Now you know it's so much better to pretend

[thatsit]

Since the revelations of the meeting the mood in the Palace had shifted. In part, that was because the population had shifted. A number of attendees had left for their own homes once more, and the air had felt a little less tense ever since.

Bellatrix had been the first to depart, slinking off with her tail between her proverbial legs before anyone had chance to notice her retreat. Ariane Emory had stayed the night and left for Gralea the following day. Ignis had no doubt the woman would be back, but since her chances of laying her hands on the stone were currently zero she'd likely considered it a waste of her time to linger. He wasn't sorry to see the back of her black clad followers, whose impassivity was unsettling and existence an affront, although neither of those things were the fault of the individuals themselves.

Sir Integra and Alucard had stayed an extra night, which Ignis suspected had more to do with the presence of Noah clan in the Palace than Integra's own wishes. Alucard was a barely leashed attack dog at the best of times, but the Palace was, if not a no-combat zone then at least a neutral one where residents were expected to behave themselves. Ignis had sought her out prior to her departure, and they'd spent an hour discussing the meeting, the attendees, and Ignis and Gladio's plans to stay on a while longer.

She'd promised to pass his well wishes to his aunt before she'd left.

The Noah remained, though they seemed more intrigued with the Arrancar than they did with Ignis and Gladio. It wasn't unfounded; the meeting had held a number of revelations, not least the fact that Captain Aizen's underlings were daemon-infused experiments. It explained a lot about some of them, such as why, despite their reputations and behaviours, they were kept around.

It only raised questions about others. Nel, for example, seemed perfectly level headed and competent, and even had a background as a ranked watchwoman, and yet as one of Captain Aizen's Arrancar, she was infused with daemonic power. Why she had consented to that was a small mystery, and one that was probably rude to enquire about unless one knew her personally.

She was preparing for another visit to D District, maintaining the air that she was Captain Aizen's lover. Ignis had informally taken over some of her kitchen duties, duties that were not, Nel had said, given to her but which she had assumed because it was that or allow a disorganised free for all that would see inhabitants surviving on cup noodles and ready meals, and no one ever washing the dishes.

Aside from anything else, it gave Ignis a good position from which to ingratiate himself with the Palace's other inhabitants. Some were self sufficient, stubbornly so in some cases. Others were accustomed to Nel's presence, and became similarly accustomed to Ignis's.

He had two flavoured batches of Lucian Delight, cooled and ready for slicing into cubes to one side. He'd found an apron too, which made him feel much more at home in the Palace's kitchen. With his sleeves rolled up and his jacket hanging over the back of a chair, he practically looked like he belonged there as he sifted cornflour and icing sugar together.

Comments

[thesilentstorm]

"I believe so," he replied, keying something into the pad by the door. He would have to overhaul that security system, though hand or retina scanning was probably beyond the capabilities of Spiran technology, modern or ancient. "Though the cannon throws that into question."

Stealth was all well and good, but it all went out of the window when cannon fire came into play.

"She came equipped with maps that suggest night flight as an option," he said, waiting for the stairs to deploy. That system, like many other things, would need to be streamlined at some point in the future. "Or perhaps purpose. Though I suppose the name gives that much away."

He stepped away from the doorway when the steps up had settled into place and gestured for Ignis to enter.

[thatsit]

Maps for night flight, stealth capabilities, and a very big cannon suggested to Ignis that someone had designed a ship designed to get in undetected, and after that it was the pilot's problem. Whether it was meant to get out again at all might depend upon its acrobatic abilities once airborne, but for a planned single strike against a difficult to reach target, a ship like this would be invaluable.

"Some targets only need to be hit once," he said.

Of course, it would also be highly useful for night time reconnaissance with the cannon as back up should it come to it. Although the size of the cannon didn't really scream 'plan B'.

Ignis watched the steps descend, and then climbed them on Lumi's invitation. Inside made it very clear that Marluxia had no influence here.

"She's rather starkly beautiful," he said, looking around. She was also, he noted, very modern looking. Moreso than truly modern things, perhaps.

[thesilentstorm]

"She is, that," Lumi said, looking around at his ship. Chrome and lacquer prevailed, with leather making up the rest of it, with little room for wood. Wood, as far as Lumi was concerned, had no space in a ship. Leather was pushing the boat out, but Lumi had reassured himself that it was far easier to get hold of than it had been in his native world, and a fraction of the cost.

She was spacious enough, for a speedy ship less than half the size of the Ragnarok's bulk, but she clearly wasn't designed for a large crew. The quarters, situated a short distance behind the cockpit, were clearly designed to be spartan and functional rather than comfortable.

"She needed rather a lot of rebuilding and reworking," Lumi admitted as he stepped up to the console and pressed a button to illuminate it. "The cockpit was mostly intact, but the rest ... I daresay Marluxia won't agree with my choices."

[thatsit]

Ignis's smile showed his teeth. "No," he agreed, "it doesn't look like his style." There was, for one thing, a distinct lack of small guard Malboros, and a notable lack of flowers. The ship also wasn't grand and ostentatious. Ignis got the distinct impression, and perhaps it had come from witnessing Marluxia dramatically flourishing an excessively large pink scythe for effect, that Marluxia's taste was a little more... in your face. It probably involved expensive wood and gold, rather than chrome and shiny lacquerwork.

Ignis was drawn to the illuminated cockpit, drawing his fingers almost reverently over the bottom of the panel as he approached. Letters were inscribed on the buttons. Ignis recognised a handful of them as Pulsian script, although he could no more read it than he could speak it. It was firm proof that the ship truly was Pulsian in origin.

With the way Lumi reached naturally for the controls he must have invested a lot of time into working out what buttons did what. "I daresay I prefer your efforts."

[thesilentstorm]

"I have no love of wood paneling," Lumi said wryly.

He clicked on a few of the buttons, as natural as a typist, long fingers moving deftly and precisely over the foreign keyboard. Menus, each arranged in full colour instead of the usual burning green lettering on black sped by, until he clicked into a section he knew to be maps. It took seconds, but that was both practice and being able to read it all.

"Here," he said, indicating a strangely blank part of the console with one hand and pressing a command with the other. It took a second or two, but a three dimensional map appeared there, shimmering and unaffected by the regular ambient light in the cockpit.

"It's rather detailed," he said, quite needlessly. That much was obvious. It wasn't a mere wire vaguery of a place, it was a fully three dimensional map. It showed hills and valleys, rock formations, a winding river and even strange tree-like structures. "I don't know where it refers to, however. The topography is unrecognisable."

[thatsit]

Ignis watched Lumi activate the ships controls as if it was second nature to him. The displays were brilliant full colour displays. Lucis was proud of its technology, and some of the things they had might be comparable.

Might. Or perhaps would be. But this technology was ancient. How far the world must have fallen.

Ignis froze when the map came up. It was unmistakably a map, or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a model. A miniature, three dimensional model of a land, perhaps one surveyed by the ship, or perhaps one that had been installed at manufacture.

The hard drives alone could be priceless, although it would take years to translate their contents. Ignis stared, and carefully lifted his coffee to his lips, taking a sip to prevent himself saying or doing something silly. Like staring with his jaw agape.

"It could be Pulse," he said, after he'd taken a drink and lowered his cup once more. His eyes remained fixed on the map. "Though how long ago, and which part remains a mystery." The possibility was tantalising.

[thesilentstorm]

"It's definitely not Bancour, where the ship was found, and the landmasses don't match with anywhere in Dalmasca either, even with time allowing for shift," he said, touching a part of a map to bring it closer. The section enlarged, showing a slightly more detailed version of what had been there before. Lumi turned it, as if turning a pot on a wheel.

It showed a ravine where the river ran through, towers of rock on either side and the water in the bottom. If it was Pulse, Lumi doubted that the map was wholly accurate any more, especially after a thousand years. Water could do a number of land that way.

"The ship is at least a thousand years old," he said, the corners of his lips curving down as he thought about it. "Perhaps a thousand and fifty, give or take. There's only a small window where the transfer between Ivalice and Pulse was free enough to enable the people of Pulse to obtain the Jagd-proof powersource, according to historical research. As such, if it is Pulse... the map is very likely long out of date."

The section of the menu he had pulled the map from was labelled 'The Heartlands'. He wasn't sure what that meant, whether it was a region or the name of the precise place.

[thatsit]

"Likely so," Ignis agreed, distantly. "But if it is indeed Pulse, it's perhaps the only map still extant."

It might be useful if you were navigating the past, for example, through historical texts. Or if you were there, and knew to which part of the terrain the map pertained. Rivers changed course and changed the land, but knowing where one used to be could be helpful in finding where one lay now. Which could be extremely useful for exploration.

"May I?" Ignis asked, reaching his free hand towards the map. The way it moved as if it were a physical thing Lumi was turning, and yet there had been nothing there to touch before was fascinating.

They could learn such valuable things from technology such as this. Important things, perhaps, that could give Lucis the edge it required.

[thesilentstorm]

Lumi nodded.

Many might not have asked before they touched technology largely unknown to them, and fascinating, but Ignis was polite enough to do so. Holograms weren't entirely unknown in Ivalice, he knew that much. A little research had told him that they had them in the higher reaches of some of the more technologically advanced societies, particularly Midgar prior to its fall, but it was far from commonplace and what he'd heard of them put his far beyond those in terms of intricacy, display and scope.

If Pulse was Hell, it was only because all the technology had gone and left behind the same woeful inadequacies as the rest of the world suffered.

"I have to admit," Lumi said, settling himself into the pilot's chair. It had a swivel mechanism, a replacement for the original broken one, and it allowed him to reach most of the console barring the furthest reaches of the hologram. "Pulse history is not my forte. Why do they say it is hell? The history books here mention brief periods of trade and war between it and Ivalice and then the records of any crossover stop suddenly with the Mist Saturation event."

The way he spoke of that historical mystery was casual and irreverent, like a paleontologist or geologist discussing the Permian-Triassic extinction event, or some other such, world-changing tragedy so distant it felt like myth more than anything. Some Spirans, he knew, spoke of the War of the Magi, and the aftermath, like it had happened in living memory, as if their Grandparents had served in the great conflict, instead of a thousand years ago in countries that no longer exist, to people so far in the past only the legendary figures survived the annals.

He, of course, knew why records of Pulse stopped with that particular phenomenon. Even back then, when the technology was available, Jagd Proof ships were undoubtedly rare and difficult to come by. Prior to their invention, people had crossed the boundaries between the lowerworld and the purvamae on the backs of dragons. Mist, though not Jagd exactly, had the same effect on technology -- it crippled it. Even technology invented on this magic-saturated world suffered the negative effects of the ambient force. With the spread of Mist, the relative rarity of the ships and the well-documented turn against Machina that the War's end brought, trade routes closed.

Ignis, however, was from a Purvama, albeit the wrong one. Perhaps their history had more to tell of the continent than that of the Lowerworld.

[thatsit]

Ignis touched the hologram. It felt strange under his fingers, as if he could both swish his hand right through it, and yet he would feel his hand passing through it in the process. It responded to the slide of his fingers as if he was moving something solid.

He turned the map a hundred and eighty degrees, looking at it from the other angle. Would it orient itself automatically when the ship was in motion? Or did it rely on the pilot and navigator to be aware of their orientation? How good was the technology, and how much did the person still have to do?

He turned away from the map to look at Lumi, who looked very much like he belonged in the pilot's seat. Ignis was filled with a strange sense that here, unlike anywhere else within the Palace, was somewhere Lumi considered home. His being here seemed natural. Even his bizarre and unsettling lack of reiatsu didn't seem so out of place in this craft.

"Public records aren't reliable," he answered. Ignis wasn't wholly sure of the reliability of Lucis's own records. The problem with history was that records tended to be clouded by opinion, supposition, and study. "Lucis," he began, "claims its origins on Pulse. Our history states that we fled a curse laid on the people as a result of the," he hesitated, repeating Lumi's words, "Mist Saturation."

Ignis frowned. It was difficult to explain to someone that wasn't already familiar with the terminology or history involved, and there was no reason to expect that Lumi would be. "On Pulse there were," he chose his words, "creatures, I suppose, like lesser gods, known as Fal'Cie that had the ability to task individuals with objectives. Failure to complete the task resulted in a fate worse than death, so it was considered a curse. The prevailing historical theory is that the Mist drove the Fal'Cie mad, and they in turn afflicted the people with their curse."

Ignis looked back at the map with a frown. "Of course, Mist is also known for killing technology, mutating people and animals, and making wildlife bolder and more violent. By all accounts, Pulse was not a pleasant place during the exodus."