Once they crossed the bridge and followed the road it was a part of, it didn’t take much looking to find the town hall - the building stood out like a sore thumb at the left side of the road, a towering edifice that tastelessly tried to copy classical architecture without its own sense of style.

It had statues and gargoyles, but they were all simplified and identical, even its shape was… Modular. Like the entire thing was designed from pre-built pieces. Even the buildings that surrounded it were like this, but to a lesser degree, their lack of opulence rendering the prefabricated architecture less obvious. Compared to the old buildings at the other side of the street, the town hall paradoxically didn’t look like part of the town at all.

“Why’s it look like that?” Zelsys thought aloud, craning her head to look up at the two-story monstrosity. A young Ikesian passerby took interest, letting her know that “It’s amazing, isn’t it? The old town hall was destroyed in a munitions explosion during the war, yet it only took a few months to rebuild good as new!”

“Yeah, good as new…” Zef trailed off wryly, turning her gaze from the abomination of architecture to one of the more noticeable buildings that stood across the street. Zelsys had noticed it herself and was also curious, but before the youngster moved on, she asked him one more question.

“I take it I can find the governor in there, yeah?”

“Second floor,” he nodded, only slowing down after he had already begun to walk away, half-yelling whilst he continued to walk away. “Office at the end of the hall with a big double door!”

Zelsys just nodded towards him in thanks, then chose to ignore her inevitable meeting with the governor for a little while longer in favor of the storefront that so strongly drew her companion’s cycloptic gaze.

A storefront unlike any other, advertised by an equally unique sign. It was a huge assembly of glowing quartz crystals, arrayed in a pattern that produced uniquely recognizable, bold lettering.

COLLIER’S EQUALIZERS

Below the name of the business, a tagline in the same lettering was painted.

“Enough to stop anything that moves.”

“I’ll wait for you in there, if you don’t mind,” Zef said, clearly suggesting that Zelsys just get the errand done and over with whilst she got caught up on how nice all the guns she couldn’t afford were.

Zelsys - somewhat begrudgingly - agreed on this point. She wanted her interaction with who she expected to be a corrupt bureaucrat to be as short as possible, and so quickly planted a kiss on the markswoman’s cheek before she walked into the town hall.

Zefaris briefly froze in place, then let out a frustrated exclamation of “Hey!”

The blonde markswoman let out a short sigh, just about catching a glimpse of her lover’s rear end as the town hall’s doors closed behind her. She could feel her face burning up, and knowing that it wouldn’t go away any time soon, decided to just cross the street and try to distract herself from one enthralling mental image with another.

Immediately, well before she was even halfway across the street, her attention was captured by the storefront display. It was just barely tall and wide enough for a grown person to fit into, and this space was taken up by a showcase of three firearms of increasing quality and exuberance.

At the very bottom, there was the familiar, the simplistic, the mass-produced - a sparklock handgun, whose outward appearance was little more than that of a wooden grip and a barrel with a trigger and a screwed-in trigger guard. The weapon’s most expensive component was likely the tiny Ignis crystal that sat inside its barrel, which a tiny internal mechanism struck to produce a spark and ignite the gunpowder.

It was even simpler than the sidearms that many soldiers were issued, Zefaris wagered that most of its cost came from the raw materials and man-hours to produce it. By its side, there was a simplistic powder horn, a lead ball, a wad of cotton and a ramrod - the supplies to reload it.

Above that was the gold standard of modern personal sidearms - a much higher-quality looking sparklock with an ergonomic grip, a built-in ramrod holder, and a modular Ignis crystal plug that stuck out the back for easy replacement. By this pistol’s side was no more than a single paper cartridge. It was a diminutive incarnation of the design principles that created her own rifle.

Then, at the very top, there was… What was that?

Zefaris craned her head at the strange firearm. It looked familiar in that it was clearly hand-made and beautifully detailed, but it was also rather bizarre in shape. It looked like some of the strange, one-off custom firearms that many commanders and nobles had made well before the war, designed to fire multiple times in a row without reloading, but it didn’t even fit this archetype quite right. Those custom firearms usually had multiple barrels that were all separately loaded and could be rotated, or in rare cases used a bolt-action mechanism with reusable shells like Zel’s arm cannon, but not this weapon.

This firearm looked like the basic design of the pepperbox, cut down to the bare minimum - instead of multiple barrels, it only had a single barrel with a cylinder that seemed to hold all the ammunition.

“Homuncul…” she began in an attempt to get a better look at the weapon’s mechanism, craning and tilting her head every which way, but then the realization dawned on her - how ridiculous she must look, ogling the storefront display so fervently when she could just walk into the store and ask to see the gun.

Down the hall, up the stairs, down the hall again. The town hall was less of a hall and more of a hallway - a long corridor with closed doors to either side and a staircase at the very end, which itself led to the exact same thing at the second floor. Its walls were adorned by a mixture of old, evocative victory scenes and vague, generic landscapes, side by side as if all these paintings were equal, even though the superiority of the older pieces was easy to see in how recognizable their art styles and contents were compared to the meaningless color-swatches by their sides.

Though none of the paintings on the ground floor drew her attention, they became increasingly more striking the closer to the staircase she got, and she could do nothing but take a look at the first painting to her right when she reached the upper floor.

This painting spoke of the victory of mankind over nature and over evil in equal measure, displaying a bloodied, wounded man with a flaming sword in one hand and the head of a dragon in the other, the pelt of a bear draped over his back like a cloak.

She turned to the left, and this painting showed vague, abstract swatches of colour, rather pretty, but ultimately meaningless.

Making her way down the hallway, just before she reached the ominous double doors, on the right side of the hallway once again, one more piece drew her eye. It was clearly recent, displaying a man in a slightly antiquated but still recognizably Ikesian military uniform. He was shown holding a rifle with a large Ignis crystal plugging the back of the barrel and a large spring-loaded hammer striking it, sparks spewing from the muzzle as an explosion propelled a massive lead ball directly through the chest of a tan, black-haired man in opulent robes and bearing an equally opulent sword, Fog spilling from his mouth.

The victory of the patriotic everyman over the foreign Fog-breather. It almost looked like a very, very well-made piece of propaganda, only short of the label by the lack of exaggerated proportions or obvious political labels.

This painting’s canvas was scored and split in many places, as if it was shredded to ribbons and then re-made through some doubtlessly arcane process. Zelsys felt a sense of unease, of trepidation, for although she could hear the muffled voices of people from behind the doors, the clacking of boots on the wooden floor, even the shuffling of papers, there was not a soul in these halls, not a word of what she heard through the doors was legible.

With this trepidation in mind, she reached for the door handle and pushed the door in. At the other side, she was met by the feeling of three gazes, two from the sides and one from ahead. Two guards and the governor, sat behind a downright opulent writing desk. The guards immediately made their way out of the office and closed the door behind her when she stepped through that door, and the governor sat there, frozen in a pose of nonverbally prompting her to take a seat.

That spark of recognition in his eyes. He’d seen her before, and she’d seen him. Before he said anything she made the first move, speaking as she leisurely walked towards the guest seat in front of his desk.

“I didn’t expect the occupying governor to defend an Ikesian patriot from the soldiers of a country allied to Grekuria,” she shot at him with all the snark she could muster, confident that he wouldn’t take it personally. She almost lazily slipped into the chair and idly scanned the room, its lacquered wood and velvet cushioning as comfortable as any throne.

All of the office was opulent, in the most tasteless possible sense - from the elaborately patterned green-gold wallpapers, to the heavily lacquered, intricately carved furniture and the equally elaborate rug that covered at least half the available floor space. The only painting to be found in the room was behind the governor’s desk, displaying none other than himself in a medal-covered uniform - a portrait.

The towering, muscular man - the living ideal of physical prowess that he was - sank back into his seat with a defeated sigh and a wry smile, the swagger and ego deflating from his form to give way to a more honest, lifelike pride. She could see a great deal of ego and arrogance behind the governor’s eyes, but it was tempered, and it was real. At this very moment, Zelsys knew she was speaking to Crovacus Estoras the man, even though the nameplate on his desk labeled him as the archetype of the occupier, the Provisional Governor.

“I didn’t expect to be the one getting interrogated today, I must admit,” he said, his eyes lighting up like living embers. “I trust you know why I wished to speak with you, yes?”

Zelsys smiled, nodded, and making no attempt to hide her pride in her actions, confessed, “I beat some sense into your arrogant pottymouth of a son, yes.”

“You’re lucky you’re not an Ikesian,” the moving statue of a man rumbled, his eyes firmly planted on one of the many documents littering his desk. “I’d have no choice but to make an example out of you, then. If I let an Ike get away with something like this, it’d look like I was admitting young Halxian’s lack of character… As lacking as it is. He’s bought too eagerly into wartime propaganda and taken to conducting himself like a common ruffian, yet I could neither punish him directly nor allow an Ikesian to get away with doing it for me. But you...”

The blazing embers that were his eyes snapped up to meet hers, and he chuckled. “Swap that outfit for a Grekurian flag and you’re straight out of our recruitment posters. That beating you gave him seems to have ignited a proper drive toward self-improvement, I’ve never seen the boy train this diligently.”

The Governor had called her here… Just to let her know why he wouldn’t punish her? No, he clearly had something more to say.

“I’m not gonna help train your son, if that’s what you want,” she denied in advance, only eliciting another hearty chuckle from the man. He shook his head and asked a question.

“You didn’t fight in the war, and if my sources are correct, you spent the war exploring ruins in the tropics. As far as I’m concerned, you’re as close to an unbiased observer as one can be. Tell me. Are you fond of Ikesia?”

“Sir, I have no patriotism for any country.”

“I am not questioning your allegiance. Country and creed aside, have you enjoyed your stay in this land? Is this very town a nice place to live, in your opinion?”

“I’ve been here for only a few days, but sure. What does that have to do with the reason you called me here?”

“If you plan on staying here for any longer than a few months, you will do well to consider my offer.”

“We have… A situation. You’ve seen the omens, you’ve seen the bickering locust-men demanding a crippled veteran be persecuted for singing in the streets of his homeland, in front of the gods-damned Provisional Governor no less,” Crovacus began his doubtlessly rehearsed explanation, leaning forward in his seat as he leaned on his desk.

“There are great many beasts left over from the war, a great many beasts who need to be slain. The holes in the walls, the ruined buildings, the munitions accident that destroyed the old town hall - we’ve connected every terrorist attack that Willowdale has suffered to a cell of supposedly rogue Pateirian operatives, and now we know where they operate from. We know they have a motive - Willowdale is one of the few places that refused to take a side in the war, and the Pateirians took it particularly personally.”

“Where do I come into this?”

“Let’s run down the list. You’re a Fog-breather of vaguely Grekurian ethnicity, yet you have the pointed ears emblematic of the far-northern imperials and the triangles in your irises suggest at least some ancestors among the southern monk-nobles. Neither you nor your Ikesian compatriots have any records to speak of, which I will choose not to question. In the plainest terms possible, you’re my best option for a plausibly-deniable bug exterminator.”

“I don’t think I have the appropriate equipment to deal with more than a couple people at once, much less to wipe out an entire terrorist cell on my own. Furthermore, there is the matter of my payment…”

Without missing a beat, the Governor shot her an offer.

“Two-hundred fifty gelt to cover your operational expenses and any equipment,” he offered, reaching into a drawer and placing a coin pouch bulging with silvers on the desk. “And five thousand gelt in Cold-iron Sovereigns once you’re done, plus the option of further employment as a sanctioned beast-slayer. As for the matter of your targets, they are not human. Not anymore. The terrorist cell in question appears to be made up of Pateirian war veterans too deformed by elixir abuse to return to civilian life.”

A question sparked to mind. Zelsys had thought that the references to Pateirians as locust-men were just petty slurs, but now… She wasn’t so sure. A raised eyebrow at the last of his words was enough to make him give a grim nod and reach into that very same drawer, retrieving a folder from within.

He tossed it over, and little squares of laminated parchment spilled out, bearing eerily detailed photographs, clearly taken in moments where the lengthy process of using a traditional camera would have been impossible. The contents of these photographs, however, were far more shocking than the implication of fast image capture technology.

The images were of Pateirians, both young and old, both men and women, but all wearing tattered, filthy versions of the uniforms she had seen the three Pateirian soldiers wearing. All of them had some variations of horrific, insectoid deformity. Some had armored plating bulging under their clothes, others had their jawbones split and twisted into insectoid mandibles, while others still had massive, yet useless insect wings sprouting from their backs, having unceremoniously torn holes in their uniforms to accommodate them. Some still had a sputtering spark of sentience in their stances, yet others were hunched over like wild beasts, holding raw chunks of meat in bloodied hands. Not all of the meat looked to be from animals.

Two commonalities among all of their mutations were the presence of vestigial, miniature extra arms sprouting from their torsos, and the presence of at least one pair of extra eyes, in most images visibly milky and blind.

“Actual locust-men. How?” she questioned, bewildered by the sights, despite the fact she had put down someone who had gone through a similar transformation only hours prior.

“Pateiria pioneered modern combat elixirs. That meant they also had to suffer the greatest growing pains of developing them. As much of an edge as it gave them in the war, it left many soldiers with deformities such as these. A death sentence in their appearances-obsessed society.”

Zelsys placed the photos back in their folder and let out a heavy sigh, considering whether this was a good idea or not, whether this would be for the best not just for herself, but for the others as well.

After a solid minute of wordless, mutual staring, she simply reached out and shook the Governor’s waiting hand. Through this handshake, the Governor gave her a small piece of paper, having palmed it from his sleeve only moments prior.

“I will have one of my agents contact you in the coming days, you will know them by this code-phrase. When it comes down to it, try to deal with your targets as cleanly as possible,” he said. “Terrorists and war criminals that they are, most of them are still people. At least I hope so.”

As Zelsys made her way out of the office and down that hallway once more, she felt a strange feeling in her gut. It wasn’t danger or distrust, but she knew one thing. There was more to this than the governor let on.

Stepping into Collier’s Equalizers, Zefaris was struck by the smell of freshly-lacquered wood, iron, and gunpowder. Her eye darted across the room, glazing over at the exuberant craftsmanship of nearly every weapon on display, until she reached the person behind the country - a white-haired, portly old lady, dressed in an outfit that toed the line between immaculate suit and filthy engineer’s uniform. On one side, she wore a perfectly ironed shirt and vest, and on the other, she also wore a richly stained leather apron.

Her bright-blue eyes darted up from the disassembled wonder of technology that her attention had been focused on up until this point, and she set down the heavy machined cylinder as she welcome Zefaris to her store.

“Welcome to Collier’s Equalizers dear! I’m Collier. By the looks of you, you’re probably here for a nice sparklock, what’d you say?”

“Ah… I’m actually interested in the topmost firearm in your storefront. I have some questions,” Zef admitted, struggling to maintain eye contact in favor of just staring at the gun on the counter.

“Oh, unfamiliar with revolvers are you? Well, shoot your shot!” Collier laughed, positively gleaming with a strange albeit infectiously positive energy.

She stepped up to the counter, and gave the disassembled weapon a once-over before looking back up at the gunsmith. It wasn’t just mechanically more complex than any sparklock she had ever used, but it was a behemoth of a gun. The chambers of the cylinder were clearly sized to fit rifle loads, and the grip was suitably comfortable to compensate for the inevitable recoil. The barrel was six-sided for some reason, and there was even what looked like a built-in ramrod mechanism designed to push the ammo down in rapid succession.

It was unlike the revolver in the display case. In fact, every single gun in the store was either generic, or unique - no in between. Her initial question of the gun’s mechanical operation gave way to a far more pressing one, “Why does it look like most of your higher-end stock is custom-made?”

“Because it is,” the old lady admitted, entering into a prolonged rant that fit perfectly with her appearance and demeanor. “I started out making these after I made the first of my revolvers for a nice young sir that wanted his personal pepperbox pistol made more compact and for it to turn on its own after each shot. Word of my custom pieces spread around, and come the war, I had officers and nobles scratching at my door wanting a revolver of their own!”

She picked up the ammunition cylinder, its metal gleaming under the milky-white light of quartz crystal lights as condensation formed around every spot Collier’s fingers touched. Turning it in her hand, the old lady clearly tried to let Zef get a good look at it while she told her story. It had five chambers, open only in the front, while the back had a pentagonal alchemical sigil, with the rune for Ignis inlaid in brass over the back of each chamber where a hammer would strike. No Ignis crystals. Was the old woman a skilled-enough alchemist to make mere glyphs produce enough heat to ignite rifle powder?

“I made them pay enough to cover manufacturing costs plus some extra in advance, but most of ‘em kicked the bucket well before they could pay the rest so now I’m at liberty to sell these beauties for however much I want without making a loss.”

Zefaris looked around, squinting her eye as she looked for price tags. They were present on the lower-grade pieces, but not on the uniques. “There are no price tags,” she stated flatly as she looked back to the gunsmith. A sly smile formed on the old woman’s face, and she put the cylinder back in its place before she tapped on the side on her nose.

“Everyone gets a different price, some don’t get a price at all. I won’t sell these masterpieces to just anyone,” she explained. “If you want, I’ll cut you a price. Show me your hands.”

Zefaris did as ordered, and Collier took her hands into her own, turning them palms-up as she gently felt her palms in the exact spots where calluses were known to form from frequent firearm use. This wasn’t about the calluses, however. The old woman took a slow, considered breath, and thin wisps of Fog rose from the corners of her mouth whilst a subtle thrumming spread through Zef’s hands wherever the woman’s wrinkled skin touched.

Her warm, grandmotherly smile only grew wider as she turned her gaze up to meet Zef’s, and for a brief moment, the markswoman felt a gaze more piercing than her own.

“How fast are you with a ramrod? Five shots a minute with one of them military-issue muzzle loaders? Ten?” Collier asked, clearly making an estimate lower than what she truly expected in an effort to draw out Zef’s own estimate. She in return gave the most honest answer she could.

“Twelve is the fastest I got in training, but I’ve gotten faster since.”

A brief thrum of pins and needles shot through her hands at that, and Collier finally let go with the words, “Honesty is always appreciated, especially from a true gunslinger such as yourself. Three-hundred gelt and you can take your pick of any gun you see here.”

“That’s… More than I can afford,” Zefaris admitted with a heavy sigh, only for the store’s doorbell to ring mid-sentence.

“...More than I can afford,” Zelsys heard Zef say to an old lady behind the counter the moment she stepped into the store, having paid no mind to its display case. She felt the old woman’s wizened eyes upon her left arm.

“Is that a gaunt-cannon with a kinetic absorption arm harness?” the old woman questioned, an almost childish sense of wonder filling her voice despite having never even met Zel. She appreciated such friendliness, especially when it was from someone who likely knew more about her own weapon more than she did, but there was another matter.

“Sure it is,” she said, raising her arm to show the gun as she approached the counter - or rather, approached Zef, who just so happened to be right in front of the counter. She unceremoniously placed her hand around the markswoman’s shoulders as she held her gun out for Collier to inspect, whilst she herself questioned Zef in regards to what she had just heard her say.

“What’s this about more than you can afford?” Zel asked, only to realize that this store’s displayed stock was half mass-produced sparklocks and half bleeding-edge custom firearms.

“Oh. Let me guess,” she guessed, turning a slightly wrathful eye to Collier. “Everything other than the mass-produced stuff is overpriced to hell and back.”

Zelsys was fully aware that anger at a gunsmith for charging high prices for custom work was irrational, but she couldn’t help it. Even still, she waited for Zef’s response before she decided to rein her irrational anger in or let it go. The the relief of one part of her mind and to the frustration of another, Zefaris cleared the impending misunderstanding with a simple, “It’s the opposite! Collier here offered to let me pick any gun she has on display for three-hundred gelt, but… I don’t have that much. I hate to do this, but could I borrow some money from you to cover the cost?”

She could almost see the inner conflict behind Zef’s eye - half of her was angry that she had stooped to asking to borrow money, from Zelsys no less, and the other half was consumed by fascination with these wonders of technology to such a degree that it overwhelmed the first half.

A shake of her head and a look into the blonde’s eye. “No borrowing,” she smiled. “I’ll pay for it, you can make it up to me by making sure I don’t do anything stupid during our next contract. Maybe use your nice new gun to dome a beast that tries to sneak up on me. Deal?”

“Deal,” Zefaris smiled back.

“Oh, now ain’t that just precious,” Collier’s voice shattered the moment.

Still smiling, Zelsys took one of the pouches that hung from her belt and handed it over, remarking “That’s two-fifty…”

She then reached for the other pouch to count out the remaining fifty gelt. Collier took the pouch, pulled it open, and gave a nod, somehow fitting the remaining coins into its already stretched-thin fabric before she closed it back up and stowed it away.

“Go on you two, take your time picking!” Collier encouraged. “It’s not like I’ve got any other customers at the moment.”

Zel and Zef exchanged looks, and did just that. The former did it mostly to satisfy her own curiosity, whilst the latter allowed herself to descend into a stupor of childlike fascination. Collier had sparklocks, she had pepperboxes, she had a dozen varieties of that revolving-cylinder design, and she even had a few strange pistols that had long tubes under their barrels to hold special ammunition that was just a shaped lead projectile with a hollow base and a solid chunk of propellant filling said base.

Their trigger-guards were levers, which supposedly were to be worked to load the next piece of ammunition. How bizarre and impractical, truly. What if the tube got bent? The ammunition would get stuck at best, or explode at worst.

A solid twenty minutes later, Zel’s eyes were just about glazing over from the meticulous inlays and alchemical glyphs that so richly detailed every single unique piece, some covered entirely in gold and cold-iron inlays. “What even is cold-iron?” she wondered, but dared not ask. Cold-iron Sovereigns didn’t look any different than tarnished iron, they were far less richly detailed than even silvers, with naught but a simple line design on either side. The only special property she could discern was the fact they remained cold to the touch no matter how long she held one of the coins, absent-mindedly flipping it in her fingers whilst she idly admired the detail work on a particular revolver.

None of these looked like something Zefaris would like. She just knew it. They were all very nice guns, but they were too nice. Too extravagant.

The only exception was the disassembled behemoth of a hand-cannon that sat on the counter, and sure enough, Zelsys caught the markswoman looking at the gun every once in a while, in between bouts of flitting from display to display and shooting her the occasional glance.

It was clear to see which gun Zef wanted, but perhaps she was just indecisive. Zel was already going to question Collier in regards to having more shells for her arm-cannon made, so she saw no reason to ask an extra question.

“What is it dear? Got a piece you’d like to take a look at?” the old woman bubbled, rising from her seat behind the counter.

“Yes, but I’ve got something to ask first.”

“Shoot.”

Zel held out her left arm and worked the bolt, the fully-loaded shell heavy enough that the extractor barely made it pop out far enough for her to remove it from the breach. She held it out for Collier to inspect, querying, “Do you have the equipment necessary to make more shells like this one?”

“I-I think so, but I’d need a lil’ while to inspect one of ‘em,” Collier remarked, excitement audible in her voice. “Ideally a loaded one, unless you’ve got the specs on-hand. Y’mind if I take this lil’ beaut to examine? Got spare ammo, I hope?”

“I have spares, yes,” Zel said, omitting the fact she only had one more loaded shell and hoping that she’d get new ammo before the Governor’s agent contacted her.

“As for my second question…” she simply looked down at the disassembled revolver, then back up at Collier, then showed the Cold-iron Sovereign she’d been fiddling with to symbolize purchase.

“Oh, you wanna know if lil’ Pentacle is for sale?” the gunsmith asked, somewhat taken aback, picking up the cylinder and showing that it only had etchings and inlays that could be seen up-close. “But why, she’s only got the basic inlays and glyphs to make her work! Surely your lady-friend would prefer a more regal arm, one that isn’t mostly bare cold-iron.”

Zefaris has slowly drifted towards them over the course of this exchange, and the moment Collier brought up the gun’s relatively unadorned state, she cut in with, “I’d prefer it to have etchings that actually mean something, rather than symbolism significant to a dead noble.”

Collier huffed, she puffed, and she relented with a faux annoyance that only a real grandmother could muster at a grandchild’s request. “Very well. I’ll get her assembled and boxed up for you along with a copy of my universal revolver manual.”

Zelsys walked out of that store having spent all of the funds she had gotten from the Governor, plus fifty gelt of her own money - she, of course, didn’t care. At this very moment, she only cared about Zef’s nearly vice-like grip on her arm as they walked through the streets of Willowdale, making no particular haste and discussing where to go next.