into a normal knife then?”

“Let it discard the mana into its surroundings, which depends on how much you put into it to begin with. So, just hold onto it for a while Hero.”

The three men and three golems begin picking out various equipments and discussing how to change their look and still maintain their combat skills. After about five minutes, the demonsteel knife finally lost the last of the mana and Marvin replaced it on the display he picked it up from and began to properly browse the equipment.

Ernest found a set of armor that he thought ‘looked cool,’ so he asked the golems about it. Thanks to Sebastian the party learned, it was made out of Arctic Megalodon of all things, which functioned somewhat like chainmail while providing slightly more resistance to impacts and magics of water or ice. With assistance from Jean and Luke, Ernest also picked out an appropriately themed spear. The head was shaped like a harpoon and was made of a steel-wolfram-nickel alloy, and the shaft was made of a steel-aluminum superalloy, with a gimmick. At the butt end of the shaft, two magic stones could be loaded, and by pressing two minor indentations simultaneously and providing a small amount of mana, the head would eject ten times the length of the spear, though only once, and was attached to the shaft by a mithril-wolfram chain. The second stone would be used up retracting the chain and re-fusing the head onto the shaft.

Marvin and Rory ended up with much more mundane equipment by comparison. Marvin found a fairly nondescript set of leathers made out of six-footed behemoth hide, lined with fabric made from the March Spider’s thread. Stronger and more comfortable than his last set, but nothing terribly unusual for a hero back by a country. Sebastian and Luke had him hand the set over so it could be dyed slightly blue to change up the “standard hero in leather armor” feel they were getting from it.

Rory was about to head over towards the robes and was chased off by Jean and Luke, who took him over to the leather goods. When the duo started arguing about whether a v-neck ensemble needed chest hair to work, Sebastian made the suggestion of a red turtleneck with black jacket and trousers, made of dyed March Spider thread. Lacking a creative impulse to pick out his footwear and casting staff, Jean found a pair of comfortable black shoes made from Murder Bison and what appeared to be a thick mithril wand with a black gem affixed to the top. This also had a gimmick, though mechanical in nature, wherein the wand would extend into a full sized staff. When Rory tried this out, he almost lost a finger and an eye, but in the end decided it was ‘somewhat different’ than what most people would think he would use and would just need to get used to ‘unleashing’ it.

After the three had their equipment picked out and had picked up the most mundane knives as possible for Marvin and Ernest and a dirk for Rory, the made their way towards the training room. However, they were stopped as soon as they were noticed.

“Do you three have a death wish this evening?” asked Jean.

“They don’t know about the color coding,” defended Luke.

“Do you see how there’s a crystal that is shining red?”

“Quite simply, if you open the door you’re liable to end up dead.”

“It’s actually one of the first things he installed in the training room,” continued Sebastian. “A number of his experiments can be quite troublesome to everyone involved, let alone the prepared. Early on he found these small furry creatures from the bottom of a dungeon on the outer edges of what he said was ‘a continent to the west.’ He decided to bring them back and see how the interacted with more ‘normal’ monsters, only to find out they multiply like crazy and are actually quite bloodthirsty. After some extensive culling, he stated, ‘I think I now know why they told me that was where they sent arsonists, murderers, and pedophiles.’”

“That west?” inquired Rory, “the west where it’s all just death and desert and demons? He has been to that place and back again? When was this?!”

“Apparently right after he had taken over the fifth mermaid kingdom.”

Marvin just rubs his temples at all of this as he contemplates asking a question in the silence that ensues. After a deep breath he finally does.

“Fifth as in ranking in an empire, or as in he has subjugated four other kingdoms?”

Sebastian, Jean, and Luke exchange brief glances when the duo decide to respond.

“Last we heard it’s worse than you believe.”

“At last count it numbered thirteen.”

“Aye, just as they said, though a good portion of that was on their own initiative, though I’ve only been around since just after the 11th kingdom. By chance have you ever noticed how the price of seafood fluctuates with more than just the seasons?” asks Sebastian.

“Can’t say we usually get that luxury,” replies Marvin, still processing the fact the Other seems to have taken over, personally or by proxy, a fair amount of the western ocean.

“Then let’s just say this, not all pirates are necessarily hominoid. Anyway, if you were just going to see how things were going, you will have to ask later. Also, we’ll put together some purified and enchanted satansheep traveling cloaks for you tonight since you will be otherwise frozen for a while after leaving.”

As the hero’s party looks at the training room door one last time, they are escorted back to the living area. Rory, having enough questions to fill several chapters of a small book, asks about the cloaks Sebastian mentioned.

“Satansheep are rare around the kingdom, but you have enough wool to make four traveling cloaks? On short notice as well?”

“They may be quite rare around the kingdom as you say, but there were at least two magician’s robes back there made out of the stuff. Rumor also has it he runs a farm that raises the blighters. Every year or so we end up with a ‘shipment’ of two bales, one purified and one not. It’s been happening as long as I’ve been here so…”

“That has to be at least 150 bales of satansheep wool! 150! You could buy a barony with that alone! And half of it’s already purified!” exclaims Rory.

“Well,” says Ernest clapping Rory on the back, “if we ever find an active volcano and you want to try your hand as a shepherd for a while, I’ll be rooting for you. From far away, but I’ll be rooting for you. Do any of you know what you can use the raw wool for? I thought it only ever cursed the wearer. Amulets of misfortune and whatnot.”

As the two men and three golems shake their heads, the group arrives back at the area their rooms are at. Jean and Luke gather their supplies and head off down a corridor, seeing that the chairs and detritus had already been taken care of.

Much later, lunch arrives at nearly the same time as the training room group, with Rachel looking tired but excited, sporting an extra belt holding what appears to be two weapons and various small enchanted boxes made of some type of metal.

As the party asks about them, the Other goes on a long-winded explanation of how a southern tribe he came across uses hollowed out sticks to propel a dart when hunting, and how that got him thinking about how he hates wands because you have to tilt your wrist, then combining both of those ideas with a crossbow and deciding to use magic for the entire thing, with upgrade after upgrade explained in detail until everyone except the Other had finished their three course meal with seconds and thirds.

After lunch, the party decided to leave the next morning as Sebastian said it wouldn’t take long to arrange the cloaks.