Jun’s grandma didn’t wait for me to answer, walking around the table and grabbing me by the shoulders with far too much strength for an unarmored old woman. “Your people’s arrival brought on these changes, but they weren’t due to anything you did. The last time a species came through the existences to land here, there were so many Embodiments vying for change and power, and a fair amount of suffering before everything righted itself. It seems like that cycle is going to repeat once again. Okeria!”

Okeria winced at the absurd volume Keratily's voice just hit. “Ya don’t have ta shout, I’m right here.”

“I’m trusting you with the metals, but they belong to Sebastian now. If you steal them, you’re stealing from him, and I don’t think you’ll be very happy about that in a few years. The creature was bad enough, but these were Persephonia’s personal materials. They’re some of the strongest metals we’ve seen outside of hazard materials, if not stronger than a good half of those, and if you don’t give him everything you don’t use I’ll cut what I was going to pay you by ninety percent.”

“Ninety–you’re kidding, right?” Okeria asked in disbelief. “Sure, these are valuable, but a level thirty hazard almost definitely has better stuff than this!”

“And they won’t be hazard tolerance thirty for a good long while, so this is the absolute best they’ll have for years. Don’t take it.” Keratily warned. “I’m going to call another trawler and remove whatever slyks have stuck on it, and if I come back to even a scrap missing, you’ll be wishing for the abyss.”

With a wave goodbye to Jun, Keratily stepped outside and signaled for another trawler to come. She didn’t come back in right away, but from the way Okeria had his neck twisted and his entire being focused on the doorway, it seemed as if she was a moment away from bursting in. And catching him red-handed, presumably.

“So, uh, that went a little better than I’d hoped.” Jun laughed, pushing herself out of her seat and motioning for me to do the same. “You still have those jars I gave you, right?”

I grunted in confirmation and pushed myself out of my seat, mentally scanning over the metals Keratily had left on the table for the off chance that Okeria couldn’t keep his hands to himself. There were three small velvet sacks of whatever desolation’s wake was, six containers of aquifer steel, and thirty ingots of gilded sunblossom. I figured Keratily had their amounts memorized down to the gram, but it couldn’t hurt to make a note for myself.

“What do you need them for?” I asked, following Jun as she walked out of the main building. I looked around for Keratily, but she was nowhere to be found. How strange. “Are you sure we should be leaving Okeria alone with all those valuables?”

“Eh, rootia could and will make sure he doesn’t steal anything.” Jun said with a shrug. “I’m more interested in a… smaller part of your core that we could take advantage of. The crystal parts of that slyk, combined with some of its oil and one of these cylinders might just make something we could… huh.”

{Is ‘corrupt’ or ‘create’ what your core does?} Jun messaged me after a short pause.

{Corrupt.}

“Well, then, we’ll do that. Your little sigil-thing turned into those ribbons on your shoulders, which are pretty powerful for such a low-level trinket, so imagine what a slyk-trinket would turn into? Or, you know, we could just make something worth keeping without using your core. That’d be nice too.”

There were no arguments from me, so Jun and I got to work. Whatever her grandma had done to the slyk still remained, and with the both of us working to pry apart the rocks and scoop out the crystals inside, we made great time. The trawler Keratily had called showed up just as Jun finished gathering the oil that was no longer contained by the slyk, and we never heard Keratily climb it. But we definitely heard her rampaging through it.

“You know, I thought rootia would be a little bit quieter.” Jun said with a glance at the rumblings that came from the trawler. She fiddled with one of the canisters, opening it to the woosh of a vacuum ceasing to exist. “So, oil first or slyk pieces first?”

“Let’s try both, but oil first this time.” I answered, removing the top of one of the containers that we’d already filled with thick oil. “Fair warning; there’s a really good chance that this won’t turn into a trinket. You usually need to get someone, or something, to enchant it first.”

I passed the canister to Jun, and she accepted it with a nod of thanks. She dropped three of the largest slyk crystals into the canister that would fit, then quickly slid the lid back on. “Oh, really? I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, it makes making anything a whole lot more tedious than just going into hazards and finding gear. Even if we have Okeria to make equipment for us, almost anything we’d find in a hazard will be flat-out stronger than anything he could make for the core mastery requirements to equip it.” I explained, watching for any kind of reaction from the slyk.

As I’d expected, there weren’t any. “We can ask Okeria to carve some runes into the crystals, or infuse the oil with… something, I don’t know. But just slapping things together never works in my…” the buzzing of Okeria’s drone brought me pause. “My few weeks of experience.”

Jun shook the canister with a frown, then looked over at the trawler. “When you climbed the chain, you said you felt a shock from it, right?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, why?”

She walked over to the massive chain that hung just a few inches away from the platform, then looked back at me. “Well, what if the problem is that the slyk doesn’t have a charge any more? It said that it was bacteria-filled oil when we identified it, but everything we’ve seen looks a whole lot more like electricity than anything natural. Or maybe the bateria’s making electricity by eating something the oil absorbs from the air. So maybe we need to charge it up again.”

With her last word, Jun flipped the canister onto its side and pressed one end of it to the chain. She waited for a handful of seconds while nothing happened, her body language growing dejected and irritated as time passed. But then a little spark shot between the canister and the chain, ripping it from Jun’s hand.

“Whoa!” Jun hissed, stepping back and shaking her hand as she did. “That’s gotta be a… well, that’s hopefully a good sign, right? And we didn’t just revive the pieces of the slyk that rootia crystallized?”

I didn’t know what to say as I watched the canister glow, the thick oil somehow becoming translucent to show us the crystallized pieces of the slyk inside. They changed from pink to the colour of a dirty rainbow, the kind that you’d find in the parking lot under an old car, then they began to shake.

Violently.

“Back up.” I warned, grabbing Jun by the shoulder and forcing her to safety. “I’ve seen things do that before, and it’s almost always before they explode.”

Jun nodded without saying a word, and we watched the crystals shake ever more violently for what felt like minutes. Eventually they were just blurs inside the canister, with massive peals of lightning arcing off the chain and through the cylinder that wouldn’t be out of place in an actual thunderstorm. But what was so unnerving was the absolute silence that accompanied the display; not a single crackle of electricity or weakening glass and not a single plink of crystal rocketing around its container.

The crystals shattered in silence, breaking down into hundreds of tiny shards that spread out evenly among the oil. All at once the shimmering stopped, the crystals fading away into nothing, then reappeared as tiny glimmering dirty rainbows within the oil. The electricity died down into a small but constant arc that barely held the cylinder in place, and the rainbow crystals began blinking at a slow pace completely out of sync with each other. Like little stars twinkling in a pollution-ridden sky.

“Well, they kind of exploded.” Jun marveled as she stepped up to the canister, keeping her hands far away from it as she opened her interface. “Oh, wow. I’m not sure how useful that is, but we definitely made something. Check it out, Seb.”

I stepped closer to see what Jun was looking at, then identified the slyk-cylinder we’d created when I realized I couldn’t read anything on Jun’s interface. That was still untranslated.

(Shoddy,Few) Oilslyk Extender: Infester Variant.

Core Mastery Requirement: 9.

While equipped, grants an external battery supply to a designated piece of equipment. Supply is equal to [2]/4/6/8% of current maximum battery. Additional batteries designated to the same piece of equipment only provide [15]/20/25/30% effectiveness.

Upgrades at Item Mastery [1]/10/19/28

“Huh. I wonder if it’s shoddy because we didn’t use the best materials, or if it’s because we didn’t use the right amount of everything.” I muttered, reaching out to grab the extender as I spoke. My fingers wrapped around it with nothing more than a jolt of static electricity, and I pulled it away with barely any strength. “I wonder if we used more crystal than we needed, or too much crystal.”

“I’d guess not enough, personally.” Jun chimed in, leaning in close to study the battery in my hand. “We put in a whole lot, but I don’t see enough blinking stars in there. So maybe we fill it to the brim with crystals, then fill whatever gaps are left with oil? Or would that end up being the opposite problem?”

I shrugged and snuck a glance at my inventory. We still had a dozen cylinders left, and enough crystal and oil to fill them ten times each. “We won’t know until we try.”

“We should try and get some of that massive slyk from Okeria before we use up all the canisters. Maybe that’ll help too.” Jun suggested, shooting a glance at a spot of empty air that emitted a quiet buzz. “There were dozens of them in that closet, but I have a feeling that we could easily go through all of them just trying out different combinations. We’ll just have to wait for rootia to finish up so she can crystallize the loneswarm.”

“Good points, and good suggestions.” I said, offering the extender for Jun to take. “You’ll make better use of this than I could.”

“That I can.” Jun agreed, palming the canister and studying it for a moment. She then reached down and placed the battery on her thigh, where her armor rose up and constricted it in coils. The rainbow glow took on a permanent yellow tint, and the oil went from extremely dirty to a perfect black. “Oh, it works on passive battery drain too, not just armor functions. Nice.”

We got to work creating as many of the batteries as we could with the materials we had on hand, waiting for Keratily to come down from the trawler so we could convince Okeria to part with some of his hard-earned slyk bounty. With what I knew of the man, it would probably be like pulling teeth to even get the smallest bit from him, but he had also quite literally given us his eyes. Okeria was a strange one, and as I listened to a hammer pound away from the main building, I couldn’t help but wonder what his endgame was.

And how Jun and I fit into it.