After finalising her deal with the king and securing a large shipment of raw materials in return for a batch of weapons and standard ammunition, leaving him to discuss the specialty ammo with his remaining nobility before they agree to any numbers, Emily heads up into the main Dome with one of Arthur's guards, Gwen, to meet their mechanic candidates. The reticent guard leads her to one of the institute's classrooms, where they find thirty men, women, and teenagers waiting for them. Their heads all turn to the door as the two mages walk in, and Emily reads the boredom etched across most of their faces, with only a few of the adults looking at her with respect.

"Who're you?" one of the teenagers, a boy who looks to be sixteen with cropped black hair and sharp green eyes, asks. "Another candidate for this fancy project they won't tell us about?"

Emily raises a brow and glances at Gwen.

"You haven't told them why they're here?"

"We weren't sure they'd all be successful," the guard replies, her voice coming out surprisingly soft from her shadowed cowl. "So, we only explained the purpose of this meeting to those who needed to be persuaded away from their previous posts."

"Ah." Emily nods, turning back to her audience. "Well, I'm not a candidate, I'm the one here to awaken you all. Or at least try."

Everyone watching perks up at that, the boredom in their expressions quickly being replaced by excitement as they recognise the meaning of an awakening from Arthur's recent announcement.

"We're gonna be mages?" the same boy who questioned her before asks.

"Not quite. I wouldn't be wasting my time if that were all," Emily scoffs, raising her mechanical hand and letting out a stream of machina that draws every eye in the room. "If you succeed, you're going to be Modo's first generation of awakened mechanics."

Most of the group nod in understanding, but a few people snort in derision and mutter complaints under their breath.

"Way to get my hopes up," the vocal boy grumbles louder than the rest, slumping back in his chair with a scowl. "I thought I was gonna be magic, not follow in my shitty old man's footsteps."

Emily closes the distance between the door and the boy's seat at the front of the room in the blink of an eye, ejecting a long blade from her left palm and pressing it to his throat before he can react. Tense silence falls over the room as everyone stares, wide-eyed, at the long silver blade crackling with machina.

"You'll be following in no one's footsteps but my own," Emily says, knocking her blade against the boy's chin before retracting it and stepping back. "Mechanics are no less than mages, just a little different. You've all been offered a privilege by being here, and you'd do well to remember that. You can leave if you want. I won't stop you, but I won't be offering again if you turn your back now."

She slowly looks over everyone's faces as she walks back to the empty space at the front of the room, letting her words sink in. A girl near the back of the room, who looks like she could be anywhere from fourteen to eighteen, with soft features and her shoulders tucked in self-consciously, raises her hand. Emily nods towards her.

"Y- You never said who you are?" she says, her voice so quiet that those next to her have to lean in to hear.

"I'm Emily Coldstone."

Several people gasp, and the boy she threatened begins sweating, slowly raising a hand to massage his undamaged throat.

"I'm a technomancer, a dual awakened mage and this planet's first mechanic, and I made a deal with the king to spread my unique vocation. So, any complaints now?" she asks, watching the mechanic candidates shaking their heads. "No? Good. Let's get this over with then. I'm going to inject machina into your bodies to induce an awakening, so simply relax and don't try to resist. This may hurt a bit, but if it looks like you're unable to awaken, I'll stop before doing any permanent damage."

Emily releases a cloud of charge, blanketing the room in her energy and designating a thread to each candidate. She watches in close detail as her energy slips into their bodies, and their pained grunts fill the room.

After a few seconds, over half of them start drawing the energy in themselves, including the vocal boy and the quiet girl. She stops supplying machina to those that don't begin the awakening process and casts Healing Light, blanketing them in cool white light that soothes the light electrical burns tracing their skin.

It takes a few minutes and most of Emily's machina supply to finish awakening twenty-two new mechanics, and when she's finished, she nods to Gwen before turning on her heel and leaving, heading straight for the closest transportation circle. She travels to the alchemy hallway and scans for Ivor's magic signature, finding him alone in one of the small labs that she then approaches, setting a hand against the locked door.

"Open." She casts an elementless spell that locates the runes binding the door shut, temporarily weakening them, letting her push the door open without resistance.

Stepping in, Emily finds Ivor standing over a cauldron with absolute focus, his hands resting on the sides and his eyes shut as he eliminates the impurities within. She shuts the door quietly and leans against the wall, waiting for him to finish and scanning through the tools and materials scattered across the nearby workbench, trying to work out what he's brewing.

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Acradine, burnroot, eartworn, black iron shavings, powdered ellelite tusks, desert crawler shells, and thrasher tendons… Curious, I haven't heard of a brew using all of those. Is he creating something new? A healing potion of some form?

She begins simulating the brewing process in her mind, using the processing power of several cores and dozens of threads. After twenty minutes of watching, Ivor clicks his tongue and opens his eyes, reaching for the cauldron's lid.

"You may want to try switching the crawler shells with a mantolyc's: it'll have a better compatibility with the eartworn," Emily says, watching the man jump in surprise as he looks over, only just noticing the other presence in the room.

He lets out a sigh and puts the lid back down, frowning at the acrid cloud of fumes that hits him from his failed brew.

"I would if I could find any," he signs. "There hasn't been any in the market since our last expedition."

Emily waves a hand, drawing a thin purple mist from her belt and setting a torso-sized sheet of black chitin on his workbench. Ivor's eyes light up as he reaches a hand towards the material, brushing his fingers against it before rapping it with his knuckles and listening to the tinny echo.

"Thank you."

"Don't mention it." Emily shrugs, pushing off the wall and approaching him. "I don't currently have any need for it, and I'll likely get more on my next trip into The Crystal Waters. Speaking of, I came to let you know that I'll be looking to go back in about two months, and to give you this."

She holds out a Communicator, already linked to hers and those she gave to Dante and Enzo.

"I'd run out last time I saw you, but I've had some free time to make more," she explains. "They're a more advanced form of communicator that will work across all of Modo and New Denntimo thanks to my relay nodes."

"Thanks," Ivor signs, tapping away at the sleek tablet for a few moments before slipping it into the spatial pouch at his waist and grinning up at her. "I was wondering why E and the pyro got gifts and I didn't."

"Clearly, I like them more," Emily says as she moves to help Ivor clean up his workspace and set up for another experiment, drawing a soundless chuckle from him.

"I knew you picked favourites!" he nods resolutely, ignoring her resulting eye roll. "Anyway, do you have spares for J and the twins? I can deliver them if you'd like, then we can plan our meeting more easily."

"Sure." Emily passes him three more communicators before tapping the side of the cauldron of failed potion. "Do you need this? If not, I'll happily take it off your hands."

"No, you can have it. What use do you have for a failed brew, though?"

"Test materials. I want to see if it's possible to reverse the brewing process and extract anything useful from the spent ingredients."

She uses a wave of water mana to lift and compress the muddy-brown liquid, depositing it into a jar that she seals and tucks into her belt.

"Right, I'm off then," Emily says, heading for the door as Ivor begins prepping his next round of ingredients. "See you later."

***

After recharging her reserves in one of The Dome's mana-gathering chambers, Emily warps herself back to her factory in the desert, appearing in the centre of the gathering array among the swirling winds. Silica lifts her head from where she's curled up in a ball, bathing in the churning mana, and yips out a greeting.

Emily walks over and scratches behind her ears before leaving the array and making for one of the nearby metal buildings to begin setting up more production lines. Pod comes to find her when she's halfway through constructing a multi-armed assembler to put together the completed pieces of A4 assault rifles.

"How'd it go?" he asks, taking the cables trailing from the machine and helping route them to the plugs in the floor at the centre of the gun's production line.

"We have a bulk shipment of materials being delivered to Reindon in a few days, and an order to turn them into a few thousand of each weapon I offered," Emily replies, using a chisel of metal mana to set the cables Pod's leading into the ground without looking.

"Nice. Do you want me to go grab them, or should I send Calypso?"

"Take Calypso and the ships you've finished so far. There's too much for one ship to carry, and it's a good chance to test your work against the sandstorm."

"Got it."

They continue their work in silence until Pod returns to his work modifying their merchant fleet. After completing the lines for half of the weapons she promised the king, Emily starts to run low on materials. She leaves the production building and steps back out into the storm that never stays calm for more than a few hours at a time and has picked up again. She heads towards a hatch at the boundary of the gathering array and slips below the surface, making her way down into the artificial tunnel system below.

She drops into an open chute and descends past the whirring Wind Source and the half-formed, room-sized Logic Core that will control the base, aiming for the passages carved by burrower ants and reinforced with metal. The chambers dug out to support a colony have been repurposed into holding cells, packed with prisoners and lined with metal soldiers holding guns at the ready, loaded with shock rounds.

Emily casts Invisible Light, a spell made from a blend of light and darkness mana that illuminates the room only for the caster and those they've marked, and passes through the cells filled with the unawakened and low circle prisoners, heading straight to the deepest tunnels. She feels thick malice building up the further she goes, and, when she passes their third circle prisoners, she arrives at a heavy metal door, sealed with an electrical lock linked to a small keypad fixed to the wall beside it. She opens it with a spark of machina instead of entering the code, and steps into a chamber that seems to leech the light from her spell on contact, leaving her with only a dim, ominous glow to observe the space within.

Mensacus is sitting in the centre of the room with his eyes shut and his tentacles splayed, wrapped around their five fourth circle prisoners. All of them are limp and despondent, with black veins tracing their unnaturally pale flesh as Mensacus pumps them full of his malice, slowly working his way into their minds. The room itself is saturated with mana being delivered from the gathering array far above, allowing the mechanical chimaera to continue his work without breaks.

"How's it going?" Emily asks, shutting the door behind her and approaching Cora Hedera to take a scan of her current state.

"Slow," Mensacus hums, not opening his eyes. "Their minds are many times stronger than my last wendigo, even the coward's."

"How long do you think until they're onto the feeding stage?"

"A month, maybe a little longer for the siblings. They're stubborn."

"Good. That should give us a few weeks to get them stabilised enough for you to leave them and follow me to The Abyss."

One of her son's pitch-black eyes cracks open at the mention of his origin, and his lips part in an excited grin.

"I'll be ready," he hums.

Emily nods and scans the other subjects, noting the minute differences in the strength of their circles and the properties of their weakening skins. She turns to leave after gathering her data.

"Mother," Mensacus whispers before she can shut the door. "Could I have a snack?"

"Of course." She nods, leaving the door ajar as she walks back through the tunnels, sending a command to one of the metal soldiers watching the unawakened prisoners. She passes them a few moments later, dragging a man spitting obscenities down into the depths.

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