74 – The Quiet Morning

“Alright, done,” Makhus said, reaching into one of his pockets for a cotton swab and pressing it against the point of entry as he pulled the needle. He squinted at it up-close, as if trying to peer into the tiny glass window of the mostly metal-encased syringe. Zelsys was just about ready to turn and walk out before he tried to further involve in his research, but was stopped by a drawn-out, “Say… If you were to pick somethin’ about the Necrobeast to use for yourself, what would it be?”

Zelsys chuckled, recalling her bouts with the beast. It sure wasn’t graceful, and she doubted the strength of a Nigredo-fueled bear was all that impressive. “It’d sure be nice if I could just pull myself back together like it did,” she said, making her way towards the lab’s door.

Though bleary-eyed and yawning all the way back upstairs, she felt no urge to sleep. So it was that Zel quietly went about her morning rituals, redoing her chest bindings properly before she moved onto the mindless process of braiding her hair. The repetitive manual labour was almost therapeutic in its thoughtlessness. Once finished with her hair, she brushed her teeth using one of the dental hygiene ration kits and left one of them on the sink for when Zef woke up, just as she had done the days prior.

Lastly came the remainder of her equipment, and once she strapped on the arm-cannon and its harness, she took the moment to retrieve two spare shells and tried placing them into what free space remained in the cleaver’s holster, at the very top left corner so they would be in reach. Much to her relief the enchanted leather clasped them tightly, not letting up even when she pulled the cleaver or retrieved the Tablet from the holster.

Planting a kiss on Zef’s forehead without waking her up, she made for the town hall, striding through Willowdale’s near-empty streets as the sun rose into the cloudless sky.

All was tranquil.

Zel bought a few large pears on her way to the bridge to serve as her breakfast, eating two almost in their entirety save for the very tops and bottoms, which she tossed into the river as she crossed the bridge. The remaining two went into Fog Storage, still wrapped in wax paper.

The Town Hall’s front door now in sight, Zelsys found herself somewhat dissuaded by the surprising number of people milling into the building, all well-dressed, and mostly rather aged - bureaucrats. She felt bile rise in her throat as she overheard their inane banter about the economy, and instead turned her gaze to Collier’s Equalizers.

There she was, behind the window, wiping dust from the display guns and gazing out over the street. By some small stroke of luck, Collier’s and Zel’s gazes met, and the gunsmith gave a knowing nod, wordlessly beckoning for her to enter.

And enter, Zelsys did, after crossing the street and doing her best to ignore the insufferable feeling of being looked at by the dusty, soulless eyes of a dozen self-important office workers. Never before had she felt such irrational dislike for anyone, and she wagered she wouldn’t feel it like this again for a little while.

“You’ve come… Ufh… At just the right time!” Collier beamed at her as she stepped into the store, carrying a narrow crate full of shells out from the back room and hefting it onto the counter. The edges of the shells were very slightly uneven as if they’d been cut short with a hacksaw, but otherwise they looked like a mix of Type-1 and Type-2 shells at a two to one ratio, arrayed in three rows of seven each. Atop the crate sat an unloaded shell that was nearly twice as long as the others and narrowed sharply around a third of the way from the top, likely for comparison’s sake.

Zelsys was utterly confused by the massive supply of ammunition, produced in such a short span of time no less! “How…” she wondered, her bewildered gaze flickering back and forth between Collier’s ecstatic face to the crate of ammo.

“Well, the shell you gave me looked a lil’ familiar, an sure enough…” the gunsmith began, picking one of the shells out of the crate and running her wrinkled finger along the casing’s edge. “Turns out, it’s a shortened version of an older design for solid-shell ammo. I ain’t sure how or why, but whoever came up wit’ yer gun had access to the development docs of an experimental armor piercing weapon meant to give infantry the means to kill enemy Fog-breathers.”

Zel furrowed her brow. “Two questions,” she said. “How do you know this, and what does this mean for me?”

A ringing laugh came from the older woman.

“Let’s just say that when he last visited our lil’ town, the Sage hired me on as… Remote research contractor, so to speak. It’s wondrous how quick you can send messages ‘cross the whole country with a couple of those neat lil’ Tablets linked together,” she trailed off into a rant, only to catch herself and return to the topic at hand when Zelsys raised an eyebrow and looked to the crate of shells again.

“Oh yes, the shells, sorry dear,” she excused herself. “We worked on an infantry weapon that could reliably kill enemy Fog-breathers, but the project ran into issues with recoil and got shelved near the end of the war. The pencil-pushers in the capital asked us to dispose of all our research, but you’re walkin’ proof that I wasn’t the only to ignore the order!”

For a few seconds, Collier quietly laughed to herself about her defiance of orders as if it were a small act of mischief, then once more steered herself onto relevant information with, “So as it turns out I still had some o’ the test casings in Fog Storage, and I cut some of ‘em down to size and loaded ‘em like the one you gave me. Bein’ that they’re useless for anyone other than you, I’ll cut you a deal - just take the whole lot for twenty gelt, and any further ammo is the same price if you buy in bulk. Otherwise, it's one gelt for a standard load and three gelt for that nasty shotgun-style load.”