RVR4|Chapter 9: Family Heirloom (Patreon)

Tess -- Floor One Private Staging

"Maybe if we didn't have a dungeon core redirecting fifty spawns at us," Yuki said to the ceiling, "I'd still have two useful arms."

"It was considerably more than fifty," Bee said.

"That's not better."

"I am not arguing the point. I am correcting the figure." A pause long enough to be deliberate. "I also said it was a mistake. I would like that to be noted."

"It's noted," Mikhail said from the floor. He had his back against the door and his eyes shut, and the only part of him that had moved since he sat down was his jaw, working through the last of his cracker.

Tess hadn't moved from the stripped wall panel. Behind the plasteel the room's air handler ran a steady, faintly wet note that she was trying not to look at with [EVALUATE]. She'd considered fixing it for the last five minutes because it was easier than watching the look on Yuki's face when Asha pressed the bone.

"Did anyone see?" Tess asked. "Out there. The other parties."

"No," Bee said. "I am the only thing watching Floor One. Nobody saw anything but me." Then, quieter, and only a little stiff: "I am sorry."

"Bee's sulking," Petra said.

"I am not sulking. I am simply auditing what went wrong."

"Uh-huh. She's sulking," Yuki said, and closed her eyes. "Go on, Bee. Tell us how Admiral Gonzales handled her big mistake in season 2."

"Admiral Gonzales accidentally led an armada of replication drones to Endova Prime." Bee paused. "She... spearheaded the forces against them and went on to become Starfall's greatest military leader. I'm not sure how..."

Asha snapped the kit bag shut. "You got us out, and Yuki's arm's fixed. Next time, just ask before you get clever, yeah?"

"Yes," Bee said. "I will ask."

Petra was on the bench across from Tess, forearms on her knees, both blades on her hips. She hadn't touched the evolution prompt since she'd read it out, but she had the look of someone holding a sheet open behind her eyes. When she looked up, it was at Tess.

"The crystal," she said. "The one with Vasquez. Could that be it?"

"Crystallized Aether," Yuki said without opening her eyes. "It's a crystal. It's full of Aether. I'm just saying."

Tess had wanted to be the person who said yes since the moment Petra read the block out in her requisition voice. She couldn't. "It reads void," she said. "Every time I look at it. I can't tell you what it is, which means I can't tell you what it isn't either." She turned one hand over, fingers spread, the way she'd hold up a part she couldn't identify.

"So maybe," Petra said.

"Maybe."

Petra nodded like that was enough. "Then we ask Vasquez tomorrow."

Petra, Mikhail and Yuki had to be seen walking out the public doors. Tess, Asha and Cici owed nobody anything, so they went up first.

"Two hours," Asha told Yuki from the lift. "Sleep sitting up. Don't lift it. If you shoot anything, I'll know."

"How will you know?"

Asha just cocked an eyebrow. "The screaming might give it away."

Cici paused on the lift's threshold, one forepaw lifted, and looked back at the room. "Congratulations on level ten!" Her tone was formal, but the cartoon jingle that played afterwards broke the illusion. Then the lift closed and Tess, Asha, and Cici were back to being spectators.

Eventually, they surfaced in storage room three, into the smell of the workshop, solder and machine oil and the dust Tess had never quite finished sweeping.

Cici trotted ahead, tail wagging furiously, as they moved through the garden and up into the Estate. She announced that she could smell soup.

And there was soup. Somebody had left a pot on the low heat in the kitchens with a note propped against the bread in Jeremy's writing: For the late shift. Asha read it, sniffed the pot, and made the face of a woman who had been defeated in advance by a better cook. Tess ate two bowls at a long table, still wearing her armor. It sounded like they might not get a chance to move tonight, though.

Shortly after, Bee reported from the kitchen speaker that her friends were through the doors.

They came in forty minutes later, the long way, through the garden front. Mikhail had Yuki's rifle over his own shoulder and her kit bag in his other hand, and when she held out her good arm for the rifle at the kitchen door, he hung the bag on it instead and kept walking. Yuki just grimaced at him.

Petra went straight past the soup, which Tess had not known was possible, unbuckled her forearm plates at the end of the table and let her hair down.

Yuki put her injured arm on the table like she was surrendering a weapon and looked longingly at the soup pot.

Mikhail got up and put a bowl in front of her. He put another in front of Petra, who looked at it as if it was her enemy, and then Sara walked in.

She was still dressed for the day, jacket and all, a datapad in one hand. She took in the table in one pass, and her eyes came to rest on Petra. She was smiling ear to ear.

Petra put her spoon down. "Who told you?"

"Bee did."

Petra looked at the ceiling. "Bee."

"You did not ask me not to," Bee said from the speaker.

"It is not the crystal chunk," Sara said. "You need a resonator."

Yuki stopped eating just long enough to look quizzical, then went back to her soup.

"Vasquez says it is compressed Aether," Sara went on. "A great deal of it. He cannot get any of it out, and he does not know why. It is interesting, and it is not what you need." She set the datapad face down on the table. "What you need is in the library."

"You knew," Petra said. "At breakfast. When you offered."

"I offered to tell you what your great-aunt's class became," Sara said. "The first thing I would have told you was what she needed to get there."

"You could have just said hey, you're going to need a resonator."

"You said you would rather find out today." Sara didn't raise her voice. The kitchen had gone quiet enough to hear the soup. "You found out."

Petra opened her mouth, closed it, and then, to Tess's surprise, laughed. It came out short and a little rough. "That's so unfair."

"Aunt Cici was a Blade Dancer," Sara said. "When she reached ten, her prompt asked for the same thing yours did. She used what's in the library. So will you."

Petra was already on her feet. "Let's go, then."

Sara considered her daughter for a moment. Then she nodded, once. "After you eat."

"Mother."

"I'm happy you recognize my title. Now eat. The library has been there longer than we have."

Petra just groaned and picked up the spoon.

The library turned out to be at the far end of the east wing, down a corridor Tess had walked past without ever turning into. It was long and high and colder than the rest of the house, lined floor to ceiling with real tomes bound in the same faded green, and it smelled like old paper and the lemon oil somebody had been rubbing into the shelves for a very long time. Two reading lamps came on as Sara crossed the threshold. The rest of the room stayed dark.

"I've been in here a thousand times," Petra said.

"Yes," Sara said. "Ironically, mostly to hide from your tutors."

She went to the third bay on the left, where the books were the oldest, their spines gone the color of weak tea. She took two volumes down and handed them to Mikhail without looking, and he held them like she'd just handed him a bomb. Behind them sat a plate the size of a hand, flush with the wall. Sara laid her palm on it.

A latch clicked deep in the shelving. The whole section, books and all, eased out a finger's width on hinges that hadn't made a sound, and swung.

Petra made a noise Tess had last heard from herself at the workshop hatch. "How long has that been there?"

"A few centuries," Sara said, and went in.

It wasn't a room, just a recess in the wall's thickness, lined with shallow drawers. Sara opened the fourth drawer down and took out a pendant on a fine chain.

It was small. That was Tess's first thought, and she was a little embarrassed by how disappointed it sounded. A clear stone about the size of the last joint of her thumb, faceted, held in a plain old setting worn smooth by a lot of hands. In the lamplight it could have just been a pretty necklace.

Then [EVALUATE] opened it up.

·········································CRYSTALLIZED AETHER MANIFOLDDesignation: ■■■■■■■■Loot Seed: ■■■■Hardware: PristineUser Tech Skill: 12·········································Aether Structuring ....... Available [■■■■]■■■■■■■■ ................. UNKNOWN [■■■■]■■■■■■■■ ................. WARNING [■■■■]·········································

Tess blinked at the readout.

Inside the stone, [EVALUATE] resolved a lattice: fine, regular, layered, every plane set at an angle to the next, like a complex set of circuits meant to do one thing really well.

Tess was getting basically nothing from her skill.

"Tess," Petra said.

"It's real," Tess said. "I can tell it's the thing. The rest is all black boxes and unknowns."

Sara didn't look surprised. She held the chain out to her daughter. "It's one of many different evolution catalysts we have. They've been here since before my grandfather."

Petra took it and weighed it in her palm for a moment without making a speech. She put the chain over her head and let the stone fall against her undersuit, over her sternum.

Nothing happened for about three seconds. Cici, sitting upright by Tess's boot, sneezed.

Then the pressure came. It was like the Aether node on Sublevel Two the night she'd fixed it, a push against the eardrums—except that it wasn't coming from the walls. It was coming in. Tess watched it through [EVALUATE]: ambient Aether in the air was being drawn toward the stone from every side and passed through that lattice plane by plane. It then fed whatever it was making directly into Petra, whose breath caught.

"Bee," Petra said. "Show Tess."

The block slid into Tess's vision in the same place Bee had once put an intercepted packet.

·········································CLASS EVOLUTION — LEVEL 10RARE CLASS DETECTED: BLADE DANCEREvolution Target: AETHERIC DANCER — Grade: EPICCatalyst Required: CRYSTALLIZED AETHER MANIFOLDCatalyst Status: DetectedEVOLUTION COMPLETE·········································

She stood in the lamplight with her hand now over the pendant, and the pressure went out of the room all at once, like a coupling seating.

The stone looked exactly the same. Tess checked: Hardware: Pristine.

"Aetheric Dancer," Yuki said from the doorway, where she'd leaned her good shoulder. "That sounds fancy."

Petra lowered her hands and started laughing, properly this time, and Mikhail, who had been holding two books this entire time, set them down on the reading desk and sat on the edge of it.

Sara said, "Well, that's certainly not what Cici was."

Petra smiled at her mother and flexed her fingers before taking the chain off. Sara put it in the fourth drawer down and closed it, and the bay swung closed without a sound.

"There's more," Petra said. Her eyes had gone unfocused. "There's a skill."

Bee shared it with Tess, and it popped up on Sara's datapad.

·········································LEVEL: 10CLASS: Aetheric Dancer (EPIC)·········································[AETHER SHEAR] ........... ReadyAP Cost: 5 (Current Ambient Aether: Low)·········································

"It's one cut," Petra said. She was looking at nothing; everyone did, the first time a skill explained itself from the inside. "You commit to it, and it throws a plane off the edge." Her hand drifted to her hip, where the seldom-used plasma emitters rode. "And if the blade's already plasma when I throw it, I think it's bigger and stronger."

"Half your AP, though," Tess said.

"Up here." Petra glanced at her. "I can already tell... all of my stats and skills are based on ambient Aether now. I think... I get stronger in denser Aether..."

"Aetheric Dancer," Bee said, her voice taking on an almost artificial tone. “Specialized combatant existing in symbiosis with the surrounding Aether. The richer the concentration, the stronger your abilities become, and the less they demand. As it thins, they weaken, and their cost rises. There is no ceiling to the strength provided, but there is no floor either.”

"Wow," Yuki said.

Petra rolled her right wrist, the way she did before a spar, testing the line of a cut she wasn't allowed to throw yet. "I can feel it in the air... the Aether."

Tess glanced at the closed bookshelf and hoped it would be enough to take down a level 19 Alpha spawn.

Petra caught her looking and grinned.

Vex -- Sector Three

The Administration's answer arrived at nineteen minutes past midnight, local, while Vex was reviewing the day's logs in the quarters the Network compound had allotted him.

He read it standing. It was not a long message. The Administration had never believed in long messages.

PL-1: Okay, read it again. Out loud. For me.

"Provisional validation of a Unique-grade class, subject to confirmation in person," Vex said. "A standing berth. Dedicated staff. An off-world posting of her choosing within Administration space." He paused. "And a line regarding the auditor responsible."

PL-1: Say the line.

"'The Administration notes the auditor's initiative.'"

PL-1: That's a promotion. That's what that sentence means. I have read four thousand of these and that is the one they write before the promotion.

"It is a generous offer," Vex said, and allowed himself the small, cool satisfaction of a man whose numbers had come out even. Most people on this planet would never be offered a tenth of it. Rivera had been offered all of it without being asked a question.

PL-1: So we go tomorrow. First thing. Walk in, hand it over, in space by lunch.

"The Duke has arranged my schedule for tomorrow."

PL-1: So unarrange it. You're an auditor. Show up at the workshop. She liked you, you liked her, everybody likes everybody. Why sit on it?

Vex looked at the message a while longer. "Because an offer of this size is presented formally, through the House, with the House present. I will request an inspection."

PL-1: Ugh, that's days.

"It is correct procedure."

PL-1: It's days, Vex. Things happen in days. We both know she's going into the dungeon. She could get injured, or even die.

"All of a sudden you're invested in her?" Vex said.

PL-1: Well... I just don't want to see you lose your promotion.

Vex wasn't sure what to make of that but he began drafting the inspection request, regardless.