I would've liked to say that things were starting to pick up, but that wasn't quite accurate.
Josh and the gang back on Critias had been busy over the weekend, between studying for the exams and making overly detailed strategies on how to deal with the ornery Canadian arch-mage. They approached it the same way one would plan a raid during a tabletop RPG session, with a clear delineation of roles and combat tactics. There was a distinct lack of contingency plans, but I couldn't blame them too much. This was the first time they'd done something like this without me (and my extra-sensory intel) to help them, so if nothing else, it was going to be a learning experience.
They even pulled Judy out of her slump by recruiting her as their mission command, which was nice, but it only made the fact that my girlfriends were getting more impatient by the day all the more visible to me. Regrettably, my own plans already ran aground in the most annoying way possible. Worse yet, due to the heightened security thanks to my somewhat botched first foray outside the Chasm of Desolation, I had to bide my time. Until now, that is.
It was a bit of a pain in the neck, and I had to quickly distract and disable three Fauns on my way out of the prison, but I made it out all the same. Currently standing on top of a gargoyle of a large municipal building, like some kind of discount nocturnal echo-locating mammal man, I had to consider my options. Chances were, each of these 'escapes' was going to get more difficult than the last. The only silver lining in this whole situation was that the Faun commander, or warmaster, or whatever, was convinced that all the disturbances and sightings were caused by spies trying to get into the barracks, so while the perimeter was reinforced, the patrols around the entrance to the cave didn't increase much.
It made some sense; who in their right mind would want to go into the scary anti-magic underground prison, right? His opinion could've changed at any time though, especially if someone mentioned that, 'Ah, actually, that Polemos guy did want to break into the dungeon, didn't he?'. I could still work around the patrols around the walls, but if they put half a dozen Fauns standing guard right at the cave's mouth, I'd be screwed.
As such, I had to make the best of this opportunity to get outside, because I couldn't be sure when I'd have another one. Not that there was a great selection of places for me to visit, and after awkwardly climbing off the gargoyle (in retrospect, getting up there wasn't a great idea), I headed to the usual haunt.
"Good afternoon, sir."
Being greeted like a regular felt strange, but not uncomfortable, and I made my way over to the bartender of the familiar pub/salon. Since it was relatively early, it leaned much more into the latter image, with energetic piano music playing in the background and the patrons being more occupied with card- and cue-games. I didn't know the exact rules of the first kind, but it sure as hell wasn't poker, while the latter were played on tables with and without pockets. Overall, the place had a more sophisticated mien than it usually did during the night.
"It hasn't been that long since you last visited," the man behind the bar addressed me with a professional yet still amicable voice. "What can I get you this time?"
"Give me a minute to think about it, but first…"
I reached into my breast pocket and handed him the cue ball I borrowed the other day. The bartender accepted it without hesitation, though not without a curiously raised brow.
"Oh? Did you succeed in your endeavour?"
"No, I'm afraid. It was a bust."
The barkeep was just about to say something, but he noticed some movement on the side and waited for an older gentleman to waddle over and sit down next to me.
"What's the problem, friend? The missus didn't like the gift?" he spoke to me in a jolly, if altogether too loud voice that nearly made me flinch.
He was one of the regulars of this establishment, as far as I could tell, and his portly body type and richly embroidered dark-green outfit would've told me he was a local noble even if he wasn't the chatty type and had done so himself. His neatly trimmed moustache was in stark contrast to his abundant side-burns that made Arnwald's look modest in comparison, and he considered me something between a drinking buddy and a fascinating curiosity.
Case in point, I was purposefully vague about why I needed a cue ball on short notice, but by the sound of it, the local rumour mill not only already came up with an explanation, but they're now treating it as self-evident.
"No, it wasn't a gift, and even if it was, it didn't work," I responded a tad morosely.
I couldn't help it. The idea was really smart and elegant on paper. I was in the Abyss. The Abyss was a pocket dimension just like the Elysium. Celestials could communicate with people outside using those communication crystal balls that made the holograms with the scanlines and everything. Q.E.D., if such communications were possible, and I could get my hands on one such crystal orb, I could reverse-engineer it and use it to contact my girlfriends.
Of course, since getting my hands on one was pretty much impossible down here, I had to improvise, and the plan was rather intuitive, if I may say so myself: grab a sphere about the same size, temporary-retcon it into a communicator-orb, and then adapt the enchantment to my Leoformer so that I could connect the transmission arrays to Judy's funky communicator-glasses.
Needless to say, nothing worked out as planned. Right off the bat, it became evident that the original idea was infeasible due to the cue ball and the hologram ball being too different. My temporary retcon ability always 'unfolded' an item into a fractal of all of its possible variants. The more different the object was from the original, the 'further' it was on the fractal tree.
Let's use a mug for an example. Let's say it's a white mug that says 'I Heart Coffee'. Other mugs with different text printed on them would be 'closest' to it on the fractal, and thus the easiest to overlay on the original. Ones that were a different colour would be further, and so would ones that had a different base shape. As such, a white mug that said 'I Heart Tea' would be easier to temporarily retcon onto the base item than a black mug that said the same.
A rosy-cheeked man with a hooked nose and a receding hairline looked up from one of the card tables and made a rather rude gesture in our general direction.
"Sir Armagnac, please…" the bartender chided him with a soft sigh, and the man awkwardly cleared his throat.
"Excuse me. My enthusiasm got the better of me." He kept fake coughing a few more times, but then he stopped just as abruptly and bumped me with his shoulder. "So?"
"So what?"
"You already gave it away, why not spill all the beans?"
"… Did you make another bet?"
"No, not at all." He rubbed his nose and admitted, "I'm just terribly curious."
I would've bounced him off under other circumstances, but I figured this could work to my advantage, so I quickly came up with a suitable cover story. Of course, I didn't open up right away, and pretended to drag my feet and be embarrassed about the topic to allow the man by my side to coax me a bit.
"Oh, fine," I relented after a suitably drawn-out back-and-forth that naturally drew the attention of a few eavesdroppers. "I told you how the Nergals burned down my estate in the countryside, right?"
"Aren't they our allies now?" a man not much older than me chimed in from the side, so I dramatically rolled my eyes at him.
"Well, they weren't back then, that's for sure!" That earned me a mixture of chuckles and some sympathetic glances. In other words, so far, so good. I followed that up with an equally dramatic sigh and acted like this was something I'd rather not talk about, but got carried away by the atmosphere. "You see, the family's been taking shelter at my sister-in-law's. They're naturally understanding of our plight, but I don't want to be a freeloader, so I asked my brother-in-law if there was some way I could return the favour, and…" I gestured for the bartender, and he handed the cue ball back to me. I raised it to eye-level and asked, "Have any of you folks ever seen a Celestial's ball?"
Now, that made everyone's ears perk up.
"… No?" the bartender answered, probably just to break the silence, so I drooped my shoulders and let out a groan.
"Me neither, but my brother-in-law wants one." I let that linger for a while, and then I added, "I mean, not a real one, but something that looks like it. It's supposed to be roughly this size, you see."
"Oh! He meant that kind of ball!" a man chimed in from the back, but his words were drowned out by the portly man at my side.
"But for what reason?"
I let the tension build for a moment, and just as everyone was at their most curious, I let my shoulders slump in the mother of all shrugs.
"Some kind of inane prank on one of his cousins, from what I gathered. I couldn't exactly turn him down, so I agreed to help him out. He told me to get a ball and make a fancy box for it, so I did just that. The artisan I commissioned just finished the job this morning, so I presented it to my brother-in-law, only for him to tell me I wasn't supposed to get 'a' ball, but 'the' ball!
Where exactly am I supposed to get a replica of something I've never seen in my life? Those Celestial balls are apparently made of crystal, or glass, or maybe crystal glass, and now I'm supposed to find something that looks just like one before the family banquet in five days! It's maddening!"
Since I 'vented my frustrations' like that, I pretended to deflate and handed the cue ball back to the barkeep again, and this time he hurriedly put it under the counter, as if afraid that I would throw it against the wall or something.
It was only then that I turned to the patrons and put on my best pleading look.
"Friends. I know this is sudden, but… do any of you happen to have anything resembling what I'm looking for?"
I wasn't expecting much. None of the people here were exactly part of the upper crust, but at least some of them were tenuously upper-middle-class, and who knew? Maybe one of them happened to have a crystal ball lying around. That would at least raise the chances of a temporary-retcon producing something usable I could then transplant into an enchantment array, and I could do the rest from there.
What I absolutely wasn't expecting was the stocky man at my side letting out a thoughtful hum and saying, "Maybe I can do you one better, friend."
"Can you?"
"Well, you did help me win thirty Staters, so it's only fair," he responded a tad vaguely, but then he puffed out his chest and declared, "I don't want to brag, but my nephew is part of Lord Inanna's inner circle!"
That… raised a few red flags, but I stilled my face and only uttered a suitably amazed, "Truly?"
"Yes, indeed!" the chubby man exclaimed with a guffaw, clearly pleased by my reaction, only to then quickly tone it back a little and continue in a more level voice. "He told me our liege brought back a lot of incriminating Celestial tools and documents from the fallen House Ashur. Maybe there's a bauble like that among the spoils?"
"That… would be wonderful, but wouldn't it cause an investigation if something went missing from the castle? I wouldn't want your nephew to get into trouble on my behalf."
In fact, just knowing about that was good enough. While I couldn't Phase in, I still knew the layout of Castle Inanna like the back of my hand, thanks to the countless hours spent observing Crowy and my occasional jaunts on the premises as Bel. If push came to shove, I was confident I could sneak in, but before I could even begin formulating a plan, I was roughly patted on the shoulder once again.
"Oh, don't worry about it! Things have been quiet in Castle Inanna ever since our liege moved to Castle Nergal, and nobody cares about House Ashur anymore. I'm sure we can find what you need, or failing that, find a Celestial dissident who can point us in the right direction!"
Right. I tended to forget it, but there were at least some stray Celestials living in the Abyss. Mostly people who got on the bad side of the Directorate, or double-agents whose covers got blown and had to retreat to the only place where the Celestial Intelligence Network couldn't reach them. Of course, some of them were also CIN agents, as testified by the sporadic reports I'd seen on the Celestial Hub, but that's beside the point.
In retrospect, I should've probably started my investigation into acquiring a communicator there, but as always, hindsight was my mortal nemesis that never passed up an opportunity to stab me in the back.
"That would be helpful, but…"
"No need to be modest! Youngsters should just accept the goodwill of us old-timers! Also…" He paused to wink at me. "Thirty Staters."
And just like that, everything was resolved without much input on my end, and I couldn't decide how to feel about this. On one hand, not having to infiltrate Castle Inanna and manually look for the spoils from House Ashur was certainly tempting. On the other hand…
"I'll contact my nephew today. We should get a word back in a day or two, so make sure you come by again!"
… It meant I would have to keep sneaking out of and into the prison until then, so…
"Now that you've come to an agreement," the bartender interjected and placed an empty glass in front of me. "The last time you told me you're interested in peculiar rumors. Have you heard that there were ghost sightings around the Chasm of Desolation?"
I turned a flat gaze at the man, and couldn't stop myself from muttering, "At this rate, there are going to be a whole lot more of those…"