Reisverfahren [Cantarella║ Ryees]

[Ryees]

Ashemore, Nimue | Fontine, Altimeda

• Positive traits: Tenacious — Empathetic — Warm — Passionate — Optimistic
  Negative traits: Naive — Emotional — Rash — Obstinate — Pedantic
  
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• Content 2
• Positive traits: Educated — Adventurous — Compassionate — Perceptive — Wise
  Negative traits: Cynical — Impulsive — Audacious — Verbose — Flippant
  
  Gallery

  

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The sun had broken early over Creta's horizons and cast a warm glow over the hills, a glow that would quickly be overshadowed by encroaching clouds and drizzling rains for the foreseeable days. It was slated to be a lazy day, away from the sticky heat and squelchy ground, and even the ever-ongoing border war seemed to be taking the day off to stay inside where it was cool.

The same could be said for the neatly-squared outpost barely fifty miles out from the edge of the border conflict. Four empty blocks in the middle of a small town had been repurposed into a sprawling research space, square cement buildings erected in grid-like fashion with a center space designated for large-scale alchemical trials. Trials that had started quite large, but had grown away from that grandiose scale, now, as the teams within came closer and closer to perfecting their craft.

Doctor Philipp Reis was a name that was becoming more and more commonplace in Creta's border wars. He had established one of the first clinics designated specifically as a war-time medical bay, offering treatment and care for soldiers who came away from the Amestris-Creta conflict with wounds that took them out of the fight. He had been a brilliant doctor even in his early days, making a name for himself as a surgeon and as a philanthropist, but the last year of his life had been one of great import. Now dubbed simply, "The Reis Method," a new mechanism by which alchemy could be used to heal the body had been under research for many years by Reis and his ever-diligent researchers. But some months ago, they had found their Eureka.

The exact details of the practice were only kept under wraps for the time it took to perfect them. As a scientist and a doctor, Reis had been adamant that the practice be shared with the world, avenues opened to treat those with otherwise-mortal wounds and perpetuate life in ways that had never before been though possible.

The announcement had been a disaster.

Almost immediately, opponents to the practice rose to vocal prominence, the State in particular making a statement that the Reis Method of alchemy was not a sanctioned practice and that its use within Amestran borders was outlawed until further research had been completed. With Reis' lab outside of the Amestran border, there was little they could do to actually stop the scientist from furthering his research, but the announcement that the world's superpower was vocally and obstinately against their practice had dampened many spirits on the project. Their research team of several hundred had dwindled to barely the first hundred as those who would not or could not risk their lives and livelihoods in defiance of the State left the project for the safety of a return to their mundane lives.​

 

Reis pulled his glasses away and dropped them on the table, scrubbing his palms over his eyes and cheeks and giving his head a vigorous shake. His desk sat in the corner of their most-often-used lab, a large square room with two long work benches dominating its center and all manner of alchemical supplies scattered around the counters that bordered the room. Behind him, the half-dozen colleagues he called his best were working as diligently as ever, but his mind had wandered, as it did often. It wandered north, to the border, where his rise to fame and infamy had only served to redouble the hostilities of the border war, adding another briquette to the fire in the form of medical heresy.

His ears popped, and he worked his jaw, squinting up at the ceiling in irritation at the heavens bestowing the pressure front of sticky rain upon them. He had not noticed the pressure building—and bent his head curiously when they popped again. He had definitely not felt the pressure that time. And his team was glancing around as well, as if they had also somehow felt—

More pops. Louder. And too rapid to be in his head.

Charlotte, a tiny blonde sprite of a girl with glasses that nearly eclipsed her eyebrows, had squeaked quietly at the sounds. "Is that... gunfire?"

Reis' blood ran cold, and by the looks on the faces of those around him, theirs had too. His eyes scanned them, landing on Nimue's just as the lights blacked out with a shuddering crack. With their equipment powered down, the hum of the lights silence, and their collective breath caught in their throats, the sound of gunfire was unmistakable in its cadence and rhythm. And its volume, as it grew noticeably closer.

"Doors. Doors, doors!" Reis was out of his seat, pointing to Marcus and Elena, who were arm's reach from the only door that led into the lab. Marcus had frozen, but Elena darted to the door, shoving it shut but halting the last inch, easing it closed with the knob turned and releasing it silently into place. The lab doors did not have locks, and while Reis thought about shoving his chair under the door, that would only serve as indication that someone was in the room if the door was tested. "Hide," he barked, and on command, Elena and Marcus darted from the door to join Nimue behind the lab counters.​

Reis stepped up to the door, carefully opening it and poking just his eyes and nose into the hallway. It was empty, for the time being. With a breath, he shot a glance back to his team. "Stay here. Do not leave this lab." Elena shot a panicked hand out to him, but he had already disappeared into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him.

Minutes passed in a silence that was only punctuated by gunfire. It was that sound growing closer every passing moment that had Elena and Marcus fidgeting, leaning up against the wall next to the door. "We... should run. Should we? Do we run?" Elenta's voice trembled. "What do we do? Are they here for us? Or for Doctor Reis?"

Marcus shook his head too violently. "He told us to stay here. You heard how adamant he sounded. We stay."

"Stay there, and don't move," Nimue said coolly. Her calm seemed to comfort Elena, but the look Marcus shot her was loathing. "I need to get to Reis, and quickly. I don't know what's going on out there, but I have a feeling they're coming for him." Nimue's eyes had darted to the door as soon as the lights flickered out. Narrowing in the darkness, she had been about to make a beeline for the generators to restart the power when the sharp staccato of gunfire had pierced the air. Freezing in place, one pale hand extended, Nimue thought quickly. She needed to get to the Professor.

"But what if they—" As if to prove her point, the sound of pounding footsteps began to echo down the hallways outside the door. There were three sets of distinct steps, and then four more, the latter four being all heavy boots and thundering steps. The door to the lab burst open, nearly flattening Elena against the wall, and her scream was involuntary. Three men from the base hauled themselves into the darkened lab; they barely made it three steps before a burst of gunfire from the hallway ripped through them, their screams lasting barely a breath before they were silenced.

Four men slunk into the room, moving like soliders, weapons tight against their shoulders and snappy in the way they scanned the room. The light from the hallway cast shadows over Nimue, but Elena was right in the light. They did not shoot her, though, as they had their colleagues.

"This is Hook 1 to Fisherman. Found one of Reis' staff in lab 3." His hand touched his ear to call through his radio, but his weapon never left Elena. Thg other three men had slipped into the room, fanning out with precision and grace, searching, but the shadowy corner where Nimue stood, behind the door they had entered through, offered her a moment of respite.

The soldier barked at Elena. "Up. Up." The horrified blonde shakily got to her feet, holding her stomach to fight back the urge to vomit. "Where's the rest of your team?"

It had taken phenomenal restraint from Nimue not to cry out when the men's lives were extinguished mere meters away from her. Clapping a hand over her mouth, she stopped in her tracks and looked on in mute horror at the spreading pools of blood quickly congealing on the previously pristine laboratory floor.

There was no time to mourn them, nor was there time to waste. Nimue, seeing keenly that there was but one escape, had two options: to await capture, or to run for it. She could only hope that the invaders would treat her colleagues well, as Nimue was not keen on giving away her position before she could even reach Professor Reis. Calming her breathing to a steady, deep rhythm and quelling the fear that seized her gut, Nimue carefully edged out from beneath the desk next to the door, sliding in a squatting position and rounding the corner to escape the research lab and breaking into a sprint down the corridor and toward Professor Reis' as soon as she was out of eyeshot.

It was the scale of the attack that Nimue was alerted to as she moved through the base. The four men that had gunned down her colleagues were not alone by any stretch of the imagination. Carefully cutting around corners and ducking into empty labs had led her towards the center of the base, and on her way there she had caught sight of no less than thirty unique soldiers, all dressed in riot gear and dark-visored helmets and sporting military-grade rifles. Whatever the organization was behind this attack, it was not a small one... but it was not the State. The soldiers' weapons, while powerful and expensive, were not standard-issue by any means, their slight variance and states of wear suggesting that they were acquired, not manufactured, by the faction. And with no insignias—or, in some cases, scratched-out insignias—adorning their armor, any affiliation was impossible to decipher.​

As she skid around the corner to Lab 1, Nimue halted, skidding on the linoleum at the sight of her superior, captured and looking up at her. Reis was not in the lab; instead, he was sitting outside the door on his knees, hands cuffed and held up behind his head. At least a dozen armed men stood around him, one with his finger pressed to his ear and speaking in a low voice.

She scarcely had time to speak up, to question the situation, when she felt cold steel press to her back. Her immediate response was to put her hands on her head. She did not whirl around to question whoever it was that dared to hold a gun to her; she merely let out a mousy squeak of noise and glanced as far as she could behind her without turning her head. The sound of her approach had led the men surrounding Reis to look up at her, but it was not them that moved. The barrel of a rifle punched into her shoulder blades as three men emerged from the lab behind her, ushering her towards Reis and the captive lab teams.

"Nimue, are—augh!" A knee impacted the back of Reis' head as he spoke, an order of quiet slithering out of the soldier whose limb had impacted the doctor's skull. Reis gave Nimue an apologetic, pleading look as she was plopped on her knees next to him.

Up and down the hallways, signs of carnage showed. Blood on the floors, the walls, and the insurgents' armor suggested untold amounts of death at their hands. Reis' own coat, usually ruffled and unkempt but pristinely white and clean, was spattered with dots of red, and the look in his eyes spoke of just how close he had been to the source of that blood.

A handful of minutes later, more footsteps came from the direction Nimue had approached from, and Elena appeared around the corner. Her face was streaked with tears, but it was the absolute mess of blood sprayed up her coat that begged the attention. Reis met her face, and mouthed, "Marcus?" Her shoulders buckled, silent sobs racking her shoulders. Reis' lips pressed to a thin line.

 

Only eight white-and-red-coated scientists remained as the armored men dragged them to their feet. At gunpoint, they were ushered out of the lab buildings and towards a waiting transport, two heavy-canvassed troop carriers that waited on the edge of the base. Breaking out into the bleak, damp daylight still strained the eyes, and the soft but harsh light of day showed a number of corpses spread out over the grounds.

"They just opened fire..." Reis' voice whispered out from somewhere deep in his throat. "They didn't even try to..." His face dropped, eyes flat, and he watched his feet for the rest of the walk towards the truck. Rough hands shoved them up the folding steps to the back of the bed, and they were seated on the benches mounted in the walls, strapped down with harnesses that secured with keyed locks. When the doors were slammed shut behind them, they were alone with no one but their colleagues. A red light mounted in the ceiling was the only light by which they could see the fear and despondency on their friends' faces.

The air was thick with dread as the transport motored away from the research base, the smell of ash and sulfur and blood heavy in their nostrils. It was some minutes before anyone spoke, and it was Doctor Reis who broke the silence. "Are you all okay?" he asked, his normally chipper voice barely a hoarse whisper. "Are you hurt?"

Nimue gave a tremulous nod. She swallowed thickly, eyes nervously darting about in the dark. She knew she couldn't ask all the questions she wanted to ask, instead opting for a quiet, meek, "I'm alright. Did they harm you, Professor?"'

Reis' head shook in the dim light. "I'm okay. I heard one of them say that some of us were not to be harmed under any circumstance." He worked his jaw where a knee had caught it. "Only mostly, I guess."

"But why? Why us?" Elena's voice was a squeak in her throat, but she eked out her question determinedly. "And why only the eight of us?"

That thin, grim line pressed back into Reis' face. "It must have to do with our research. You seven were my closest assistants, you know the most about the Method."

Elena asked, "But how did they know who we were?" with a furrowed brow, eyes averting to the floor.

"I don't know. There were so many of them, they have to be a part of something, they have to have an information network of some kind, intel from somewhere." The doctor's head dropped back against the wall of the carrier, staring at the dim red disc that fancied itself a proper light source. "And who knows where they're taking us now."

Nimue fixed Professor Reis with an incredulous stare. While she couldn't speak for his conclusion for the reason why the seven of the lab assistants had been spared, she could cry foul on how the Professor had been manhandled. Still, a bruised jaw was better than the alternative. Thinking hard for a moment, Nimue pondered their circumstances and what had led up to it. "Who was it that bankrolled our research? That could be our answer right there. Clearly, someone couldn't keep their mouth shut about it."

"Donors, mostly," Reis chimed back, eyes scanning the ceiling aimlessly. "By the time we'd set up the base proper, we'd done so much work for the backline medics that the city power was provided to us for free and the townspeople helped with most of the construction. Only a few thousand cens were given with any names attached, mostly from people in Amestra who believed in the cause but didn't like how the State was pressuring us."

Nimue mulled it over, idly chewing at her lip. "It wouldn't surprise me if there was some shady business going on, even if our intentions were for the best." She tapped a finger on her upper arm. "Someone that our captors opposed, perhaps, or they wanted the research for themselves. Outside of that? I'm drawing a blank." Nimue sighed.

A sound from outside stopped their conversation. Another engine from another vehicle, higher-pitched and moving very fast towards them. Brows furrowed and glances were spared, but it was the hail of gunfire that made their eyes all go wide. Reis, though, looked puzzled, more than anything, scrunching his face and looking around as if the interior walls of the truck would offer some answer.

"Why are so many people shooting at us today!?" Elena screamed, ducking her head into her lap and holding her hands over her ears.

"And why are other people shooting at these people?" Reis added onto her question, leaning forward against his harness to stare at the back of the truck.

Another burst of gunfire rippled out around them, and then they were being thrown around as their truck swerved out of control. Their speed decreased, and after a teetering, spinning slide, the truck halted. Sounds of fighting came from outside, shouts and shots in equal measure.

But within the cabin, something else had made itself known. A thin line of quicksilver had snaked through the thin gap in the back door, tracing down the center of the floor. From that center line, eight branches protruded, snaking towards each of the bound captives.

"What the fuck is that thing!?" Marcus shouted, flailing his feet at the mercurial thread that was snaking towards him on the floor. As his foot impacted it, the telltale blue arcs of alchemical energy sparked over its surface, reforming the mercury before his foot had even come away from the floor.

"That's alchemy," Reis called, staring at the silver as it inched its way towards his feet.

That silver liquid slunk over to Nimue, spiraling up her calf and thigh, the electric tingle of a very mild current of energy running though its quicksilver form. It wound up her hips, then reared back, its head shifting and wriggling to form the spoke of what looked to be a key. In perfect unison, as if all heads of one mercurial hydra, those tendrils dove into the locks of their harnesses, twisting and thrashing about until the shoulder belts that held them fast snapped open. As soon as that click came, the liquid metal zipped back, reforming its central line and snaking out of the cabin.

The last sound they heard from within was the lock on the outside of the door snapping open, and with it came a crack of murky daylight as the door cracked open.

 

[Cantarella]

Nimue Ashemore had fancied herself a simple sort.

She had wanted for very little. Coveted even less. She lived within very spartan means on a meager alchemical researcher's salary, and it suited her just fine. She didn't have much of a life outside of her work, and that, too, satisfied her. Dedicating herself to an impossible cause seemed to sate her family's urgency to get her married off before she was "too old" by their standards. Among her peers, she was likely among the most dedicated to the cause in the group, just after Reis himself. Although she was no great talent in the field of offensive alchemy, she was a brilliant practitioner of the Reis Method. Nimue chalked it up to a passion for what she did, but there was more to alchemy than passion. It came out of technical know-how, a form of genius.

All of that was for nothing once the guns started firing that sticky morning. Although Nimue handled it fairly well, with a level head and the sort of logic that could be expected of her occupation, she was not prepared to be a hero. It was enough that the eight of them, including the professor, were spared and crammed into the back of the van, headed off to a destination unknown. Nimue ought to have been grateful to have been spared, but where did that leave her? To bear witness to the violence that had extinguished so many lives? To mourn the people she had taken her meals with, researched with, long into the night and when the sun rose to its apex over Creta?

Nimue cast her eyes from each face to the next, clustered together in the back of that van, the disc overhead casting a bloody light over the contours of each terrified face. She took in each and every detail to the point of memorizing each curve and line, for it was possible that none of them would survive the day, let alone the evening. That was the reality, the human cost, of conflict, and despite never having wielded a gun herself, Nimue knew well what the human cost of such knowledge entailed. It was through her work tending to the fallen of the Amestris-Creta border conflict that Reis had found her in the first place. She, too, had bloodied her hands countless times binding the manifold lacerations of the wounded, had broken the news to the families of those she could not save before she had been gifted with the technical knowledge of the Method and its miracles.

After that? There had been far fewer deaths. Nimue and the team she worked with, with renewed vigor and efficacy, became sainted in their own right. Seen as angels of the battlefield, in their bloodied smocks and uniforms and gore from fingertip to elbow. While the sight might have been a terrifying one to some, to the wounded of the border war, there was no more hopeful a sight.

Nimue had hoped that in continuing to bring what she knew to the world, she would be embraced as she had by those soldiers. But instead, she was met at every turn with scorn. Derision, even. "This could fall into the wrong hands" this, "this is too powerful" that. The world had largely done away with the use of Philosopher's Stones; the population's alchemists had found out where they had come from, how they were made, and had collectively decided that no transmutation was worth that terrible cost. That sometimes, dead was better left dead, and that some things were ordained to end the way they did. And the Reis Method defied that.

Or so they had said.

Nimue had justified it saying that the material costs were still there. The price was paid. It was simply aiding the body in what it already wanted to do. Homeostasis was paramount to the human body. It would do anything to maintain it. The Method simply helped it to continue. No one was being brought back from the dead. There was nothing taboo about restoration and regeneration. If someone was a goner, they'd go, and there was nothing that Nimue or even Professor Reis could do about it. If a soldier was carted in with a bullet in his brain, no one was restoring what had been lost. It was gone, and as a former medical professional, Nimue knew better than most when to call it and when to leave the next steps to the coroner.

Death was like an old friend. Ever-present in her field, a presence Nimue was all too familiar with. She knew the signs, she'd seen them time and again, but as a Method alchemist, she'd learned how to keep it at bay.

But as she sat in the back of that convoy, she began to question her role in things. No, she didn't have regrets-- what she had done was for the best, and she would defend that to the death, but if the Method fell into the wrong hands-

Before she could finish the thought, the wheels under her skidded, and she would have collided with the hard wall of the truck bed if not for the straps holding her fast. She exhaled a sigh of relief when the truck didn't topple onto its side or flip over. A light, bright as starlight, pale as the moon, snaked into the truck bed, slithering across the floor and finding its place wrapped around her boot, inching up to her thigh and even around her hips.

Nimue immediately and intensely blushed. She knew alchemy when she saw it, and knew the mote of quicksilver belonged to someone. The thought of it scandalized her, but even still, chances were, someone did not know quite how risqué they were being. Before she could allow herself to be too flustered at being manhandled by mercury, the locks snapped, and all eight of the researchers were freed.

Nimue wasted no time in wriggling free of her bonds. She was halfway to the door when it cracked open, and light spilled into the compartment. Whoever was prying it open would be met face-to-face with two scorching violet eyes set in a moon-pale face.

 

[Ryees]

 

Watching the base from the top of a building across the street had been like pulling teeth with tweezers. Barrackos had been strict in his orders to let it happen, that it would be, somehow, easier to right the wrongs from the attack once the caravan was on the road, but Altimeda was less convinced. Letting someone take a bullet who wasn't supposed to would mean the end of the whole thing.

Reis had a good thing going here, and they all knew it as Altimeda and his three companions watched the trucks pull into the base and spill out men that opened fire into the civilian populace. Altimeda had long ago come to terms with the idea of acceptable losses, but there was no version of this scene that did not make his stomach churn. And beside him, the three sets of eyes that stared along with him reflected that sentiment.

"Y'sure Barrackos was righ' abou' this?" asked the diminutive woman to his side. Barely five feet tall even in her heeled boots and with a lithe frame to match her height, her shoulder-length brown hair was nested up underneath the headgear she wore. Perched atop the forehead of the Clockwork Alchemist, Beillahn Ymmillianna Rorotorinne, sat a set of clockwork goggles, etched in their entirety in alchemical markings and small circles. Despite her size, she wore a fitted set of full plate mail, articulated at the joints with gears and springs and looking bizarrely light on her for how heavy it should have been.

"Lost trust in our grand tactician, have we?" Nitani Mel'Feiyu's voice was a satisfyingly ringing baritone, and came from more than a foot higher than Beillahn, rumbling out from underneath startlingly green eyes and a tired face that had seen too many smiles. The Twilight Gap Alchemist was dressed in the same drab as the other men, a version of the State's military uniform but colored down to match the semi-desert environment and help camouflage them. He sported no grand clockwork armor like Beillahn, his kit noticeably more lean. An ornate sword hung comfortably on his belt, devoid of a sheath, with a blue-glowing circle in the center of its blade ornament that attached to a matching silver-embossed buckle on his belt. A open-banded silver ring encircled his left finger, a fox head that tapered down and around his finger to an engraved tail. The tip of that tail contained a dark gemstone that looked deeper than it had any right to, as if the cosmos themselves were buried within the stone. "Barrackos was a military dog for a long time, remember; he knows his stuff."

Roki Kyrus flexed his fists, curling and uncurling his fingers around the two sets of circle-engraved iron knuckles encircling each of his hands. The reddened tint to his brown eyes was just as hollow as his friends, even set into his young, just-twenty face. "Knows it or not, this is awful." The Steel Flame Alchemist's voice was just as young as his face, but his words rang with a firm jading that suggested he was not new to the field.

"An' I ain' watchin' it no more," Beillahn spat, turning away from the building and walking to the roof access hut to slump against the wall. "Tell me when we're leavin'," she grumbled with a finality, leaning her head back against the wall and closing her eyes.

Altimeda's lips pressed to a thin line, knowing that he couldn't join her despite wanting to get his eyes off the carnage. He brought the telescope back up to his eyes, following the attackers as they made their way into the compound. There were minutes of stillness outside, after the gunfire stopped. The silence stretched ominously. It meant that whoever was supposed to be dead had been put down, and now only their high-value-targets remained. Altimeda had been scouting the camp for some days before the attack on the note from their intelligence crews. In a base of some hundred scientists, with only one small group on the target list... that was a lot of bodies.

Minutes later, the doors were thrown open again. The prestigious Dr. Philipp Reis led the pack, hands cuffed behind his back, and a group of seven of his lab assistants followed, white coats stained in red and eyes clearly dim with fear even from the distance of the rooftop. They were herded into a troop transport, and the engines fired up.

"They're out."

---

Roki pushed the pedal down farther, pushing the nimble, gunmetal-painted truck towards its maximum speed. "T-minus sixty," he called out as the caravan came into view ahead of them. "Lahny you sure this thing is gonna do what you want?" he questioned, giving a dubious glance down at the steering wheel. "You're usually the one to drive."

"She'll be fine, jus' push us up pas' Reis' truck in the middle an' I'll do th'rest," she answered, hand waving his concerns and only making him more concerned. "Once the caravan stops, y'can get out an' start punchin', yeah?"

Altimeda grinned, unbuckling his belt and popping up the interior lock on the front passenger door, mirroring Beillahn and Nitani in the back seats. "He is very good and punching," he chriped in affirmation, and the humor in his voice seemed to diffuse Roki's anxiety. But then Altimeda's smile slipped, his face steeling. "Review." Beillahn and Nitani's faces snapped forward, locked in and focusing. "Beillahn disables the target vehicle. I spring the captives. Nitani you're on visual dispersion, giving us cover of night. Once the scientists are free, Roki pulls the car up, and we disable the rest of the guards. From there we take one of the other trucks and go."

"Locked in," Nitani, Roki, and Beillahn all called back in perfect, practiced unison.

Altimeda nodded, the caravan now only a few moments ahead of them. He and Nitani racked the compact submachine guns slung over their shoulders. The collective breath in the cabin drew, and released.

Roki punched the accelerator, and the engine growled as the truck jumped forward. He cut around the back of the caravan, darting past the last of the three trucks and pulling up alongside the second. The moment his front wheels aligned with the transport, the other three members threw their doors open. Attached to the joints on each sides of their ankles, a set of clockwork wheels had been fused to their boots. As the trio launched from the truck and those wheels touched the ground, they sparked with energy and started spinning, gyroscopically stabilizing their rider even at highway speed. Altimeda and Nitani skated alongside the truck, but Beillahn angled towards it, the open palm of her gauntleted hand extended towards the truck.

The moment she contacted it, her glove flashed a green-metallic glow, and a reaction sped along the truck towards the engine compartment. All the gears within the truck flattened, their teeth dulling to flat nubs, and the truck immediately began to slow. The truck in trail had to swerve not to impact the back, and at the speed they were traveling, did not fully stabilize, toppling onto its side and careening off at an odd angle, tumbling the entire way. The truck ahead began to slow in time, the latches on its back door clicking as the occupants began to unlock it from the inside.

Nitani sprayed a line of bullets at the seam in the door to dissuade whomever was activating that mechanism from being anywhere near it, buying them another handful of moments for the middle transport to finally come to a stop. Beillahn circled back to them, and all three made their way to the rear of the truck, the wheels on their feet snapping up to their knees in a ready position as they hopped forward. Nitani reached into his pouch, pulling a tiny glass bottle from within containing a hand-mixed ink. He uncapped the silver lid of the bottle and dolloped a drop into his palm, then pressed the underside of the lid into his skin, stamping the alchemical circle engraved underneath into the back of his hand. When he charged the circle, the smear of ink on his palm grew to a fist-sized cloud of black, then expanded outwards, forming a globe of inky darkness that obscured them from the outside.

Altimeda had already skipped over to the door, leaning one knee on the step as he pulled up his sleeve. A wrist bandolier of metal vials was slung about his wrist, and he uncapped one of them to allow the jittery silverine liquid metal from inside drip onto the edge of the door mechanism. Like Nitani, the cap to his vial also had a circle engraved into it, but he instead held his with his middle and ring fingers pressing it into his palm as he pointed his index and little fingers to flank the puddle. The circle charged, and he felt that phantom limb manifest in his mind. He closed his eyes, snaking the line forward into the cabin, feeling the stirring of the air. Left, right, forward. Left, right, forward. He repeated the branch four times, finding limbs and seats to crawl up, sniffing around for the latches he knew were there. And when he found them, he dove the head of the mercurial fingers into the locks, violently jittering them around and bursting the mechanisms from inside.

"Free," he barked. Somewhere during his closed-eyed ritual, Roki had appeared alongside them, bouncing on his heels and loosening up his arms. "Are we ready?"

Beillahn nodded, hearing the footsteps approaching from the front truck. "Le's ge'em outta here."

Altimeda hopped up onto the ledge, heaving on the latch to free the locks. He pulled open the door, letting the dim, passthrough sunlight that barely made it through Nitani's sphere of night land on a startlingly, distractingly pretty face with a pair of violet eyes that froze him in place under their lavendrite gaze.

"What? What's wrong?" Roki, watching Altimeda, had note of panic in his voice as he watched his friend freeze in place, trying to peer around Altimeda to see in through the crack in the door.

It was long moment before Altimeda replied, but once he shook his head out, he called back, "Nothing, they're all here, they're okay," over his shoulder. He met those eyes again, purple greeting teal in the failing light. "You're okay," he repeated, this time to her, and softer than before, "but we don't have time. Keep your heads down." He addressed the final note to the whole cabin, his eyes lingering for a long moment on Reis before he stepped back and hopped down from the truck. "Open it up," he commanded to Nitani, who nodded.

With another stamp, Nitani recharged his circle. The ink globe shuddered, rippling along its surface as it expanded to encompass the whole truck. The sound of panic from outside the dome grew, nervous steps shuffling backwards away from the eldritch bubble. As it moved, Beillahn had replaced Altimeda on the truck's back step, but then hopped up, catching herself on the top of the truck and deftly pulling herself atop. As she disappeared atop the vehicle, the sounds of a circle activating echoed from above, and the truck groaned as pieces of it were stripped away in payment.

Altimeda held up a hand to stop the scientists from exiting the truck for the moment, and now touched both of his ears with his palms, calling out, "Cover up," in an urgent whisper. Then his head snapped to Nitani. "Drop it."

Nitani, oddly, grinned in a knowing, satisfied way as he let the alchemy fade from his hands.

"You rang, gentlemen!?" Beillahn bellowed from above. She sat in the seat of a small-sized, double-barreled, mounted chaingun, her seat enshrouded by a seamless metal pod. There was barely time for the eighteen men below to even raise their weapons before she dragged on the triggers. The barrels spun, and a half-second later, a haze of projectiles rent into the crowd of gathered terrorists. The chains were attached from the guns directly to the fuselage of the truck, eating away at the metal bit by bit with every round and cannibalizing the truck.

"Go!" Altimeda shouted, and he, Roki, and Nitani ripped from behind the truck, the wheels at their knees snapping back to their ankles when they hopped forward.

With their gazes trained on Beillahn's turret atop the truck, the first of the soldiers barely registered Roki and Altimeda upon them. Roki's fists flashed as they impacted, pulling the body heat and blood from within their victim to push gouts of liquid-heated semi-molten gelled fire out of his dusters with every punch. Four blows later, and two men were dead, holes burned through their chests and neck.

Altimeda slipped forward with a sheen of mercury trailing behind his hands, two beads following his fingers and circling around the back of the first soldier's head. When he twitched his fingers, those beads rocketed back to rejoin the homogenous body, bursting through the skull of the man on their way. As the man behind him moved to lower his weapon, Altimeda thrust his palm forward, a thumbs-sized bead of mercury balling and yo-yoing forward. Its outward path ripped through the man's shoulder, and its inward path his chest, dropping him to the dirt like a sack of bleeding grain.

Nitani's sword had jumped to his hand, and as he moved towards the two men he had targeted, they spun to face their assailant—and turned away from him, opening fire into the distance. Ink stained the back of their heads, thrown forward as Nitani had approached, and it was a trivial affair to tear his sword through their backs as they took aim at a phantom attacker that never existed.

The final dozen men lay nearly in pieces surrounding the truck, bodies eviscerated by hundreds of holes. Beillahn touched the pod that encircled her gunner seat, opening the metal to free her from within. She gave it a fond look, riddled with dents from gunfire, and patted it approvingly before she hopped down from the truck, the joints of her armor's knees easily cushioning her fall. The four raiders regrouped, moving around the back of the truck, Altimeda stepping forward to address the group that did not, yet, know that they were his captives.​

 

[Cantarella]

The eyes that had held Altimeda's were made all the more intense by the bloody light of the truck's interior. That light streaked across the lavender expanse of her irises like a bloody comet over the face of the moon, and the brilliant golden light of the space beyond those doors spilled onto her face, highlighting every contour, every hill and valley. Crossing the crinkled bridge of her nose, her furrowed brow, to the valleys of her shadowed eye sockets with that violet fire burning within.

Nimue was more than a little miffed by this whole ordeal. She was incensed. Practically incandescent. The curl of her lip and the way her hands coiled into a nautilus of fist would have given it away if her sour expression failed at conveying it. Even if the former battle medic didn't say a word, it was plain enough to see.

She was angry, and rightly so. She had been so close to a breakthrough on the Reis method, definitely something to write home to her indifferent parents about. Instead, she had been wrested from her work, dragged across the laboratory, her associates and peers murdered in cold blood, stuffed into a truck, and now even more men lie dead at her feet and she was unable to save them, even if she wanted to rescue the people who were responsible for all of this disruption.

And now, she had seen the face of-- ostensibly-- the person whose alchemy had tickled up her thigh and freed her of her bonds. Although he lowered his voice to a gentle timbre, it was evident that it did little to assuage Nimue's anger. It was she who marched forward ahead of her companions, ahead of Professor Reis, even, ready to give the group of raiders a piece of her mind. Her booted foot found the edge of the door of the closed truck, and she kicked it roughly the rest of the way open and marched right on out into the daylight beyond, leaving her companions forgotten in her wake.

After all, they were alive, they were unharmed, and they would likely be too shell-shocked to demand answers. Unlike Nimue, who was a (relatively) calm port in a storm. Never mind the fact that a mote of mercury had slipped up her skirt and tickled its chilly way across her bare flesh, never mind that there were dead people lying everywhere, some even in her path, which she merely stepped over like any soldier in the trenches.

After all, Nimue wasn't the average lab assistant, no mere research alchemist. This was a woman who had seen the horrors of war, smelled it, touched it, reached inside its rent belly and pushed its entrails back up into the wound. She had sealed more wounds than she cared to remember, smelt and tasted tangy, smoky gunpowder, had the saltpeter and chlorine burn her eyes until they were watery and bloodshot and her lungs burned. But that was nothing compared to what she had witnessed her patients endure.

And what did that diminutive, teal-haired woman do but march straight up to the nearest living, breathing body, who happened to be Altimeda, even with his softened features and gentle voice, shove her pointer finger into their sternum, and bark out a tremulous, harsh "YOU! How dare you! You have some nerve, tearing me from my work, gunning down my coworkers, my peers, my mentors, and taking us here! To god knows where, when we were so close to having a breakthrough that could shape the very face of medical alchemy!" She swept her incensed lavender eyes across the field, blazing, furious eyes, lip pulled into a harsh snarl.

"Every one of you ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Gunning down all these people. I don't care if you, specifically, aren't the ones who kidnapped us in the first place. None of that matters. Now, you could do the right thing and let us go, handing me those keys so I can drive back to work. You could do that, do the civilized thing. But I don't expect you to. Now, unless you have some other, grander ideas in mind for us, I plan to be going. Otherwise, you'd better give me a damned good reason to cooperate with you lot."

 

[Ryees]

 

The unfolding scene had Beillahn and Nitani puckering their lips, biting back laughs not for Altimeda's sake, but for fear that making a sound would turn the barrels of this teal-haired spitfire to them. Roki's eyebrows looked to be trying to climb into his hairline, likely to hide.

Altimeda put his hand on top of the woman's, pointedly pressing downward to lower her hand from his chest. "Gonna be tough for you to go back to work," he said dryly, fixing her with a flat stare, "not much to work on back there but a field of bodies." He took a step away from her, crossing his arms over his chest. "Got a name, miss?"

"Nimue Ashemore." She replied, equally as flatly. "And who are you?"

"Altimeda," he replied, seemingly finished. "We do have some ideas in mind for you, actually," he added, his eyes moving in a circle to take in his companions." "Plan is to take you somewhere that's actually safe, for a while."

"I was safe where I was," Nimue stated bluntly. "But I see that is no longer the case. What's the plan, then? Where are we going?"

"Yeah, clearly." Roki's voice from behind her was as dismissive as it was derisive, but Altimeda held up a silencing hand to him, prompting Roki's mouth to pop closed.

"We're going back to our ops-base," he replied, jerking his head back towards the one functional transport truck, "we'll take one of their trucks."

Nimue's eyes narrowed at the jab, but just as soon as the voice had quipped, it was silenced. "Fine, but that doesn't answer my question. Are we passing country lines?"

Altimeda snorted a puff of air through his nose, nodding his head. "Oh yeah, we sure are. We're gonna end up in Amestris, and the sooner the better." He gestured to the truck. "If you and your team wanna hop in."

Nimue sighed. "Looks like I don't have much choice in the matter. Alright, let's go."

Altimeda bit back the No, you don't that had come to his lips, walking with Nimue and Dr. Reis and company to the back of the only transport truck that had been the least accosted by Beillahn's mechanical alchemy. He walked behind them, pondering the possible outcomes of the following hours. Beillahn and Roki were currently moving from corpse to corpse, scavenging ammunition and weapons and gear, making trips back to their chase truck. Nitani was taking notes in a small black pocket journal, taking stock of the number of bodies, important symbols, demographics, and any other relevant details he could find.​

It had not yet come up the exact nature of this "rescue" mission, and Altimeda was happy to leave it that way. The less they resisted early, the easier this would be, and the less obvious it would be that everyone in the team was expendable but Dr. Reis.

Walking up to the transport, Altimeda heaved open the doors to the truck, taking one step back and opening one arm inside. "Everybody in—ah... oh." He winced, looking inside the cabin. The farthest back seat contained a body, whose hand was still stuck on the locked buckle of his harness. It appeared the mechanism had jammed when they were all trying to file out, and the spray of bullets Altimeda had peppered the truck with had found contact. "Well..." He put a hand behind his head, biting the inside of his cheek. "We'll clean that seat out real quick."

Nimue took a sharp intake of breath through her nose. She was not immune to the horror of a bullet-mutilated body, not even after exposure after exposure over the years.
"Oh second thought..." she trailed off. "...I'll ride in the front."

Altimeda's head jerked over to her. "Ah, cabin's reserved, sorry. One of your boys can take that seat, won't be that bad."

Nimue looked to the spattered gore across the floor and walls of the inside of the truck blankly. Never mind that the now pulpy red mass had once been human, let alone one of her peers. Steel in her gaze, the diminutive teal-haired woman squared her shoulders. "No, I don't think I will." She stated coolly. "It's not sanitary, and my job requires I be as sterile as possible."

"Ah—" Altimeda's rebuttal caught in his throat, catching her eyes. Roki's composure finally failed behind him, and he let out a proper snort. "Not much doctoring to be doing where we're going," he asserted, crossing his arms. "You'll have a chance for a shower before you're needed again."

"Unless we get attacked on the road," Dr. Reis cut in, sounding unimpressed with the logic. Something in his voice was very flat, as if he believed pieces weren't aligning somewhere, but he didn't say anything to that effect. "We'll be fine in the back without her." His eyes sharpened, looking through Altimeda as much as at him. "You can explain your plans to her, and she can relay that to us." Reis looked to Nimue in askance query, his look as insistent as Altimeda had been.

Nimue abruptly turned her attention back to Roki, her poise never once faltering. Her lips began to form the query, a curt, "Beg pardon?" before the professor gave her a specific role to fulfill. Instead, Nimue looked at Dr. Reis from the corner of her eye and gave a sharp, dutiful nod. "Noted, Professor," she grunted.

With a defeated sigh, Altimeda waved a hand to the cabin. "Fine. No middle seat on these things so it's just you and I up there." He jerked a thumb inside, turning his attention back to Dr. Reis and the other gathered technicians. "Hop in, make yourself comfortable. Long ride ahead."

Altimeda stomped the heel of his boot twice in the dirt, and all three sets of his companions' eyes jumped to him on cue. "Review: I'll take the transport truck. Lahny drives our truck, and I want Nitani on the scope to ensure that if anyone is comin' up on us, we're not surprised by it. Roki, be ready to get on the gun."

Their nods and unison chants of, "Locked in!" saw the three of them move at once, stowing gear and hopping forward to snap their skates into place, rolling back towards the car. Altimeda watched them go, then turned his attention to Nimue with a jerk of his head towards the truck. "Shall we?"

---

The ride was, indeed, a long one. From the Cretan border, the Reis Labs were more than an hour if your vehicle was fast like the car, but the transport trucks had barely two thirds of the speed of a more nimble vehicle, making the miles stretch on and on monotonously. It was some half hour of awkward silence, Altimeda's elbow propped on the window's edge, before he finally peeked across the seats to the girl who had insisted she ride with him. At least he got stuck with the pretty one. "How'd you end up with Dr. Reis?" he asked, clearing his throat to break the silence like a pane of tempered glass. "What brought you all the way out here?"