The Armorer Ch 38 (Patreon)

A week flew by like a dream. Life in Lomb was easy, mostly due to the fact that Lambert paid for everything I needed and refused to accept my monster cores.

I spent the mornings stretching and exercising Grogtilda’s muscles by running laps around the tower. The days were filled with exploring the town’s various small shops, chatting with Lomb residents and acquiring clothing and accessories. In the evenings I chatted with Alessi over our soul connection, relaying the events of the day to her. While my human body slept, I used my chimera body to explore the sewer and cavern system beneath Lomb. The advantage of having two bodies made sleep a thing of the past, allowing me to function perpetually. 

The edge of the chasm on the first two levels was formed from hard rock absolutely riddled with holes. A labyrinthine cavern system started right beneath Lomb and led all around the Chasm. The caverns closer to the city had been taken over and maintained by people, some of them turned into underground parks, storage units, shops and even restaurants. Almost every business in Lomb had a basement connected to the much cooler underground. A few of the rivers crossing through town pooled into the caves forming little lakes and sandy beaches.

The inspector didn’t end up taking me to the bank as Antoine was taking his sweet-time experimenting with my chimera hair gems to design me a pair of perfect armacus bracelets. The armacus was an extremely expensive tool, usually worn by servants of the Empire, successful adventurers, the aristocracy and the merchants. Since each armacus worked on a single person, it functioned as a passport of sorts that the banking system accepted as an id. In the end, Antoine shook five large gems out of me in exchange for various artifacts made by his shop that would allow me to train my skills and also helped me explore the local underground with greater comfort and ease.

I was currently holding one of them in my hand - the puzzle-sphere. It was a bit similar to a Rubik's cube, as the sphere was made up of a hundred hexagonal plates that could be rotated up or down. From what I understood, the puzzle-sphere functioned like a Wisdom/Search thread, pulling random, jumbled-up information out of the Still Forest.

The game was to put random letters together to form coherent words or a concept from some long-dead language and culture. It took me a few hours to assemble a word and whenever I succeeded the winning combination of random nonsense glowed green and I gained the tiniest amount of experience. I was apparently supposed to gain Wisdom/Search skills from playing with it, but nothing had shown up in a week, so the sphere remained a game of random chance for me.

I was twirling the edges of the puzzle-sphere at random, while sitting in Lambert’s office and chatting with his assistant Anniya Leblanc. Anniya was a green-eyed blonde in her twenties and she was an expert on the local shops. She had recently gifted me a makeup set. I had used it creatively to make my chimera face look more human and also hid the worst of the blue bruises from Grogtilda’s face. Whenever Lambert was too busy to watch me, Anniya was the one who followed me everywhere. Their endless attention was a bit overbearing at times, but I put up with it as I knew it was their jobs to figure me out.

Inspector Lambert stepped into the office and Anniya vanished behind the doorway.

“I’ve just spoken to Antoine, your armaci set should be ready tomorrow,” he said, sitting down behind his desk.

“Sweet,” I replied.

“So, Yulia… I believe we have something to talk about,” he said.

“Yeah?” I looked up at him. His words took a minute to catch up to my brain which had been preoccupied with the puzzle-sphere. 

I was currently in my chimera body, and he called me… Yulia.

“I’m going to make a few assumptions, based on our observations of you over the week,” he said. “And you’re going to confirm or deny them.”

I gulped.

“You are one consciousness inhabiting two bodies,” he said.

“Yeah,” I sighed, putting the toy sphere down. “How did you…?”

“You don’t exactly hide it well,” Lambert stated. “Your voice might be different between Yulia and Juni but you speak with exactly the same accent, stumble over the same words, get excited about the same things and so forth. You even twirl that toy sphere the same way. While she's asleep, you're awake and the other way around.”

“Yeah,” I nodded.

“Onto my next assumption,” he continued. "Grogtilda Lic Misem is dead."

“Uhhh?” I looked up at his sharp, gray eyes behind his circular lenses.

“There’s only a tiniest bit of her in you,” Lambert said. “You simply don’t behave like a girl from Undertown.”

“So you think I’m a Dungeon Monster?” I said.

“I didn’t say that,” the inspector steepled his fingers. “You don’t behave like a Dungeon Monster either. You get way too excited about crepes. You instantly recognize things that someone who’s been born in a Dungeon shouldn't. You knew exactly how to use makeup like a pro before Anniya even had a chance to explain it to you. You behave like a human from some distant place and… time.”

I gulped as Lambert stared at me.

“You got me,” I said, my shoulders slumping.

“Really?” He asked.

I nodded. The silence between us stretched on and on with neither of us willing to speak first.

“You’re exceptionally good at uncovering secrets, inspector,” I said finally.

“It’s my job,” Lambert nodded. “So… who are you, really?”

“Do you have a guess?” I asked.

“The Almn-Inian Arch-Necromagi from Novazem are said to possess the ability to bring back the long dead,” Lambert said. “Perhaps… you’re one of their ‘experiments’?”

“I am from another place and time,” I said. “But I am not from Novazem. I don’t know any Necromages either nor am I an agent of the Empire’s enemies. I can swear on the Truth-Sphere if you’d like…”

“No need,” Lambert said, leaning back on his chair. “It doesn’t really matter that much where you’re from, Yulia. What really matters is that you’re a good person.”

“How do you figure that?” I asked.

“You are willing to work with us on a case,” the inspector replied. “Plus my assistant and I have been subtly testing you.”

“Oh?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Three days ago you found a purse filled with a few diamonds left sitting under an empty table in the creperie. The address of a jeweler was sewn onto its back,” Lambert said. “You immediately showed it to Anniya and dragged her to find the owner.”

“Those weren’t real diamonds?” I asked.

“Just some polished glass magicked to look very expensive,” Lambert nodded. "If you were interested in attaining wealth, you'd keep it instead of returning it and getting nothing in exchange."

“Anything else?” I asked wearily.

“Two days ago you helped an old lady get home,” Lambert said. “And then you spend the afternoon helping her cat down a tree and talked about sewing patterns for two hours with her while petting her cat.”

“The cat wasn’t real?” I blinked.

Lambert laughed. “That wasn’t one of our tests. What I’m saying is that you’re behaving like a good person who simply wants to help people. You want to fit in. Yesterday you spent nearly the entire day scouting the town for a workshop to rent and then looked for high-quality sewing tools and old clothes to buy, so that you could make dress designs for the 66’ expo and gala.”

“I did do that,” I said. “I want to have a few designs ready for the expo.”

“Exactly,” Lambert said. “You have dreams and passions. Something which the ghosts and ghouls pulled up by Inians lack - a spark. And an Inian agent from Novazem would not waste their time on creative endeavors - buying old, used dresses to sew new ones, etc.”

“Maybe I have a greater nefarious purpose and I’m just biding my time,” I smirked.

“I very much doubt it,” Lambert smiled. “You don’t hide your intentions and you don’t behave like a criminal. I do understand your passions. I’m simply utterly confused about how you ended up with a chimera and a human body.”

“Do you want a full timeline of my life?” I asked.

“If you wish to share it,” Lambert nodded. “I am willing to listen.”

“I was born in a nation called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” I said. “In a breakaway Republic that declared independence as a new nation, called Ukraine… on another world, called the Earth. A world completely without magic…”

Lambert listened to my words, nodding along, his eyes growing wider at my declarations. I told him how my parents died in a car accident and how a scientist named Vladislav Kerenski adopted me and taught me mechanics and sciences. How I drew up with a passion for urban exploration and armor designing. How I died in Chernobyl and woke up in a little chimera’s body four years ago. How I had found Grogtilda in a Folding Seed and set her on fire by accident.

In a few hours of a heartfelt confession, I was done. Another person other than Alessi now knew my full story.

“That was…” Lambert said. “A lot more than what I’ve expected.”

“Do you believe me?” I asked.

“Yes,” The old inspector nodded. “While much of it sounds extraordinary, my skills are telling me that you’re honest.”

“Do you have a theory?” I asked curiously.

“Your journey to Andross started when you touched a crystal?” The inspector asked.

“Chernobylite is an extremely radioactive crystalline compound,” I said.

“Then it is entirely possible that this… Chernobylite preserved your essence, imprinted your spirit into itself with perfect clarity.”

“What?” I blinked.

“Animancy,” Lambert explained. “The highest grade of it can preserve people’s memories in crystals… for a ridiculously long time.”

“So you think that I’m not from another universe?” I gaped at the inspector. “That I’m from… another time?”

“There are legends that Andross was built by the gods with parts of Inaria,” Lambert said. “It is entirely possible that a shard of Chernobylite containing your soul ended up in Andross.”

“What is Inaria exactly?” I asked. “Have Basquenate mages ever opened a gate down there?”

“No,” Lambert said. “Gateways pointed at Inaria fail to open. What we do know is that all that lived there died and took their civilization down with them, leaving only frozen ruins and giant, glowing rings. Every magical construct sent there falls apart when it hits the atmosphere. We do have pictures of Inaria taken from high up in the sky, made by golems with depictomancy… hold on.”

The inspector walked to a wall and tapped it. A hidden panel unlocked itself revealing a shelf covered in books. Lambert  pulled out a drawing from one of the shelves and handed it to me.

It was a picture of an ice-covered city made from metal and concrete. I identified three, incredibly blurry, tiny words written in English on one of the rooftops.

“The Good Directorate…” I read and looked back up at the Inspector.

His eyes were wide as he stared back at me.

“You… can read these words?” He asked. “What language is that?”

“English,” I nodded. “There are words on one of the rooftops that I can understand.”

“Then you’re from Inaria,” Lambert finally said. “A girl from a world that’s been dead for one hundred million years.”