Author's Preface
Lucas stood, a bloody anchor in hand, his suit sprayed with red and green droplets from the freshly destroyed zombie. This was a much more natural look on him than at the science fair, muscles straining under the suit, tense as a wire, pupils shrank to dots, trembling just a touch. His chest was heaving as he forced his breath down.
He was gonna hit me too. Gonna bash my brains in for breaking in here and seeing things I shouldn’t. And I’d never be able to tell Sarah that Raspe hadn’t killed himself, never be able to tell anybody what I’d found, never-
“Schreck.” He said, his voice a low growl. “Get this cleaned up before somebody comes through.”
Schreck nodded in silence, put both hands on the arms and started dragging the corpse back into the lab.
“Anchorhold.” He planted it down in its alcove, hard enough I felt the thud in my chest. That left him turned away from me, and I took the opportunity to start edging towards the door.
“What. The fuck. Was that? You’re meant to be acting as security. That thing nearly- don’t!”
He jerked a hand out, barring my way. I’d almost made it out too. He didn't even turn away from Anchorhold, but I went stock still, straightened up, almost jumped out of my skin.
“...Why didn’t you stop it? Hell, why did you let her in here?” Her being me, I figured.
“The Kegare was authorised to exist in the laboratory and I was strictly instructed not to destroy your work.” The anchor glowed. “Alex De La Ruge was granted permission to access by-”
Lucas waved a hand, dismissive, not wanting to hear the rest.
“And you. What in all the infinite hells are you doing destroying half the tech faire and breaking into my goddamned lab?”
I swallowed audibly, taking a step back. I couldn’t even really think of an excuse, just letting out a whimpered “I don’t- uh- please don’t kill me…”
He was red in the face, still tense as a wire, his harsh breathing not quite having died down. He fixed me with a stare that left me feeling damn near pinned to the wall, considering me for a long, long time.
“You were the one who got the Godbox out of the Liberationist base, right?”
I tugged at my collar, awkward. “Uh, yeah?” I replied. He let out a vague nod, finally looking away from me, just for a moment, and that alone gave me an intense feeling of relief.
“Would’ve been more surprised if you didn’t come down here at some point. Okay… okay.”
He pulled the edge of his shirt into a bundle and used it as a rag to wipe his hands off. The adrenaline was still working its way out of his system, mine too. He took the moment just to compose himself, and I did too. I ran my hand through my hair, trying to steady my breathing.
“Okay.” He repeated, one more time, once both of us were steady again. “We should probably talk, huh? Been rather a long time coming.”
“And then I run out screaming back onto the dock, thought they were about to mug me! Made a total ass of myself, they probably thought I was a crazy woman. Or crazy ballsy, walking into a pub like that alone. But you know what I realised a week or two later?”
“No, what?”
“...You know how the Liberationist Einherjar said they were all calling themselves Frank? Throw off the cops or whatever, confuse ‘em?”
It took Lucas a minute to put the pieces together, but once he did, he burst out laughing. “Hah! Oh, you could probably have tracked them down then and there. The Scrimshaw Turtle’s a liberationist pub? I had no idea.”
“That or it really was just some guy who happened to have the name. Hey, what d’ya reckon they call any other liberationists who’re already called that? Are they still just frank? Doublefrank?”
Lucas shrugged as he took a sip of his whiskey. “...They’re the only one that gets t’be called ‘Dave’, I reckon.”
And then I doubled over in a giggling fit again.
It was about twenty minutes since we got out of the lab, and I was sat on a bench in Lucas’ office. Towel around my shoulders, having had the worst of the gunk and blood wiped off me. I looked a little bit less like a wet cat than before, and was probably less of a biohazard, but I really needed a proper shower. I had a piping hot tea in my hand, and had generally been treated pretty gently, all things considered.
We were on the second floor of the university building and I could see the fallout from the electric horse’s escapades down below. Chaos everywhere, stalls split in twain. The thing had gone down with a gas-powered harpoon in its side, scorch marks across its body and covered in what appeared to be dead bees, various science experiments having been unleashed upon it to try to stop it before it eventually just ran out of charge.
Nobody had been hurt, thank Hylyss. I didn’t see any blood, and the place wasn’t being held up as a crime scene, no cops swarming around, just one or two standing to one side interviewing a few final folks as janitorial staff started the cleanup.
I pulled myself together, the sight was a little sobering. We’d been laughing, but we had more serious stuff to discuss.
“I’d say I’m sorry for the trouble but, uh, your experiment tried to kill me too. Call it even?” It had only tried to kill me ‘cause I’d broken into their lab, but I was hoping he wouldn’t notice that. Wanted to take the mood down slowly.
Lucas waved a hand. “Not my experiment. And the horse wasn’t ever going to kill me.” He grunted.
His office was pretty well-kept, though I couldn’t tell you what kind of academic worked here by looking at the place alone. There were books on every topic imaginable, from social science to hard physics. At the very least it definitely was an actual researcher and not just a science aficionado, you could tell from the whiskey.
He’d taken a bottle from under the desk and was pouring it out into a shot glass. He was pacing himself, but he’d already had more than I could’ve taken without being affected.
He extended the bottle to me. “Want some?”
I tried to get a look at the label. “What is that, Lowland Angel? More’ve a, uh, Rosegate Bull kind’ve girl.”
“Oh, yeah, you’re Rugan. You ain’t wrong, that stuff’s better. Drank some back in the war when I was stationed there. Bitch to get ahold of out here though, Eccless drink’s basically piss.” Lucas grumbled. That I could agree with, much as Sarah might slog me for saying so.
“Oh! Uh, wait, you were- if you don’t mind me asking, where were you stationed?”
“City itself. Banking Quarter, mostly.”
“Angel’s Arches!” Shit, we might’ve met, those were right next to each other. Admittedly, the war had only really touched Ruge briefly, but… I stood, grinning, going to shake his hand properly this time. He took it, shook it right back. And after that, I actually did take some of his whiskey. Couldn’t pass it up from an old neighbour.
“Hey, if you like to drink, did you ever hit up the Red Shawl? Trash pub, but gods, the booze was good.”
He snorted at that. “I was only stationed there briefly. My unit had just finished training, was shipping out to the deserts and happened to be passing through. Didn’t have time to sample all the vintages, just remember it was good.”
I opened my mouth to continue the conversation. I almost said ‘I ought to take you there sometime’, and then I remembered.
“...Gnolls hit it with one of their techno lightning-ray things, blew it to bits.” I said instead, quietly. He stopped drinking, I did too. I stared outside into the courtyard, at the shattered remains of the home-defense tool one scientist had been marketing based on Gnoll technology, meant to zap intruders. The horse had been zapped by it during its rampage, I’d been told. Turns out it ran on electricity, so that didn’t help.
“Is that how you got into this? Experimentation? I remember reading you’re an… biologist?” I must have gotten that wrong. Schreck the engineer making zombies, Lucas the Biologist making radios and dishwashers. Wasn’t it the other way around?. “But you work with foreign tech, and well… saw Gnoll tech a bit too close a few too many times during the war myself, you know?”
“I barely even do that anymore. The radios are a hobby.”
“So the Staircase…” I started.
“I just fund them. I don’t tell my people what to do. Let them keep their own souls, I don’t care so long as they show up the church.”
“So you aren’t… amassing a zombie army to take over Eccless?” It sounded ridiculous saying it out loud, here in the light of day. Everything had felt so surreal, dreamlike out there. I rapped my knuckles on the hard wood desk that felt so real, two floors up.
“Not much use in an army you can’t take out’ve the house. Catches fire as soon as it goes outdoors. Schreck says it’s a longevity cure. Got work to do, if he wants that to be true.” He grunted.
He sat down, turning to face me from across the desk. I was less than convinced by him, but still shaken. Quite literally, I’d barely stopped shaking from the shock, but the tea was hot in my throat and the jokes kept me steady, kept me grounded.
“Look, I know that’s not all that was down there. There was something… bigger. And- the flamingo, and-” I wasn’t making sense. He furrowed his brows a bit, and I reeled myself in. “-Lady Regress. The one who killed Raspe. You have an idol to h-”
“Schreck. You meant to ask if Schreck has one.” He said, firm as a rock, cutting me off harshly. “Our department used to work with her: She’s currently under sanction and review by the church, nobody can call on her at the minute. I don’t know if Schreck ever used her-”
How long would a flamingo take to starve in a basement like that with no food? No, it had to have been summoned recently, right?
“I know you funded Raspe.” I ploughed on forward just as aggressively as he was blocking me. “I know you worked with Regress. Did you know Raspe was committing fraud?”
“He was what?”
“The Godbox, it wasn’t real, it was-”
He let out a one-note chuckle, closer to an exhalation of breath. “No, the Godbox was real. Papers call it fraud, the papers are wrong.”
“It wasn’t able to alter physics though. There was a little god inside was all, powering it. Mechanical Gnoll, I saw the thing!”
As I started to explain, he started to smile. A genuine, thrilled smile. He wasn’t annoyed at the accusation. “You’ve been chasing this like mad, apparently. From your stories, madder than I’d even heard. Apparently you refused quite the bribe from Irons to drop the matter, too. Did she give you the whole speech about ‘what reality thinks’?”
“She did!” I nodded, enthusiastic. “You’ve met her?”
“Not a lot of people in town I haven’t. You believe her?” That question felt like a test. The way he looked at me after it, the way he didn’t blink. I shifted in my chair uncomfortably.
“No. I- there has to be an actual answer, right? She seems so damn… incurious. Like… she thinks believing things is a tool, not- mrhgm.” I couldn’t quite formulate the idea right. It didn’t come out the way it was in my head and the sentence just fell apart in my mouth.
He shifted his shoulders. Test passed? I wasn’t sure. I noticed there was a pretty heavy lead paperweight on his desk, I wasn’t past getting my brains bashed in, though admittedly he’d probably have a much harder time getting out of jail if he did it here. He wasn’t laughing anymore, and we were back into dangerous territory.
“What do you want?”
He asked it straight up. I was taken aback a moment.
“I- to know what happened?”
“Why?”
“So- at first I wanted the Godbox. It could help people, now?” Because the missing materials stuck out like a missing tooth, because there was still an impossible marble of antigravity in Raspe’s lab. “...because I want to know.”
“Crop yields, right?” Did he have a file on me somewhere? My eyes went to the books on the shelves. Had he been watching me? How did he know this much about what I’d been doing? The Liberationist thing had been in the papers, but… “Seems a bit pedestrian. Omnipotent box, couldn’t you make people not need to eat, ever? Just stop entropy outright?”
I hadn’t even considered that. Answered on gut instinct. “Feels like it’d make people a bit less human, dunno if I wanna go that far, at least off the bat. I just don’t like being hungry, is all.”
His brow furrowed deeper. He was nearly squinting at me, and he let out a low rumbling sigh. Wrong answer, I got the impression. Had my other answers been correct, then?
“...So…” The silence stretched on. I shifted uncomfortably. “Look, we’re talking around the subject a bit. If- look, you didn’t kill me for breaking into your lab and I appreciate that, but I need to know what you know about Raspe. What you know about Regress. Is there anything I can do to convince you, or…”
He just kept staring at me. After a moment he murmured. “Thought you’d be taller. Huh. Well, you’ll do.”
It was quiet enough I don’t think he meant me to hear, enough of a non-sequitur it almost through me. “Uh-” I started.
“Cut you a deal.” He said. He took one more sip of the whiskey then he stood, walking around the desk to behind my chair, putting both hands on the headrest. Squeezing down. “I worked on the Godbox project. Funded it, yeah, Raspe was Staircase. And I like you, blondie, I do. You get ahold of an idea and you don’t let go, look at you, never seen combat in your life and I hear you nearly shot somebody over this?” He was back to that manic stage, grinning again. He seemed to alternate between a quiet, still persona and a more energetic one, smile and a frown. “I want you working for me. I want you working with the Staircase, chasing down whatever idea gets into your head. You want another Godbox? I can give you money, go make it. Some other project? Sure. But I want you doing it for me.” I shifted. Turned around until I was sitting sideways in the chair just not to have him looming over me like that. He looked down at me, with a smile. “Do that, and I’ll tell you whatever.”
Okay, now I needed that drink after all. Before answering I extended a hand in silent permission to take the bottle off him. He nodded, and I poured myself a shot. Needed something harder than the tea.
I let that burn in my throat, smacking my lips as I mulled that one over.
“...I’ve been trying to make one for ages. It- I told you, it isn’t possible, it was a fraud.”
“Sure it isn’t.” He snorted. I could only marvel at his confidence, he sounded unshakably convinced.
His money to throw in a pit, I supposed. A job and information?
It was such an obvious trap. I wasn’t sure how, but it was. But he hadn’t beaten me to death yet, and he’d had a good couple of chances to. If this was meant to harm me, it wouldn’t be like that. It’d be in ways I could figure out later, ways I could twist to my advantage.
“Resources. Money?” I asked. He nodded once.
“...Monster parts?” That was the important thing. He didn’t hesitate for a second.
Simply put, he nodded again.
I hadn’t seen Raspe’s lab for a while now.
It had been picked over pretty thoroughly by the authorities. Bare shelves, bare tables, empty walls.
But there was still a little marble of broken space in the corner. Two, three. One was anti-gravity like the one in his office, another had a crack running through it and simply sucked in anything that touched it, irretrievably. I wasn’t sure what the third did, it looked much like the gravity one, but Raspe had told me never to touch it.
I hadn’t been allowed in here much to start with, but it still brought back fond memories. It would, I supposed, be a good starting place. Nice clear spot in the center of the room to work in, this being an engineering project as much as anything.
“I could take everything out, just leave it empty whilst I work. Not exactly gonna have paperwork to do.” Or a lot of work to do, either. I’d be getting paid for an impossible project, but that was besides the point. “Barely anything in here anymore. Shocked they haven’t handed this out to some student to make baking soda volcanoes with…”
“More cluttered when he was working on it.” Lucas hummed. “Box in the middle, engineering parts on the periphery. Schreck would deliver parts and he’d assemble them. Whole place locked off from the outside, couple deities in the corner. Regress was one’ve them, that girl of yours, setting the physics for the room.
“Wait, she was? He uh, he worked with her openly?” I blinked. That was new information to me. I’d never kept a catalogue of what gods he worked with, too many to count.
I tried to picture it. It was funny, I hadn’t even given the actual murder scene a proper going over, but now I felt obliged to.
Monster parts had come into this room. Schreck assembled them into mechanical parts, brought them in here. Lady Regress in the corner. The box…
I’d seen it partially complete, but I still had to ask “It still looked like… The Godbox back then, right? Leather, and… square, and-”
He nodded. Okay, so the device he’d been building in the middle of the room probably was the husk containing Regress I’d taken out of the Liberationist base.
So where’d the parts go? Fed to Regress? Over-elaborate for sacrifices.
I couldn’t help but side-eye Lucas.
“...Why aren’t you mad?”
I hadn’t realised I’d said that aloud. He didn’t even respond for a moment, genuinely mulled the question. “I’d’ve broken into Schreck’s lab too, in your place.”
That was all he said.
“...If he worked with her to make it, I’ll need her to make it too. Church are currently interrogating her, right?” I looked to Lucas, and realised he wouldn’t know better than I did.
“Right, he is.” I answered my own question.
I looked over my new space. Open, clear, all to myself. A bit of a sham, but it was what it was. A mysterious new employer who probably had something to do with Raspe’s death. I hadn’t asked nearly enough questions before agreeing to this, but then, Lucas hadn’t asked nearly enough about me. I mostly just needed the money, needed the breathing room, and needed the excuse to look into his affairs.
A nice little setup, for what was probably some kind of trap.
Guess it was time to get to work, then.