"One day." Tesla planted his fists on his hips and locked eyes with Arledge.

"One day for what, pray tell?"

"You have one day to arrange for aerial transport to Aurora's Caul." There's no point in hesitation, Tesla thought, this is what I came here for.

"Preposterous! Who are you to lay down conditions-"

"-This is not a condition, Deacon, it's a backup plan. While you seek to procure air travel to the target location I'll get Janek's help to prepare for the overland route." Tesla jerked a thumb at the dwarf. "It shouldn't take more than the remainder of today to requisition the equipment and supplies I'll need to travel by road to the convent. Janek, how many days do you figure it would take to reach the sisterhood from here?"

Tesla could imagine the dwarf scowling behind his ridiculous profusion of facial hair. "If the highways are still in good shape, if we're not harassed by monsters too much, and we rely completely on ailuros rather than a bos-drawn wagon, then mounted men could expect to make the trip in six days. Four with spare mounts."

Tesla turned back to the deacon with a nod. "With three days lost in the dungeons and today lost to prep work, that leaves eight and a half days to get to Aurora's Caul and complete the mission. With spare mounts I'll have four and a half days to "sweep the chimney," as you put it, then get word back regarding success or failure."

Arledge tapped a finger against the desk top, deep in contemplation. "You mean to say if the highways are not snowed out and if monsters, of all creatures, decide to ignore a single man traveling alone? ...Fine, have it your way. If I cannot gain access to air transportation then it would not hurt to have a backup plan. However, we cannot afford to send a force to Aurora's Caul; The Diocese of Wolf's Tail has many obligations to the royal household in exchange for our many priveleges. Right now we do not have the manpower to spare."

"I don't need an army, Your Excellency, but I do need a guide. I can't rely on a map alone to shorten a six day trek into just four days, spare mounts or not. Traveling at those speeds I would quickly mistake a landmark or a village, take a wrong turn, and wind up in the middle of nowhere."

"That could take a little longer. The only man who was familiar with the route to the convent never returned from his last trip north; it is the reason why we knew something was amiss in the first place."

"We know how to get there." Janek thumped his chest. "I can wrangle a few of the boys if it's just an escort mission."

"Impossible. The Taskmaster wants no further Bricoleur involvement in this case."

"Then. I'll. go. myself. The Taskmaster can't argue if it's just one man."

Arledge rubbed his forehead and sighed. "Very well. I will take it up with the Taskmaster; if he has no issues then I will allow it." The deacon's expression hardened. " I shall also contact the quartermastery, the armory, and the stables to submit the requisition permits. Now, get out, the both of you. You have already added enough to my plate."

The trip to the quartermastery was a simple enough affair; Janek merely wished to contact the storehouse managers and give them advance warning. A requisition would be incoming for enough goods to supply two men on a twelve day trek to the gulf and back, but not so much that they would need a wagon. The quartermasters moaned in disgust and pulled at their hair but, according to the wily dwarf, such tight-fisted histrionics was part of what made a quartermaster a quartermaster. Thus, having passed his discontent on to someone else, Janek whistled lightly to the tune of other men's howls of dismay as he stomped to their next destination.

The armory had its own issues. Defensive equipment was easy enough to procure thanks to Book's "Equip" and its auto-sizing ability; Tesla was able to get his clawed hands on a rather impressive-looking set of steel half plate that was originally forged for children in a set piece for a popular old temple play. He had no idea where all the additional mass came from in order to suddenly make the armor fit, but after the armorers got over their surprise and inspected the material they pronounced it combat-worthy. Afterwards, they spent an hour equipping undersized armor too battered to function in order to recycle the suddenly-larger items. Many smiths rubbed their hands greedily at the thought of obtaining more raw material than would have otherwise been possible. Tesla was not only offered a contract for the service, he was enthusiastically given an open invitation to visit the armory whenever he wished.

The real problem was with weaponry. The Golem Puppeteer was a relatively rare Job Class, and the Golemeister even more so, but in truth anyone had the capacity to command a single golem in or out of combat. Their control, however, was poor so the practice was unpopular. As a result, the diocese's selection of golems left a lot to be desired.

"I'm really sorry, young master, but this is pretty much all we have." The chief armorer rubbed a handkerchief across the top of his balding, sweaty forehead and bowed in an apologetic fashion. "Most golems are used by the local temples for scutwork; they can barely carry a broom, let alone a spear."

"That's hardly your fault, Chief, it's just the way these sorts of things go." Tesla wasn't entirely sure where the "young master" comment came from, but the rest of the chief's statement was spot-on. The golems arrayed in front of him were little more than bipedal lumps of clay with a magic circuit painted crudely onto their backs, one broken humanoid unit made of treated timber that was missing an arm, two dog-like brass golems with grass shears hidden behind their jaws, and four bird-like golems made of tin with flint strikers concealed in their bellies. "I'll take the dogs... and one of the birds."

"You sure? Non-human types are harder to control; even the clay ones are easier, and isn't three a bit much?"

"Nah; my Job Class lets me control multiple golems, and I should be able to handle four legs or wings without difficulty." That said, Book wasn't the source of all knowledge and Father Prymaug had yet to send that copy of the Golemeister's information, so Tesla wasn't exactly sure how many he could control at a mere level one or how easy manipulating a quadruped or an avian would be. Then again, he had managed to figure out the human form instantaneously with little previous gaming experience so how hard could it be?

"Well, at the very least let me give you this." The chief passed over what appeared to be a rolled up blanket and a large, corroded pendant. Said pendant was not only missing its neck chain but also appeared to have a few chunks gouged out. "The cloth is pretty simple: Just roll it out and channel a little magic; it'll turn into a basic Golem Engineer's worktable. The tools are good enough to do repairs out in the field, but I wouldn't recommend trying to do upgrades or building anything of your own from scratch on it."

"And the pendant?"

"Sorry about the chain; that rusted away years ago. Think of it as a good luck charm; the only records we have on it says it's a keepsake of one Julius Denatus, a sage from the Golden Age of Magic. Apparently, he used to employ golems defensively in battle while he blasted his enemies with mighty magics."

Last, but not least, were the stables. With them came Tesla's first glimpse of the ailuros. "Ah." To be honest he wasn't necessarily expecting something as mundane as horses, but his mind boggled slightly at the sight of long-tailed sabretoothed cats the size of rhinos. ...Ones complete with a rainbow assortment of colors and fur patterns, no less. An idle part of his mind wondered if he might find a green cat with yellow tiger stripes. Add some red armor and- voila! To say the stables were noisy would have been something of an understatement.

"They're actually as loyal as dogs," one farrier confided as he filed down an oversized claw. "Smart, too, and their regular diet is monster meat if you can believe it!"

"They'll do anything for chocolate, though," the stablemaster, an elderly but stout dwarven woman with a peg leg, opined. "Don't overdo it or ya'll spoil them." In that vein Tesla learned the ailuros were both fast as cheetahs and endurance runners on par with wolves at the same time, they could handle any terrain except loose sand and unpacked snow, and could jump thirty feet in length (or fifteen straight up) from a standing start. Missus Dinkles, a scarred gray ailuros with a broken tusk, was Janek's pride and joy; she was both nasty enough to rip an adult orc's head off with a single swipe of her claws and, apparently, addicted to belly rubs.

Unfortunately, Tesla didn't have the opportunity to choose a cat for himself. Obtaining a pair-bonded ailuros was expensive, and he didn't have two pennies to rub together. Even the clothes on his back were little more than a glorified loan. Still, the stablemaster wasn't stingy with her selections. The five ailuros she pulled from the paddock may have been trained to accept multiple riders, but none of them gave the impression of being lazy or sickly. "They'll get ya where yar going," she promised, "sure as I'm looking at ya!"

The next day found Tesla cursing under his breath as he tried to settle himself in the saddle. Janek chuckled as he watched the younger man's antics. The trouble didn't lie with the mount; ailuros were remarkably easy to master despite their ferocious appearance. "It's yer own fault, ye know."

Tesla grimaced, "Like you didn't do exactly the same thing? I was exhausted!"

"Maybe, but I'm used to sleeping in my armor if I have to, and leather's more flexible than steel in case ye haven't noticed. Next time, don't just collapse into the first empty bunk ye see."

"Why don't you try spending half a week in a dungeon first? That bed was calling my-" Tesla's voice cut out as quickly as if his head was lopped off, but Janek didn't bother looking back. He knew what had caught the ryujin's voice, after all. The darkened stone walls surrounding Diatom's High Temple were quite high, and the temple itself sat on a hill. When the two men rode through the outer gates that meant Tesla finally got his first look at the city of Diatom itself. Two- and three-storey buildings of quarried stone and meticulously-carved lumber, painted gailey, sprouted up in all directions. Broad thoroughfares of ruddy red brick wound sinuously through their midst, branching off into lesser streets of white cobbles and older alleyways of gray flagstone.

As a nod to more modern sensibilities the brick roads were lined with street lamps. Those lamps housed lumps of crystal that glowed no matter the time of day, but the light they produced was soft enough to not be a hindrance while the sun was up. Likewise, a number of carefully cultivated parks were sprinkled throughout the city and individual trees, protected from wagon wheels by bronze fencing, were planted in the intersections. When Tesla commented on all the bronze and brass in Diatom Janek proudly proclaimed that there were multitudes of copper, tin, and zinc mines in the country; bronze and brass were as common as dirt. Besides, once the verdigris set in, such materials didn't corrode as fast as iron, and steel was too important to the military for use in construction.

Despite the modern feel, the overall design of the city gave off a solid medieval appearance. The roofs were steeply gabled in order to shed the snow that inevitably built up over six months of winter, and the architecture in general had a distinctly gothic image. There were many plazas incorporated into the city's layout, but they were perfunctory in nature. Rather than fountains, which would freeze and burst, or for statuary, these were the marketplaces of Diatom. There peddlers and grocers, butchers and artisans, or simple mages and alchemists would sell their goods and services for a haggled price.

The city itself was anchored by four major landmarks. First the territory of the Great Temple, with its vast cathedral and supporting structures, held the easternmost point of Diatom. To the west stood the apparition of Lonely Mountain, capped by the High King's palace. The steam that vented from the mountain's sides appeared to pool at its foot before rising into the air; this gave the mountain a fairyland quality that made it look like a floating island. A great wall that incorporated multiple fortress-towers linked these two edifices across the entire northern face of the city. This blocked off any view of the outside world from where the two men rode, but there was a gate at every tower to allow for the influx and egress of hordes of people. To the south was an enormous natural harbor modified not only for the docking of sail-powered oceangoing vessels but also more advanced ships driven by sorcerous engines. Even airships docked along gantries that stretched upwards into the sky. The harbor was mostly clear at that time, but Tesla could imagine the entire zone choked with ice and impassable with the fall of winter. Undoubtedly all the ships at port would be gone within a month's time, departed for warmer climes until Diatom was freed of winter's grip.

The people of Diatom were everywhere. A thick press of culture and life swallowed Tesla and Janek up as they rode along the thoroughfares. Men, women, and children worked and played in the end-of-fall temperatures as many things were built, others broken down, and all manner of items were bought and sold. A great wash of races moved, carried, consumed goods, laughed, shouted, flirted, got in fights, and stopped others. The City Guard marched through the mass and maintained order while shifty-eyed people in dark garb haunted the alleyways. Priests intoned blessings upon beggars and nobles alike. Harlots hung halfway out of both the windows of bordellos and their dresses while calling to any man who appeared to have a coin. Shopkeeps hawked their wares. Government officials and nobles alike hustled from one bureaucratic effort to the next in emblazoned carriages pulled by slender, horned, and flightless raptors Janek called "rooks." Farmers hauled their goods to market in simpler wagons pulled by the ox-like "bos." Hardy adventurers rode at random on the backs of their own ailuros.

There were numerous humans, ethereal elves, gruff dwarves, childlike gnomes, and more besides; Book tossed up so many indentifier screens there was no way Tesla could keep up with them all. A centaur woman with two small sons in tow haggled over the price of apples with a shaggy-headed lion man. He would have been called a furry anywhere else, but was actually one of the many variants of "zoans" in the virtual world of Corundum. Janek commented that another race altogether, known as the "volk," were often assumed to be zoans but that it was not a good idea to mix the two in their hearing. After all the volk, and all their variants, were mostly human in appearance with only the ears and tails of beasts. Apparently both the volk and zoans got along like oil and water because each race fundamentally believed in its superiority over the other. When Tesla asked why the zoan shopkeeper seemed to be getting along with the centaur, then, Janek merely shot the ryujin an incredulous look and said that "centaurs aren't volk."

Nearby, a zoan with the characteristics of a rabbit tested the point of a dagger against the pad of her finger and nodded in a pleased fashion when it drew a drop of blood. The young cyclopean apprentice smith standing across from her puffed his chest with pride as his hulking troll master clapped the boy's shoulder with a laugh. Elsewhere, an off-duty human guardsman leaned against a streetlamp with his arm around a lamia's shoulders. He whispered naughty words into her pointed ears, words that caused her to twitch the tip of her serpent's tail and hide her reddened cheeks in a bouquet of flowers the young man had presented to her earlier, but she did not pull away from him. Down another side street, an elven man was welcomed home by his gnomish wife; an elven boy and a gnomish girl danced around the two of them and, if the swollen nature of the wife's belly was any indicator, a third child would be on the way soon enough.

Again, Tesla was struck by the quality of the world Mystletayne Electronics created. Every line was perfect, the wash of colors were meticulously contained, and the shading shifted appropriately in relation to every light source. Even in a city as bustling and busy as Diatom the attention to detail was just as exceptional as ever. The city, and the men within it, looked like they stepped from the imaginations of the world's greatest mangakas as they engaged in the world's largest collaborative shounen fantasy action-adventure.

The women... not so much. Tesla tried not to stare, but it wasn't easy; at least the priestesses back at the temple wore outfits designed to conceal their (many) virtues, but they were obviously the exception to Diatom's norm. If the men, and the world in general, were made with the ideal of "the world's greatest shounen by the world's greatest mangakas" in mind, then the women of Corundum were a combined effort of "the world's greatest fan artists out to create the world's greatest hentai doujinshi." Oh my god, he thought, is every woman on Corundum just orc bait waiting to happen? Did they make the gnomes like that just to satisfy the lolicons? Why are they all dressed like this when winter's on its way? Did they run out of enough acres of material to cover all that T&A? Tesla choked back his inner monologue. It wasn't all that bad, he had to admit; age progression was definitely accounted for. There were plenty of older women and grandmotherly types to balance out the parade of "love goddesses," and at least the children themselves weren't sexualized. Still it was painfully clear that, let alone "ugly," the concept of "average" didn't exist for any woman in the game of Diamondback. It looks like continuity can take a hike if the need for eye candy demands it.

His silent ranting over, something else caught Tesla's eye. "No ryujin."

"What's that?" Janek leaned over from his mount. "Don't mumble in this crowd. I can't hear ye from here."

Tesla cleared his throat; "Are ryujin uncommon in Diatom?"

"Ryujin are uncommon anywhere. They have their own lands, their own culture, their own life; they hate mixing with the rest of the world more than they hate the idea of a new demon lord cropping up!"

"Isolationists, huh?"

"To say the least. Ye won't be meeting too many of yer own kind anytime soon, and ye probably wouldn't be happy if ye did." Janek shrugged. "Ryujin "on the outside," so to speak, are typically exiles cast out for criminal behavior. That means any of them ye meet is either a crook or some official diplomat that's going to treat ye like a crook."

The ever-shifting scrimmage of humanity finally gave way the closer Tesla and Janek got to the first tower of the northern wall. Eventually, it petered out altogether at the giant gates leading to the outside world. "Big," Tesla commented. "Is there really any need for a wall this massive?" He craned his neck back and gazed upwards at the crenellations. "What's that moving around up there?"

"Ye haven't even seen yer first monster yet, let alone yer first monstrosity. The wall is necessary. If it weren't for the wall, there wouldn't be a city. If it weren't for those cataphracts up there manning the wall, and the thousands more patrolling the Wolf's Tail, there wouldn't be a kingdom."

The City Guard passed both men through the gates after glancing through a couple of documents the dwarf shoved into their hands. The passage through the tower wasn't so long with all its inner portcullises raised, so Tesla quickly found himself outside the city. "Monsters, monstrosities, and cataphracts; what's the difference?"

The dwarf nodded knowingly. "Any magical mutation, inherently hostile race of intelligent beings, or evil spirits are lumped together as "monsters." The landscape outside the city was a harsh steppe, occasionally hilly, dotted here and there with darkened swatches of evergreen forests and liberally dusted with layers of snow. "Monsters come in all sizes and shapes, but when they get, say, that big then they become trouble all out of proportion to their numbers." Janek jerked his thumb at a pair of gigantic steel masses stationed on either side of the outer gate, and Book helpfully identified them as They were fifty feet tall, simplified and unadorned, and they had the appearance of men covered from head to toe in full body plate. "Such horrors are called "monstrosities," and they're the reason why cataphracts like these exist."

"Golems, maybe?" Tesla looked around, but saw no one else. "Are they controlled from the wall?"

"They're controlled from the inside; too many issues, otherwise."

Book?

Why?

Ouch. Does the same hold true when going up against cataphracts?

"How common are monstrosities, anyway, Janek?"

"Depends on where ye live; here in the "Old World" it's not so bad. The nations, laws, and shipping lanes are well-established so there's only controllable levels of infighting, wars, and piracy. As a result the military forces of both the nations and the Temple are free to focus on controlling any major outbreaks of lesser monsters and greater monstrosities. The payout for all that is the "Old World" getting to enjoy more of a peacetime footing. The monstrosities are few in number, keep to the hinterlands for the most part, and can be reliably stopped by a reasonable degree of military strength." Janek turned his ailuros off the road and began to angle to the northwest. "We'll have to turn off, here. It's actually Thirdgate Highway we're after; Firstgate and Secondgate branch off to the east."

"Why didn't we head to Thirdgate from the outset?"

"Faster to do it from outside the wall. There's no street that follows the entire inner length; it's an old siege strategy to keep invading armies from linking up if the wall's ever breached."

For a while the men rode in silence and enjoyed the natural sounds of the outside world; the low growls and snow-crunching footfalls of the ailuros coupled with the metallic ring and creaking leather of their tack. An unknown creature cried out in the distance, but the big cats paid it no heed. The music of the wind through the distant trees kept time with the light clank and hiss of Janek's prosthetic hand.

That same wind playfully tousled with Tesla's hair, but he could only tighten his fur cloak and scowl. The sweeping horns of a ryujin may be visually impressive, but were little more than an aggravation when you couldn't wear a helmet, hood, or hat. That scowl turned into an amused smirk as the young man eyed the squat dwarf riding beside him, though. Janek fancied both a two-handed axe and a horned pot helmet when he was "on mission," which fit the man's rough image as a "dwarf's dwarf," but even then he gave them his own personal touch. The axe was broad and its single blade was demonstrably sharp, but it also had a thick, chisel-like structure to its design similar to a woodsplitting maul. In combat, the dwarf explained, he could strike an enemy and split them in half with a single blow; if the target was tougher than expected and the axe got stuck partway, Janek would whip free another two-handed weapon (an unwieldy, but heavy, hammer) to strike the blunt end of his axe and "finish the split."

The helmet, like the axe, was both practical and impractical at the same time. It had three horns spaced equidistantly around its rim that stretched upwards in a daunting fashion, but they were too narrow to be reliably used in combat and had been patched or replaced multiple times. The open face of the helm was set so that the wielder's head would be completely covered all the way down to the shoulders, but the opening was so narrow it almost covered Janek's eyes; it forced the dwarf to conspicuously turn his entire head to see where a single twitch of the eyes would have been sufficient without the helmet. At the same time, he refused to part with the equipment; Janek could take the helmet off, insert an attachment to close off the open face, then flip the whole thing upside-down and use it as an actual cooking pot. The attachment was water tight and the horns, as legs, kept the pot out of the fire so it wouldn't burn out. In other words, it functioned far better as a pot than it did as a helmet.

For his part, Janek thought Tesla looked rather silly as well. The ryujin's armor may have been steel, but it was gaudily-decorated with votive imagery more appropriate to the stage than the battlefield. In the dwarf's estimation his younger companion was a little too chiseled and stoic for what was essentially prissy fencing equipment; the kid would look better either in full plate or some barbarian getup. To make matters worse, Tesla was unarmed; his only "weapons" were two brass dog golems that ran around the ailuros aimlessly trimming wild bushes and a tin bird that would flit about and occasionally try to set Tesla's hair on fire. Only the ryujin's sharp claws and brutish hammer of a tail looked useful in a fight, but that meant Tesla would have to get even closer to the enemy than Janek himself. Naturally, that was not a safe proposition for someone with zero fighting experience.

Ah, well, the dwarf mentally shrugged, the kid's a Spark; he'll probably be fine even with a handicap. If he can't handle it then he can't handle it. Just have to wait and see.