What she managed to wrench out of the two wasn’t quite as helpful as she’d hoped for, but it was enough. Krahe left the Society and, following Glasses’ directions, found the store without issue. That mural truly did look stupid, and the redheaded, armored-bikini-clad warrior-woman that had been painted over part of it truly did have huge tits, albeit not quite as huge as Favonia. The original mural itself depicted androgynous figures with wildly disproportionate limbs in simple shapes, like the artist had been struck by divine inspiration from a talentless corpo illustrator. The buxom redhead, by comparison, was fairly typical cel-shaded art one might expect from a young man whose love of women is inversely proportional to his experience with them.
Now that she was looking at the mural, the redhead’s outstretched sword was pointing right towards the store she was looking for. In the store's display window, Krahe could just about see a statue of whom she presumed to be Mamon Knight Galeas, at least when one of the city’s trams wasn’t passing through her field of view.
Licht Equisetus sounded, on the surface, almost like a normal name, but it wasn’t quite right. It carried the same sense of unreality that pseudonyms typically did. She entered the store, and found that it was almost entirely dedicated to wargaming and various other homebody hobbies. Besides the miniatures popular among the members of the Lost Sun Society, there were a few other types at varying scales, including fairly impressive snap-fit, color-accurate out of the box models of Mamon Knights and various war machines, both mechanical and fleshy. A line of grimey designs marrying crustaceans and WW2-esq vehicles took up one of the lower shelves, titled Ma.W, or “Machine Warriors.” There was even a corner dedicated to modular hobby-grade voidkeys, all priced such that a teenager could reasonably afford it. Half of the generous floorspace was dedicated to tables for the patrons to build or play on. Real-estate was easy to come by in Audunpoint, after all.
The comics took up a modest section of the store, maybe one-fifth. Out of that one-fifth, Rampage had two shelves dedicated to its collected volumes, which ran well into the double-digits, amounting for hundreds of chapters. It seemed to be the epitome of a gritty dark fantasy revenge-quest epic, grizzled protagonist with a cursed suit of armor and all. Wrought in the Pit was relegated to part of the shelf below, having far fewer collected volumes on sale. Half of that same shelf was filled by tomes of “Soltern Saga,” covering what appeared to be multiple narrative lines in the same setting — Puppetmaster’s Travelogue, Termination Gene, Tragedy of the Upright Ones, so on and so forth.
She grabbed the first five volumes of Wrought in the Pit and a three-volume “Halcyon Years Arc” set of Rampage off the shelf and checked them out. While the clerk — a remarkably pale man considering how much sunlight filtered into the store — was ringing her up, he kept glancing up at her, like he wasn’t sure who he was looking at. She wagered someone from the Society had mentioned her at some point, but she didn’t bring it up. Rather, she made idle small talk, and, flipping through the first volume, she remarked: “Licht Equisetus? C’mon, that has to be a pen name.”
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“Haha, yeah,” the clerk uttered automatically.
“Wonder what his real name is though, if he even is a he,” she continued. It was a long shot, but one couldn’t catch a fish if one didn’t cast the hook.
“Uh, I think it was Renzo something. The early prints had his real name on them. Dredger? Dre-something, I dunno,” he shrugged. Seeing that Krahe was already on her way out, the clerk finally spoke up: “Say, you wouldn’t happen to be that Blackhand, would you?”
“Sure, why not. Don’t tell anyone I was here,” Krahe winked. She didn’t mean it seriously, but that clerk took it seriously, and though he would never learn the true extent of his impact, his imagination would almost match up to reality. Almost.
Wrought in the Pit was, truly, a work of immense beauty. Just the artwork contained in each chapter, all clearly drawn and inked by hand, would have sufficed to merit Renzo the epithet of a “True Artist.”
The contents of the story were a touch different. When one looked at the setting and narrative from afar, it seemed somewhat akin to a dark fairytale about children — a human and a diminutive Pilgrim Banisher — exploring a multi-layered, underground megastructure clearly based on Jas’raba. They encountered various places and peoples along the way, both wondrous and terrible. It was, indeed, a fairy tale, if a very, very dark one. The problem was in the execution, the details. Glasses was right in his complaints regarding the author’s apparent fixation on the characters pissing, and on their bodily functions in general. The horrors to which the characters — both the children and others — were subjected in the course of the story were their own pandora's box to get into. Once again, the description of “torture porn” couldn’t help but fit like a glove at points. It crossed a certain barrier, where it was so obviously trying to elicit a reaction from the reader, that instead of feeling the intended sense of horror and revulsion at the gruesome scenes, Krahe simply felt a bubbling contempt for the author. She wasn’t sure why only some fiction elicited this sentiment in her, but it did.
The most notable element of Wrought in the Pit, however, was the antagonist, a freakish man, the depth of whose portrayal made it abundantly clear he was based on someone Renzo knew personally. Even the epithet was the same as the one she had received from Aldritch — Vondreld, the Helmeted Man. It was a vile being, who perpetrated much of the story’s vilest acts, such as stripping down the bodies of orphan children he had raised himself to the barest minimum vital organs so that he could stuff them into small capsules and use them as “environmental protection” in cursed environments, shunting the curse onto the child in the capsule.
At the end of the day, art was art, and it wasn't as if Vondreld was portrayed in a sympathetic light within those first five volumes — delusional in the belief in his own righteousness, perhaps, but not sympathetic. Krahe had no doubt that a novel written regarding her own life could come out just as dark and stomach-turning as Wrought in the Pit, if not moreso. She just hoped that, were such a thing to come to pass, her life’s chronicler would be a touch better-adjusted than Renzo.
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