A bitter laugh echoed as he pulled out another cigarette, flicking closed a plate on his gun that obstructed the flashhole before he brought the sparklock to his face and pulled the trigger once, cocking it back and repeating the cycle three more times before the cigarette caught. He picked a metal Tablet out of the mess of his workbench, skimming over it as he complained: “I got in the cockpit ready to rein in a bloodthirsty beast, and now I’m the dog of war getting reined in. What a fuckin’ joke.”

The Dog of War then looked up at her, asking, “Y’gonna stand there all day or what? I’m not joining your sect or spilling my life story. Unless you have something to say, just leave me be.”

She stared him down for a moment. She did have a question.

“Where is Alcerys? The Third-” she began.

“-Renegade, I know.” he interrupted. “Hunting down one of the Divine Generals. Probably inflicting fates worse than death upon products of war like myself who happened to lack the self-control I do. Bandits. Warlords. Occupiers. Why, you two related or something?”

Recognition sparked in the man’s face at the last sentence, so she decided to divert: “Which general, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Cao Hu, arguably the second biggest degen of the lot. Typical iron fist Pateirio-chauvinist type, somehow survived… Whatever she does with that flaming sword.”

The conversation went on for some time as Zelsys dug up more and more details regarding the Rigport Operation, learning of Alcerys’s current state, the secondary objective of the operation having been Burgess’ extraction, and even… Red.

“Wait, she’s alive?” she blurted out without thinking, prompting a grin and a laugh from the Dog of War.

“Alive and a killer piece of mutant ass if I do say so myself,” he cackled jokingly, but she could tell he was being partially genuine. “Dunno where she’s gone, since I’ve only got this as second-hand info, but apparently she helped with stabilizing Rigport before she up and bailed to “build something of her own” or something of the sort. I’d wager she’s warlordin’ it up in the north of the northwest, plenty of wannabe-dictator abortion survivalists to usurp under the guise of “the will of the emperor” or whatever the fuck.”

Another long drag. Another smoked cigarette.

“Somethin’ tells me she ain’t as loyal to Big E as she says, doesn’t have the sycophantic glint in her eyes. Here…”

He pulled out two cigarettes, flipping one into his mouth and tossing the other to Zelsys.

“I’ll give you a cancer stick to fuck off. Homunculus lungs don’t get gunked up so easily, n’ you can just cough the tar up besides.”

“Alright, I’ll leave you be - if you tell me where you got that Tablet,” she conceded, albeit only partially. “I’ve seen two others like it, and before the caravan arrived in town at that.”

He sighed, then gave her a series of somewhat cryptic directions that would supposedly lead her to a “Lingering Smoke Market”, though the directions sounded more like ones to a back alley corner store. Regardless, it seemed he was telling the truth, and so she left it be.

With but a nod as goodbye, she took the cigarette into the corner of her mouth and went on her way, lighting it with a small arc of lightning between her fingers. From her perspective, the cigarette was a vaguely unpleasant-smelling nothing. Her body was unaffected by its intoxicants… But she had to admit it was a good look, if not one for her.

Before she returned to the sect, Zel decided to follow up on Strake’s directions, and they did indeed have her reach a rather unassuming little store, whose most notable trait was the fact it was staffed by two Pateirians; ones which, upon seeing her, panicked and did everything in their power to make clear that they were not “Loyalists”, and were merely criminals exiled from their home country long before the war. The fact they spoke with startlingly native-sounding Ikesian accents and without hesitation derided the Emperor and everything he stood for when she asked them to, she was inclined to believe them.

Their workshop reminded her of the pawnbroker she’d visited when the caravan first arrived, at least in its contents, with a great many vaguely arcane objects stacked upon shelves lining the space behind the counter, while the customer side of the store was nothing but a small area. At her request for a Tablet, the older of the duo asked what features it needed to have. When she listed these by just recalling the main features of her own Tablet, they further asked whether it needed to be “unshackled-jailbroken”, only to correct himself to “unregistered”.

With some hesitation and an apologetic tone, the older man said that mass-produced models didn’t hold up to such specifications, and that of the craftmade units they had, the cheapest one matching her criteria would run over five-hundred gelt. She asked how much for a truly good one, and the quote shot up to nearly two-thousand. After some haggling, she managed to bring it down to sixteen-fifty and closed the deal, putting the device through its paces right then and there to ensure it worked properly. It was a sleek thing compared to her own, wrought from polished granite and carved with glyphs resembling no language she knew of, even its projections were somewhat alien, which the grey marketeers claimed to be a current fashion among the nobility of the “Southward Enlightened Islands” or somesuch, apparently in an effort to replicate the aesthetics of some ancient lost promised land. That side task handled, she went on her way and returned to the sect, committing to memory the location of the store in case she needed to come back for any reason - good or bad.

As she made her way back to where she had parked the Sturmgandr, she fiddled with the Black Tablet a little more, finding that bringing it in close proximity with her own White Tablet caused a new prompt to show up both on her own device and the new unit.

PAIRING-COMPATIBLE UNIT FOUND

PROCEED WITH PAIRING SEQUENCE?