Over the coming days, he settled into a rhythm. Despite the foreboding nature of the Bleeding Mountains, this was not the Bleeding Mountains proper; this was a borderland, a desolate, cursed Goldilocks zone with too much danger and not enough resources for the major forces to bother laying claim. Thus, it had naturally become something of a neutral zone with a number of mostly small, widely varied towns and settlements, all separated by at bare minimum a hundred kilometers if not several times more. Overall, the level of danger here was somewhat tame; for Zanma, anyway. To travel alone through this region without the comfort of ESP and a multi-ton ceramic-plated crushing machine at your beck and call, that was peril of the utmost order. He regularly had to cross chasms, scale sheer walls kilometers high, or travel through underground passages with malfunctioning or no lights at all for days at a time. Once more, a mere taste of the Bleeding Mountains.
On the whole, he didn’t mind. The views were nice and he had peace. He knew that he would soon meet with far greater peril than some errant war-automata scuttling about on all fours with no weapons to speak of save some lasers and bladed fingers. Glorified security alarms, those things. At this moment, he sat inside the mouth of an antediluvian pipe on the side of a structural wall, just high enough to glimpse both the ceiling and the ground from where he was, the tallest of the Bleeding Mountains still towering almost all the way to that ceiling. From here, he could see the Sea of Blood, he could see the ancient puppet battlefield like a desert in the south and the shining metropolis of vultures who had grown fat from its spoils. Lakes and oceans of ordinary water could be seen to the far southwest, just barely, with gaping hollows of empty black right next to them, huge reinforcing slabs visibly plugging holes through which that water might have drained away. He wondered, if he had better eyes, or perhaps a great telescope, could he just look in the right direction and see Axis Fulcrum, hanging over the abyss? There was no curvature, after all, this wasn’t the surface of a free-moving planet. He’d studied the maps and atlases, many times and at length; Taisei hadn’t given him or any of the other prospects a choice. Oculoid navigation could only do so much if you didn’t know the lay of the land. This subsector, so vast you would struggle to explore it in an ordinary lifetime, what was the entire world to many people, was nothing more than a small slice of the greater megastructure. Even less than that, it was just a subsector. Part of a sector. On every map, inside every atlas, the name Equilibros was emblazoned.
Equilibros, so named for the fact it had been damaged over, and over, and over again, and always repaired just enough to return to equilibrium. These countless cycles of destruction and renewal had scarred the land and left gaping chasms all over, including the chasm into which the Sea of Blood drained, preventing its tide from rising overmuch.
Whenever he made camp, every thirty hours or so, he would unfold a partial workshop and disguise it with static camouflage projectors, if he deemed it necessary. Unlike the White Serpent’s active camouflage, this version had to be allowed to self-tune to the environment over the course of around a few dozen minutes, and the illusion would break down with any significant movement. Also unlike the White Serpent’s active camouflage, there wasn’t a serious time limit. Not a short-enough one to be a problem for how long he usually stayed in one place, at least.
Even as he traveled, Zanma chipped away at his work on the Hadou Frame. It wasn’t just the desire to see it done, the love for puppets, but a gnawing paranoia, an expectation that, at any moment, he could encounter a random hostile evolver or monstrosity that none of his current puppets could deal with. Or, perhaps, he might encounter a foe that the Wurger could deal with, but sustain damage in the process, and the next foe might come too soon and be too fast for the White Serpent, and what then? Such scenarios were obviously very unlikely, but they were still possible. It was said that the Soltern megastructure itself conspired to make evolvers encounter one another, not for any grand scheme, but just to see what would happen, as a way of explaining why, despite their comparatively tiny numbers, evolvers kept running into one another and getting into conflicts throughout history. The real answer was naturally far less mystical, relating to resources and the spread of information, but the reality of that phenomenon was undeniable.
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Zanma’s arrival at his first settlement was at once a momentous occasion, but also far more mundane than he had expected. Despite having lived in isolation from wider civilization since the age of nine, he was an alien here not because of that, but because he was a puppetmaster. Before he even arrived, he came to regard this place as “The Bonewood Town” for the fact it was surrounded by flesh-and-bone trees visible from afar, and its buildings were heavily decorated with the material, often having live branches growing out here and there. Some of the trees bore heaving, reddish fruit of oblong shape. The pale-faced people of this town, clad in colorful fabrics with tassels and decorated by pieces of whittled bone-wood, looked upon him like he had stepped out of a storybook, and why wouldn’t they?
One day, out from the fog, an evolver riding a giant monster arrived to our town. He said that he was here to put on a play with his puppets, to “humbly offer up his skills as a puppetmaster” for the short duration of his stay, and that he would accept three temporary assistants to help him set up his stage. What fool would disregard such a figure, who commanded the obedience of a machine, or perhaps a creature, that most closely resembled the legendary envoys of the Soltern itself?
The townsfolk failed to answer him at first. A few of the women bickered with one another, and the children swarmed around him, gawking at the White Serpent while also keeping their distance, cowed by the puppet’s presence alone; no wonder, the psionic force that animated it could erupt at any moment, and children were on average more sensitive to such things than adults. He mentally picked up one of them and sent him floating through the air for a short distance, much to the brat’s raucous amusement and to the worried hemming and hawing of whom Zanma presumed to be the child’s mother. Within the space of half a minute, an elderly man with a three-fingered prosthetic arm of bone-wood came running, or rather run-skipping down the main thoroughfare, which was also cobbled in pieces of pale bone-wood. It was a strange way of moving, and yet the old man was so quick that it almost appeared as if he was hovering just above the ground at breakneck speed.
“...Puppetmaster. Lord Puppetmaster! I humbly beseech you — please, our water, we’re dying of thirst. Since times immemorial, we have relied on the work of one of your kind, a device for converting the Blood River into potable water. We have relied on the fruit of these trees to persist, but our youngest and our oldest cannot stomach it. We don’t have much to offer you, but-”
Zanma reached up to his earring and brought out a small slip of ceramic, one of dozens in his possession, and tossed it onto the elder’s shoulder.
“I will take a look. In the meanwhile, try to set up a stage matching these specifications to your best ability. It will be no issue if you can’t match them, considering your situation,” he said. While it was true that he liked a more casual atmosphere, akin to what he had had back on the island or with Carter, the Captain, or the man’s sons, he knew well that people had expectations of what an evolver should be, what a puppetmaster should be, and that it would be easiest for both sides if he fulfilled those expectations. Besides, being a walking fable was also enjoyable.
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