The Chained Watcher

Looting

Suffering from the "I don't like this chapter" problem with this one. Don't even know what I don't like about it, but I just don't. Maybe I've just been looking at it too much. Eh, here it is anyway.

~~~

Nothing of interest happened during the flight out of the forest, and they'd dropped off the former captives within a half hour's walk of a city, so they had gone back using the carpet again.

Unfortunately for Grian, none of the others wanted to try flying it, so he was stuck being the chauffeur the whole time. Oh how he regrets not trying to add an autopilot feature to this thing. He couldn't even join in on the card game that had started on the way back, since he was stuck sitting in the middle.

Letting the carpet deactivate about a foot off the ground, he smirked when several Hermits fell over at the unexpected drop. Stretching his arms out above his head, he said, "Next time, I'm totally adding autopilot. Being stuck driving is boring."

"Magic has an autopilot?"

"Well yeah, people find ways to automate just about everything! Magic too, but it's pretty easy to mess up and have the enchantment start having opinions. Don't confuse that with actually being sapient, it's still just a magic item, it just sometimes decides it doesn't want to do what it's been told. I've got a box of flight charms somewhere that don't do what you tell them to, usually trying to bash your face against stuff instead."

Rubbing his hands together, Grian climbed up on top of the courtyard's centerpiece. He'd set up a little something for bringing things down into the underground area without needing to teleport them himself, mostly for things that were bulky or didn't react well to normal teleportation. The centerpiece is a large gyroscope-looking thing, with concentric rings arranged at different angles.

At the top of it is a small button-ish thing, triggered by pushing it while feeding it a bit of magic. It's a bit bigger than normal buttons, since it had been designed with his much larger Watcher form in mind, but that won't stop it from working. He pressed it, gliding down next to the Hermits to get a good view of it turning on.

Dust cascaded off the rings as they started moving, rotating and spinning with increasing speed, each revolution bringing a slight glow to the structure as branching lines lit up with magic. The rings blurred together for a few seconds before slowing down, coming to a halt when they were perfectly aligned and revealing a hole to somewhere else in the middle.

His grin stretched across his face when he saw the wide-eyed expressions present on everyone's faces. With a theatrical bow, he held out a hand to welcome them through. "Welcome, dear friends, to my humble abode."

Scar was the first to break out of the silence, bursting out with, "Dude! That was so cool!"

Grian nodded proudly. "Sometimes the aesthetic is worth sacrificing efficiency for. But for real, you guys wanna see the place I used to live?" He wants to show everything off so bad. Like a kid whose friends came over for a playdate, he wants to show them all the cool little trinkets and things he's made. If all of them already knew what he was, then there's no doubt that he'd be doing exactly that.

But they don't. They don't all know. Not yet, at least.

Some of them should be able to start piecing together what it would mean for him to have lived in a Watcher retreat, and with each person who learns there's more chances they'll let something slip. The thing that had made Xisuma finally voice his suspicions had been an overheard conversation with Scar, after all.

When he stepped through the activated portal, he found himself subconsciously relaxing. He'd lived here for such a very long time, it's no wonder it feels safe and calming to him. This is, or was, his home. Already, he can think of half a dozen unfinished projects he could go work on, things he hadn't gotten around to completing before getting imprisoned.