56 – Displays

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.