"Temporal stasis disengaged. All systems operational –Garlond?"
"All clear on this side! It's waking up..."
The background hum of Omega's control room had changedpitch, making the Miqo'te dragoon's ears twitch and swivel. There was somethingdifferent about the place, now that the two scientists had been tinkering withit. But... there was something else, too.
Striding forward, Lhei'to regarded the control console witha thoughtful frown, earning a laugh from Cid, "Come to do the honorsyourself, old friend?"
Instead of answering, he reached down, hooked his fingersunder the edge of the console, and lifted.
A creak of ancient hinges, a squawk of an outraged Garlean,and then Lhei'to was blinking into a small compartment full of a bewilderingarray of levers, buttons, and little screens... and a little dog sitting in aswivel-chair with a pair of headphones firmly on its head.
"So... it was you all along."
"Arf!"
A'khebica
"What the heck even is a 'miqo'te'?"
"H-hey give that back! It's not done yet!"
"Is this what you've been doing instead of studying forfinals? Writing fanfic?!"
"At ease, boy! The chirurgeons will have my ears if you so much as sit up. Just tell me what happened."
The young Ishgardian settled back against the cot, the bandages over his wounds a by-now-familiar discomfort. He'd been told they'd managed to save his eye, but he'd probably have a limp in his left leg after all this. The officer settled down on a nearby camp-stool and stirred the brazier a little to get some more warmth in the room. Outside, the weather was no worse than usual for the Western Highlands, but no better. They'd be cracking ice out of the wells come morning again, no doubt.
"Yes sir. You know my squad was set to patrol near Camp Riversmeet, sir?"
"Yes, I've read the reports from the Convictory and the patrol that found you. Now I want to know what you saw."
"Yes sir." A moment to gather his thoughts and his breath, the moan of the wind outside making him shiver even though he was plenty warm, and then the young soldier began his tale.
"We set out as usual, and it seemed like t'would be a dull patrol. Colder than the Fury's scorn, begging your pardon sir; even the wolves were staying in. But we thought worst we'd have is some frostbite, the way things were going."
Another pause, poorly masked as a stop for breath, the elezen's face having gone even paler than before, his throat working a moment, "Then we started finding people. Well, parts of them. Sir."
"Easy, son. So there'd been a battle?"
"Yes sir. At first we thought it might have been a dragon attack or an archaeornis or summat, they weren't... It was... Sir, I'm farmer stock, and I've seen cleaner butchering days. The only reason we didn't smell it coming was because even the blood was froze. The captain, he had a few lads check the... the bigger bits, we found a few rosaries. Were all set to be cheerful, damn heretics getting their due, but something was off."
"Howso?"
"Sir, begging your pardon, but I don't rightly know. T'was like something scratching the windowpane, like. A feeling. Then we found the Iron Wolf. Er, that outlander Miqo'te dragoon, I never learned his proper name."
"Tayuun, yes, I'm familiar with him in a vague sense."
"Sir, t'weren't natural nor sacred, what he were doing."
"Easy lad, calm down. What's all this then?"
"Sir, I... He'd taken one of the heretics, dragged him off a bit. Torn him open, fresh like, I could see the steam. He were holdin' th'man's heart and lookin' to the sky like he were waiting for summat. Th'captain, he tried t' get the Wolf's attention, called to him, but... Sir, Halone strike me dead if I lie, there were something there and it weren't no dragon or god."
"Did you see anything?"
"It reached down from the clouds."
The boy's unbandaged eye had gone wide, the pupil a mere pinprick, and he clawed at the sheets, starting to shake.
"He knew it. It knew him. We weren't supposed to be th-"
"NURSE!"
The seizure wasn't a bad one, but it left the soldier exhausted and senseless.
So I had a random thought about Lhei’to this morning, and it’s been gnawing at me all day off and on.
Namely, what if Lhei’to’s so bad at magic because he’s got the wrong aetheric setup for it? Not just low powered, but wrongly powered. Like his antenna’s tuned to the wrong station.
And then I got to thinking about what it might be like if he’s tuned to some other wavelength. No Haedalyn or her dark consort Zodiark, but something else entirely.
I need to stop injecting Lovecraftian themes into everything I encounter.
Just randomly thinking about nicknames my various characters might’ve picked up over the years.
Lhei’to’s default nickname seems to be “old man” or variations thereof, sometimes “grumpycat.” Lately I’ve also been thinking that with his operations out of Ishgard he’s started being called things like “the Iron Wolf” just based on the fact that he seems impossible to kill.
Khebi’s nicknames tend to run the gamut, but most seem to settle in the area of things like “kitten,” “button,” and similar “you are so small and cute” titles. “Fumbles” sometimes also shows up, owing to her tendency to fall down stairs.
Oriane doesn’t have nicknames so much as she has aliases, though “the house ghost” and such sometimes get tacked on when people are talking about her.
Jijinji is often called all manner of things, some much more complimentary than others. “Old Jiji” is common, as is “you old lech,” usually meant humorously. He’s made an active effort to distance himself from the man he was earlier in life, and thus the titles he accumulated them are deprecated somewhat...
