Jose recoiled at the cacophonous thrumming of the morning bells that rang through the colony, his body preemptively tensing up to the expectation of another work day so soon after a weekend.

In groggy apprehension he lifted himself up from bed and looked through his schedule. The cabal was expecting a shipment from a caravan today.

Always an interesting haul with their shipments, if time consuming.

“rrrrrRRONKKK.” His partner, Emma, cut through the momentary silence with a snore. She was fast asleep and likely enjoying the respite of being able to sleep in without him, stretching her body to take up all of the bed the moment he got up.

Jose shook his head with a bemused smile and gathered his things at his bedside. His Archivist vestments were neatly folded on his work desk.

He dressed himself in that familiar navy overcoat, feeling its many pockets to find the torch in its rightful place. His work pants clung to his skin and provided comfort from the cold; a momentary disservice to his commute considering the oppressive humidity and ambient heat of the outside world.

He pushed away his work thoughts and focused on the cube on his nightstand, the core glimmering a faint blue. Today’s puzzle arrangement and yesterday's statistics were registered in the cube.

Jose took a deep breath and pressed his fingers on the cube, extending his soul out and into the device. His senses explored the contents of the device, attempting to decipher the contents of today's labyrinth. His essence slinked and slithered through pathways and doubled back from dead ends as quickly and efficiently as he could, beads of sweat forming on his brow from the effort. Once he felt that satisfying click in his mind, he opened his eyes and saw the affirming green light. A panel of light shined in the air and displayed his solve time, his errors, and methods of improvement in a simple manner. His overall growth chart showed promise. Satisfied with his performance, Jose placed the cube back on the nightstand and finished the rest of his morning routine.

“Good morning and goodbye.” Jose whispered into Emma’s ear before kissing her forehead and leaving for work.

He was greeted with the afterglow of the crystalline sky, a brilliant shade of orange from the sun intermingling with the deep violets of the crystal structures above to cast a dazzling hue on the cloud tops and oversized leaves of the mangrove trees. Even though the ground was stationary, he could see that Ileah was moving at a steady pace south, the deep drone of its core and metallic appendages wading through the mire.

He slapped the back of his neck. Pulling his hand away revealed a mosquito squashed on the palm of his hand. Soul or blood variant was indiscernible to him, he merely wiped its carcass on his work pants and made his commute south to the square proper. The walk was surprisingly pleasant with the movement of the Ileah colony catching a nice windstream providing intermittent relief to the oppressive humidity of the surrounding swamplands.

“Jose!” A voice called out from another cottage path. Lysa ran towards him in her own Archivist vestments, with small accoutrements pinned haphazardly to the cloth. “What, you’re just gonna walk on to work without waiting for me?”

“If you’re not waiting at the crossroads by this point, I can only assume you’re being held up at home.” Jose insinuated, making space on the walking path for his wide shouldered friend.

“Don’t give me that shit. Our mornings are as much a priority to me as the time spent getting ready with Nora and Ollie.” Lysa remarked. Jose shrugged, holding his tongue from saying something he’d regret. Regardless of the interaction, he faintly smiled once Lysa joined up with him on the path to work.

The rest of the cabal would interject with their own perspectives once he riled her up at work anyway, so best to save the discussion for then.

“Any guesses on what we’re gonna deal with in the office? We’re expecting a shipment of items from the Mire Men Caravan, so my bets are on waterlogged pipes and natural amber soaked cores.”

“Can we not talk about work this early in the morning and just enjoy the peace of this all?” Jose waved his hands across the idyllic grassy plains, winding paths all centralizing towards the city center with its equally rustic architecture. Moss covered the stone-laid buildings with interwoven vine patterns doubling as natural art pieces and natural reinforcements for potential gale force winds that might malign the community.

Lysa gave Jose a pout and crossed her arms, “Hm! Fine, whatever. Crotchety little piece of...” Her protests devolved into grumbles. Seeing as how Jose wasn’t giving in today, she pulled out her journal and shot a message. Feeling a ping in his pocket from his own journal, and several pings after as they approached the cityscape meant the rest of his group was indulging in Lysa’s speculative guesses.

No skin off his teeth; crotchety or not, talking about work so early in the morning on a pleasant walk was the last thing he wanted to do.

The two of them walked through the shopping district with storefronts just beginning to open up to their early rising customers. The scent of fresh bread and fried croquettes left a hungering pang in his stomach. He took a sip from his thermos, warm coffee and milk holding off the need to eat until later in the day.

“Well if you won’t talk about work, do you want to talk about some of the rumors going around Ileah?” Lysa stared at Jose long enough that he relented to the conversation.

So much for peace and quiet.

“What rumors are going around? I've been living inside a tree.”

“Well, I heard from Nora that the rest of the Vanguard team had found something in one of their sweeps.” Jose perked up at the information. He made a mental note to ask Emma for more information whenever he clocked out and got home. “They found sections of a vessel encased in mangrove roots. They were only able to explore the layer above ground but they’re guessing that accessing the other sections of the vessel should be as simple as swimming below.”

“Any identifiers for what the vessels' name used to be? Or its function?”

Lysa looked at Jose with a toothy grin, “I knew you’d bite. Get this, it looks like it used to be a forge vessel.”

A forge vessel! He yelped. There were a number of mobile fortresses that specialized in forging and even that discipline had its subsections, but their migration patterns were tied to the needs of the Kingdom of Odalla. Ileah needed to fill itself with a majority of its forging needs before their trek through the swamplands and subsist off of the scrap and core sweeps performed by the Vanguard team.

Finding a forge vessel like this meant any number of things. If its specialization didn’t require external components, the waterlogged forging device could be extracted and assimilated into their own fortress core. Whether it crafted raw materials or usable magic items, Ileah could repurpose what was workable and salvage the rest for a sizable chunk of change.

“Is the salvage point on path or would we have to veer off course to gain access to it?” Jose asked.

Lysa shrugged, “Nora wasn’t sure. They left a beacon on it yesterday and planned to consult with the helmsman of Ileah on the course. She feels like anchoring at the salvage point wouldn’t leave us far off course, but that’s for the helmsman to decide. Or for the Elders to overrule.”

There was a cautious optimism that rose in Jose, something that he often suppressed when talking about the world outside Ileah. If the course wasn’t out of the way, there’s no doubt the helmsman and the rest of the Council would make the salvage point a point of interest. If it was too out of the way, they’d mark it on the maps and chart a course for it in the next migration cycle. If we could veer off course for it though… it meant that they’d need to send a scouting party to get the goods.

And if that happened, Jose wanted to be on that ride.

“You lookin’ to snag a spot on the expedition crew?” Lysa raised an eyebrow. Jose shook his head no.

“I’d like to but I know better than that…” He sighed and walked a little faster to work, his meandering now spoiled from the hope in his heart.

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They reached the Annals with time to spare. The building was the city's quiet pride and joy, an expansive structure with colorful stained glass windows and steeples more reminiscent of a church than an institution of arcane knowledge. It wasn’t as massive as the Town Hall or as dense as Vanguard HQ but held itself as a beacon of intellect for the rest of the community. Jose pulled out his key card and entered the facility, the cold chill nipping at his skin even through his attire.

“Fuck, why do they keep it so cold!” Lysa shivered, rubbing her arms in a self-hug. It was more uncomfortable going from the warming humidity of the outdoors into the frigid conditions within the building and no amount of time spent working at the Annals changed that. The Overseer had explained why they kept conditions the way they did but it wasn’t a valid enough justification in Jose’s eyes to allow for flecks of ice to form on their skin.

Maybe he was exaggerating a bit but the contrast made it feel that way, the cold sweat clinging onto his skin.

“Come on. Let’s meet up with the rest of the cabal before our shifts start.” Jose motioned for Lysa to let go and the two walked their way through narrow halls to their respective workshop.

The workshop was a massive square room with a U-shaped conveyor belt at the end, a metal item chute, a large rectangular operating table, smaller work stations for each member of the cabal complete with seats and lamp lights, and decorations on each workstation courtesy of each member of the team.

“Good morning Jose. Good morning Lysa.” A diminutive and tired voice called out from their workstation, a smorgasbord of radiant flowers and elegant insect displays juxtaposing a sullen, black cladded woman. Laura’s shoulders drooped, her eyes were at half mast with deep circles under them. She yawned and waved for them to come over to her work station. “Take a look at this…” she pointed to an Archivist’s Digest magazine in her journal, the title of the article in question being ‘My theory on Hollow’s.”

What a load of crocshit.

“I just read the first few bits and it got me thinking about items and the differences between them,” Laura closed the magazine and pulled out two similar looking metallic pipes; the sigils written on the ring at the lips of these pipes suggested they were arcane in nature, “These two pipes effectively look the same and their function is just to make light but one has an Aspect to be bound to and the other doesn’t.”

Jose followed her train of thought and interjected, “So you’re wondering why these items needed to be different? If we’re going by the patterns of discovery for an Aspected item, adventurers only find those kinds in the wild with Hollow items being artificial. But-”

Laura interjected, “But not all items in the wild have an Aspect to them, meaning there should be some other purpose behind it. Or a method for us to simulate one…” She trailed off, placing the items away to dive back into the rag she was reading.

“Does it matter that one has an Aspect and the other doesn’t?” Lysa piped up. She wasn’t all that interested in the literary component of her position, preferring to have her questions answered by her peers or learning about these theories through trial and error in the testing chamber.

“One requires less effort on the soul to activate than the other. Even if we’re not using the Aspect attached to the item, our soul needs to envelop a wider amount of space than the other to activate the same function.” Laura responded in a mechanical fashion. It seemed she took her job more seriously than Lysa did.

“These easily accessible items might act as a crutch for Hollow folk since their ability to manipulate the soul is less refined.” Jose added an aspect of his own theory to the discussion. From personal experience, the ability for him to manipulate his soul to learn some applied techniques varied from exercise to exercise, but even the tasks he ‘mastered’ were decent when compared to his non-Hollowed counterparts.

Sure, he could make bonds with more items and familiars than the average person, but without the refinement necessary to create, maintain, and utilize those bonds, he would always be set at a disadvantage.

Their talk of items and Hollows petered out once Radolfo came in, his slicked back black hair and charismatic demeanor filling the office with an ambient hope and excitement for the work day.

“Good morning, good morning, my wonderful friends and Jose,” Radolfo went around and hugged everyone, the scent of his cologne a pungent aroma of ocean breezes, “From what Lysa sent on our cabal chat, we’re getting some new shipments today. And from what I’ve been hearing through the grapevine, it might even be stuff from that forge vessel.” He raised his eyebrows at everyone, expectant for a reply.

Jose bit the bait, “I doubt it’s anything from the forge vessel. Lysa mentioned the Caravan coming in were the Mire Men. They are on friendly terms with us but they’re not a part of our colony. I doubt they’d have gone on a mission with our Vanguard to such a drop point even if we hired them as mercenaries.” The politics of colony sanctioned Caravans and independent Caravans were precarious enough that Jose didn’t like to commit much of his time to learning about those intricacies. That political sphere didn’t influence his life beyond what his workload was going to be so anything beyond a cursory understanding was overkill.

Radolfo leaned on the table and looked either way at imaginary eavesdroppers, “I agree with you, but what if I told you that the Mire Men were the ones that gave us the intel on the vessel? What kind of Caravan would willingly give a colony that kind of info, especially one that they’re unaffiliated with?” The group considered the question before Radolfo gave his own answer, “They’d only do such a thing if they’d already checked that nothing of value was in there. Why waste time on a drop that yields no fruit,” He leaned away from them all and shook his head, “They get in the good graces of the Council for appearing selfless and if anything is found, they can claim initial selection even after we’ve committed to the work of clearing it out and excavating the site.”

“But what makes you think that the Council hasn’t already thought of that situation? They wouldn’t just enter into an agreement on that and waste resources if it wasn’t a net positive for the colony.” Lysa challenged Radolfo to disagree.

He gave her a coy smirk, “Frankly, I think that they are underplaying the severity of our stockpile. I’m sure you two have been paying attention to how often our Vanguard have been out there hunting game and eradicating Nests. If the drop point’s within route, they might be desperate enough to agree to the Mire Men’s conditions if it means a greater economic stockpile for the next cycle.” Radolfo gave a noncommittal shrug, downplaying his own investment in the situation. “Those are my two cents anyway. I’m frankly excited to see what kind of items we do get.”

A bell inside of their shared workspace dinged and the conveyor belt light shined a brilliant green. The hatch opened up and their first shipment came in on the workshop table. There were numerous water logged pipes with scratched sigils at a glance. There were a few natural amber soaked cores, glistening with an orange glossy membrane. There were a few other unexpected trinkets; a memory map, a dagger, and an egg shaped device. Curiously, there was also a Grimoire in the pile, its pages bound in lichen covered tree bark and stone and an elegant if weathered symbol of a blossom.

Jose casually inspected the book. The pages within had the same texture that leaves had.

Lysa elbowed Jose, “See, look what I told you. All pipes and amber cores. That’s how it goes with these Mire Men.” Her fist was bundled with multiple pipes, gathering a handful to bring back to her own desk for inspection and maintenance. Laura made no statement, merely grabbing the memory map and the egg shaped device and silently bringing them to her desk.

“Ah, but it’s peculiar that they’d have something like this grimoire or that dagger around. I’m sure that even Jose would find it strange to see a Grimoire out here in the Great Glades.” Jose kept quiet but he didn’t disagree. The Great Glades were known to house heretics and bog folk, people dedicated to mutilating the soul or grafting souls to one's own. Not even considering the environmental conditions in a swamp not being conducive to keeping bound books from sloughing off its bindings.

Jose placed the book on his desk. He pulled out a pair of glasses and began reading through the tome, struggling to decipher the title and its magical focus all the way until his lunch break.