We left the Nested Continuum immediately after the experiment. Despite knowing what was going on there, the whole place gave me a sort of creepy, mysterious vibe. I was glad to be out of there, and as soon as Elonwy dropped us off outside my residence and vanished, I headed inside to show Callie around my place, glad to be back in my own territory where nothing was waiting to infringe on my normalcy.
Which, obviously, was why when I arrived at my door, I found a pair of strange boxes waiting for me that I’d never seen before.
I froze in my tracks as I approached. “Huh,” I said, staring down at the two boxes with interest. “Never seen those before. How about you?” I kept my tone nonchalant, but I had a weird feeling. My instincts weren’t telling me I was in danger, but they weren’t telling me I wasn’t. It was a strange sense of almost deja vu for my danger sense.
Callie shook her head. “Nope, but then, this isn’t my major. They probably aren’t aimed at m-” she stopped as the boxes changed. Before our eyes, a series of silvery letters scrawled themselves gracefully across the dark surface of the box. Shane Wyndham. Calliope Wyndham. “Oh,” she said suspiciously. “Nevermind.”
Which was very dark. The wood it was made of (if it was wood at all, it was hard to tell), was so dark it drank the light, seeming to almost highlight the tracery of decorative silver flourish behind it like the void of space emphasized the stars. Originally it was a smooth black surface with a frame along the edges of the top and side panels made of inlaid silver, but once Callie had noted the absence of a reference to her, the names had just written themselves on the boxes.
The thing that bothered me about them took me a second to pin down. I’d seen lots of magic and artifacts, and they’d done a lot of things. These boxes, by all rights, should just be more of the same. So it took me a second to identify what was throwing me off.
I triggered Dantalion, scanning the artifacts, and it clicked into place without much trouble. Black boxes.
The term “black box” was ubiquitous. I had no idea where it came from, or where I’d even heard it. But at some point, someone had started using that phrase as a euphemism for inscrutable technology, and it had stuck. But despite having heard it plenty of times, I had never seen ACTUAL black boxes that defied analysis.
These things were LITERAL black boxes. Even Dantalion couldn’t see any information about them. They were just fancy, creepy looking boxes that had seemingly come from nowhere.
I glanced at my wife. “These aren’t your other two artifacts, are they?”
She shook her head. “Definitely not. I already got those. Besides which, why would one be addressed to you? No, these are new. And a mystery. Do you think we should open them? I don’t get a dangerous feeling, but my instincts aren’t as sharp as yours.”
“MY instincts aren’t as sharp as mine,” I said dryly. “Not in this case. I’m getting conflicting impressions here, but if I had to guess, whatever was doing to the boxes to scrub them of information is interfering. I’ll open mine. My armor should protect me, and I’ll use Mornax just to be safe. A-rank and everything. Give me some space.”
Callie didn’t look happy, but she knew that if anything could get through my armor and Mornax at A-rank, there was little to no chance that either of us could do anything about it. She backed away to make some room.
Once she was backed up a bit, I triggered Mornax and boosted it with my staff, then inched forwards cautiously and knelt down to open the box with my name on it.
I blinked as I stared down at something I hadn’t expected to see. A mask. An intricate masquerade mask carved from that same black wood with the same silver tracework. Leaning against the mask was a black envelope with my name on it in silver lettering. I opened it carefully, wary of traps, but the inside was just a pressed, embossed paper card with that same flowing script.
Dear Mr. Wyndham,
Through meritorious acts of service or daring feats of intrigue, you have caught the attention of a select group of students and faculty dedicated to the identification and enrichment of talented seeds of potential.
Attached is a mask that acts as an entrance pass to a small gathering being held in Common City tonight at the stroke of midnight. Please arrive on time, properly attired, and in possession of both your mask and this invitation. We look forward to making your acquaintance.
Sincerely, The Lazarus Club
I reached up and handed the card to Callie, who took it and read over it, eyebrow going up. “Ok…well I can’t tell if that’s flattering, condescending, or worrying.”
“Yes,” I replied bluntly.
She laughed. “Fair enough. Seems like they’re some kind of talent scout secret society. I’m guessing they reached out because of your mid term grades. Though the timing is a little weird. Maybe they were waiting to get us both together here? What do you think they actually…do? And should we even bother going?”
“If I had to guess,” I said with a sigh. “They’re investors. Based on what they didn’t say, they do favors for up and comers and probably expect them to be returned later.”
“Makes sense,” she grimaced. “The boxes are a demonstration, I take it?”
I nodded. “The fact that they knew you were here, when, and could arrange these at exactly the right time is interesting. The boxes themselves even moreso. They must have someone from the crafting faculty. I don’t think a mortal ascendant could have made these. Dan isn’t a normal analysis skill, and he got NOTHING from these.”
She grimaced. “More than that, if we got these, chances are good some of the others did too. We don’t have a way to get in touch with all of them in short order, so it’s not like we can call a meeting about it. There’s no way Bethy isn’t going to show up,” she sighed. “And she’ll probably bring her siblings, and maybe the butterfly girl.”
“I’m more worried about Benny,” I frowned. “If the faculty involved are from the crafting departments, the chances of him getting tapped will be higher. He hasn’t told me much about his situation, but I think he’s been making a splash. The science he learned from Sebastian is odd and probably unusual even for this place. Not to mention he has that dragon with him. Though I still don’t know where he’s keeping it.”
Benny had confided that he’d brought Toast with him on this trip last time we’d talked, but since Toast was a whole ass dragon and I hadn’t seen him, I wasn’t sure what mechanism he’d used to transport the dracolich here.
“The point is, we have to go,” she said with a grimace. “But should we like…tell someone? Elonwy and Hawkins are at the Continuum, but we might be able to get in touch. They may know more about this organisation than we do. In fact, I can almost promise they do. Going in blind seems reckless.”
I nodded. She was right. We had to go, simply because after getting this project running, I’d finally realized how many resources we could have been using to make our advancement faster here. Even a hundred contribution points had been enough to streamline MONTHS of work to help me create Cosmic Waltz and prep for my next upgrade. If this organization was faculty inclusive like they said, it could be the key to getting more contribution points.
Those points would allow us to not only help our friends get access to all the various ascension thesis versions, but massively speed up our progress to the next rank, something I highly suspected I was going to need soon, though I couldn’t put my finger on why.
I walked over to my bed, pulling open a drawer in the end table and taking out a small bronze device the size of my palm. It was covered in dials and knobs, and I started turning them, flicking through settings until I found the one I wanted. Then I pushed down, depressing a trio of buttons that caused the gears inside the device to whir. Along the outside edges, tiny bulbs flickered and there was a hiss of static. Finally a voice crackled out from the device. “What do you WANT, Shane? I told you to leave me alone to work, that doesn’t mean go somewhere else and call me from a distance.”
“What do you know about the Lazarus Club?” I asked bluntly, knowing he wasn’t in the mood for pleasantries when he got like this.
There was a pause. “Did you get tapped?” he asked suspiciously. “That seems…fast. They usually don’t bother with first years. I suppose you did make a splash at the mid terms. Very well, what do you want to know?”
“Who and what are they?” I asked. “And should I trust them?”
“Of course not,” he snorted. “Never trust anyone. Terrible habit. But the Lazarus Club are MOSTLY benevolent. They are a sort of favor trading circle. Get their hooks into impressionable students and make them dependent so they can call in favors later. Their membership is…extensive. Most of the professors were Lazarus.”
I nodded. That was pretty close to what I’d expected, at least the basics. Though I was curious about one thing. “So does that mean they’ll make us stay or kick us out if they find out we’re not sticking around? None of my people are planning to do the full four years here, as you know.”
“I know,” he said with a laugh. “But it doesn’t matter. The Lazarus Club is more interested in sowing karma than anything else. Personally I disdain karmic manipulation, messy stuff, but I can’t claim it isn’t effective. Joining creates a karmic connection with the other members. If you run into one out in the world you’ll be compelled to help them.”
I grimaced. Karma. The Judgement Pope, one of my grandfather’s fellow disciples, was a karmic manipulator. I didn’t like it much either. Messy was a good way to describe karma. Luckily, back home at least it was a rare attribute. Judgement was the only person I’d really heard of who toyed with karma, and he was on good terms with the family, so I hadn’t had any trouble with it personally, but I was wary of the ability all the same.
“What do you think I should do?” I asked my mentor. Honestly, I really did think having access to a powerful backer here before leaving would help us make the most of our time. We were planning to dip out after the first year, and I doubted we’d have time to really mine the academy for all the benefits it could give us at the current rate.
Even with help from the Lazarus Club, it seemed unlikely we’d get everything we could before leaving, but maximizing our gains should be a priority. But then again, forming karmic entanglements was dangerous, especially to people who had access to karmic abilities.
“I say go for it,” he said, in a voice so uncaring I could HEAR the shrug. “Karma is an esoteric discipline, but something most karmic manipulation specialists don’t like to admit is that it works less concretely on people who don’t fear it. Karma is, even more than most abilities, highly subjective, and the amount of respect you place upon the karmic ties in question has a great deal to do with how much influence they have over you.”
I laughed at that. “So your advice is to take their money and then not worry about it?”
“Basically,” he confirmed. “In any case, be careful about making further agreements there. Much like any other society, the Lazarus Club is not a monolith. Side deals happen all the time, and THOSE can be problematic.” With that final warning, he hung up, leaving me sitting there holding the bronze device pensively. Well…that hadn’t been ominous or anything.