achelord: (Cycling trance)
[personal profile] achelord posting in [community profile] vivala
-1: The Vault, The Port-

If you enter the Vault, the only real way to do it is via submarine. So whenever a new sub pops into the Port, there's usually a fair amount of interest. Maybe there's some new books for the library! Maybe there's a supply of luxury goods from Elysium! Maybe there's a batch of new recruits.

It's the last one, this time. After some informal cooperation the TDM, they finally had brought Ziel back to the Vault, as they had promised. If anyone in the Corsairs could help him, it would probably be someone here, so he had reluctantly decided to hang around, at least for a little while. It probably wouldn't go anywhere interesting.

Somehow, word had gotten ahead, and there was a small crowd waiting to see if it was true who was on this submarine. Surely not THE Ziel? The youngest leader of the infamous monster hunter school known as the Dawnwings? Who spent his life protecting the people of the Empire from monsters, and who had killed a behemoth when he was 15. He was practically a living legend!

The main who emerged from the submarine somehow didn't live up to the hype. He still looked young, but moved like an elderly man. His clothes were filthy and in tatters. He trudged like he had the weight of the world on his back, dragging his massive warhammer behind him like he didn't have the strength to hold it properly.

After a moment, he realized there were people staring at him and slowly raised his gaze to actually see what all the fuss was. He saw a dozen pairs of hopeful eyes, but they were tinged with doubt. Well, that was only fair. He knew he hardly cut an impressive figure anymore.

Ziel looked back down at the ground and kept on trudging along the dock, amid a cloud of whispers. Surely THIS can't be the hero of the Dawnwings, can it?

-2: The Vault, upper reaches-

The Empire likes to consume ether crystals en masse for its power sources. It's a very profitable way of gaining ether, but it's hardly the only way. There are older methods that have fallen out of favor because they're much slower. Most mages find they have an affinity towards certain fundamental elements, and a VERY old method of cultivating power was to meditate near a source of that element.

Ziel's magic was attuned with Force and Motion, and, well, there was a near continual source of force and motion just about anywhere in Bavrecht, if you were willing to take the risk.

In the upper most chambers of the Vault, the distant rumbling of the Empire's near constant weapons testing was louder than ever. Ziel sat with his legs crossed and eyes closed, ignoring the sound. The constant barrage was close enough here that he could just barely sip at the endless force above and gradually absorb it into his core ether reserves. It wasn't much, but it was about all his system could handle right now.

That he was sitting in a random hallway wasn't a big deal. Not many people came up this high, anyway. What were the odds that someone would actually come up here and trip over him?

1/3

Date: 2024-06-17 06:34 am (UTC)
transrobotism: (quoi)
From: [personal profile] transrobotism
Force as an element of ether wasn't a concept she'd encountered yet, either. RPK had been listening with a clear interest... right up until the point he'd cut himself off, dropping the topic like the dull thud of a closing book.

In her opinion,
it had begun to sound like it mattered rather a lot.

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