The blonde chuckled, turning her eye toward the beast’s carcass. “Yeah, that’s fair. Seen weirder shit in the zone,” she remarked. Zelsys had noticed her looking, but she didn’t particularly care. She’d let the riflewoman make her own choices, and in the meantime, she was just fine with sitting there and looking pretty.

Sigmund found the violent buzzing sensation that holding the Tablet caused unpleasant, even painful, but he had gotten used to pain. It was a fact of life, as far as he was concerned. The arcane device showed one word at his touch. 

SCANNING

He waited for the device to finish scanning him without any thoughts on his mind beyond a hope that his attributes hadn’t decreased since he was scanned at the training camp. While this part of the process took place he sat down on Makhus’s bunk, taking care to position himself in a way that wouldn’t cause him to slip into the drool-stain when he fell unconscious.

RECORD FORMAT NOT RECOGNIZED

REGISTER NEW FORMAT

OVERWRITE RECORD

“Overwrite record,” he mentally repeated as he cautiously raised his hand to the projection to press it. He never was too confident around Fog devices. When his action caused pain to shoot up his arm, he expected to just pass out the way the other two had. Instead, he felt a familiar sensation creeping in, one not unlike a Rubedo Sickness seizure. The edges of his field of view were fading into silver rather than red, and instead of stiffness he felt himself becoming sluggish and overwhelmingly sleepy but it was worryingly familiar. “Boy, did the sickness mess up my soul too?” he worried, his concerns only worsened by what little he knew of the scan process.

Relief washed over him like a warm summer breeze when he felt his consciousness fading. “Guess I’m just a bit tougher of a nut to crack,” he smiled into his beard as he fell unconscious, sliding down into a lying position as his bald head squeaked against the metal wall. 

Just as it had for Makhus and Zefaris, the Tablet woke him up with two words that flashed in his mind’s eye.

DELETION SUCCESSFUL

He woke immediately, sitting up so quickly he slammed his head against the bottom of the top bunk. A pained “Ow!” thundered from his mouth - more an exclamation of annoyance than one of pain, it nevertheless prompted a laugh from outside. The one who laughed was Makhus, to no surprise.

When Sigmund turned his eyes to the Tablet, it had changed to the very same thing it had for the others.

RECORD OVERWRITE

PLEASE ENTER NAME

Not questioning it, he thought of his own name. 

“Sigmund.” 

He didn’t much worry about being recognized - he was there when his death certificate was penned, the last report from their squad to central command, which listed both him and the Captain as casualties. To be a casualty didn’t mean one was killed in action, but that didn’t matter, especially since in his record photo he had a mustache and a head full of hair. As far as the post-war government was concerned he was a dead man, and that gave him a sense of security in using his birth name.

The projection flickered and changed to an attribute readout, one which furrowed the brow and befuddled the mind. Partly for the supposedly superhuman Hardness which the device assigned him, and partly for the second attribute ratings in parentheses.

NAME - SIGMUND

SEX - MALE

 SPECIES - HUMAN (IKESIAN)

FORCE - D+

PRECISION - C- (C+)

HARDNESS - B

AETHER - E+ (C-)

TRAITS>

<STORAGE

Taking care not to hit his head again he stood up, walking out onto the clearing as he shook off the last cobwebs of unconsciousness. A conversation echoed faintly from outside, and he could tell it was between Zelsys and Zefaris by their voices. He passed by Makhus on the way out, taking no particular note of what he was doing until he heard the swordsman enthusiastically muttering something. “Purgation Arts: Hundredfold Viriditas Containment Seal Creation!” he recited, soon followed by a weak breeze from the rapid movement of his arms and the sound of calligraphy brushes on parchment. He turned to look, and saw something he hadn’t seen in a long time - since they first started brewing Viriditas, really. 

The butchering table had been cleaned to a cleaner state than usual. To Makhus’s left, there were four empty sheets of parchment, the seal-covered bottle that seemed to store an endless quantity of Rubedo, an inkwell, three calligraphy brushes, and a bowl with a liquid so dark-red it was nearly black. To his right, he had stacked four sheets of parchment covered in a repeating pattern of that dark ink - containment seals, painted with Rubedo-infused ink.

Sigmund knew his friend wouldn’t so much as acknowledge any external stimuli until he finished this sheet of seals, and thus he just waited, leaning in to get a look at the process. First came an outline along the parchment’s edge with one brush, then a grid to outline the seals with a different, special brush, a narrow blade flashing amidst the bristles. “He could’ve made a living off that back in the day,” he thought, and then a realization hit him. He waited - Tablet in hand - for the swordsman to finish the seal-painting sequence, for that small exhalation at the end when he put the brush down. 

“What’d you need all those seals for?” he asked as Makhus put the finished sheet on the stack. “We don’t even have that many bottles.”

“I know. It’s to cover all our bottles completely. Partly to make sure none o’ the stuff goes poof, partly to-”

“You think they’ll let us past the border with all of that?” he jokingly interrupted.

“Let me finish. I figure they’ll confiscate some of it no matter what, so we just gotta make sure what they confiscate is Liquid Vigor instead of pure essentia. Thus, I gotta cover up all the bottles, so it’s not suspicious.”

“Won’t making all those seals tire you out?”

Makhus laughed at that. “It normally fuckin’ would, the ink’s one third Rubedo by volume. Lucky fer me…” he shook the Rubedo bottle.