Iron Quill (Metamorphosis): Warehouse Inventory

[Hateful Darkblack]

A very incomplete list of a subsection of the contents of Guild Hazardous Materials Containment Facility K:

 

1. Me

 

When the Death Marshall raid came, I stowed myself in the nearest crate while the chaos was happening. The crate was full of spare odds and ends, and plenty of packing material, and I hid at the bottom. I was drunk and panicked and they were rounding up and shooting everyone, so I stayed quiet and stayed put. The Death Marshalls seized everything, boxed it up, and put it into this warehouse to sort out later. I was pretty used to being used as cargo, so I didn’t move and just slept uncomfortably for hours or days, and I woke up in a crate and kicked my way out.

 

2. A useful assortment of lamps, nails, tools, crowbars, carts, and other warehouse tools

 

The first things I found scavenging. The sorts of things the warehouse employees would need to do their job, and by wonderful coincidence the kinds of things I would need to rob the place.

 

3. A box of unsorted books labelled “For Incineration”

 

I’m sure these were dangerous things - Resurrectionist tomes, political propaganda, recovered notes from Old Malifaux, the kinds of things the Guild liked to ban. I didn’t read them, though. When I crowbarred that crate open, I just started tearing out pages and eating them, I was so hungry. I think I got lucky and didn’t eat any books that would curse me just from touching the pages, but in that instant I would have eaten them anyway.

 

4. A very solid doorway

 

This isn’t really part of a standard inventory of a warehouse, but it was the most important thing for me in that moment. That door was a very solid metal blast door. The Guild are smart at their jobs. They weren’t going to let out any of the terrible things they worked so hard to lock up. Which meant that unless I could think of a plan, and once my stomach was full enough that I could think straight I realized I had only one chance to get out, and that was held in the other boxes.

 

5. A box of unstable explosives

 

The label on the crate said that the contents were “QUARANTINED FOR ERRATIC EMANATIONS”. I didn’t know whether that meant they were just bum explosives that would blow up at the wrong moment, or if they were cursed or something. Some dynamite would have been a great way to get out, if I knew how to use it safely, but this was not looking very promising at all.

 

6. The Courtesan

 

She was beautiful, all tin and brass and gears and coils. She looked like an elegant dancer with an adoring kissy-face, and she was perched in a graceful pose up on her tippy-toes, arms upraised, standing on top of a big pedestal-sized music box. Now here was something that might be useful for an escape. A nice condemned construct. I wound up the music box, but all it did was play music. Unfortunately, I had no talent with clockworks, so I couldn’t fix her. And I certainly couldn’t stop the music that was playing. I started hurrying a little bit, worried the sound might attract guards.

 

7. A crate full of assorted musical instruments

 

I grabbed a few of the smaller items that I thought I might be able to sell for a profit later. Didn’t see much else I could do.

 

8. A giant elephant’s skull, all pitch black, its eyes still glowing

 

And there was nothing I could do with that but shiver and move on.

 

9. The Brass Herald

 

The device I’d been hired by the Neverborn to protect, some long time ago. Hell, the device I’d been hired by someone claiming to be in the Guild to protect, even longer ago. A scholar had told me he’d extracted it from my dreams. I’d seen myself the way it forced the truth out of people. I’d seen the way everyone wanted it.

 

And of course the Guild locked it up here. It was too dangerous. I was in a fever dream by then, and I forgot that I didn’t know how to work that kind of machinery. I started taking the Brass Herald apart piece by piece. Maybe I could fix it. Or take it home.

 

10. Assorted gears, crankshafts, parts, and mechanisms

 

In a boxed labelled CONFISCATED. I began grabbing pieces of the Brass Herald and putting them together. Connecting them up in new ways. Attaching them to that beautiful Clockwork Courtesan. Was it a trick of the dim flickering lamplight, or were they fusing it together? Were my hands the agents of some higher power, guiding my way without bothering to instruct me? It wouldn’t have been the first time.

 

11. A box of soulstones labelled “SOULSTONES, CORRUPTED”

 

One for love and two for fortune, three for hope and four for revenge. Sing-song instructions were bubbling up in my mind to the tune of the music box as I scavenged parts and haphazardly joined it all together. The Courtesan grew part by part, fusing with the soulstones and the clockwork pieces. It took hours or days, I don’t know. Nothing I was doing made any sense. Everything I was doing made all the sense in the world. I was building a Companion. I was building a Promise to get me out of this prison. I was building The Brass Herald into her metamorphosis. I was establishing a getaway. I was lost in the throes of madness.

 

12. A curved blade with a warning “DO NOT TOUCH — AETHER DECAY”

 

When the Courtesan Herald was completed, I handed her the sword. She was nine feet tall by then, her limbs misshapen and powerful. Her Soulstone eyes glowed to life.

 

13. Not me. Not any more.

 

I was lucky: she decided not to kill me. I was loyal: I guided her by lantern to the door and she smashed it without effort. I was careless: I had not considered what I would do about the guards once we got out. I was alert: I picked off a few with my trusty Collier pistol as I followed the Courtesan Herald down the hallways.

 

I was insignificant: If she knew I was there, she never recognized me. I was immune: Whatever madness she projected from her strange brass body wasn’t affecting me. I was desperate: I followed her path of bloodshed and destruction. 

 

And I was clever: I threw a spare lit lantern onto the explosives as we were running away.

 

I was free: we walked out to safety and into the cool night, somewhere deep in the Quarantine Zone of Malifaux City itself.

 

And now, I was hunted. I'd just built something horrible, attacked a dangerous facility, damaged Guild property, destroyed buildings, and made myself a fugitive. That’s why we never came back here!

[Hateful Darkblack]

1161 words. All themes used: Metamorphosis (the Brass Herald), Courtesan, Music Box, Doorway, Quote ("That's why we never came back here!")