Strol narrowed his eye and leaned in for a closer look. A second later his eye shot wide open and he dropped to the ground, sneaking away into the hoard-chamber. When she shot him a curious look, he wildly signed something about how the Emperor knew who he was and that it would be a catastrophe if his presence here was revealed. Then, he gestured at the machine.

Zel seemed to have returned her attention to its projection just in time, as the image began to shudder and move in unsettling ways and tinny sound started to issue from the machine. The Emperor was looking off to the side, talking to someone. When he spoke she heard the sing-song tones and strange words of Pateirian, yet she understood the intended message behind his words. His voice carried untold centuries of experience, incredible implied violence behind every syllable, but somehow it rang hollow.

“You did what again? Speak up.”

A vague, muffled voice came from beyond the projection’s scope. It sounded terrified and panicked.

“No, no excuses. Your actions have consequences, no matter how long you’ve spent in my service. Three generations of residency at the chimera farm.”

The screaming and pleading that ensued was only quelled by dull thuds and the Emperor’s all-encompassing boredom as he looked towards something else out of view.

“Possibility of early release in case of Tiger-class metamorphic response,” he said.

It was only then that his attention lazily drifted towards her, his head slightly tilted and his ring-covered hand raised in a bored, yet ostentatious gesture. He was perfect, to an inhuman degree. The Divine Emperor didn’t look like a real person, he looked like an excessively idealized painting brought to life.

Perfect skin, perfect hair, perfect clothes and jewelry, all as lifeless as they were imperious. His eyes, too, were dead. No more human than the precious metals whose colours shone within them.

Zelsys gazed upon the Divine Emperor’s visage, and saw nothing behind it. Her mind and instincts alike dredged his face for any trace of emotion, any microexpressions, and found nothing. She was speaking to a mask, a facade that the Emperor put on like any other piece of clothing or jewellery.

An aura of overwhelming charisma and authority radiated from that unnaturally perfect face, but the feeling in her gut told her that it was fake. A reproduction of human emotion, masterfully practiced and mixed up from myriad sources over centuries, but still…

“Fake.”

That was the first word Zelsys spoke to the Divine Emperor. He raised an eyebrow ever so slightly.

“Excuse me? Did the connection cut out? It seemed like you went through the usual period of awestruck observation and then just said ‘fake’,” asked the Divine Emperor in a completely earnest question, as far as Zelsys could tell. There was annoyance behind his words, but it was directed towards the devices facilitating this conversation.

“I did,” Zel chuckled, her mouth curling into an indignant grin whether she liked it or not. “That’s the first thing that came to mind. The bugmen described you as unsettlingly perfect, but I didn’t expect a moving wax statue. And the empty stare, it’s like I’m looking at a doll’s eyes. Is that what it takes to look this young after a couple centuries?”

The Divine Emperor smiled, he even let out a chuckle.

“Are you certain you are in a position to comment on my appearance? I didn’t expect an exterminator to have a sense of humor. Tell me, what did you feel as you gunned down the failures of my army?”

“Recoil. Pity. Satisfaction.”

“Did you not hate them?” asked the man-god with child-like curiosity. “The locust swarm that threatened to swoop over the beautiful farming valley and strip it bare? The unhinged hive queen parasitizing an ancient machine in an attempt to facilitate my traversal across the cursed wall?”

“They were stuck, desperate, and indoctrinated. Regardless of how they wronged me or what promises of cruelty they spat at me, it was you that they hailed as they died. They and any who come after me in the future will die in the dirt, but it will be your head that I will parade on a pike through the burning halls of your capital until the crows eat your eyes.”

From that disdainful tirade, the Emperor entirely ignored the promise of decapitation and desecration. It seemed that Zel’s claimed lack of hatred for his servants took him aback the most.

“Really? You don’t hate those you fight against? Or is that what you tell yourself once the heads have rolled and the corpses stopped twitching?”

Disgust filled her and bile rose into her throat. Even as he put on that exaggerated tone and tried to tug at the strings of remorse, the Emperor’s eyes stayed dead and empty. The only emotion he broadcast was this unsettling sense of amusement. Zel spat off to the side, noticing that the others had gathered near the hoard-chamber’s doorway to listen in.

“You don’t get to moralize at me,” she spat with a mocking laugh that came out on its own. “There’s nothing behind your eyes. No moral compass, no empathy. You know less than nothing of guilt or remorse. The dead drones that litter this chamber are more human than you.”

“I could say the same about you. The drones were children to a still human mother, no matter how animalistic their behavior. Looking at you, on the other hand, shows me a stained-glass mosaic made from hundreds of pieces, yet I don’t go bringing it up every other sentence, do I? You would do well to consider that the time I was thirty years old, I had surpassed the limits of my humanity thirty times over. I had ransacked every single dungeon on the continent, toppled the reign of the Three Kings, and with the spoils founded the very nation that blossomed into my empire, in the very mountains atop whose peaks my palace is built. You’ve paid an arm to destroy a liability, to clean up my trash. What makes you think you could ever so much as lay a finger on my great work?”

“So what? I’ll just reattach it, “ she scoffed. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me. I’ll get dismembered a hundred times and take a hundred lightning strikes, but I’ll still keep pushing back. You and yours have chosen to go after me and mine, so the only way I can ever be safe is to make sure you don’t have the means to do that. The fact that I take great personal satisfaction in spitting into a face as insufferable as yours is irrelevant.”

A furious countenance flashed across his visage, so subtle and slight that it was only noticeable thanks to the absence of other expressions to hide it. It was there one moment, then gone in a split-second. He blinked a few times, took a deep breath, and shifted in his seat before he next spoke.

“Let us stop exchanging threats and insults for a moment,” he said. “Humor an old god-king for a moment, and answer me a question. In exchange, I will answer one of your own to the best of my ability. Is that fair?”

On one hand, every fiber of her being wanted to say no just to spite him.

On the other, she was curious enough to agree to it.

“Sure,” she chuckled with a dismissive tone.

“Tell me and be truthful, as I will know if you lie: Do you hear voices telling you what to do? Or perhaps see projected boxes in your field of vision marking things in the same way the dungeon’s utility glyphs do? Maybe feel a particular drive to act maliciously towards some people but benevolently to others? In other words, is there an ephemeral other that guides you?”

“No, there are no strings on me,” Zelsys said, truthfully. “I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. Those who serve you and their actions are entirely to blame for my opposition to your country and to you in particular for having made them the way they are. Know that there is nothing you can do to undermine my convictions or sway my moral compass. Now, answer me this in return: Why target Willowdale?”

There was not a single moment of hesitation, not a second of consideration or forethought before the man-god answered.

“It’s the most likely source of a second unification, even with someone like you out of the picture,” he explained. “The city was built on open resistance against aristocratic rule and its population maintains an insufferably strong cultural identity of ah… What was the phrase again?”

A voice came from out of view. His eyes flicked towards it and he gave a nod of acknowledgment, “‘Step on me and lose your leg,’ that was the one. Such sentiments are virulent when presented to a demoralized populace without propaganda to demonize those who hold them, and unfortunately the blackwall prevents large-scale propaganda operations. The Sage really got me good with that one.”

Zel opened her mouth to question why he was being so suspiciously generous in his answer. Before she could so much as make a noise he interrupted, “Before you ask, I am only telling you this because if I didn’t, your counter-propagandist friend that’s recording our conversation on a Type-17 Phonograph would tell you the same thing tinted with his own narrative.”

Her gaze instinctively turned towards the hoard-chamber’s entryway, and sure enough, Strolvath was holding a strange foldout device with a three-piece reception pan and a wax cylinder that was being carved by a needle as it spun round and round. She saw tension fill his gaze and his Hellfire Mantle flare, but he remained steadfast in his operation of the recording device.

“It doesn’t matter after all,” the Emperor broke the tense silence. “You’ve amused me more than I had expected, and that’s as good a reason as any to give you another hint. When next a blue moon rises, the thunderstruck beast-mountain roars again. Soon enough we’ll find out if that ego of yours is justified.”

The Emperor touched the middle joint of his middle finger with his thumb, pointing this strange gesture at something just under the projection’s field of view, likely his own aether wave communication machine.

“I would step back from the machine if I were you,” he said. “There are other nosy little birdies on the telephone line, so I’ve no choice but to cut it.”

A thin beam of violet shot out from his middle finger. The image grew distorted, the machine’s nozzles sprayed Fog in violent sputtering bursts, and it emitted a horrendous chorus of mechanical grinding and the ringing of its bell. Zel felt a subtle instinctual gnawing telling her to get back and she abided, just in time for the machine’s casing to spill Fog from its seams before it buckled inward and imploded into a heap of crumpled metal.

Just one question dwelt on her mind.

“What the fuck is a telephone?”

Crovacus had just called an emergency senate meeting, using the time he spent waiting for the senators to prepare his material. The senate meeting chamber was unremarkable in decoration or furniture, equipped with the same well-polished wood as the rest of town hall. Even its layout was basically just one big room with a horseshoe-shaped table and some seventeen seats - one for the governor, twelve for the senators, and four for any guests. If it were up to him he would’ve bought his own comfortable seat, but one of the old codes dictated that, if possible, no one senate member may have a more opulent seat than another.

Looking through his papers, he took a sip of his flask filled with Fivefold Philter and sprinkled a small amount of daytime dust under his tongue. He’d slept for only two hours, yet thanks to the first batch of the near-miraculous elixir he felt… Well, he didn’t feel great, but he certainly felt infinitely better than two hours of sleep. The alchemist had advised that daytime dust would help bestow more immediate energy to round out the Philter’s longer-term restorative effects, and the governor gladly partook. It wasn’t entirely because he trusted the alchemist, seeing as Crovacus had had a hand in popularizing a paste version of the yellow drug in Grekuria.

The senate members filed in one by one soon enough. Most notably the two Pateirian senators arrived first, closely followed by three of the younger Ikesians and the single other Grekurian. All of them seemed surprised by the sudden improvement in Crovacus’s apparent health, and unsurprisingly three were visibly displeased - the Pateirians and one Ikesian who had previously expressed some well-meaning if misguided nationalist ideals, believing that an Ikesian city-state should be led by an Ikesian. The aforementioned senator was the youngest, and Crovacus felt the need to prove himself to the young man - if only to temper his risky demeanor into something that would better serve Willowdale.

The meeting of the senate went about as well as he’d expected, that is to say rocky at best, for a simple reason. His presence at the meeting instantly made all his suspects clam up, and his apparently improving physical state reflected on quite a few senators in a bad light. Murmuring, sideways looks, even outright hateful stares. These suspects were both the Pateirian senators and two excessively wealthy-looking older Ikesians.

Eventually, rote work and uncontested propositions bored Crovacus enough that he stopped bothering to appear alert, even if he was listening. It was then that a mind-boggling proposal shocked his system and forced him to full attention.

“No, we cannot restrict the citizenry’s freedoms under the promise of returning them after suspected war criminals and terrorists are eliminated. I am not just saying that it would be wrong to do so, but we simply do not have the legislative power to do such a thing. The rights of Willowdale’s citizens are carved in stone, and the oath that I swore upon my induction as provisional governor is a binding geas that forces me to abide by that stone,” Crovacus rebutted, exaggerating the reality of things as naturally as he breathed. It was true that Willowdale’s governors had historically sworn upon a particular carved stone, and that the ritual of it held a certain degree of binding power that was akin to a geas. Unlike a modern geas, this ritual wasn’t a soulbinding contract that would sooner lead the subject to their death than let them break its conditions. It more-so just caused him unpleasant intrusive thoughts and headaches whenever Crovacus seriously considered a course of action that he knew was against Willowdale’s best interests.

“It has come to my attention that yesterday while I slept, the senate made motions to pass a bill that would dissolve core aspects of Willowdale’s exclusive democracy and limit the citizenry’s ability to override the senate through referendums. Most abhorrent of all, the bill seeks to significantly loosen the requirements to become a citizen, as well as remove the minimum residency time required to apply for citizenship.”

“I have chosen to veto this bill in its entirety, as well as reinstate the single-subject clause three years early. To those in the senate who do not have Willowdale’s best interests in mind: I am obligated to civility, but there are others who aren’t. Willowdale is not an occupied province, its citizenry voted to comply with the treaties out of their own free wills. These people are not subservient, they are not afraid of those who govern them. They view us as public servants in the most literal sense, some consider the best politician lesser than a miller. In fact, let me bring up the only thing that I am certain will convince you.”

He reached into the inner pocket of his coat, and retrieved two card-thin slips of milky-white quartz. As predecessors of contemporary photographs, this archaic and expensive method of pict-capture still held certain significant advantages, including full colour. Unlike paper photos, the quartz slips were impressively resistant to the ravages of time, only vulnerable to sudden impacts. Secondly and more importantly, they couldn’t be edited or easily copied. Any alchemist worth their salt would be able to detect alterations to the item’s subtle enchantments.

“Seventy-three years before the Unification, there was a certain governor who had a private aethermancer break the geas,” he began, showing the first slip. The first slip which he showed was a portrait of an excessively noble-looking individual, his relatively subtle outfit betraying vast wealth through selectively chosen ornaments such as the cufflinks.

He put the first slip down and held up the second one, prompting a wave of disordered noise. It displayed that very governor’s mangled corpse, his upper half stuck between a pair of large cogwheels and ground into paste.

“With his oath no longer truly binding, he went to great lengths in his attempts to abolish the Exclusive Citizenship Act, for reasons that have been lost to time. He was accused of treason and assassinated by a local miller who shoved him into the mill’s cogworks. When the miller was tried for murder, the jury refused to convict him and even cheered for him.”

Crovacus put the slip face-down on the table as he directed a stare at the two Pateirian senators.

“I wager Willowdale’s people will hesitate even less when it comes to foreigners,” he said.

“He recognized you,” Zelsys looked to Strolvath.

“So he did,” he nodded grimly as he folded up the weird three-flap dish and tinkered with the device, moving the needle arm, flipping a switch here, winding a spring there. “I still got him on record, though.”

Click.

It replayed what Zel had said word for word starting right after the point when she had made clear her hatred for the Emperor rather than his servants.

It was just… Gibberish. Not even Pateirian. The most recognizable pattern amongst the noise sounded like “oijay jija”. As the needle neared the end of the cylinder, Strolvath’s face moved from disbelief, to frustration, to simple disappointment.

“Damn,” he sighed. “At least we got confirmation on that myth about how he speaks. Guess he really can make his speech illegible to unwanted listeners.”

The Inquisitor had already stepped back into the hoard-chamber by this point and began moving things around, seemingly piling objects of the same general type together.

Zefaris observed Strolvath handling the phonograph and its cylinder, finding it curious that the wax didn’t melt in his hands despite the great heat he gave off. He wrapped it in wax paper and packed it away inside his prosthetic leg, staring off into empty space for a moment.

“What’s done is done, let’s see if the scumsuckers had anything workwhile,” he rumbled, rising to his feet.

Finally, it was time to go through the Locust Queen’s hoard, divvy up the spoils, and take what they could carry. Only… Not really. It quickly became obvious that a great deal of what made up the hoard was either mundane or well beyond fitting in a backpack.

Furniture, structural panels, paintings, huge chunks of black-stone - raw stock waiting to be fashioned into something, but nearly useless without access to the dungeon’s arcane tools. Another major portion of the hoard was the Queen’s supply of “Blood of God” elixir, of which they agreed to take samples for study and leave the rest here.

Even with all the impractical loot out of the equation, the sheer volume of objects in here was massive.

Thus, Zelsys offered up her Tablet.

“We can just take everything that fits in the vortex and divide it up once we get back to town, have the Tablet make a record of all the loot for posterity,” she said.

Strolvath had no qualms with it, and obviously neither did Zefaris, while the Inquisitor seemed wary. Always with the ice-cold stares. Wait, no, it wasn’t caution. It was a tense, heavy coldness which all but screamed that the woman had something on her mind that she wanted to say, but couldn’t bring herself to say it.

This sentiment remained even as she made a sign of agreement and walked off to the back of the chamber while Zelsys set up the Tablet near the entryway. She grabbed a string of strange copper coins from the drawer of a nearby commode, lowering it into the vortex as she kept her mind on the intention to record that it was part of the hoard.

Scrolling through the list had her finding it all the way at the bottom, separated in its own little convenient category.

HOARD LOOT String of 20 Pateirian Coppers

Just as she checked that the Tablet had properly separated the item, Strolvath came over with three belts of six wheellock pistols on each arm. He tilted his head, squinted, and remarked, “That don’t sound right. Zipperheads call their money ‘huén’ and break up the denominations by animals: Copper rabbits, silver eagles, golden tigers, n’ jade dragons.”

Huén. The word sunk in, and the listing changed to match.

String of 20 Huén Copper Rabbits

The pistol belts went into the vortex just as easily. Feeling no particular need to stake her claim on anything, Zel started leisurely digging through the commode’s drawers and emptying them, watching what the others dropped in the vortex as she did.

There were swords, daggers, pieces of rusted armor. Some two-dozen paintings, all possessing a strangely surreal quality as if one was looking at a vivid memory given visual form. Looking at one of the smaller pieces up-close, Zelsys couldn’t discern individual brush strokes despite its oil paint appearance.

She set it aside and waited for Zef to come over, handing it to her with a question. “See anything weird about this?”

Dilating her Homunculus Eye and even opening the Philosopher’s Eye to get as good a look as possible, the blonde grew increasingly more visibly befuddled as she observed the piece.

“It’s… Printed? No, that’s not right. It’s like the paint was arranged on the canvas without the involvement of any tools…” she pondered, stepping aside to let the Inquisitor access the Tablet, carrying a comically opulent gold-embroidered robe on one arm and several strings-of-cash draped across the other. Zel received a tense, brief glance before the Inquisitor dropped the robe into the vortex, followed by the money in quick succession.

As the last two strings-of-cash dropped into the vortex, Zefaris let out a disbelieving laugh of realization.

“Paintings?” she exclaimed. “This bitch could force the core to make anything and she had it make paintings?!”

The painting was dismissively tossed in, and Zefaris began digging through the hoard with renewed curiosity, setting her sights on the commodes and closets that littered the left side of the chamber. More frivolities were found wherever she looked - jewelry, fabric stock, coins of all denominations arrayed on strings-of-cash of varying quality.

She walked up carrying strings-of-cash on both arms and even on her shoulders, dropping them in one by one. Zel noticed that the type of string was specific to the coin - coppers had thick linen strings, silvers were on some sort glossy of braids of fabric, while golden coins were on sturdy-looked red braids. Strolvath completed the puzzle when he brought several deck-like stacks of jade cards with dragon iconography.

“At this rate we’ll make off with more cash than Estoras is paying…” he murmured.

“Won’t it be a pain to exchange?” Zel asked.

“Not if we find the right people,” he answered, dropping in the last of the cards. “Plenty of merchants want or even need to trade with the cat-eaters, n’ they won’t try to screw you so hard if you use their own money.”

So it was that they continued the ordeal of emptying the hoard-chamber of anything worthwhile.

Further loot of note that caught Zel’s eye included unnaturally large chunks of white, green, and purple jade, statuettes made from the aforementioned gemstones, solid bricks of gold, and… Clothes, of all things. Dresses of varying styles from prudent to scandalous, hats of all sizes, eyeglasses with tinted lenses, earrings, even lingerie.

The more of the Locust Queen’s hoard they plundered, the more sad a picture its contents painted.

“It’s like she had expected the Emperor to return her to a human form and take her as a concubine...” Zel pondered as the last of the loot was being stored and they were preparing to finally leave this dismal place.

“Wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what he told her,” grunted Strolvath, hefting a solid rock of jade into the vortex. His Hellfire Mantle had progressively grown dimmer and smaller, and by this point his hair looked almost normal. The golden-coloured amalgam paste was scooped into empty jars that they found in the hoard and stored in this manner.

From there it was onto scavenging the iridescent gemstones, which took them only a few minutes. Zel even took the sister’s sword, more as a memento than to use it for herself. Strolvath grew increasingly more visibly exhausted throughout this process, eventually reaching a point where he moved like a sluggish old man.

Zef stuck close to Zel, both helping her gather the gemstones and keeping an eye on her in case she tripped or suddenly displayed signs of the major blood loss that she had gone through. It wasn’t her injury that concerned Zelsys, even though she could never get into a groove because once she did, she would be torn out of it when she instinctively tried to use both hands.

What concerned her were the constant glances from the Inquisitor. She’d thought the masked soldier had warmed up to her since they’d first met, but it seemed that raw animosity and disgust had only been replaced. Zelsys decided to bring it up when they first made camp.

In the end, they left a good third of the hoard’s contents behind because they were either useless, too big to fit into the vortex, or abominable beyond consideration.