LIGHTNOVELONLINE 8 – Loot
Her first thought was light, and indeed, burning a smattering of Thauma and funneling it through her arm with the intent to produce light caused a reddish-orange glow to spill from its many crevices, illuminating the entire hallway with scattered rays. It staunchly refused to narrow into a usable beam, and feeding it more Thauma produced an unacceptably small light increase compared to how much heat and Entropy was produced, so she just let it go for now. At least, with some further experimentation, Krahe found she could easily produce a small flame from her left hand, a trick she had always wanted to do, but never could justify due to the space it would’ve taken up in her cybernetics.
“Now I just need hand-rolled au-naturale real-paper cigarettes,” she muttered with a melancholic smile, watching the flame as she walked, repeating word-for-word a cheesy line from an old B-grade gangster movie.
Soon, she reached the lab.
First things first, she washed her face in the sink and sat down behind the writing desk, taking more ammo from its topmost drawer so she would have one clip in the gun and three in hand’s reach, whilst also facing the room’s only entrance. She rifled through the desk’s other drawers. Most contained writing supplies, books, and journals, a majority of them indecipherable. Those which she could read were one of two categories: Maintenance manuals for the machines in this place, and anatomical books. The latter of the two groups were all marked as “Property of the Grafting Church, Audunpoint Branch”. Either the lab owner was a member, or not supposed to have these… Or the original owners could be defunct, she supposed.
As she went further, Krahe laid out anything vaguely interesting on the tabletop.
First came the gun’s ammunition, holster, and a gun maintenance kit, including a manual, a box filled with spare en-bloc clips and another filled with empty shell casings and bullet moulds. Instead of primers, the cartridges had arcane sigils. The manual’s cover gave up more than just the secret of the gun’s name:
Pattner Mod. 3 Lever Pistol
Prod. Series No. 1
5133 AB
1/72
On the inside was a hand-written dedication.
“To my good friend and generous benefactor, Audun Sorun. This gun wouldn’t exist were it not for you, it is only right that you have the first production model.”
From a brief skim-read, Krahe was delighted to find that the manual contained the gun’s blueprints and guides on how to produce new ammunition. Besides the ammo, she also found a rectangular slab of onyx or some other polished, stone-like material, thrumming with magic. The moment she picked it up, she felt a ping of newness; a new tab in her menu.
[STORAGE]
Excited by the prospect of being able to have things on-hand without needing to physically carry them, she mentally commanded the storage to open… Only to find that the tablet demanded Thauma. And so, she sat down, with the gun in her right hand and the tablet in her left, once more focusing on the idea of opening a window to that promised storage-space. Thauma surged in, igniting and flowing through her arm and out of the palm, setting the whole limb alight with the same ember-like glow she’d produced in the hallway.
Seconds became minutes. She felt a vague sense of progress, but with a bit of focus she managed to catch not only a more exact sense of how far along the storage-opening process was, but also how much Entropy she had; it was nearly done, and her Entropy was at around one quarter of her Tolerance, slowly rising.
With a noise like flesh tearing and glass cracking simultaneously, a hole in the world yawned open over the tablet’s reflective surface, a gaping void shimmering with iridescent shades of unreality. Meanwhile, in her mind’s eye, the [Storage] submenu opened. It was empty - weird, considering where she found the object. A few possibilities came to mind. It could have gone unused for some reason, perhaps being a backup, or each person had their own specific storage pocket to which the tablet merely served as a connecting terminal. The reason to keep things around physically was obvious - minutes of one’s time and a fair bit of effort to access the storage made it impractical for storing things one might need at a moment’s notice.
She tossed an ammo clip into the rift. It showed up on the list. One by one, she transferred all the ammo from the drawer into the storage dimension, keeping two clips on her person. Accounting for the five bullets in her gun, she had a total of seventy-one bullets. All of the firearm maintenance kit followed, and since she couldn’t find a belt of any sort, she stored away the gun’s holster as well.
Not as many as she would’ve liked, but it wasn’t as if she was reliant on ballistics anymore. She had half a mind to toss all of the books into storage as well, to just gut the whole place and take as much stuff as she could. However, she felt that the type of person to have a lab in a place like this would be far more likely to come after her over research materials than a handgun, unless firearms were extremely valuable in this world; she only took the anatomy book, as it had been buried deep enough and covered in enough dust that she figured it wouldn’t be missed and its absence wouldn’t be noticed right away. She chose to leave the other books behind, taking a few more minutes in this place of apparent safety to examine the other facets of her menu, closing the [Storage]. Putting down the tablet, she wondered what exactly was special about her left arm, what features it had and so on, just as she had thought about actual cyberware in her past life. Querying [Chernobog’s Mystic Wisdom], she found that it nudged her towards [Fleshgrafting].
There, she found not just her arm, but her bodysuit as well.
“Was this why the suit was the only thing that came with me? Can’t be just because it’s organic, half my cybernetics had organic components…” she thought, but didn’t dwell on it much longer, opening the detailed readout for her left arm.
