Chapter 41.1: Time Up
If there was anything Christoff Veritas really knew, it was biding time. In some ways, his whole life had been a matter of biding time, just an endless series of events he’d waited for. While his father had lived, he’d sustained the man’s unrelenting training, just waiting for the day he’d perfect the spellcraft of the Veritas bloodline. He’d endured the man’s increasingly incompetent oversight of their Mantle cell, patiently postponing his own ambitions while the doddering old man continued to draw breath. He’d waited for an opportunity just to touch the creations of the Unseen Ones, and since that day had come in the unexpected hands of the sylvari vigilman, he’d been waiting to find its source. And now? Now he bode his time until he had enough of that prize to construct the first jade slave his people had seen in over two-hundred years. But there was still a hurdle—a series of hurdles, in fact, and they just kept mounting.
Surrounded by asura engineers frantically scurrying about at Vadd’s instruction, Christoff stood at one of their diminutive workstations, calculating. He ran a slow finger along the ridge of scar tissue that cut down the left side of his face, recognizing again that not one of them paid him any mind.
The small swarm of big-eared engineers around him were working at the hulking monster of a golem that Kikka had pressured them to finish; they’d been at it for days, with hardly any sleep. Vadd and his assistants had successfully assembled the skeleton and internals of the construct some days past, and now, with Christoff’s help, they’d gotten the agony-magic cannon docked in place at the center of the thing’s torso. It seemed it was just a matter of locking down the remaining pieces of armor plating around the construct’s magitechnical innards. When they weren’t working too frantically to speak, the asura spoke of the thing like it was some technological marvel born of their collective genius. Perhaps Christoff would have agreed, had it not been for the Unseen One magic that he himself had helped them harness to make it possible. He’d had no alternative, but for that reason alone, the monstrosity was an utter bastardization of the gifts his gods had given to Kryta. It roiled him just to think about it.
Still, Christoff held his tongue and waited; timing was everything. That had been the truth so many years past, and it remained the truth now as he glanced up at that massive abomination still hooked to the wall. He wiped the sweat from his brow.
The one difference between timing his father’s forced passing and plotting this current situation, however, was the external time constraint. With his father, the only deadline Christoff had had to contend with was any other end the short-sighted tyrant might have met before Christoff could poison him, something that could only have helped him reach his goals faster. Now, though, in this cave of a laboratory, Christoff faced down an unavoidable deadline, the one Kikka had placed them under. She’d given her people only three days to finish their work, and those days were up. That reality was driving the babbling team of asura nearly insane with fear, but they were closer to completing their work than even that wretch Kikka could ignore. Amidst it all, Christoff had hoped a perfect opportunity for his plans would have presented itself, but it hadn’t, and now he was down to the wire.
He flashed a glance at the other team of asura behind him, packing little, floating, pill-shaped golems into crates for shipment. Inside of them, he knew, was the rest of his siphoned Unseen One magic, enough to power a dozen agony-canons—or one jade armor, like his forebears had done generations past. That was his goal, and he needed both the golemites and the remaining, depowered jade to accomplish it, but he knew he couldn’t move either of them on his own. He’d been working the problem internally for days now, and there was no way he saw around the need for additional manpower, which meant that before he could claim and escape with what was rightfully his, he had to free his people. All three pieces of the puzzle could be accomplished in time, he knew, but time was no longer on Christoff’s side: the deadlines were up, Kikka was shipping those pill-shaped golemites today, and if he didn’t act, there was no telling when or if Christoff would ever get the chance again. He had to create his opportunity.
He came to himself, standing amid the flow of asuran traffic, engineers and assistants streaming past him on their way to whatever they were each working on—Christoff didn’t care what it was. Each of them altered course around the frozen human, but no one paid him any mind.
Christoff’s focus moved beyond the insolent rats to the steel doors across the lab. With all that had been happening here, no one in Kikka’s krewe had been through those doors all day. That was convenient, as his first step lay just a bit beyond them, in that macabre room Kikka called a test chamber. He knew that much.
The thought of that infernal sylvari caught in his sickly-green test cylinder was pleasant in a way, however much the bandit chief detested him. It had been a headache keeping the vigilman alive for those three days, repeatedly persuading the asura to delay testing the weapon on him until the golem’s completion, but any good escape needed a distraction, and the elementalist in a room full of deranged beasts would be his. The people of this facility prided themselves on their knowledge of chaos, but Christoff Veritas would give them a master’s lesson in the subject.
Of course, even that step of the plan had a necessary antecedent that he was working out.
Christoff shifted his gaze to Vadd, who stood hunched a few yards to his right, tapping out some sort of inane data on one of his many terminals. Watching him, Christoff slipped a hand into his pocket and thoughtlessly ran a finger along the crisp, wavy edge of a jade shard nestled there among its brothers.
Vadd kept on at his work, utterly oblivious to Christoff’s hungry gaze. Unless the human was invited to speak into a problem the myopic asura was actively, obsessively working on, Vadd paid the man no more mind than anyone else did. Veritas was virtually a ghost wandering around their facility
It was a sort of irony that only Kikka, that conceited wretch, was the only person in the complex who seemed the least bit wary of Christoff’s capabilities. She’d confined him to that cell for all those days; she had had him under guard even when alongside her; and she had baited him along with false dealings, always keeping him just under control. But now that she’d released him into the care of these technical lackeys, they all but ignored him. Too busy elsewhere, Kikka rarely appeared, and when she did, he still received nothing more than sidelong, mistrustful glances. In only days, he’d gone from her greatest asset to just another nuisance. And no one else here considered him even that.
Hand still in his pocket, Christoff felt the sharp sliver of jade again, gripping it for just a moment as he continued pondering its use. Then he touched the next. And then the next. The thrum of magic inside each of the three shards was weak but no less intoxicating, and the man couldn’t help but grin. It was another expression that no one else noticed.
Yes, after a few days’ work, he’d gotten the Unseen Ones’ magic back inside those shards.
After Kikka had shoved the energy-drained jade in his face, Christoff had been furious enough to kill, but he set his mind instead on a solution, collecting any fragments spilled in her krewe’s haphazard departure from the lab. Aside from the shard he’d clutched near to bleeding at Kikka’s revealed treachery, Christoff found two more fallen from the cart, and that was when he’d realized what to do with them.
The whole mountain of jade had been drained of its power, that was true, but the power that had been removed was the very same that now pulsed through the technology Christoff was helping the asura build. It was the very same power he’d controlled by will during their testing and the same power he’d spent his youth learning to weave into jade. He may not have had enough of either to form a full construct, but he did have enough to craft a few, small, agonizing weapons, and weapons were the backbone of opportunity.
Weapons and surprise, actually. Those were the starting point of every good plot, and among these arrogant, dismissive people, Christoff had both.
He released his tightening grip on the shards and glanced at the technicians milling about him before settling his gaze again on Vadd. Yes, the lead engineer was his starting point, and stabbing that hatchet-faced, little snob would be a fun start to the plan.
It was nearly time for the waiting to stop, and still no one paid him any mind.
