Everything Krahe learned from securing her new office would also inevitably carry over to everything else that involved talisman-drawing, especially Theurgy. Besides just being able to produce working Wandrei Faust talismans faster and more consistently, the standard Wandrei Faust would inevitably be improved as well, as her improved understanding would allow her to incorporate more complex maneuvering thrusters based on her own left arm, allowing it to be uncannily maneuverable for its size. She was also certain she could create a lighter, faster variant that could harry an enemy for a longer time. Concocting such a variant wasn’t at the top of her priorities list, however, since she didn’t want to split up her two eidolons.
By the time she was done securing the place, she had spent nearly twice as much on the security as she had on the property itself. The walls, ceilings, and floors ended up plastered in three total layers of talismans: The first, most expansive, was the general security layer. It included passive structural reinforcement, active warding in case of high-powered direct attack, detection of any would-be intruders, prohibition of Astro Skimming, and a number of weaker traps that could immobilize and be reset. The second layer was the more potent, containing multiple networks of high-powered precision traps leveraged against one another, able to be triggered manually if necessary through Krahe’s specific thaumic signature, made nearly impossible to imitate due to the Astral Implosion Furnace. The active features of these two layers were powered by a great number of CRC rings scattered all throughout, with a larger “power bank” embedded inside the floor. She also placed a few “signature-mimic” talismans at other points, which would directly mimic the power bank’s energy signature while themselves requiring only a miniscule amount of energy to do so.
The third layer was purely diagnostic. It traced and interlaced with the other two layers while remaining separate, and its main feature was visual projection, meaning that Krahe could easily diagnose if there were any issues and where they were.
While Krahe took care to make her defensive perimeter not obvious from the outside, she decided that the performance hit wasn’t worth it when it came to the interior. The exterior door was one thing — it was hammered, black iron, an Ironworks slab of metal, but these were not too rare to see. The strangeness only came in past that door, in the stairwell. Up and up it went, and the closer to the top, the more densely the paint gave way to the red-and-black-on-yellow of paper talismans.
Finally, when it was at last done, there came no flood of clients, not even once Krahe began distributing her contact talismans. Over the coming days, she settled back into some measure of a routine, now spending a significant portion of her time at her office. Of the people who contacted her, one was a letter, an offer from the Ironworks to become a tester for the Black Sun Project. That they knew she was Viridaimon didn’t surprise her, but she didn’t feel like walking that path. She didn’t hold any particular dislike for them either, knowing little of the company, so she filed the offer away. Another was, at first alarmingly, one of Brizogia’s men, one of the few who stayed behind rather than chase after her. He was just as on-edge as Krahe, but, it seemed, he only brought an olive branch of sorts. Entirely unofficially, he claimed that he was certain his employer had completely dropped the subject of Krahe, which made him believe she wanted to move past the incident and save as much face as possible. It was an awkward, tense exchange, but in the end, no violence came of it. Krahe wasn’t sure if he was right, but she was fairly certain he at least believed his own words.
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In the meanwhile, she returned to her research on eidolon evolution rituals, continuing to draw upon the Lost Sun Society’s libraries for this purpose, and also made some attempts at elaborating her thaumaturgies’ designs to better take advantage of the properties conferred by Implosion-Burning. Tracers could benefit from improved guidance, but she couldn’t maintain a good connection just by line-of-sight. Extruding long, thin threads by way of Tar to achieve a wire-guided effect was a sound solution, but she couldn’t quite get it to work yet. The threads either broke within the span of a few meters, or they ate up too much entropy to be worthwhile. She just needed to work it out through trial and error before it worked properly, she was sure of it. Then, there was Lasher. It was still new, and it was great on its own, but Krahe couldn’t help but feel that its use-case crossed over with Cinder Flash a bit too much, and more importantly, that the two could be made to compliment one another. Perhaps something excessively potent for a Thaumaturgy, straying well into the realm of Theurgy, designed to rip apart wards and bodies in one shot. A real, true, undeniable, howitzer. That was when the thought sparked, a memory of a certain nuclear plasma weapon used in space combat. The problem with Lasher was that its threads relied on the physical motion of her fingers for extrusion, and it was propelled forward directly by her thaumaturgy, without any chain of causality. She knew well that she had a natural lack of affinity for makings things go fast in this method, perhaps as a form of naturally-ocurring leverage. While her Tracers had simply become more missile-like to solve this problem, another solution was needed. This was where the concepts behind the aforementioned nuclear plasma weapon came into play — Krahe intended to modify Cinder Flash so that its burst-beam would simultaneously extrude and propel Lasher’s threads, whilst also conferring an anti-armor element to the thaumaturgy, softening the target before the cutting element hit. After countless adjustments, she was able to consistently recreate a prototypical form of her intended thaumaturgy. It was absurdly inefficient and required several seconds of charge-up time, but its power was like a siren’s song. Her left arm aglow with scarlet light, it poured out more like a sudden gust of wind than an instantaneous snap, and brought with it a five-pronged net of superheated black glass. It wasn’t complete, not combat-usable by any other means, but Krahe had already christened it the Solomon Howitzer.
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