2018-12-30: Weight Off Her Shoulders
- Cutscene: Weight Off Her Shoulders
- Cast: Jacqueline Barber
- Where: Inside the Carakin
- Date: December 30th, 2018
- Summary: While tinkering with her gauntlets, Jacqueline reflects on recent events...
The sun had long since set, and yet Jacqueline was still wide awake, sitting at the worktable in her room aboard the Carakin. A pair of gauntlets rest atop it - ancient equipment she had found in an undersea ruin - with various tools she had borrowed scattered around.
Tonight, Jacqueline found herself doing something she did not often do - tinkering. Despite the late hour, she was unable to sleep, and so she picked at the gauntlets in front of her, trying to restore them to a working state. With the exception of the week or so she spent either asleep or shuffling about in practically a zombielike state, sleep had been...evasive for her.
A part of her believes that week has something to do with it, but the rest she would blame on a sense of general...uneasiness, creeping at the back of her mind. Arising whenever she found herself growing too comfortable. And in her current state, her mind drifts.
Mother had been defeated, but...Jacqueline found herself unable to take joy in it. Neither did she feel sorrowful that she had been unable to see reason...not that they had tried very hard, admittedly. Mother had made her stance clear, after all, and she posed an immediate threat. Mother had been dreaming of it, what she would do - she had said that much.
Was there more to it than that? It was too late to ask. In the heat of the moment, Jacqueline had allowed adrenaline to overtake her. It had been...exhilarating, certainly, but Jacqueline wonders if perhaps she would have been able to learn more if she acted differently.
...But in the end, perhaps she is just trying to extract something from her lack of feeling on the matter.
The world should, ostensibly, be safe. Filgaia could rest easy, at least for a little...but in truth, Jacqueline knew that it was more complicated than that. The Hyadeans had been freed from her grasp, but at the cost of their home and everything they had known and believed in. Malfi had been...understandably, inconsolable, when she found her. Jacqueline could only image that the other surviving Hyadeans would be in a similar state.
And what's more...even if Mother's defeat would make things easier for Filgaia, the problems facing it did not just conveniently disappear. And they were not problems that could be solved simply through sorcery and force of ARMs. Those would have to be dealt with at some point, as well...
...But for now, the problem she is most equipped to deal with is the ones in front of her - her gauntlets. They had been disabled in the fight with Mother, protecting Jacqueline from her vicious assault. Up to that point they had been stuck forcibly in place on her hands, but their disabling had freed her. It was a relief, but at the same time it meant she could no longer use them...but she would need them, in the future, and so she set to work.
It was strange - though their insides resembled some manner of ARM, working with them was much more like working with a sorcerous item. In a way, her studies for her Crest Sorcery certification had prepared her for working with them. It was fitting, she supposed, given their use with her own Crest Sorcery.
Thankfully, the damage was not too severe...there were a few parts that needed to be replaced, but she had managed that. She was even able to find the part that adjusted its size. That one was difficult to handle but she found, surprisingly, that it was more easy to comprehend after she broke down and consulted the notes and items she acquired from the Artificer's Workshop, back on Lunar. The technology wasn't directly compatible, of course, but by incorporating the concepts, she was able to get it back into working shape. No longer would she have to go months with her hands stuck inside a pair of bulky, albeit useful gloves.
As for an energy source...well, that had never been a problem. /She/ was the energy source - supplying it with power much like she did her spells. It drew upon her power to maintain its shape and to project the barriers that allowed her to manipulate certain energy fields...and protect her from attacks. She had thought it had run out of power, but in truth they had disabled themselves to avoid drawing too much from her.
It meant one less thing she had to deal with...and one less thing standing between her and completing the work in front of her. But, after replacing the panels...the gauntlets appear to be back in working shape! Jacqueline carefully, hesitantly, approaches the gloves with one of her hands. There is a brief sparking before the gauntlets adjust in size to fit her hands. She slips one of them on, flexes her hand experimentally...and then attempts to remove it. Unlike before, where it remained firmly affixed, it slowly returns to original size, allowed her to remove it safely.
A wide smile crosses Jacqueline's face. With all the problems she found herself facing of late, it was nice to be able to take care of at least one of them. It might not be much, but it was a little weight off her shoulders. She experiments with the gauntlets a few more times, though slowly, she finds herself drifting off...
She ends up being late for breakfast the next morning. The rest of the Caravan Kinship will find her still at her worktable, gently dozing with a wide smile on her face...
...And an imprint on her cheek of the four elemental Crests from the etching on the back of the Gauntlets, where she had been resting her head.