Legend of Ransera

Posted: **Wed Aug 31, 2022 11:01 pm**

Searing 52, 122 Age of Steel

The von Osten estate in the Reichtum was an immense, sprawling affair, more reminiscent of a country villa than a city house. It was evidently true that all that Zaichaer did, the Imperium did in a grander fashion, on a vaster scale - or at least, so it seemed from Anton's perspective. His grandparents' home had so many rooms and buildings that the staff and retainers he had brought with him from the High City hadn't just been housed, they had effectively vanished inside of the recesses of the complex.

He had lived in the main manor for less than a month, and each day he discovered some new chamber or corridor that he swore wasn't there the last time he had passed that way. It was, after all, an old house, and Anton knew how the bones of such places did not concern themselves with what blueprints and diagrams written in a dusty archive. There was always something that passed through the cracks, something that even the current inhabitants didn't know about, the last to use it having died with the secret.

Which was all to say, it made perfect sense that Anton refused to go into the library, the sitting room, the tea room, the living room, the den, ir the solarium - or indeed most any other room aside from his bedroom, the dining room, and the foyer - without a servant or family member to guide him. After all, even his own mother, who had grown up in the building, had managed to get since her return to her childhood home.

It was the latter of his three 'safe' rooms that Anton was currently lounging in, the lord finding it more convenient for his sense of direction to keep himself as close as possible to the front door. He, of course, reacted to this relative safety by completely overloading his arcane perception by reading a book at the same time as he listened to news on the Hub. His fascination with the magitek information system probably had something to do with the fact that even he got lost in the house.

Probably.

Still, it's not like he had much better to do. Vanessa had gone off to do her typical recreations days ago, and unfortunately for Anton the Imperium had a 'mass media' that influenced 'public opinion' and it could make things more difficult for his grandfather in 'Parliament' if news of any untoward behavior got out, so joining her was not an option. He had already attended to all of the business in the city he could at the moment, and it was now just a matter of waiting. So he did what he did best and busied himself learning as much as he could about his motherland.

Posted: **Wed Aug 31, 2022 11:01 pm**

.

After her discovery that Vanessa was in town, it was only fitting that she found Anton, too. She wasn’t sure if it was a genuine sort of affection, or an almost scientific fascination with the blind man, or if it was a desire to sell his ostentatiously wealthy family’s silver for rent. Perhaps all three - they weren’t so different concepts from each other, after all.

She’d already begun to aetherically infiltrate the foyer by the time the butler answered the door. It was clear he had checked through the peephole and saw her, not quite dressed for the neighborhood - The Reichtum sounded too much like the Rectum, to her, and so she did not give a shit how she was perceived there - but he answered regardless. At the very least, she wasn’t dangling a lit cigarette from her mouth. That had been smothered and kicked into the bushes besides the door a few seconds before she figured out how to use the heavy door knocker.

As soon as the door was open, Carina pushed her way inside. If she hadn’t been able to use force, she would have simply blinked in, but the butler was surprised enough by the action that he didn’t give much in the way of resistance. Standing inside, a hand on her hip, she addressed the servant.

”I”m here for Anton.” She informed him, though before he could finish stuttering out a forceful reply about nonsense regarding calling the constabulary, she spotted him. In the foyer, as if he had been waiting. Already her vision was flooded with the mental map she had begun to create for the building.

”ANTON!” she yelled, as if the first mention of his name wasn’t loud enough to alert him. She sidled up to where he sat and plucked the book from his hands - dog-earing the place, she wasn’t a total monster - and leaned down to turn off the Hub.

”Why do you listen to this nonsense?” She said as she straightened up. ”You’ve got much better things to be doing, don’t you?”

.

Posted: **Tue Nov 01, 2022 8:40 pm**

The old butler would have ordinarily never permitted any riffraff inside of his master's manse, but Anton had insisted that other survivors of Zaichaer may not have been as fortunate in retaining their access to funds as he was. That was the excuse that he had given the staff at least, politely neglecting to mention the fact that a great deal of the people he hoped to see were significantly less wealthy than himself even before the destruction of the city. In Gel'Grandal, every Zaichaeri with a bit o creative flexibility could present themselves as merely temporarily embarrassed, and live for a time off of the kindness of Imperial grandees while insisting that they had just needed to wait for the Guild of Coins to verify their identity. By comparison, letting in anyone Anton approved of was practically raising a moat and drawbridge.

Fortunately for Carina, she said the magic words almost immediately, the manservant having briefly considered calling for men to see this boyish waif out the door. He managed a brief spluttering about impropriety before she reached the young lord, and any role he was meant to serve as doorkeeper was firmly irrelevant. Shaking his head, the butler closed the door and retired to his other duties, leaving Anton with his strange Zaichaeri relations. At least he was able to confirm that much, she had the unmistakable accent of someone from frigid Karnor.

"Anna," Anton replied somewhat breathlessly. He had spent the moments in between recognizing her aura entering the door and her pulling the book away from him to compose himself, but some of his emotions leaked through in the name regardless. A bolt like lightning had struck him as soon as he noticed her barging inside, surprise and relief both. He chided himself for both while collecting his thoughts, of course she would survive. He was certain she could dance her out of almost anything, and perhaps even give Death a twirl so spectacular to have her judgement day delayed. Still, it was another thing to know she was safe, made even more potent by her standing before him in flesh and blood.

He was so relieved he even forgave the dogearing.

That was a very peculiar thought for him to fixate on - which his mind in turn fixated upon, distracting his thoughts so entirely that he barely even noticed when impulse overtook him. He immediately crushed her in a hug, or at least as much as anyone as gangly as him could crush anyone.

"I knew you'd be okay," he whispered, not even bothering to ask her how she escaped. The fact that she was nowhere even close to Zaichaer when its doom had come would have never occurred to him on its own.

Posted: **Thu Nov 03, 2022 2:16 pm**

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Carina hugged him back, a bit, forgetting that he was one of the few she knew of left that would still call her Anna until he did so. "Of course. It helped that I was here on business for most of the season before the Zaichaer incident." She pulled back from the hug, and her aura showed a glimmer of relief, of mild discomfort, and most importantly, and most strongly, of her own usage of magic — semblance. She wasted no time in pooling the aether in her rune, and had already begun to create a mental map of the estate. Anton was one thing, but this was a very, very large property, and there was bound to be something special within.

She briefly retreated from the immediate surroundings and focused on Anton. Now that he wasn't actively hiding it, she was able to notice the rune of semblance he carried himself, marking his aura. No wonder he made his way around so well, recognized people so easily. Read a book.

"You know, I never saw where you lived before, but I think the Reichtum has far grander estates than Zaichaer ever did. This place is huge! You could spend all day wandering around the halls and still find something new, eh?" She paused. "You have explored it, yes?"

Realizing she could, in fact, use her magic in his estate, she attempted something she had only practiced for herself — projecting the mental map she had created, for him to view with his own rune of Semblance. It was by no means complete, depicting only the room they were in, the entryway, and the rooms adjacent to them. But she could manipulate what was shown. She wondered how Anton would perceive it, if he saw auras and lines like she did, or if they expanded to his other senses as she sometimes perceived. The taste of blood from Hector's mystery rune was one of those.

"Look in front of you," she instructed, "I want to know if you can see this."

The projected map was not physically visible, but it was clear as day to anyone with Semblance. She mentally adjusted the aura to mark where they were near the doorway. Some details were fuzzy — she had not yet perfected the skill of finding the doors that were marked, but any negation wards were light but present on the three-dimensional floorplan. She could have attempted to continue and investigate the aura of the massive home while she was projecting it, but that ran the risk of overstepping. She pulled the mental map back, and replaced it with the full depiction of the department store in Wintergarten Circle, where she had done the tiny heist with Hector. She had had the time to totally memorize that aura, and it was far more detailed than the sketch that she had just shown.

"Now this." She said, and slowly manipulated the aura of the tiered store. Staircases were marked, even exit routes had special notes where she had adjusted the memorized aura herself. Points of interest were brighter, but despite not being anywhere near it, he would be able to even see the faint aura of what general objects were where. "Oh, shit, you didn't know I was—" She exclaimed, and then shrugged.

"Railrunner," she said quietly, if he even knew what that was. "I'm guessing you probably didn't know that."

.

Posted: **Wed Nov 30, 2022 3:56 am**

Anton felt slightly foolish for his worry as soon as Carina explained that she had been away. Vanessa had mentioned something about that, but it seemed too... convenient, and when all the world was ending he didn't think himself lucky enough for that to save anyone he cared about. He didn't even bother interrogating the fact that he had evidently decided Carina was someone he cared about, despite their few encounters. Dimly, a distant part of him noted that keeping the charade up was pointless as he noticed her own Rune of Semblance shining. Then again, it didn't really matter anymore anyway. "That's one way to go about it I guess," he said with a half laugh, knowing that any attempt to hide the conflicting surge of relief and self exasperation and concern would be... dishonest. He was relatively certain he could've shrouded his aura from her, but it seemed unfair now that the pair of them stood upon the same stage.

"This is much larger, yes," he replied, half baffled by the sudden turn of questioning. "There was only so much room inside of Zaichaer, the old manors were all clustered around the Presidium. This is more on the scale of the country estates, but I guess the Imperium decided it had to do everything grander and put those in its capital too. I... haven't really explored much of it at all, honestly. It's s-"

Before he could finish his explanation for his frankly boring lack of attention to the massive house he lived in, Carina projected the map of the estate - or at least, the immediate area of it. "I can see it," he said softly, face stuck between dumb wonder and a broad smile. "Well, not exactly see, but, it's... never mind. You can just... do this?" he asked softly, turning to face her just as she admitted the truth.

Railrunner.

He didn't know what reaction she thought he would have, but the long 'ooooohhhhh' of understanding was likely not it. "That makes so much more sense! Constantly surprising Vanessa, vanishing without a trace, the way you shone at the balle-" he cut himself off, slightly embarrassed at his exuberance.

"I'm guessing you didn't know this either though," he murmured, extending a hand to touch her shoulder. A soft hum, audible only to those with Semblance, arose between them as he tuned their auras, extending his senses into hers. A vibrant soundscape of sense and sensation intruded upon her mundane hearing, drowning it out as she was confronted with the music their souls - and the almost jaunty, whimsical, mysterious sound of her heist map.

"Let's fill in that map."

Legend of Ransera

Make Yourself At Home [Carina]

Make Yourself At Home [Carina]

Re: Make Yourself At Home [Carina]

Re: Make Yourself At Home [Carina]

Re: Make Yourself At Home [Carina]

Re: Make Yourself At Home [Carina]