Zefaris knew she should feel a cautious reverence for such dangerous things, but in truth, she only felt giddiness - a feeling that was only intensified when, before she even got around to putting all the stuff into the bag, Collier started up another line of conversation entirely.
“So, that out of the way, what about the real reason I called you, eh? Wait here a touch.”
Once again, the gunsmith disappeared into the back before Zefaris could react in any meaningful way. There was no clattering to be heard this time, and the gunsmith walked out with a long, polished wooden box, alongside a smaller, sheet metal counterpart. It was quite well made, but the fact it was clearly oak and the recognizable shade of a common and affordable brand of wood varnish betrayed its utilitarian purpose. It wasn’t something she particularly paid attention to, it was just that strange, seemingly irrelevant details had developed a tendency of jumping out at her when she looked at something with full focus, intentionally or not. It had to be some effect of the Philosopher’s Eye. Zef almost felt bad for noticing, it just stood out when compared to the bespoke lavishness of the boxes both Pentacle and her fotoapparat came in.
She had no reason to notice such a thing normally, but her eyes instantly snapped to the elongated shape when she heard the door open as Collier returned. The gunsmith set them both down on the counter and pushed the smaller one off to the side, her wrinkled features upturned into an expectant smile as she lifted the lid, revealing within a familiar, yet new object. It was her rifle, yet something different…
Zefaris recognized that stock and even that rugged barrel, but the wooden furniture had been embellished with meticulous, clearly hand-done crosshatching for better grip, and a silver and brass-inlaid glyph now adorned the side of the stock facing her - the left-hand side, meaning it would be visible to her even when the weapon was shouldered.
It was a five-petaled Giltine Belladonna flower rendered in silver, and at its center was a symbol in brass clearly meant to represent an eye with two pupils. The lethal flower was famously cultivated solely for the lethality of the poisons brewed from its fruit by the Black Horses, and was readily recognized for its particular petal shape that seemed to abruptly split at the point, a trait always included and exaggerated in artistic depictions to distinguish it from its far less lethal cousin, Atropa Belladonna. The eye was, well… It couldn’t more obviously be her own right eye. Subtle and subdued by the standards of what soldiers often carved on their weapons, but its real meaning wasn’t exactly obscure or ethereal.
“If I see you, I can kill you.”
The barrel had been shortened by a noticeable amount, and now gleamed with a subtly damascened pattern. Instead of the original sparklock which had been embedded in the wood, there was now a solid block of brass etched with a lightning pattern, one she recognized as the self-same pattern that had covered the shell that had been imbued with lightning by Zel’s use of Thundercannon during their battle against the locust horde.
A memory of that earth-shaking event flashed in her mind, juxtaposed with all the other times Zel had used the self-same technique. Even amidst the tremendous power expressed with each firing, that single instance stood out, the perfect confluence of a magic-amplifying environment and colossal Fulguric charge from near-continuous use of Graze Pulse against a horde of mindless enemies that hadn’t known better than to keep playing into it. The brass-plated block doubtlessly concealed a complex mechanism, and from its back protruded a visible hammer, with an additional piece of wood where the palm would rest that was separated from the rest of the stock by a thin sleeve of metal, suggesting it to be some sort of iteration upon the ring lever she had seen on the volcanic pistols. Perhaps a less awkward, sliding action placed such that one need not awkwardly change grips on the weapon?
Her eye drifted towards the hand-guard; where the wooden furniture had originally followed most of the barrel’s length, it had been shortened to just long enough to be a useful grip, just about two and a half times as wide as her palm, and the foregrip’s steel-shod front end protruded a second tube nearly as long as the barrel. The wooden furniture also had strange cutouts - one on the stock, one on the additional handle piece next to the trigger, and one on the front grip.
Right after the overall look of the gun, the other articles contained in the box caught her eye - four strange metal tubes of similar dimensions to the firearm’s under-barrel tube, a somewhat thin manual, and various maintenance tools that somewhat resembled those intended for sparklock rifles.
She could scarcely contain her excitement and curiosity at the sight, drinking in every detail of the gun all over again, noticing the seam between the front of the brass block and the rear of the barrel and the curious latch-like piece of metal at the top of the barrel that ran across the seam, a sort of tab running through the piece of metal and a hook securing it on the other side, and wait, was that…
“...A hinge?”
It was almost as if Coolier had been waiting for that question, effortlessly pulling the gun out of its box, lifting a tab from the which pushed the latch away from the body of the gun, disengaging the hook. With a slight push she slid the entire front end of the gun down by a tiny amount, before folding it in half along the hingepin and exposing the mechanisms within.
The design was simultaneously complex and elegantly simple - Zef could easily make out exactly how the gun held together on the inside, a series of finely-machined interlocking ribs where the front and back ends met. How exactly it functioned, however, she could, at best, guess - her guess was that the bottom tube was some sort of spring-loaded magazine and the gun’s mechanism moved ammunition into the chamber with the sliding action of that handle next to the trigger.
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