Eventually, the Swordsman piped up again. “The Tablet. Mind if I take a look?” he asked.

“I’ve got a couple questions first. Three of them.“

“Shoot.”

“What exactly is Rubedo Sickness?”

A dark chuckle rumbled from his mouth, and he briefly glanced out the door, remarking, “So she told you. Too careless with potentially sensitive intel, that one.” before he turned his eyes back towards Zelsys. “Near the tail-end of the war, when things were really getting bad, our squad and a couple others were issued an experimental combat drug based on Rubedo and Ignis, called Victory Wash. Our Captain told us to not touch it unless our lives were on the line, and eventually, that time came. We’d just settled down for the night on our way back to some fort behind the front line, Sigmund on first watch.”

He stared off into the middle-distance for a moment, reaching down to grab the bottle and taking a short sip, exhaling some of it through his nose as a sigh of Fog before he put the bottle back down and re-establishing eye contact, his gaze as hard as steel and as cold as ice. 

“They came in the night, or so he said. Three squads of Grekurians, with sleep gas and those horrible scatter-guns of theirs, probably intending to capture us. We’d given Sig our squad’s bottle of Victory Wash to safeguard, and so he downed the whole thing before the gas could knock him out.”

The Swordsman fell silent again, half-whispering his next words.

“When we woke, we found him... Curled up amidst Grekurian corpses, only bloody tatters left of his uniform, skin charred and shrink-wrapped around little more than bone as if he’d burned up every ounce of fat in his body. The burn scars are still there, but it’s the colossal Rubedo overdose that he never recovered from. His body somehow produces a huge amount of the stuff in stressful situations, but he can’t metabolize it so he just seizes up.”

“I’ve recovered just fine, thank you very much,” Sigmund’s voice rasped from just beyond the doorway, completely calm and lucid. “How long has he been there?” Zelsys wondered, instinctively shooting a glare out the door. His head poked out from past the door-frame, a warm smile shifting the mass of wires that was his facial hair. “Sorry to interrupt. Just wanted to tell you the soup’s ready,” he said to the two of them, before focusing his attention on the Swordsman. “And don’t you go saying I ‘never recovered’, the last time I pushed through the seizure on my own.”

“It took you twenty minutes,” the Swordsman shot back.

“And you ran off into the trees for an hour the first time you purged me, doubtlessly to spend that time wan-”

“That’s enough out of you,” Spliteye’s cold voice interrupted from out of sight as she yanked on Sigmund’s collar before he could finish the sentence, eliciting a noise not unlike the squawk of a choking chicken. The Swordsman watched it unfold with some amusement before his attention returned to the silver-haired amazon across from him. 

“Second question?”

“Why were you out there when you found me?” 

“We were huntin’ an animal that had briefly crossed the barrier. All those dead plants ‘round the crossin’ point were just from the creature walkin’ around for a bit, so I figured it had to be a walkin’ Nigredo battery. Probably a mutated bear or somesuch. Third question, then we eat.”

“How’d you leave a butcher’s cleaver sitting in viscera and somehow have it stay clean?” 

The Swordsman chuckled, blindsided by the question. “Oh, that thing,” he meandered. “It was the Captain’s, one of those fancy livin’ swords what change shape for the user. I was s’posed to take it as the next in the chain o’ command, but even though my Aether’s good enough to make it change, I ain’t strong enough to use it as a weapon. Speakin’ of stats...”

He looked off towards the cleaver for a moment as his speech trailed off, then looked to Zelsys again. “...Mind if I take a look at the Tablet, check my stats? It’s been a lil’ while.”

Without a second thought she tossed the tablet over to his side, leaning even further back in the bunk until she was functionally laying down. She’d expected to feel the springs, but it was filled with some sort of grainy material instead. A brief grimace flashed across his face and his grip suddenly tightened when he first picked the device up, but after a few seconds she saw the familiar wisps of silver Fog rising from its surface while the projection formed.

Cold. Solid. Heavy. Real marble. It seemed to confirm what the silver-haired amazon promised, but his suspicions about the Tablet’s supposed pre-war origins were dispelled by the buzzing pain that shot up his arm after it had sat in his hand for a few seconds.

A single word materialized in the middle of the Tablet.

SCANNING

It was a familiar pain, one he hadn’t felt since his time in the training camp. Most soldiers thought it was just something lackluster about the first-time process, but he had the education to know better - what the process really was. A tendril of Fog reaching into one’s very soul, for that was the only way to read one’s fundamental attributes accurately. 

This Tablet hurt more than the one in the training camp, but that was to be expected. Unlike post-war Tablets, it was made the old way, the way that took hundreds of hours of work by a highly skilled alchemist. The way that couldn’t be mass-produced. 

 “I bet it even has Fog Storage,” he thought as he watched the word just sit there, feeling the seconds drag on. It was taking too long. All too long. Had it not aged well? At last, the projection flickered to a different one. A sentence in white, and below it two phrases in blue, to signify that they were buttons.