Chapter 8: VIII. Meeting the 409 (part 1)
It took Iro nearly half a minute to process what he'd just been told. Even then, it still made no sense to him.
1159? Three hundred years later? But how? That simply wasn't possible. He refused to believe it.They had to be trying to pull some sort of elaborate trick on him. Maybe they suspected he was an enemy, and were trying to fool him into giving into giving away his ruse or something.
But, what motivation would the Captain have to lie, if he didn't believe that Iro was an enemy combatant? And how would the younger man know to be in on it with his reactions to Iro's statements?
That was harder to explain, as he thought about it.
Assuming what the Captain said was true, how was such a thing even possible? How could he have just traveled 300 years into the future? And how in the tap-dancing fuck had he ended up in a body made of clockwork? Magic couldn't do something like that. At least, not that he was aware of....
As he continued to think about what he'd just been told, the ramifications started to dawn on him for the first time. If what he was being told was true... he was alone. Everyone he'd ever known was hundreds of years dead. The nation he'd served didn't exist anymore. And there was no guarantee that anything he'd ever known previously as a point of reference still existed, either.
If he'd had the ability to, Iro would've cried.
As it stood now, he at least knew he was alive, and while not safe, per se, he didn't appear to be in any immediate risk of harm. The Captain had also, for whatever reason, left him unbound when he'd left. Had he forgotten to bind Iro back because of what he'd just heard? Or was he testing how Iro would handle the additional freedom?
Was he free to leave the tent? And if so, what was stopping him from just fleeing the camp while it was still dark?
Outside the tent, he heard a couple voices laugh, and then a few cheers and the clink of something metal. He stood slowly, and walked his way over to the tent entrance, and peered out of the flap. From the look of things, we was in one of the tents he'd seen earlier. About a dozen or so paces away, he saw half a dozen shapes sitting around a brightly burning fire, drinking and talking. From what he could see, there were three humans, a dwarf, an elf of some variety, although from the angle he couldn't tell which kind, and a smallfolk tightly wrapped in a cloak. A halfling or a gnome probably. It all struck Iro as very odd. He'd never seen the races get along much at all, much less fighting for the same side and laughing and bonding as friends. The whole thing was very, very strange.
As he looked out from the tent entrance, one of the humans seemed to notice him, and nudged another next to him, who Iro recognized as the younger man who'd accompanied the Captain a few minutes earlier. The man said something into the Sergeant's ear, and the Sergeant looked in Iro's direction. He turned back to the man and said something, and then stood and began walking Iro's direction.
Shit.
Iro ducked back into the tent, and returned to his seat. A moment later the Sergeant entered, and looked at Iro.
"The soulspeaker will be here tomorrow morning. In the meantime, Captain Vrataski's put me in charge of keeping an eye on you," Joren said. "I would appreciate it if you made that easy on me."
He turned, and motioned with his thumb out towards the direction of the fire.
"You're welcome to come join us by the fire. Just understand that if you do anything that raises any alarms, my squadmates and I won't hesitate to fill that metal body of yours full of holes," He said.
Iro nodded. "Seems reasonable enough," he said.
"Glad we understand each other," Joren said. He stepped through the tent entrance and held the flap open, motioning for Iro to exit the tent. As Iro walked out of the tent, he felt all eyes on him, and several of the bodies around the fire leaned in to speak quietly to each other as he followed Joren into the firelight glow.
"Have a seat," Joren said, pointing to an empty spot on a log, seated between the dwarf and the elf, who Iro now saw wasn't in shadow, but instead had the distinctive purple-blue skin of a dark elf. The elf smiled with some kind of amusement as Iro stepped over and lowered himself onto the wood.
"Have a nice rest?" The elf asked. It was the soft voice from earlier. Iro turned and looked at him. The elf's expression, while amused, didn't seem to be particularly full of malice.
"Leave him be, Basta. There's no need for that," Joren said.
"I'm only being friendly," Basta said, raising his hands. "There's no reason I can't be civil."
Iro said nothing, choosing to keep his focus on the fire. He found himself rapidly warming up for the first time since he'd awakened, and found that, absent the cold, he felt a lot more comfortable. He looked around at the faces in the circle, quietly observing and trying to get a sense of each of the other soldiers he hadn't met yet as he sat there in silence.
The Dwarf spoke little, but what he did say tended to be straight to the point, from what Iro could tell. He also had an accent that Iro recognized, though from where he couldn't say. When the dwarf conjured a small jet of electric energy to light his pipe, Iro realized that he was probably the stocky shape that'd shocked him unconscious earlier.
The man next to Joren was younger, maybe early twenties or so, with light brown skin and jet-black hair parted to the side. The way the firelight shined off it told Iro there was likely some kind of oil or fat keeping it in place and giving it that gloss. He seemed friendly and open, and laughed more frequently and more loudly than the others. Iro took a liking to him immediately.
The other human never spoke. Upon closer inspection, Iro saw that she was a woman with close-cropped red hair and hard features, her face weathered from the elements and bearing numerous small scars. Despite this, however, she probably wasn't more than 30 or so, and wasn't unattractive, in his opinion. She was the only one at the fire visibly armed, with a long blade kept in a black sheath by her side, and an ornately marked pouch tied to her belt that Iro recognized as a spell component pouch. Probably a spellblade then, though he'd never heard of one who used prepared component spells instead of an inherent sorcery pool. Interesting.
The elf fit every stereotype Iro had of elves- conceited, sarcastic, condescending, and elitist. He was also, Iro noticed, incredibly observant and insightful, and quickly noticed small details in the actions and statements of others that Iro himself missed. He also appeared to have genuine respect for his squadmates, despite his constant demeaning of them. On more than one occasion as he watching, Basta would redirect a line of teasing back onto the harasser to put an end to a line of attack that would be upsetting another of the group. The whole effect was odd, and while it didn't make Iro like the man, it at least kept him from disliking him so much.
The last member of the circle, Iro saw, was a gnomish woman of indeterminate age. From this angle, Iro could see for the first time in the light that every visible inch of her skin was covered in elaborate black-line tattoos that weaved and traced patterns on her hands and arms, up her neck, and across the cheeks and forehead of her face. Below the cloak, she wore what looked like tight-fitting black robes free of ornamentation, save a small silver broach that clasped the cloak across he shoulders. From the look of it at this distance, it appeared to be some form of creature with numerous tentacles. She caught Iro observing her, and her eyes flashed to his with an intensity that would have previously made every hair on his body stand on end. Instinctively, Iro got the sense that she, more than any of the others, was the greatest threat around the fire.
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