The Chained Watcher

Backstory: Centennial Loot Run

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Xelqua absently touches the access panel of the monolith in front of him, withdrawing the excess materials and storing it into the spatially expanded bag tucked into his cloak. Nothing overly expensive or interestingly unique here either. That's a shame.

He ticks the location off on his mental checklist, wandering out of the facility without the occupants being any the wiser, and takes a moment to figure out the next closest monolith he hasn't looted yet. Teleport vaguely nearby, then walk over. Wouldn't want to teleport right up to it and run into a group of Listeners snooping around after all.

This round of loot has been generally disappointing for a century's worth of accumulation. Tons of mundane metals, small amounts of magical materials, and a couple scattered bits of elementally aligned metals with only a single chipped jewel with the most common affinity for jewels, fire affinity.

Was there a large influx of low Tiers this past century? Quantity over quality usually treats him fairly well, but there seems to be a point where the quality is too low to make up for with quantity, and he seems to have lost out this time around.

Oh well, such is life. He'll just have to hope for better luck next century.

Such are his thoughts as he accesses the next monolith, trailing his eyes down the manifest with mild disinterest.

His eyes snap back to the miscellaneous category. There's no way, right? The monoliths he scatters around like this are most often used by Tier 3 and lower, and there's no way one of them could have somehow acquired this. And yet...

He withdraws the items from the monolith's storage, cradling them gently in his hands.

Three fiery eggs, radiating an intense dry heat, their shells surrounded by a heat haze despite their time in storage. He holds one up to the sun, seeing no silhouette within. "Fascinating..."

How did a low Tier manage to pilfer three phoenix eggs from their mother? They appear to be infertile, so were they abandoned? That might explain it.

Regardless of their viability as eggs, this is indeed quite the valuable find. The shell is a wonderful fire-aligned material, and since it's technically alive, a careful application of healing magic should allow him to generate as much shell material as he wants. He should practice with more ordinary eggs first though. It would be a right shame to ruin the only three eggs he has.

He still finishes his rounds, if only because there's only a couple monoliths left to check, before returning to his retreat to get the infertile eggs set up in an ideal location.

Could he just shove the eggs in a storage room without any special treatment? Yes, he could, but that would lower the shell quality by quite a bit. If he wants the most useful, effective phoenix eggshell, he needs to set the eggs up in an environment that suits them perfectly. We're talking the kind of environment they'd hatch in if they were fertile.

An enchantment woven into a special room created just for this raises the temperature to roughly the same level as the interior edge of a volcano. As one might expect, this makes it a bit hard to make a proper nest for them. Normally, the mother would use her own feathers to make the nest, doubling as both a soft material and a perpetually warm one, protecting the eggs against sudden changes in temperature. However, as he lacks a phoenix to obtain that many feathers from, he'll have to fall back to his usual choice when it comes to high end crafting.

Curling a wing around, Xelqua plucks a number of the smaller downy feathers on the inside of his wing, delicately weaving them together into a little bowl shape. He goes a step further and enchants it too, mimicking the steady heat of a phoenix nest as best he can. It's not perfect, but it's as close as he'll get.