Victor looked up at the strange hood-sleeve-thing behind the counter, then at a pair of long, armored boots. His knowledge of fashion screamed and thrashed as he pulled it apart and conceived of an outfit akin to what Zelsys was wearing, a set of clothing that so flagrantly defied good taste it would loop back around and become the peak of fashion.

“Shorts with the fur lining sticking out the top,” he proclaimed, grinning. Zelsys and Zefaris had both followed his sightline, and burst out laughing at the mental image.

“Why are you laughing? You should be rejoicing. You’ve found one who shares your ridiculous tastes in fashion,” the Craftsman admonished Zelsys jokingly. “But, that drake leather… Hrm… You know you could sell that for a couple thousand as a whole piece, yes? I’d hate to fleece you.”

“It’s degraded and covered in scars, nobody who wants a drakeskin rug will buy this thing,” Zel dismissed, already having pulled out her Tablet and began the process of retrieving the false drake’s still-bloody hide from storage.

“Alright, give it here. I’ll have the piece ready in a couple days, would you rather come pick it up once it’s ready or just pay in advance and have me send a runner to deliver it?”

“I’ll pay in advance…”

So it was that Zel and Zef turned Victor’s newfound motivation away from being far too brave for his own good towards his natural sense of vanity. The top ended up being the priciest of the bunch, as it turned out to be lined with cold-iron chainmail on the inside and enchanted to ward against lightning, betraying its origins as some Kargarian noble’s commission that they had failed to pick up. The boots just happened to be one of the Craftsman’s projects of fancy, being entirely unremarkable in any particular aspect beyond their high standard of quality.

Much to the duo’s disappointment, the auction equaled the boots in mundanity, excepting the impossibly creepy parasite-ridden guards. No slaves were sold, and even that which was being sold was mostly recreational drugs, foreign jewelry, or talked-up cultivation supplies that screamed of falsity; of these, Zefaris purchased two pieces of jewelry in order to create a sense of legitimacy as customers, using funds the Bureau had allocated to them specifically for this use. There were two items of note: A deck of Jade Dragons with twenty-thousand gelt as a starting bid, and a jar labeled with a Pateirian symbol that the auctioneer translated as “Gu”. It supposedly contained an immensely potent insect that could instantly allow someone to become a powerful cultivator if they consumed it.

She chose not to bid on it, being suspicious of anything to do with Pateirian merchants.

At the end of the day, the auction turned out to primarily be a way to wring money out of those with more cash than sense, with a sliver of possibility towards more serious ends.

It was here, after the auction, that Zelsys finally took her opportunity, and used the passphrase.

“The red sun rises over bloodstained peaks.”

The auctioneer, in all his superhuman sleaziness, smiled at her, stating, “Just a moment.”

He returned with a sealed-up envelope.

“Here you are. We look forward to your patronage.”

The envelope itself had instructions written on the back, instructing the reader not to open it until the listed date, and stating that the map within would burn up after twelve hours.

“Looks like we’ve got our ticket to the Meat Market.”

A rhythmic knocking pattern on the door. A familiar, professional voice.

“May I come in?”

Karmesin sighed, dragging herself out of the depths of meditation into full consciousness. For all the benefits of no longer needing to sleep, she almost missed it, taking a few hours each night to meditate as a replacement. Even this brief respite from her accursed existence, it seemed, would be denied to her tonight.

She stepped out of her bed, donning her smalls and lazily draping her cloak around herself. It barely covered anything the way she preferred to wear it, but it didn’t matter in a private setting such as this, given the identity of the man beyond the door. Her left foot, a prosthetic of gold-lined blackstone, clacked annoyingly against the marble floor tiles.

“Enter!” she commanded, striding across the room towards a table upon which sat two brass chalices and a simple bottle full of blue liquid, one of the stabilizing seals cleverly doubling as a label. It read “Tengri’s Tears”, the first half of that name being a Kargarian word for a clear, blue sky as well as an old, traditional sky deity. A small stamp on the label marked it as something produced in concert with the Krishorn Clan, a dominant Kargarian mercantile family. An unassuming man in an unassuming martial arts outfit slipped in, instantaneously closing the door behind himself while carrying a metal Tablet in one hand. A mass-produced form of a previously rare and expensive luxury, this model primarily a storage device. Another convenience of Ikesia’s industry that Karmesin had embraced, while her Occupationist peers publicly decried anything produced by the country’s surviving industry… While still investing in that same industry, in an effort to subvert and take control of it company by company.

Similar products from the southern Free Cities Alliance had begun flooding Ikesia’s unoccupied territories in recent months, sold en-masse in places exactly like Arches to smugglers who exported them to occupied regions and resold them at massive profit. Karemsin poured herself a chalice, taking a sip.

A new elixir imported from the far south that invigorated the body and mind alike without the side effects of older alternatives.

The man walked over to the same table, the Tablet producing its meager vortex of Fog from which he retrieved a bottle of the self-same liquid. Then, another, and a third. It was Tian Meng. A broker from Pateiria’s own Land of Lingering smoke, a ghost in human skin, so unassuming he looped back around to being extraordinary in his own way.

Karmesin would’ve demanded an explanation for a disturbance at this time of night, had it been anyone else. However, Tian Meng was not the sort to ever do such things without reason. The elixir delivery was obviously just a matter of convenience. This man - Tian Meng - this actual nobody, had exhibited more professionalism and loyalty in her months working with him than all of her highborn, honor-obsessed superiors ever had. He finally piped up when she had drunk most of the liquid in her chalice.

“One of our agents in Scarlet Silk Road just confirmed the presence of Zelsys and Zefaris Newman, together with a Borean and two pupils of the Duma School. Zelsys directly challenged the knight captain, forced him to transform during their match, severely damaged his liver, and sawed off his horns as a submission tactic. She was later spotted near one of the suspected Red Locust Bandit auction locations.”

A deeply-rooted murderous impulse surged within the Lady in Red at the mention of that name: Zelsys. It had been bad enough, seeing those pulps that so callously fictionalized the true events leading up to the death of Karmesin’s past self, those books that so maliciously, so accurately characterized her past self as no more than a puppet for the Locust Queen. It didn’t exactly help that Karmesin hadn’t been able to stop herself from reading both books, out of a desire to know even a fictionalized account of events outside her perspective. But knowing that Zelsys was here, very nearly within reach… It incensed her very nearly beyond reason.

Despite the seething, all-consuming grudge that had caught fire anew within her, Karmesin retained self-control. To show up, humiliate the knight captain, and just vanish seemingly into thin air: It was exactly as obnoxious as she had expected those two to be. The last time she’d seen either Zelsys or Zefaris, she was still more or less a parasite-ridden mind-slave, in the core chamber of a particular dungeon down south, but what little of her past self remained was consumed by the desire to kill that homunculus. It had been the actions of Zelsys that had driven the Locust Queen to such desperate measures as forcibly imbuing her lieutenants - Karmesin among them - with the primordial essence of the Dungeon Core, and it had been through that damned homunculus’ victory that Karmesin had been driven to retreat, unwittingly subjecting herself to the Dungeon Core’s whims when she used a teleportation talisman to flee through the Sea of Fog.

“It would be foolish to interrupt the enemy when they are doing my work for me,” she uttered as she crumpled the chalice into a hunk of scrap metal. “However, once that work is done… There may be a prime opportunity to exploit their battle fatigue.”

She would yet get to fulfill the promise she’d made to Zelsys back in that dungeon; the promise to kill her the next time they met. It was only a question of how long it took her to find the correct opportunity.

Death had no grip on her, after all. The accursed Dungeon Core had made sure of that, in its ever-so-cruel choice to purge her of everything the Locust Queen had afflicted her with except for her imbuement with the Dungeon Core’s own eternal essence. A part of her believed such a feat to have been beyond even the Core’s reach, such a deeply-rooted corruption of body and soul alike; her brain and nervous system had been completely crystallized into a magickal construct akin to the Core itself, sections of it erupting outward after running out of space to grow. Those crystalline horns jutting from her hairline were proof of what she was, a one-of-a-kind abomination born from a combination of the modern and the ancient.

Her reward was the inability to die lest her brain be destroyed, and the power to wield a magick akin to the Dungeon Core’s own functions. She drew in a breath, burning her lungs’ contents to extrude a short-lived construct solely for the purpose of reaching across the room and picking up a pipe that she’d bought from a passing-through Kargarian merchant. She filled it by hand and lit it with a snap of her fingers, toking from it in an effort to calm herself down.

Once, a rudimentary feat like this had caused her intolerable pain, her innermost being threatening to splinter and split open from the resonance of her horns. What little remained of her past self was utterly appalled at what she’d become, eagerly walking a path that entirely circumvented everything the Emperor would have deemed an acceptable form of cultivation.

But then, Red had already chosen to serve the Empire’s best interests according to the Divine Maxims, guidelines the Emperor himself had drafted for the running of his Empire before it was even founded. Red had chosen to pledge her loyalty to the Maxims, rather than the Emperor's current, misguided state of mind.

“Manufactured paragon, embodiment of scientific triumph…” she sighed a smoke-filled breath, picking up a pulp with the image of Zelsys printed on the cover. “By the Maxims, how I resent that this monstrosity is the only person I feel true kinship for. Perhaps when I kill you I’ll feel strongly enough to weep.”

She sighed, turning to her servant.

“Inform all of our lookouts of the trio’s appearance. No confrontation, no active trailing - just have them report back as soon as possible. If they take a contract, buy something, walk by an agent’s storefront, I want to know it within the hour. If Zelsys is pursuing the path I think she is, we may yet have our slavery troubles dealt with without moving a finger… Just make sure the duke stays in the dark.”

“Yes, Lady Karmesin.”

Victor was welcomed to the land of the living by a splitting headache, a mouth as dry as a mausoleum, and two parts of a ridiculous getup hanging from one of his chairs. Going through the motions of his morning routine with all the half-asleep clumsiness of a necrogolem, he found himself reflecting on the previous night, particularly the tail-end of it all, though he was unable to fully scour the revolting memory of that mnemonic record from his mind’s eye. He had a good reason to pick out such a ridiculous outfit, beyond just wanting to mimic Zel’s mode of dress. It was so ridiculous, so beyond any reasonable sense of fashion, that he would have no choice but to make it work by actually acting with the same self-assured confidence that Zelsys seemed to exude without even trying. Victor feared that, once his momentarily-elevated state faded, he’d only be left with a smoldering hatred for the knight captain and the same schizoid urges as usual, so he figured he might as well dress in a way that would give him no choice but to act the way he wished to act, lest he look like a total fucking tool.