Night in the surgical chamber was peaceful, because for the first time in a while, nobody was squabbling. Nobody was arguing. Nobody could, because right now, scattered across every seam and crack in the floorboards were hundreds of dismantled chitin plates.

Some were flat. Others were folded. Most were mid-mutilation, bent halfway into jagged little birds. It was a mess. A beautiful, surgical, glorious mess.

Gael sat cross-legged on the surgical table in the center of the room, hunched like a tailor in a butcher's shop. The table creaked under his weight, but he didn't care. His coat sleeves were rolled up, his gloves glinted wet with glue and blood, and his fingers moved with priest-like precision as he folded each pliable chitin plate into the form of a crude raven, murmuring to himself as he traced glyphs onto their backs with his scalpel.

Fold. Carve. Fling. He tossed the finished raven over his shoulder without looking, and it thudded somewhere beside a growing flock. Then he extended his hand, and his hungry flower snapped out to pull in another chitin plate from below the table, allowing him to repeat the process over and over again.

"Doing good, kids?" he called out idly.

Liorin and Evelyn, both sitting in front of their bedroom doors, gave him a disgruntled nod. He'd enlisted their help in folding and carving glyphs onto the chitin plates as well, so he supposed he could reward them later for being so cooperative.

Off to the very far end of the chamber, Maeve sat cross-legged atop her own stool, quietly disassembling and reassembling her umbrella with her toolkit opened next to her. Every few minutes, she glanced at the three of them from the corner of her eye, her brows drawn tight in suspicion.

Eventually, she asked, "What are you making now?"

He didn't turn to look at her as he folded another chitin plate. "Birds."

"Birds?"

"Since we'll be going deep into the pipes tomorrow morning for the largest assault the Repossessors have ever done, we're gonna need some weapons against Rustwights just in case," he mumbled. "They're built like mausoleums: big, heavy, and armored, but you've seen them. They're slower than rot, and their perception's fucked as well. If I can make something that can massively disorient them in a cramped, underground environment, then it'll open them up to a well-placed attack from you."

Evelyn cracked her neck, evidently sore from having sat there for the better part of the day. "But how can these birds disorient anythin'? They're just puppets, ain't they?"

In response, Gael plucked a finished raven from the pile behind him and turned it toward her.

"Wonderful question. I'm glad you asked."

He held the raven up, wings unfolded like a dead butterfly. The glyphwork shimmered faintly under the lamplight: spirals and thorns etched deep into the wing joints, all converging at the spine.

"After some not-so-thorough analysis, I've concluded that the halfling Myrmurs we slaughtered in the Fogspire Forests were variants of 'coffin flies', and according to my book on Nightspawns, coffin flies have a special biological trait: their flight and movement patterns are completely nonsensical," he said, wiggling the raven around. "They've got tiny muscle fibres interwoven inside their chitin plates, which twitch rapidly and erratically whenever they fly, which is how they get their extremely uncontrollable movements. Furthermore, they give off pheromones that excite each other when they're in a group, so the more of them there are, the more erratic they are as a whole."

"So that's why there were so many of them?" Maeve asked idly. "They like travelling together?"

"Mhm. Now, I figured: if coffin flies can twitch themselves into a frenzy, why not repurpose that same divine madness?"

Then he turned the raven in his hands around, letting the kids see the glyphs running along its back.

"First, I carve ninety-nine percent of the 'muscle contract until exhaustion' glyph onto the back of the raven, which connects to its wings." he said, tracing the swirly lines with the flat of his scalpel. "Then, I draw the final one percent of the glyph onto my thumb. What do you kids think will happen now if I complete the glyph by pressing my thumb to its back?"

Liorin blinked slowly. "It fly—"

"It'll fly!" Evelyn blurted out immediately, shooting him a grin. Liorin scowled back at her, evidently annoyed she shouted over him, but before the kids could start arguing, Gael grinned wide and pressed his thumb onto the raven's back.

And the reaction was instant.

The moment his thumb met the glyph, the raven snapped to life, and it launched straight up like a bullet. No grace. Just raw, spasming motion from its wings. First, it smashed into the ceiling hard enough to dent the lantern mount. Then it ricocheted into the far wall, cracking a jar of surgical screws, and then it slammed into the floorboards, the side of the surgical table, the front of a cabinet, then back into the ceiling again.

Evelyn shrieked and ducked, while Liorin dropped to the floor with his arms over his head as the raven zipped over their heads. Maeve, however, didn't flinch.. She simply tilted her head with eerie calm, letting one razor wing slice a single strand of hair as it whizzed by her face.

Then it came for Gael.

Chuckling aloud, he caught it as it was about to fly through his right eye with his hungry flower. The petals clamped down instantly, chewing through the twitching chitin with wet clicks and snaps, and the raven spasmed twice more before the muscles inside exhausted and its wings gave out like dead nerves.

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He let the raven drop, and it clattered hollowly to the floor beside his table as he looked at Evelyn, his smile curling even wider.

"... Now, what do you think would happen if I unleashed hundreds of these little ravens against something very, very big?" he finished.

While Evelyn and Liorin immediately looked horrified at the little ravens they were folding and carving in their unprotected hands, Maeve simply clicked another spring into place with a faint metallic snap, her toolkit glinting beside her. She didn't even look up from Mistrender.

"That's a very unreliable weapon, though," she said.

Gael's hands didn't stop moving as they resumed folding, thumbs resting against the spine of a half-formed raven. "Uh-huh?"

"For starters, you can't control where they'll fly." She flicked a thin coil into her palm and threaded it through a gear. "They're dangerous to you and to the people around you."

"That's true."

"And there's little point in making hundreds of them if you have to activate each one manually."

"That's true too."

"And they're not exactly portable. Since you've shaped them like ravens, they're difficult to store, and they're hard to stack. Good luck running from anything while carrying them."

"Also true," he muttered, and then he threw in a half-formed swear as well, "but, consider this: ravens are fucking sick. If I can figure out how to carry and activate just a dozen of them, anyone standing inside a small room is getting carved like fruit."

"True," she said idly. "They are very cool."

Gael froze mid-fold.

Then, slowly, with exaggerated caution, he turned his head and looked at her like she'd just recited an ancient plague rite backwards.

She met his stare, deadpan, then shrugged and went back to adjusting the copper gears on her umbrella.

"Right?" he said.

"Right," she agreed.

"So?" he asked, pointing with his scalpel at her half-disassembled umbrella. "What are you doing to Mistrender now?"

She lifted the umbrella slightly, revealing a narrow hatch opened in its shaft. Inside, the cramped interior bristled with fresh coils, springs, and what looked suspiciously like gearwork too intricate for comfort.

"I added new springs to help with impact suppression," she said proudly. "Higher quality ones. In theory, they should make it easier to block blunt-force attacks without snapping my wrists."

"Good idea."

"But that's not the important part." She smiled faintly and clicked a lever inside. The internal components rotated with a smooth, satisfying tick. "The real improvement is in the firing mechanism."

His eyes narrowed. "What'd you do?"

"I added ten more spinning chambers," she said. "Now when it siphons blood, it spins it, twists it into a spiral, and makes it even tighter. The chamber channels it into a compression coil. Then, if I disengage all five new safety locks… it'll fire all the blood out in a really, really concentrated burst. It should be strong enough to punch through armor."

He gave a low whistle. "How much more power?"

"No idea. The original firing mode only had three safety locks to disengage at maximum, but now there's eight, so…"

She pulled the last of the eight safety locks with a series of crisp, mechanical clicks, the umbrella's shaft hissing faintly as the pressure built. Then, she angled the tip of it towards the far wall—right between the doors to Evelyn and Liorin's rooms.

Gael raised a hand lazily without looking up.

"Not there. Aim for the window."

Maeve casually adjusted her aim to the stained-glass pane at the back of the chamber instead.

"Here goes nothing," she said.

It was bright and early in the morning as usual when the church doors creaked open beneath Fergal's heavy palm, and he alone stepped inside, his small army of forty Repossessors waiting outside.

Sunlight spilled into the prayer hall through the pretty stained glass windows on both sides—what little light the city's morning haze allowed, anyways—but this time, unlike every other morning in the past month, he didn't have to walk all the way to the altar at the end of the hall to throw a stone up at the Plagueplain Doctor's window.

Four bodies were already sprawled across the pews closest to the front door like lazy corpses.

Gael was draped upside down over one bench like a rotting saint, his cane tucked beneath his neck like a pillow. Maeve was slumped against the pew beside him, her umbrella half-unfolded and rattling gently with each breath. Evelyn was curled up at their feet, half-covered by someone's coat, and a boy Fergal didn't recognize lay snoring on a stack of cloth like it was the most natural thing in the world. There was also the man in an inconspicuous grey coat and hood at the back of the prayer hall, cleaning up loose rock debris and metal shards on the floor with a broom. Fergal didn't recognize the man, either.

So instead, he stared at the four of them sprawled across the pews, completely deadpan.

Then Cara marched in from the east hallway with her sleeves rolled and her own broom in hand.

"Oi." She gave Gael a whack on the shin. "Up. All of you. Move it. The Finger's here already."

Maeve jerked upright like she'd been struck by lightning. Evelyn let out a noise like a dying duck. The boy gasped awake, alarmed, while Gael blinked, yawned, and sat up lazily, fixing his coat with one hand while putting his top hat on with the other.

"... Oh," he muttered, dim green eyes eventually finding their way to Fergal's. "Is it time for the descent already?"

Fergal nodded slowly. "Lorcawn and the other Fingers have already assembled at the mouth of the pipes with a small force of two hundred Repossessors. We're hitting the central command chamber today, and he wants the three of you there."

"Aight," he grumbled, before calling over his shoulder. "Oi, Cleaner! Have the clinic cleaned up by the time we get back and I'll pay you extra!"

The hooded man in the back—the 'Cleaner'—didn't even respond. He simply kept on cleaning the debris off the floor as the Plagueplain Doctor, his wife, and his sister patted themselves down and trudged around the clinic getting their equipment ready.

Fergal gave brisk nods to Evelyn and the other young boy before something caught his eye.

His gaze drifted past the bumbling Plagueplain Doctor, past the Cleaner, and then up the stairs that—under normal circumstances—led to the surgical chamber.

And his brows furrowed.

… What happened there?

Is that why they were all sleeping down here?

Before he could ask about the surgical chamber, though, Gael clapped a hand on his shoulder, yawning hard enough to crack his jaw. With practiced ease, the Plagueplain Doctor slipped on his flower gauntlet, slung a silver-edged canister onto the back of his coat, and tapped the brim of his top hat down with the pommel of his cane.

The canister caught Fergal's eye. He didn't recognise that piece of equipment either.

"Alright," Gael said through a grin. "No more dilly-dallying. Let's go get our Gulch water."

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