2022-02-26: The Flame Whose Trail Once Grew Cold

From Dream Chasers
Jump to navigation Jump to search
  • Cutscene: 2022-02-26: The Flame Whose Trail Once Grew Cold
  • Cast: Ethius Hesiod
  • Where: Celesti Wastelands
  • Date: January 28th, 2022
  • Summary: When you find what you've been looking for, without finding what you've been looking for.

The wastes of Celesti have nothing left but the dead. Nobody's been to those parts on the map since the war. Common descriptors, among the handful of settlements that continue to exist in these parts, as they all deal with an odd well-spoken man like he were merely the twenty-sixth person to ask in the last five years.

There's nothing left out here, he was assured by locals a few times over. What reached the man's ears was the opposite of what they intended to impart, which was standard fare for those who identified as Drifters. Nobody's had any reason to go looking unless they were desperate for an obscure place to lay down and die.

It was exactly as he needed to hear, for there were few places left to look after six years.

Six years, since he came to in the mountain ranges of Lacour, over in Ignas.

He was sure of a few things then: his name, privileged knowledge as it were, was Ethius Hesiod. He wished to locate lost or out-of-place technology. A series of gestures and incantations in accordance to the myriad Symbological tattoos on his body were both his greatest defense, and most useful tools.

The rest came piecemeal, with occasional bouts of urgency that he act upon the unexplainable or strange without explanation or apology. Somehow, he was given this amount of free reign by those who tolerated his presence in-between moments of critical decisive action.

His greatest fear: there were few places left to look. When Jay asked the ruler of Shevat as to whether she recognized him, he knew that was a ticking timebomb. There was no plausible deniability left as to where he could have been from.

Assuming what few shared resources by Shevat were accurate - in so much 'shared' when it was more accurate to say one was hovering over the shoulders of others on the grace of others' powers of persuasion - there were almost no stones left to turn over between the two worlds.

Saying his search was for nothing was unacceptable a conclusion... and one, he believed to the very last, is incorrect. This place of 'nothing left' was one of his last candidates, and he only had a narrow window of opportunity without arousing (further) undue suspicion.

The earliest hours of dawn - the only timeframe in which Reaper activity subsided while minimizing risk of the mid-day heatstroke - were poised to be a time of illumination.

There were silent contributions to the field of cartography about the two worlds, uncomfortable by his reckoning but incidental at best. He had always done his best to jealously guard even the smallest correction to topography unless it was in the company of others who made the observation first, and what his eyes found coincided with the local settlement's claims. No one was here for some time.

The Spectral Lens - one of the few items he found in the caverns about Lacour as he fled who he later learned to be Gebler - was taken in hand. The odd eyeglass wasn't something he recognized as belonging to him to begin with, but he wasn't able to escape their searching party's security measures without it.

Buried explosives were always a concern out in these frontiers, and this morning was no exception. With one of the usual spellcasting rituals, a small zap of electricity found its way into the lens in which to cast its faint cyan hues.

He hissed and recoiled, clutching an eye - the readings came back too painfully bright to look at directly. With greater caution, he observed the landscape with his other eye in a more measured squint.

Most of the time, they would return as a series of lines. Connected devices, measuring interactions between mechanisms. Sometimes they were too complex to see clearly. Other times, it resembled a roaring blizzard of pale cyan static.

Disruptive measures. Extant jamming, he thought as he crouched behind a rock and considered. He had been to some sites spoken to be from the Zeboim era. That kind of visual noise was consistent with the handful of times he ran into that issue.

No one would have found anything in a casual scan. He wasn't sure how Gebler's observational equipment stacked up against what might have been deployed here, but there were no signs of Gebler movement at present.

And yet, he could not afford to go back and gently suggest the Caravan Kinship go here to no immediate tangible commercial benefit. Jay had become a little more skeptical of some of his stranger justifications, and he doubted any villagers of the settlement could fabricate a reason against her convincingly.

He had to investigate further. He allowed the eyeglass to cool in his gloved hand, picked up a small rock, and tossed it out into the wastes ahead.

A process he had elected to repeat no less than six times, until he found a long-dead carcass of a large beast, bones bleached in the relentless sun. They were alone, and nothing was.. scattered, as it were. He recognized this was a sort of herd animal, all by itself.

But it was not free of suspicion.

Burn marks bore into the large ribcage, which indicated the use of energy-based ARM weapons. They were not exactly uncommon in this region, and the herd animal in question was known to be territorial to the degree that only death would have dissuaded it. He ran a hand across the length of the rib for a closer look, pressing gently with one finger into the damage for its texture.

His eyes caught something more distinctive first, where the weapon made contact. A faint hint of crystalized residue nestled within the bone, of a greenish-purple hue. He recognized /what/ kind of weapon left that mark, and so, broke off the rib to take with him to dispose of later.

It wasn't a Gebler weapon. He knew that for certain.

He would find that wasn't the only victim. All were of wildlife, and they were all at least dead by a handful of years. A timeframe he found increasingly worrisome as he similarly collected affected remains. Securing the residue was of utmost importance, even if it were just a mere byproduct of no greater threat nor application.

It shouldn't be there.

He followed the loose trail, which crested a hill and embedded rocky outcropping. The topography did not match the best map he was able to grab of the area prior. His quarterstaff doubled as a walking stick to help him ascend.

His footing started to slip at one step, at which point his quarterstaff failed to sink too far before it hit something that resisted its sinking into the hill. An inquisitive Ethius raised the staff, and lowered it again with additional force.

The feedback was metallic. As he stood back up and looked over his shoulder, he was able to take note of another feature of the landscape that had eluded him until he ascended high enough...

A trench, formed by something large having burrowed through here at high speed. Some of the sand along that had fused into glass, and it all terminated right at this rocky outcropping.

He froze, and waited. He flexed his fingers and murmured a single syllable over and over for a solid minute - 'chambering' the beginning of a Symbological spell as to cut off some of the lead-in time to cast a stronger yield electrical spell should the need for self defense come.

Nothing.

He relaxed - by Ethius standards of 'being relaxed' - and dug at the ground underneath him. The earth underneath gave way, peeling away the layer of obfuscation as it revealed a different color underneath the wastes.

Metal plating. Distressed, but mostly intact. Once more, he consluted the Spectral Lens with another conjured bit of electrical power, and did not have to look into it to see he was getting back the same 'noise.' Some sort of jamming mechanism was live, here, but there was nothing to him that suggested it was part of where he was standing.

If it were part of an automated defense, he would have already been beseiged by now. He kept sweeping aside more, not wanting to descend below until he could ascertain what it was that was buried here.

Something tugged at the back of his mind, and told him to cover it right back up. It didn't matter if it was /just/ a tiny little sheen of an interesting color. His earliest waking memories were of being in the presence of Gebler searching fervently about the area, and he knew there was something up far higher that might have caught a look. He wasn't going to give them that peek.

He had to descend beyond the hill, and /quickly/.

The rocky outcropping had provided generous shelter from the rising sun. He surmised if he needed to stay here for the day, this would have been an ideal place to camp out. No one would have been able to find this unless they knew where to look, and as he took further stock of the shade...

Footprints.

He crouched low and waited anew as he silently considered them. They were long since faded by the elements, beyond a certain point. The few that were there, he could identify as having had only belonged to one set of feet. Large ones, but the surviving imprints were all identical. Whoever was here prior must have left years ago. That, or perished nearby.

He approached the shade, hand held out, as the gloved hand touched upon what was once smooth, treated metal by a technique and make he recognized as...

....

Urgency took over. He would have had issue explaining it aloud to himself had a part of him not already acted on a deep-seated inkling of an idea as an unsecured hatch was located and hurled open within a span of no more than two seconds.

A Symbological spellcast of building heat in his palm was thrust forth like a torch ready to be discharged as a moment's notice. It was the only lighting he had available in the moment. Fiery orange color filtered the darkness in clarity.

The innards of a craft. Damaged, and silent. None appear to greet the intruder. Empty. Abandoned.

But lost, and out of place, with no clear origin on Filgaia or Lunar.

Nonetheless, it was clear.

Ethius let the spell disperse and elected to grab hold of a more conventional torch to better survey it. He knew where to look and how. Above him, smaller compartments whose hinges were removed... but not violently.

There wasn't a sign of a struggle here. No blood, no signs of battle. Nothing present bore the signs of someone desparate to claim something they didn't understand how to 'properly' claim to begin with. Sockets were emptied. Paneling was removed with care and left to rest on the ground. Some pieces he could identify as being protective in nature - heat-shielding, and things of that ilk - were picked apart and removed.

Loose wiring was not ripped clean, but taken with due care and diligence. Engines were simply no longer there, though one side did appear to suffer significant heat damage.. an explosion? The hold was empty, beyond a handful of small containers themselves pillaged of exotic components. A nearby mattress frame was the only evidence anyone took up residence here - and the size of that frame spoke of someone of prodigious size.

Nothing present that could have explained the disruption, unless this was atop a Zeboim site - but a part of him recognized this may have been fortuitous circumstance. His survey of the space otherwise complete, he found the way towards what he identified as the cockpit. The hatch, this time, was secured.

There wasn't a soul in there that responded when he gave it a violent knock. One more Symbological spellcast later, he cut it open with a concentrated stream of heat and gave it the boot to confirm that the cockpit was similarly abandoned.

His eyes narrowed as he took in the mere shape of what was in front of him. It was the same story - everything was stripped apart. As he laid a gloved hand atop a console, he surmised some possibilities.

Possibilities that demanded, at base, an understanding.

Scanning equipment may have come up useless due to whatever was causing the jamming here - an understanding that the previous occupant(s) must have considered themselves completely broken off from...

...

Ethius put a hand to his forehead from the migraine that started to form thinking about it. If it's not here, it's out /there/, but he hadn't encountered any bandits making use of... this sort of equipment. Where did it go? Who has it? What was it being used for?

How long ago?

...

His boot nudged at something on the ground. With a growing trepidation, he picked it up.

'It' could have been dismissed as a curio, to anyone else's eye. Damaged, beyond appreciable value for having half of it damaged by a crushing blunt impact, but the shape and weight of it in Ethius' free hand was not that of lightweight detritus.

A mask.

One to be worn and wrapped around's one head, an electrum-like coloration with a downward protrusion as somewhere in the median of a bird and a gas mask. One socket for the eye was crushed and collapsed, straps and buckles distressed as if it were torn free.

There were no words.

Except for two.

"It's him."

The first two words he spoke aloud. As the only audience within, Ethius let go of the tight control of even his slightest nervous tics. His head bowed. His fist clenched around the torch until the threat of it snapping in twain brought him out of it, if only just so.

"Six years." Ethius spoke. His tone of voice, incredulous. "Six years," he repeated. It could not have been any sooner than that, no.

Why he was in Lacour's mountain ranges that day, six years ago almost to the very /day/, scattering from attention with the feeling that it was odd that he would believe himself pursued.

"This has been here six years." The enormity of it threatened to choke what breathable air there was.

He was not mistaken, as countless false alarms he acted upon had nearly imparted upon him-- no. He knew it was important he not stop.

This vindication was not a cause for celebration.

He whirled about-face and ran back into the hold he already knew was empty. Where there was building anger, there was racing emotion further along a different spectrum entirely. It was fruitless to look into the containers that were present, for they were too small.

Only a set of perpendicular trails where a heavy weight stressed the ground of the hold gave him cause to ask question that he had no answer to.

"Where's the Demetrioi?"

He ran out the hatch back out into the morning sky of the sun that Filgaia and Lunar both shared. It had fulfilled its quiet promise to herald a time of illumination.

It did not cross him to go back and deal with the rest of the structure, for now, there was far more urgent business.

One he already had a lead for, unwittingly, by another's uncertainty but trust in disclosing to him a certain someone.

"You're here... and you took the Demetrioi with you." Ethius held the mask close. The local troubles, the greater mysteries, all of that ceased to exist.

The torch, dropped to the ground, found itself buried into the dirt and then thrust by his heel into its final resting place. That certain someone who tipped him off... she doesn't need the context.

"This has gone on long enough... Homer Mecone." Ethius recaptured his chilling, unwelcoming manner. His steps, measured. His voice, even and almost completely free of emotion. Only the rational challenges presented in just trying to sprint the whole damned way back stopped him from doing just that.

"None of this belongs here," Ethius said.

"And yet, it won't be leaving," Ethius summarily acknowledged.

Even this many years after the fact, he had work to do.