Getting Lena established within the library didnt quite go as expected. The original plan was to set her up in the basement, but upon seeing its darkness a 2nd time, and being reminded of the greyness of her shop, Egil instead had the clockworks expand into the nearby university area, and placed her tools in an atrium.
The atrium would mean sun from the glass rooftop by day, and glowing orbs by night. Not a bad setup. The sudden concern was security. The clockworks could patrol the grounds, but they were shit fighters. It was really a trade-off at the moment: have Motoko patrol the grounds, or have her listen in on developments at the capitol.
The *real* bottom line was the team was going to get harder to conceal. Walking out onto the rooftop, next to the atrium glass panels, Egil looked at the glow of the distant capitol. Still no patrols from the occupiers... yet.
Next priority, we need demons actually built for fighting.
Egil took the steps back down, to the workshop, now illuminated by the light orbs. The surrounding plants and gardens did a lot to give a more welcoming atmosphere.
He announced himself by knocking on Lena's shop door. She looked back at him, tears running down her face.
"Everything ok?"
"Yeah." She gave a slight laugh, wiping her face with her arm. "I was just noticing how much different this is compared to the old shop... and how much I wanted to work on things that affected world events."
"Really?"
"I grew up reading about legendary weapon smiths... and then saw what it means to be on the losing side... its probably not the healthiest fascination."
"Want to talk about it?"
"Just the stupid gang wars. I thought I could do more good to supply the city with better devices, but they blocked me at every attempt. No matter how good I got, they would always turn me away."
"Yeah... Im familiar." Egil said bitterly. This was mostly the core of Egil's complaint about the nobles. The problem wasn't that they existed. The problem was they locked everyone else out. If you didn't have family within the ranks of a particular institution, the door was essentially locked.
"Were you ever part of the summoners guild?"
"Well... there's one thing I can say about getting in: there's always someone who wants you out."
"How did you do it? Get in, I mean."
He gave a slight laugh, thinking back to the first time. The merchant who realized he employed a summoner. The black cloaks who didn't want a summoner-backed merchant operating independently.
"I learned to disregard the taboos, and explored all the tools around me. My admission into my first guild was a combination of me being too..." He never did come up with a good word to describe it. "...unchained, to reliably execute; and too dangerous to them, to ignore."
"What do you mean 'reliably execute?'" Lena's tone got a bit darker.
"Soul tethering. Its a chaos magic trick..."
The girl shot up from her chair and took a step back. "That magic is banned."
An emotional reaction. Egil realized he needed to maintain control over the interaction, shifting over to his colder persona. "Do you know why its banned?" He asked.
The official messaging on the matter was pretty vague.
"The stories..." She responded sharply.
Summoners had a bad reputation, for having relationships with demons. Chaos mages had a worse reputation for 'being demons.' Egil's memory flashed to the grimoire... the book that essentially destroyed his life... no, it was the people who destroyed his life. The book rebuilt it.
The simple, thread-bound notebook that started it all. The desperate, ashen, scribbles of some desperate proto-summoner during the demon invasion...
Egil weighed his words carefully, in an attempt to diffuse the situation. At the same time though, he was a bit irritated at how easily panicked this girl was. Anya never cared, but then Anya was a much different person. "Its a funny thing... history. If you came across a chaos grimoire, what would you expect to be in it?
Would you expect notes on how to bring misery to the world? Diagrams on the best ways to prepare babies for consumption? Details on the best dog kicking techniques?
Do you want to know what I saw? There were no mentions of human sacrifice. The only mention of animals, were for summoning effigies. Even then, I've never had to actually sacrifice a being for any magic. I just hunt down the scraps from other businesses. With the summoner demon on the team, I don't even have to do that.
The notebook's content was on how to avoid dying. How to keep people safe, while an unstoppable force invaded their lands. How to heal people without the aid of experienced healers. It wasn't a book of evil. It was a book of desperation."
"But the stories." She insisted.
"I can't say with certainty that they didn't happen. What I can say, is they're not happening here; and they're definitely unnecessary for the magic to work." Egil looked her over, realizing she wasn't moving.
Granted, it took getting murdered for him to shake this mindset, it was a hassle to deal with in others. As with a lot of human limits, there were ways with magic to get around them, but the more you bypassed, the more people see you differently.
Just tell her. "Maybe this will help change your mind: my adherence to the rules got me killed, and chaos magic is the only reason we're having this conversation right now."
"What are you talking about?"
"In the village where I was born, we had a coming of age thing, where we'd climb up a mountain and plant a flag. Well... my team leader chose a mountain nobody climbed before. We climbed it, and stumbled across an old human settlement. A... hideout... from the invasion.
The hideout was carved into the actual cliffside, so you'd only really see it when looking at the right angle. The team investigated, and one of the things we found was what appeared to be a simple notebook, except, it somehow survived 100 years.
After another member read pages of it out loud, we realized it was a grimoire. I told the team to leave it, but I wasn't the lead. We got to the top, planted the flag, and got back down. I learned that the leader kept the book and was trying to make its magic work.
Then... a girl came between us. It turned out that he wasn't able to do anything with the book, so the bastard just planted it in my things, and accused me of witchcraft. The other team members made their stories match his, and claimed I was the one who brought the book back.
That was enough to start the 'witch trial,' which was a death sentence. Have you ever seen one?"
Lena shook her head 'no.'
"Basically, you drop a person, bound, into a river. If they drown, they're not a witch. If they float, they are a witch, and the village will then burn them at the stake. You die either way.
I was thrown into an empty wooden building, with the grimoire, and given six months to 'reflect on my crimes.' The first month was the worst, because of the shock of it all. The 2nd month, I decided, since I was guilty anyways, let's see what Im guilty of exactly.
By the 4th month, I figured out channeling, and opening my third eye. By the fifth month, I figured out soul tethering, and realized I had a way out of my execution... or... I had gone batshit insane. Either was a 'win.'
The entire grimoire was about surviving demon encounters, and as luck would have it, I needed to survive a 'human encounter.'"
"Where was your family in all this?"
Egil remembered their laughing faces in the window. "The society was agrarian, and prided on being self sufficient... without tools. I saw a plow in a neighboring town, and built a facsimile, which my family promptly called 'lazy.'
By the time the accusation came about, they believed it was my attempt at getting out of an 'honest man's work.' They'd come to the window and pantomime laughing until they got bored. They were essentially, worse than useless."
Lena sat back down. "How did you survive?"
"I didn't. By the day of the witch trial, the tether was already in place, but untested. You needed an open third eye to see it, so the village was completely ignorant.
My plan was to avoid burning, by just drowning. They tied me up, dragged me out, and forced me to stand in front of an audience while reading off my crime. That was probably the worst part.
When the finally asked me to plead my innocence, I just yelled 'Can't you get this over with faster?' I didn't know if the tether was going to work. I just didn't want to spend my last day bored out of my mind. I was already mentally 'done' with the village.
It was almost winter, and the water was freezing. My plan to drown failed. The knots were terrible, and came undone in the water. I knew drowning would get things over with, but at least for me, it was nearly impossible to stay under the water.
I got to shore, realized I fucked up, and ran. The first person to catch up to me was my sister. She hugged me, and told me not to hurt her. ...she was only holding me there until my dad caught up with his broke-ass sword."
Egil remembered that bug eyed, constipated look of rage on his father's face, after Egil turned around from the first blow... the blade already broken by then. "...I'll skip the gruesome details, but I fell to blood loss and hypothermia. I only managed to avoid the stake because my dad was apparently totally fine, doing the deed himself.
That night, I reconstituted in a new body." ...and then pissed myself. "When I regained my faculties, I was near the site of my death. The village was apparently burning my original body in a funeral pyre.
While everyone was distracted, I packed up a bunch of supplies. Robbed the village blind, and recovered the grimoire from my 'cell.' By the time they were at my back, I was pretty well off."
"You didn't get revenge?" Lena asked.
"My whole goal was to move on from that place. Attempting to enact some sort of elaborate plot ran counter to that. I was also power tripping... HARD. Six months of study, robbed them of their power to wipe me from the world, and allowed me to shrug off death itself. Concentrating on a group of know-nothing villagers didn't feel like the best use of my time.
They felt they were on a crusade, ridding the world of some wildly misplaced belief in evil. None of it mattered in the end. ...a bunch of idiots pretending like they're part of a much bigger game." He concluded dismissively.
He didn't realize until much later, that things probably didn't end well for them regardless. Their savings were gone, right before winter. They had already executed the 'thief,' so its not like he was a viable suspect. The only real people to point fingers at, where it made sense, were each other.
He imagine a lot of very bad, and very desperate, decisions happened after that night; though he never heard of, nor investigated the village since. Maybe they pooled their resources, faced winter together in a unified group effort. ...yeah, that probably didn't happen.
"I'll need to think about this." Lena responded.
"No pressure." Egil said, getting up. "Just keep an open mind to what's happening here. The conventions you're used to might not have your best interests in mind. Practicality, requires thinking outside the box."