Thereafter Chapter 13: Suit Up
The Exalted Heroes gear up and gets some practice in.
Michael found his gait clumsier, but less painful as he strode down the corridors of The Castle with his temporary cane. He had tried as best he could to describe rubber well enough that Eltern could conjure it up, but the resulting viscous goop that covered the handle and bottom of the cane had both refused to stay on and left a oily residue that rendered the first attempt at conjuring up a cane a total loss. Eltern’s second attempt was less of an experiment, but the magus had taken care to follow the spirit of the request, if the exact wording could not be followed. The cane was made out of dark wood, and although it wasn’t quite as comfortable as a rubber grip would be, the leather handle had some slight padding which made gripping it feel pretty good.
“I realize now we probably should have taken you to the Armory first thing,” Eltern spoke up as he led the Exalted deeper into the building. “We were worried you’d be overwhelmed, but perhaps kitting you out properly from the word go would have been better.”
“If ifs and ands were pots and pans,” Alicia said, seemingly mostly to herself.
“No use dwelling on the past,” Felipe added.
“Except where one can extrapolate into the future, or at least form a hypothesis of some sort.” It was somewhat unclear to Michael if Lex’ statement was intended to be a rebuke or an addition to what Felipe had said. Despite their habitual frankness, Lex was quite the enigma.
Michael, for his part, was entirely busy keeping pace with the rest. It wasn’t difficult to walk with a cane exactly, but it was an extra set of instructions for his brain to execute and a slightly different motion to get used to. While he was in a complaining mood, the extra weight he put on his hand was starting to hurt, but it felt like workout pain, the kind that’d disappear once he got into the swing of things properly. Meanwhile, the pain in his knee diminished considerably, which was a nice surprise. That pain was a different kind of pain. Wound-pain, strain-pain, the kind of hurt that’d work its way into your soul if you let it. The kind of pain that’d have you turn into a sourer, less accommodating person because your Getting Along juice would drain into a void of pain you didn’t even notice because it was always just there.
“Needless to say, this room is only for the select few,” Eltern said as he traced a finger along the elaborate carving in the stone wall, his finger left a trail of glowing blue. “Apart from you four and the Council, only quartermaster Keegan has access.”
“So you don’t have a guard but you do have a quartermaster?” Lex asked.
“His title came from before his stint with us,” Eltern answered, somewhat curt on account of the question, or perhaps it was the opening of the door that took more out of him than Michael assumed. You couldn’t always tell with these things. “And we have every intention of letting the man ply his trade if we actually survive long enough to make a city guard or similar organization.”
As if to underline this point, Eltern finished the drawing with a flourish and the relief Michael started to realize was a door started sliding open with a dry grinding screech that he was pretty sure would have actually killed him if he hadn’t gotten over his hangover.
The Armory was a curiously non-chimeric room, with every wall of heavy stone bricks unbroken and uniform. This, Michael supposed, might mean that the room was custom built after the founding of Thereafter. Then again, there was every chance that this room was just so incredibly solid it outlived the world that housed it. The room was filled with row upon row of racks and shelves, holding an assortment of armors and weapons that Michael had no problem believing were magical.
“We’ve salvaged quite a few magical items since the Calamity,” Eltern said as he continued into the room, he didn’t beckon for the Exalted to follow, but he did not need to. Michael felt the excitement in the air, this was Extra Christmas set in a ren faire tent, this was Halloween costume shopping in the armory of a real headless horseman. For a little while, Michael tried to tell himself he was above it, but as he passed through the rows upon rows of glinting armors and jet-black daggers, it became abundantly clear to him that he was not. All of these things Did Something, Michael could just tell, and a part of him wanted to stop and ask what each and every one of them did.
“Hey, what’s that one over there? The Blue One?” Lex’ curiosity got the better of them first, as they pointed at a deep blue blade almost as tall as them. The sword’s long grip made it seem like a two-hander of some sort, and the broad, elaborate guard was seemingly made out of whisp-thin silver strands of material that all the same seemed as solid as bedrock. Perhaps most notable about the sword was that it wasn’t mounted on a rack, but rather stuck right out of the floor tiling, as if it was planted into the very rock itself.
“This, and I mean no insult to you, Exalted Lex, is the only sword too important for any of you to wield.” Eltern approached the sword with the kind of reverence one’d expect towards a beloved religious leader. “This is the Sword Of Lakes, or the Evilbane. Some call it The Blade Of Virtue.”
“Right,” Lex said. “But what does it do.”
“The exact primary function of the sword is actually… mostly unknown to us at the moment,” Eltern conceded with a sigh. “But the method in which it is put away is very important. When it’s planted in earth, implicitly after banishing whatever evil it deals with, it will produce fresh water, seemingly ex nihilo, until a lake of at least eight feet deep is formed around it. It’s how we’ve been fulfilling the need for clean water for the city.”
“So, now you have a nine foot deep water tank and a flower pot of earth at the bottom of it?” Felipe guessed.
“More or less. We store the Sword here between uses. It is no exaggeration to say it is the single most important weapon in Thereafter.”
“And you don’t even use it for its intended purpose,” Alicia mused, she seemed somewhat charmed by the idea.
“There’s a lot of that going around lately,” Felipe said with a shrug.
Eltern cleared his throat. “At any rate, we should proceed.”
What followed was a measured, but still semi-crazed “shopping trip” as Michael and his friends picked out several weapons, armors and other sundry accoutrements that attracted their fancy. Michael found himself not going for the more outrageous stuff. Sure, he could see the use-case for the jet black dagger that allowed the wearer to move from shadow to shadow like they were portals, or the short sword that passed through armor like smoke passed through a wicker basket, but some, like the curved sacrificial dagger that caused crystalline “vines” to grow through the victim’s veins and pierce their hearts, just seemed like making a mess for the sake of it.
Once they were all loaded down with about a D&D-campaign worth of magical equipment, Eltern took them to the next stop on their little tour, the Field Room.
“This place can have some unintended side effect on some people,” Eltern explained as he fiddled with a somewhat arcane locking mechanism to the simple oak door. “And if it gets to any of you, we can find another place, but barring that, this place should meet your needs admirably.”
“What kind of side-effects?” Michael asked, but as the door swung open to reveal impossibly blue sky and deep green fields grass so soft it looked like laying down on it would be like falling down on a crash mat. Michael forgot he had even asked, as they entered the strange Elysium.
“This is the Endless Field,” Eltern explained as he ushered them through the door, into the impossibly idyllic fields ahead of them.
“It isn’t endless as much as it loops after a bit, but this place is bigger on the inside than the outside, and not everyone can handle that.”
Michael looked back at the door appearing as a dark rectangle in the otherwise perfect blue sky, a sky he was just starting to notice had no sun, and yet was plenty brightly lit. He could understand how this place could do people’s minds an unkindness.
“The advantage with using this room as a training space is that it’ll do a fair bit of maintenance on it’s own.”
“How do you figure?” Lex asked.
“It’s not easy to explain, but the room has… preferences, I suppose,” Eltern said. “We set up some sparring dummies, you beat the living daylights out of them, and after you leave, the room will change the dummies back to the state they were in before.”
“Oh,” Lex said. “And how can we be certain it won’t just remove the dummies?”
“We can’t, at least at first, but from experimentation the room seems to get used to changes that are made many times in close temporal proximity.”
“I swear,” Alicia said under her breath. “One of these days I’ll go 10 hours in this place without encountering a fresh existentialist terror.”
“Today’s out,” Lex said cheerfully as they dumped out their load of assorted wands, staves, and spears on the grass. “Tomorrow’s not looking so hot either.”
“Yeah yeah, sure, room’s spooky, whatever,” Felipe said, he was occupied with inspecting the stringing of his bounty of bows. “Just remember to get some crates and targets in here too, not all of us are in the “Hit It With Big Stick” category of martial matters.”
“Certainly, I’ll have Keegan bring you some sparring dummies and shooting targets for today at least,” Eltern said. “If it pleases the Exalted, I’d like to take you on a small tour of the city after this?”
“Sure, that sounds nice. Just… don’t make it a spectacle ok?” Michael said, to which Eltern replied with a noncommittal sound before leaving them to their new training space.
It had come as very little of a surprise that Alicia had picked out a bunch of axes for herself, even factoring in that at least half of them were magically heavier than their mass should allow. What had come as a surprise was when Alicia had asked him to spar with her. “I picked up some wooden weapons, so we can get into practicing against each other right away,” she explained.
“I don’t know,” Michael said. “I’m kinda rusty, you’ll wash the floor with me.”
“Nonsense. I’m strong but I haven’t actually fought anything since I was a tween, a good spar is all about technique anyway.”
“So the rumors about your violent rebukes are just rumors I take it?”
“Oh that old bullshit,” Alicia said. “I did put a creep I was PTing in a handlock when he tried to grope me a few years back. Didn’t as much as sprain his wrist, but once the Dude-o-sphere got a hold of that story it grew in a real hurry.”
“And before you knew it the story was that your, uh, barbarous strength had broken the guy’s arm straight up?”
“Yeah,” Alicia sighed. “Got some death threats over that, but nothing too serious.”
“Jesus,”
“Language!” Felipe chided.
“Oh fuck off choirboy, we’re commiserating over here,” Alicia shot back. Felipe took the opportunity to shrug and move away from the soon-to-be-sparring pair.
“Right. Well, I suppose sparring won’t be too bad,” Michael said. “As long as you don’t mind fighting a cripple?” He nodded towards the cane.
“Actually, I was thinking about the cane,” Alicia said. “It’d make for a good off-hand weapon I figure. Might be smart practicing how to drub folks with it, if you can fight without it of course.”
“I’ll probably be fine” Michael said. “It’s standing and walking for long distances that get to me. Still, once I get one that won’t turn into a pumpkin at midnight this thing’ll probably be by my side all the time.”
“Yeah that’s what I was thinking. Might come in handy, y’know”
And so, they sparred. Michael felt that getting good swings in with the cane to be relatively intuitive, but he kept whiffing his sword strikes. The first match came to an ignoble end when he attempted to strike at Alicia after she over-committed to a swing of her wooden-bladed axe, only to be shoulder-checked hard enough to send him stumbling ass over teakettle into the admittedly very soft grass of the Field.
“Ugh, this is not working,” Michael said once the world stopped spinning around him.
“Sorry about that last bit, kinda let the instincts take over,” Alicia said, looking rather sheepish.
“Oh, no that was great,” Michael said as he started the distinctly turtle-esque process of getting right-side up and then off the ground. “I’m just no good with this sword, it feels like I’m using left-handed scissors or something.
“Hmm,” Alicia said. “Say, back when you learned to fight that was with Molekin weapons right?”
“It was what they had, so yeah,”
“Might actually be that you learned using molekin longswords as a shortsword, then…”
“Is there a difference? I mean apart from the size?”
“Oh yeah,” Alicia said, something in her perked up from the chance to tell someone about something. “They’re weighted differently. Longswords have their weight biased towards the blade to do more chopping action, shortswords in general have the weight closer to the guard, both to be better at parrying and for stabbing motions.”
“Huh,” Michael said as he got up. “You know, that makes sense.”
“Yeah, if I’m right it’ll take some training to get used to the weighting difference, but you can do it. Ready to go again?”
Michael twirled his cane as way of affirmation. “Let’s go.”
The sparring match that resulted was more even as these things went. Alicia still had very little trouble of swinging her axe with such feriocity that Michael was busy dodging, but dodge he did. He had no idea how Alicia could be as fast as she was, doubly so with a heavy weapon in her hands, but as long as she favored her right foot just as she was getting ready to strike, he could stay ahead of her, albeit only just about. It wasn’t a winning move, but Michael wasn’t going to lose. Alicia reeled back, ready, no doubt to lunge at him, but this time Michael had a plan. He stepped forward, into Alicia’s reach, and as the head of the axe came down, he stopped it.
“Ok that was pretty slick…” Alicia said once the din of their clashing weapons had quieted. Michael had “seized” the axe just under the blade in an improvised swordcatcher of his shortsword and cane in an X. It had been one of those moves he did not foresee working, but he had tried all the same. That had to constitute a bad habit, Michael figured, but at least he didn’t try it in an actual fight.
“Do you think that’d work with a real axe?” Michael found himself asking, giddy as he was after the gambit paying off.
“Maybe,” Alicia said, “but I wouldn’t bet my life on it.
“Yeah, I’m sure you were holding back anyway?”
“Maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t,” Alicia said, for a brief second Michael could’ve sworn there was some playful teasing to it.
Then again, thought the part of him that considered these things, they were standing rather close to each other, and adrenaline was one hell of a drug.
“Anyway, uh, thanks for the spar,” Michael mumbled as he stepped back.
“Yeah,” Alicia said. “We probably shouldn’t overexert ourselves on day one… good hustle and all that.”
“Yeah…” Michael found himself saying. “Good hustle. Let’s go see what Lex and Felipe have been up to.”