Krahe deciced to undertake an exercise in creating a theurgic pattern usable by others. Yao’s scroll insisted that even if one didn’t plan to do so, it was a useful skill to have, and understanding the principles behind it was vital to having a solid foundation as both a theurge and a talisman-maker. It quickly became evident why — it just wasn’t the same. First, one had to create the root pattern, then adapt it to universalize the instructions. The wider the intended userbase, the harder it would be to adapt, not unlike how one had to have a truly profound grasp of a subject in order to simplify it enough for someone particularly dim-witted to understand. For this same reason, customizing a mass-produced theurgic pattern for your own use was naturally likely to make it unusable for others, in the sense of empowering it with their own eidolons. Personally, Krahe thought of it as high-performance combat walkers and their mass-production counterparts. You couldn’t expect every soldier to bear with a full-embodiment neural connection, to consistently react in 24 milliseconds or to eat 10 Gs of acceleration like nothing.
The prerequisite for this exercise would be, of course, completing the Wandrei Faust’s sibling-theurgy. First, strip away all elements of energetic offense. Then tear out the core of murderous intent and, in its place, channel the michievous impulse for deception that had served her so well throughout her many cat-and-mouse games in both her past and present lives. To say she had simplified the Wandrei Faust to the bare minimum was not quite accurate. It was better compared to the butchery carried out in the process of creating the very same pilots who could stand 10G acceleration — by the time she was done removing elements there was barely a third of the original pattern left. This was not a literal removal, of course, but rather, Krahe mentally went over her own knowledge of the Wandrei Faust and only replicated the parts that would be necessary for its sibling theurgy. A major portion of its pattern constituted its energetic offense and the “control systems” that enabled its bimodal operation, parts of which she kept so that the new theurgy could remain at a standoff distance if needed, or rush in to grapple or strike the target. In fact, much of the space that had been cleared out would be filled in by a vastly more advanced maneuvering suite. Whereas the Wandrei Faust was a simple hunt-lock-kill missile, this sibling would have a maneuvering action-chain that, if Krahe were to write it out as a chart, could only be described as obnoxious.
The occult procedures of getting her Chthonian Eels to interpret her intent into the correct theurgic instructions were still as tricky as ever, but she had developed a workflow that at least made it feel far less like gambling for barely acceptable results with a dogshit generative neural network.
Krahe kept the construct very similar to the Wandrei Faust, in order to ensure its appearance was as similar as possible. On the inside, it was of course much simpler, but the cost and level of effort required to create it would be identical, as the theurgy would still need to have similar durability to the Wandrei Faust, for two reasons — so that it could withstand its own maneuvering jets, and so it wouldn’t break apart on impact when used for attack. Given the simpler design, she didn’t need a special target to test it — she simply used the basement of Sorayah’s house, which she had by now cleared out piecemeal of any materiel relating to human charcoal. Most of it had been useless to her, but she had made copies of many of the texts just in case. Testing didn’t take long, given that no matter how drastic a modification, it was still a modification of an existing theurgy.
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Schwarzfaust. That’s what she would call this one. This version could get as many as six shots out of a single Chthonian Eel, and struck with kinetic force comparable to a Red Reaper. The fact she didn’t find this yield impressive was something of a reminder of how far she had come. She found the whole process to have been somewhat underwhelming, both in terms of the difficulty and the sense of accomplishment. While the Wandrei Faust had been momentous, the Schwarzfaust felt more akin to another tool in the box — one she didn’t expect to use very often until she got her hands on a third eidolon, because six Wandrei Fausts were just enough as far as she was concerned. Enough to kill anything that moves, and failing that, wear it down enough for the Daemon Core to come into play.
As she went over the sixth or perhaps seventh practice copy, she realized the part that was missing, somewhat aghast at her own desire for attention, however momentary it had been. Indeed, the thing missing was Casus’ presence to react to her advancements. She decided it had been a while regardless, so it would be a good idea to seek him out later, and to perhaps meet with Favonia, if she was indeed back in the city.
With the Schwarzfaust’s first iteration complete and consistently reproducible, Krahe turned towards the main meat of this exercise — simplification. This stage was, in itself, another partial redesign. The elements that made Schwarzfaust uniquely suited to her had to be translated into simpler, more specific instructions that almost any eidolon could parse, meaning that not only would the end product have simpler evasion patterns and thruster network, it would also be weaker and more fragile overall. She had somewhat expected to encounter a gordian knot when came time to disentangle the theurgy’s direct connection to her own elemental affinity, only to find it… Not really present. She wouldn’t know until she got someone else to test it, but as far as she could tell, the Schwarzfaust was compatible with any affinity that could produce solid constructs, perhaps because the thrust was generated by means not bound by elemental causality. She still didn’t quite understand how theurgy compared to thaumaturgy, and wasn’t sure if it was simply not practically necessary knowledge or if it was a high-level secret that could change one’s outlook on the discipline.
Once she had simplified the Schwarzfaust to a degree she was satisfied with, a degree at which point she deemed it not much better than the mass-production standard fare of Audunpoint’s everyman theurge, Krahe swallowed her pride and took her work to Yao. Firstly, she didn’t want to cause pointless conflict with the Talisman Mistress, and secondly, she genuinely wanted Yao’s opinion on both her personal and universalized designs for the Schwarzfaust.
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