Damon was, surprisingly, bored. And annoyed. Neither were things he was expecting to be. For the first time in his very long life, Damon, the Ghost of Authority, had been captured. Truthfully, he’d assumed it was impossible. After all, when he was in his formshifted state, he was invisible even to aura senses and completely intangible. How could one capture something that they could not see or touch?

The apparent answer to that question was to build something that could see and touch him. A surprisingly straightforward answer, all things considered. That was what this…thing…had done, anyway. The massive Etherman had not only seen Damon as he’d observed the flagship’s core and its siphoning of shrouded souls, but also casually grabbed him in one of its massive hands.

Normally, Damon could have found a dozen ways to break free. But this was not a normal situation. His aura was still suppressed, denying him practically all his offensive options. Once the Etherman stuck him in a cage constructed of the same material as its hand, Damon’s formshift was rendered useless as well. It was a novel situation, knowing he had no way out.

He wasn’t exactly afraid, per se. Damon had faced death too many times, lost too much, to really fear his end. Some part of him readily accepted it. So he just found his circumstances to be…interesting. Of course, that was when he’d first been captured.

That interest quickly fled, for one simple reason.

The Etherman wouldn’t shut up. He constantly rambled on and on about everything he was doing. He wasn’t actually talking to Damon, but merely voicing his thoughts. Damon would guess that he was someone unused to company, and had made up for the lack of social interaction with a constant internal dialogue that had eventually become external.

At first, Damon had hoped to glean some information from the endless deluge of words, but almost all of it was so technically complicated and deeply involved ethertech jargon that he felt more confused the more he listened. It didn’t help that whatever the Ethereman was doing obviously had something to do with him.

It was building several devices and pointing them at Damon’s cage, making noises of interest and approval, before disassembling what it had made partially or completely to make something new. That didn’t even include the several times it had prodded him with various devices, all of which merely went through his formshift. Damon had no idea what the Etherman was getting from it all.

Sometimes, though, it spoke plainly enough for him to understand.

“The interactions with the soul plane are elevated, but retains sensory ties to the material plane. How is this achieved?...I see, separation of aspects into independent reality substrates. Conceptual interference is the most likely answer. Source of concept is…Ghost. I believe there’s a file on that somewhere…Ah, here we are! Yes, Damon Vestigious, of the CA. Lots of data here…No recent readings, though. Tsk, so unsophisticated.”

And on and on it went.

Finally, something changed. The endless fidgeting and adjustments stopped as a loud ringing filled the engine room. A red light shined on the wall, flashing in an obnoxious and eye-catching pattern. The Etherman turned, the mechanical apparatus that made up its face focusing on the light before it turned off.

“...Odd.”

With that one word and a flick of its massive hand, the Etherman caused several CV screens on the walls and hanging over several instruments to flicker to life, showing reams of data or views of other sections of the flagship. The mechanical head moved round and round, looking between them all.

“This is quite a bit different than my expectations. I would have thought…But no.” His focus shifted, looking at Damon. “It seems that you might be joined by other interlopers shortly.”

“Oh?” Damon asked. His interest wasn’t solely with the statement itself, but also the fact that the Etherman had addressed him.

“Indeed. It seems that my removal of that-” He flicked a long and pointed metal finger at the hoop of ethertech he’d been observing when Damon had first entered. “-Has not gone unnoticed by its original owner. I thought that my bit of theft was not of much consequence. More than that, I thought my flight was unobserved. That is apparently not the case, as the owner and his little band of troublemakers have made their way here. They even managed to breach the energy shield. In record time, I might add. Your own entrance excluded, obviously.”

“What is it, anyway?” Damon asked. He had seen Caeden use the hoop, but this Etherman didn’t know that.

“You don’t know? I supposed you wouldn’t, would you? Shrouded are always so loath to expose their advantages. It’s some manner of portal. One far more successful than my own project, to my greatest shame. A shrouded managing to progress ethertech in a way I hadn’t imagined.” Scorn dripped from its words, despite the light tone.

“I attempted to gain an understanding of its functions from a distance, but the systems it employs have proven to be…exceedingly well made. Worse yet, their construction doesn’t seem to be at all based off my own design methodology, but made from an entirely different base. It has proven an additional barrier to my studies.”

A sigh slipped from the Etherman. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think that it had been developed somewhere else entirely, somewhere not even of the Starry Sea. But ether only exists here. It must originate here. Which means a shrouded somehow independently developed their own ethertech separately from my influence. An impossibility.” He rambled on.

“It’s maddening. The inherent contradictions are enough to drive a man mad. And that’s not even including the fact that certain aspects of the design touch on concepts I’ve never seen, using ether unknown to me. How is that possible? It was even tied directly into a shroud. Making it an extension of the shrouded’s power. I cut that connection easily enough, but doing so seems to have triggered a failsafe that renders its portal capabilities inert. A failsafe I still haven’t found a way to bypass.”

Damon almost regretted speaking, as it seemed to have encouraged the continuous barrage of words flying at him. It was bad enough when none of it had been directed at him. Now, it was so much worse. The Etherman truly loved to hear himself talk.

“Nevertheless, it shouldn’t be too long before these new ones are seized and added to my experimentation stock. They’ve managed to breach the shielding, but the ship itself should prove to be beyond them. Its design is focused entirely around defense, and they’ll be hard pressed to make further progress.”

The smug assurance in that assertion was almost comically short lived. It was only a few moments later that the Etherman was pulled from his most recent round of tinkering by another alarm.

“Huh…I…Well, that’s not a method of ingress I anticipated. How fascinating. It seems they managed to somehow almost instantly reverse engineer my thermodynamic dispersal polymer. They even seemed to have used it to suppress the implanted explosive plating. That’s actually almost inspired, really.” The Etherman sounded surprised and impressed. “Though they seemed to have only found access to a storage segment. They’ll find it quite difficult to leave from there. And the defenses are nothing to scoff at. Even if this group is of above average capabilities.”

“Oh, come on! Someone actually wrote down the layout! We literally have seminars about informational security specifically so things like this don’t happen!”

“This is ridiculous, an armed segment should hold up to assault better than this!”

It didn’t take long for all other projects to stop as the Etherman became fully immersed in tracking the invaders, who Damon could only assume to be Hekate and her teammates.

“They’ve managed to divine the purpose of the transportation system. Perhaps they’ll use it…No, it appears they’ve even discovered its shortcomings. I can’t say I’m surprised, considering their apparent understanding of teleportation and spatial manipulation.”

“Why would they not…Oh, they still haven’t figured out the patterns to the layout. Well, not everyone can so easily follow my designs. Now if only they’d encounter one of the experimental depos. Things in there could do them harm. But they aren’t in the right areas yet. And they’re moving steadily closer to…here, actually.”

After a certain point, his attention turned fully from Damon, seemingly forgetting him entirely. Instead, his attention returned to the portal ring. He fussed over it, even peeling sections of it apart before returning them back to their place. Instruments were created and deconstructed, attached at various points and then discarded.

“I don’t understand. This concept here, it has no parallels. How is that possible? My catalogs contain the sum total of all confirmed and projected concepts that even might exist. Is the processing algorithm flawed, to have missed this? It makes little sense. I’ve been refining that for decades, how could it be wrong? But if it isn’t, how can there be an unknown concept? And one so strongly present and pervasively used? It's tied into every part of this system! That would imply extensive knowledge of a concept I’ve never encountered, which seems impossible.”

Meanwhile, Damon had turned his attention from the Etherman’s ramblings. Instead, he focused on the CV screens that had been left running. One in particular seemed to be following Hekate and her team as they traveled throughout the flagship.

Though traveled might not be the most accurate term. Rather, they rampaged widely, with nothing they encountered even stopping them. Damon could find some measure of amusement in it. His flesh and blood, rising to a point where even a foe of this caliber was treated more as an inconvenience than a true threat.

He was also once more drawn to the fact that all of them were much stronger than they had been mere weeks ago. He had no idea what could have elevated them so quickly. Perhaps they had been hiding their strength? But that was silly. Hekate knew him, had no reason to hide anything from him. But the idea that they could gain this level of strength in such a short period defied all explanation.

But he couldn’t deny his own eyes. On and on they went, the further they traveled the faster they moved. The work of navigating the ship was no small thing. Another CV screen showed Damon a map of the ship, and it was a maze of labyrinthine proportions. Truly, it wasn’t something designed to be traversed.

Damon could, grudgingly, admit to the logic in such a design. The Revolution itself worked under similar methodologies. Compartmentalization, independent but narrowly defined parts combining into a greater whole with only the minimum amount of interaction necessary. Few portions of the ship connected to more than two others. Only storage areas acted as connection hubs.

The layout’s ability to confuse and misdirect was only aided by the sheer size of the ship itself. Its diameter matched that of the island below, but that fact didn’t account for the ship having multiple decks. Damon would estimate that it housed many millions of people, and it was a military vessel, not a true city or other urban environment. Large sections were dedicated to weapons depots and ship bays instead of housing.

Still, Hekate’s group moved steadily closer to the engine room. Sometimes they had to double back as they took a wrong exit, but they continued to move steadily in the right direction. Hours passed as they destroyed more and more of the flagship’s internals, slowly grinding all activity to a halt as more and more pseudo-independent sections lost access to the few outside resources they needed.

Foundries stopped producing replacement parts, storage hubs had their teleportation systems destroyed, and ether transformers stopped supplying weapons batteries with the specific kinds of ether they needed to fire. Massive cannons fell silent, and more and more revolutionaries were left unconscious in their wake.

Finally, they reached the engine room.

Or rather, it’s outer shell. Because Damon had realized, looking at the schematics, that there was only one way to enter the engine room proper. And it was outside the ship.