His eyes leered toward Zelsys. He scanned her up and down before he added, with notably less venom to his tone, “You too, snowtop.”

She chuckled at the remark, waiting for the officer to begin walking before she did. He effectively backed into the open doorway, keeping both his eyes and his gun trained on the Ikesians that followed behind Zelsys. She had to bend down slightly to pass through the door, and once inside, what she saw was… Thoroughly underwhelming. The room was a squat rectangle, more of a square really.

At the end opposite the entryway, there stood a table with a relatively nice-looking chair at the user’s end and a pair of rickety metal seats in front of it. There were some lockers behind the desk, and a strange machine up against the wall. The machine had a bulky base which held a slot for a key, a couple unlabeled buttons, and a handle. There was a row of upward-pointed nozzles, which Zelsys suspected to be outlets for Fog. There was a metal door behind the table, clearly not intended for those wishing to cross the border.

It looked well-used, unlike everything else in the makeshift office-space. A thought crossed Zelsys’s mind as she looked around. “Does the guy live here?” 

The officer took a seat at his desk, placed his gun on it, and did nothing in particular to prompt any of them to take a seat. They knew better than to try, and all four of them preferred to remain standing. 

“Now,” he smiled with venom at the four of them. “Under the… Frankly generous assumption that the three Ikes aren’t war criminals or worse, why should I let you cross the border? Why would anyone of honest heart try to enter a seedbed of scum and degeneracy such as Ikesia?”

Despite his vile demeanor, Zelsys only continued to smile at him. She held no fear, and the officer could tell. 

“Scan me, little man,” she rumbled, bending down to look him in the eye properly. ”Be a good soldier.”

One of his eyes visibly twitched at that and his hand shifted slightly toward his gun, but he maintained his composure as he stood and reached into his coat, pulling out a keyring of many keys and inserting one into a slot on the strange machine. With a turn, the machine emitted a chorus of mechanical ticking, a complex internal mechanism audibly coming alive. 

He stepped aside, gesturing for Zelsys to approach the machine, while he kept his hand firmly on the key. She stepped squarely into the officer’s personal space, took hold of the handle with her right hand, and squeezed. The metal creaked in her grip. With some difficulty, the officer reached over and pressed two of the machine’s buttons in sequence, prompting its nozzles to sputter puffs of Fog before they began to emit continuous threads of it, much like candles that had just been snuffed out. A warm thrum spread through her hand and to her forearm.

The threads of Fog swam through the air, intertwining and contorting to form a sentence at eye height.

NO CRIMINAL RECORD FOUND

Craning his neck to get a look at what it said, she could clearly see the surprise growing in his face, his eyebrows rising as if the mercury in a thermometer. He blinked a few times and pressed another button, causing the stream of Fog to stop and the sentence to dissipate. 

“That’s… Good news, I suppose,” he admitted begrudgingly. “Step away from the machine, please.”

She did as asked and he returned to his desk, pulling open one of the drawers and retrieving a piece of paper, . He looked up at her again, his eyes glinting with a mixture of purely physical attraction and deep, deep suspicion.

“Your reason for entry into the country?”

“Work.”

“What type of work?”

“Well, I’m an armed and eh…” she raised her right arm and flexed, briefly looking at her own bicep in an exaggerated gesture of narcissism. “Unreasonably attractive foreigner trying to enter the country, through the Exclusion Zone no less. What’s that tell you, officer?”

“That you’re probably wanted outside the Wall under a different name, a different face, and different soul signature, and that you’re probably going to leverage your previous trade for a more honest job while you lay low, likely as a beast slayer...” the man rattled off, almost visibly charging her with imagined crimes as the resentment in his voice turned to resigned acceptance. Finally he sighed, retrieved a fountain pen from within his coat, and wrote something on the paper in cursive so stylized she couldn’t read it before stowing the pen away. 

“Welcome to Ikesia,” he said with professional courtesy and a half-fake smile, one which vanished the moment he turned his gaze toward the three Ikesians behind her. He pointed at Sigmund. “Next! Baldo!” he called out, standing from his desk and walking to the machine to take up the very same position - one hand on the key, the other hovering over the buttons.

The bearded man grumbled into his beard, walking briskly towards the machine and grabbing hold of the handle. A malicious grin flashed over the officer’s face as he tapped the same two-button sequence to trigger the machine, fully expecting the condemnation of guilt to be written out in Fog. Rising threads of silver, twisting and intertwining to form three words.

CRIMINAL RECORD FOUND

The officer’s grin grew as he reached into his coat, but what he was reaching for would remain unknown. Zelsys readied herself to commit a crime, noticing Sigmund tensing up as he entered into the first stages of a Rubedo-induced seizure, visibly fighting the stiffness as he opened and closed his left hand. 

Only, the officer noticed the leftmost nozzle sputtering, failing to produce a thread. Glee turned to disappointment, and he sighed, “Let go, it’s malfunctioning. I have to restart it.”

When Sigmund wouldn’t let go, the officer shot him a dirty look and repeated, not even trying to veil the threat in his words this time. “Let go, Ike.”