21 years ago

The proficient fingers of Hephaestos' left hand manipulated his personal dataslate with quick, precise movements to scroll to the extract he was looking for. Meanwhile, his right hand was still filling in a matrix with the aid of his well-used silver auto quill, noting down a few reference lines from the last bit of text he had been reading. Hephaestos didn't even need the slight flickering light of the iron glowglobe next to the pile of tomes on the wooden table to record the relevant data. His ocular implants had no trouble whatsoever to decipher his notes in black ink on the yellow piece of synthparch, even as an unaugmented man would have to hold the glowglobe right next to the text to pierce the gloom of librarium cellar 655b and the fine haze of soot particles that could be found anywhere within a 300 mile radius of the forge complex of Mount Pertubo.

So involved was Hephaestos with his study that his sensors didn't manage to pick up the approach of another tech priest. Nor did he see the disdain on the scowling face of the woman now standing only two feet behind Hephaestos' red robed back. The fact that he didn't notice the binaric scraping of her throat, only served to annoy the other adept even further until she finally grabbed the shoulder of the man who had been sitting there for over nine hours. The female tech priest managed to keep the irritation from having to use her hands, out of her voice and skipped the 128 curses that had been suggested by her language capacitators. "MP5568-05. Our superior, Mech-Deacon Tremendus 8878, has send me to fetch you. It is time for conclave."

Startled by the sharp voice, which he immediately connected to the pict of adept Venatoria-81TCH together with notes of his major observations - highly intelligent, impatient & arrogant - Hephaestos MP5568-05 rose to his feet, the two copper coloured bionic legs responding in the blink of an eye, unburdened by the cramped position they had been in for the better part of a Pertubo workshift. Unfortunately, Hephaestos' mind wasn't as adroit as his legs which meant that his answer wasn't nearly as efficient. "Ah... Yes... Ehrm... Yes, of course Venom... I mean, adept Venat-t-toria. I will... Ehrm... make arrangements to arrive... Ehrm."

But his fellow student had already turned her back at him, not even deigning him worthy of a retort, even as Hephaestos had adressed her with the slanderous call-name she knew him to use behind her back. The tech priest added another 1 behind the tally of occasions where his manners had fallen short of being sufficient. The number now stood at 12.365 and once more he observed the patterns in the data. He could only conclude that his strategy to limit the number of social interactions to a minimum, had been the only succesful one.

Without wasting more time - Venatoria was already heading to the door of the librarium cellar - Hephaestos quickly scattered some fine white sand over the piece of parchment to dehydrate the last bits of ink from the auto quill and curled it up so he could fit it into the stained grox leather map case that he had once won from an Imperial Guard sergeant from the Keldis Rifles. Although winning was a relative notion that day as the sergeant had put it on the pokir table to replace the small mountain of copper pieces that Hephaestos had actually won. Risking another few seconds, Hephaestos took picts of the first ten pages of the tome on top of the stack so he would have something to read during the conclave.

Now adept Venatoria actually did curse when she saw him extending the number of picts from ten to thirty. Without dousing the glow globe, Hephaestos started running towards her, slinging the Guard map case over his shoulder and lifting the slips of his red robes slightly so he wouldn't stumble over them, but his change in behaviour didn't change Venatoria's mood. "You think yourself above the conclave, MP5568-05?" she said when he arrived at her side. "Ehrm... No..." he mumbled, thinking exactly the opposite, only to reinforce his lie with more conviction as he thought he saw her nose cringing, a sure sign of her disapproval. "No, no, no. Not at all. No, no." He focused the lenses on the blue and green irisses of the female adept next to him, but saw no reason to believe her convinced. "Quite the contrary, in fact. The conclave is..." "Composed out of tech priests with greater skill and knowledge than you. Right?" Venatoria cut in, challenging Hephaestos once more. This time Hephaestos tried another strategy and just kept quiet, averting the six red lenses of his visor from the other adept's face. And this time, his strategy met with success as the other tech priest didn't follow up on her question. In silence they marched to the elevator station to start their way up towards the personal quarters of their teacher and superior: Mech-Deacon Tremendus.

Mech-Deacon Tremendus 8878's personal quarters were located somewhere midway of one of the needle like spires of Mount Pertubo's Librarium. Having abandoned the need for physical privacy a long time ago, Tremendus had rearranged the rooms drastically. All the inner walls had been torn down to create one space with a single massive window looking out over the southern slope of Mount Pertubo and the grey, rocky wasteland beyond. Seemingly haphazardly placed across the room were a desk, service station, charging station and a mansized cogitator connected to an impresssive number of datalooms. But over the years, Hephaestos had discerned a subtle but unfailing logical pattern in the placement of these items. Unfortunately, the gains in efficiency were drastically diminished by the unbelievable amount of tomes, scrolls, books and dataslates that were piled up everywhere one looked. Datacrystals littered the floor and pieces of synthparch could be found everywhere: sticking out of drawers, pinned against wooden shelves or even squeezed between the grills of the charging station, making the thing a bigger fire hazard than some of the more uglier hacks Hephaestos had witnessed aboard the shabby pilgrim ship during his youth. Still, Tremendus seemed to prosper in this environment and as his quarters were never visited by one of the magi of the Librarium, no one said anything about it.

Close to the large rectangular window stood seven seats, two of which bore the weight of a dozen books and dataslates, while the back of a third one had been used to scribble down a mathematical problem and two possible solutions. Hephaestos had solved the problem a long time ago during one of the hundreds of conclaves of Tremendus' students. Anything was better than listening to the endless complaints and basic interpretations of standard works, which meant that Hephaestos' attention usually was elsewhere, focused on whatever he could read from his position in the circle. An attitude that had attributed quite a bit to the high tally of failed social interactions, but that had also earned him numerous insights and chances to expand his knowledge even further.

Adept Venatoria-81TCH sighed as they stepped into the room - she really hated manual labour and even the effort of removing the books and slates from her chair was enough to provoke a sign of agitation - but Hephaestos was blissfully unaware of this as he surged forwards, relishing the chance to take a closer look at the titles of the works that impeded him sitting down comfortably. This time though, the looks of the other five tech priests were enough reminder for Hephaestos to just put the stack of books on the ground next to him, pushing the titles in binary to his enhanced brain to look into them later. The tech-priest next to him, adept Garant, gave him an encouraging nod, echoed by the two finely crafted silver mechadendrites on his back. It was the only positive reception he received from his peers. The other three adopted a neutral stance at best or showed small signs of irritation, resembling those Venatoria had displayed earlier in the cellars. When he sat down, the six lenses of his visor crossed the bionic eyes of Tremendus, who was inscrutinable for anyone outside of the Mechanicus (and for many within its ranks as well) due to the complete reconversion of his face, but the years in his presence had learned Hephaestos that the man was now looking at him with benevolence: his shoulders were slightly bend forwards and his artificial skull was ever so slightly turned towards the junior tech priest.

And so began another session of the conclave. The gathering of the pupils that were directly instructed by the mech-deacon. Each and everyone of them would need to give a relatively short briefing of the lore they had delved into, the insights they had developed or the difficulties they had encountered during their study. They were all obliged to attend. From start to finish. This was one controversial rule that was discussed every now and again or at least ever since Hephaestos had joined the conclave. Garant had told him that before his arrival the rule hadn't been as controversial. Despite the debates, Tremendus held on to it, staying true to his motto that one could learn from anything. Both Hephaestos as Venatoria's group disagreed, both for the same reason, but each with a different perspective. Luckily for Hephaestos Tremendus hadn't held on to his other principle - equality between his pupils - as Hephaestos would probably have died from boredom if he would have received the same tasks as the others.

That day adept Profokov/Kivo, a rather young member of the group but already mounted on a grav-sled, albeit of poor quality, was presenting his findings about the dogma that teached that the Emperor and the Omnissiah were one single entity. Having read "Martian Theology" by Grand Magos Taylius and "Dogma's of the Omnissiah" by the seventeenth fabricator general of Rhodin IV and a few dozen books and essays about the subject, Hephaestos couldn't say he was very interested. The whole idea of having two different entities would be, apart from being blasphemous, also be the death of mankind, as the loyalty of the Mechanicus to the Imperium was forged with the bridging figure of the Omnissiah/Emperor. In Hephaestos' opinion the rest of the Imperium wouldn't stand a chance without the Mechanicus. Something most men wouldn't agree with and which was reflected in the status of many servants of the Machine God holding low positions in society. This was something Hephaestos had experienced himself during his stay aboard the pilgrim vessel and still frustrated him. Of course, the practicality of the debate meant nothing to Profokov as he, like the other pupils, were all bred to join the ranks of the Mechanicus, born and raised on forge worlds. For him it was but an exercise. There was nothing to do for Hephaestos but to wait it out, or find another, more worthy point of attention.

Hephaestos looked down to the stack of dataslates that Venatoria had dropped quite carelessly aside his own seat. The top slate was still active, betrayed by the little green light that lit up every 15.2 seconds. The tech priest crossed his bionic legs so he could gently and inconspicuously give the data slate a little nudge, spurring the simple machine spirit inside to refresh the screen. Slowly the screen started to lit up. Hephaestos looked around if anyone had seen his transgression, checking his peers first and his mentor last, following the logic of checking high risks first, but it seemed they were all somehow captivated by Profokov's endless & boring presentation. The only thing that might have noticed was one of the three servo skulls of Tremendus that had his augur array in his direction, but even for a tech priest it was hard to see what operational procedures those boneheads were running.

Hephaestos turned the fifth lens of his visor, the one with the most appropriate zoom capability, towards the data slate, registering the soft whining of the little servo's directly with his inner ear. Not to his surprise, he looked down on a bit of text and a rather complicated schematic which, after running some basic specs through his memory cores, he could classify as something resembling subatomic particles, although there was something seriously wrong with it. Hephaestos couldn't put his finger on it and once more he cursed the fact that his memory cores were only a very basic model and that cross-references weren't made automatically. What he could do was create a mental image of the schematic, building it up from the bare essentials, adding details and filling in the last of the blanks at the end. At least he would be able to do more research in the near future. Something he would be aching to do, because, as usual, the mere hint of new knowledge had triggered a small ache at the back of the skull. And he knew that only the collection of relevant data would be enough to sooth that ache.

Hephaestos didn't need to look up to check his peers. The other five lenses whirled around and concluded that they were still enthralled by Profokov/Kivo's hypotheses. Only the bonewhite servoskull with the red X-shaped symbol of the Librarium might have been paying attention to him. So he risked nudging the data slate once more. The machine spirit complied without the slightest digital purr and more text scrolled down on the pictscreen. Hephaestos' trained look picked out the most important words instantly, using the technogrammar of the text to link them together and his own enhanced brain to bring in even more context from other sources, carefully ordered and categorized in his memory cores: Graviton beams, intra-atomic force, neutronic spin. These words and concepts were all connected to the central, but to Hephaestos utterly unknown concept of chronoton particles. The tech priests filed query after query, taxing his memory cores and logicalculus drive until he could feel the heat building up in his skull, a sure sign to stop his searches, but still he couldn't find any other reference, not even vaguely to chronoton particles. Even while the temperature levels of his coils surpassed his personal max, which lay already far above standard safety protocol, Hephaestos didn't want to give up.

Perhaps fortunately for his brain, mech-deacon Tremendus interrupted the peer discussion, picking the three servoskulls out of the air with his delicate mechadendrites to start inloading the discussion notes. As usual he would now comment on the relevant parts of the pupil's presentation, pointing out the merits, but more often, the flaws in their discourse. The sign for Hephaestos to archive all active queries and start paying attention. In the past Tremendus had shown that his lack of attention during the presentation didn't bother him, although ignoring the mech-deacon's insights, was quite something else. The burned out MIU-port on his left arm served as a harsh and constant reminder that even though Tremendus was the man that had rescued him from a lifetime of mindnumbing and almost certainly deadly labour, he still was a demanding and utterly strict teacher. The day Hephaestos had come completely unprepared before him, was the same day that Tremendus had jacked him up on the internal circuitry of an Adeptus Arbites shockmaul via his MIU-port. The lesson wasn't forgotten so the six lenses of his visor turned towards the holoprojection in the middle of the room and Hephaestos eagerly awaited Tremendus' words.

Two terran hours and 43.34 minutes later Tremendus' lesson came to an end. Time in which the small ache at Hephaestos' still biological brain stem had gone from a diminuitive and smouldering nagging feeling to a wildly beating hurt that Hephaestos believed to be as visible as a throbbing carotid artery of an unaugmented human confronted with an angry skitari. Anxious to take his leave, the tech priest left the conclave with inappropriate speed which got him far more strange looks than even a non-illusionary bobbing skullbase would have provoked. When all the pupils had left the mech-deacon's quarters, only the three servo skulls were witness of Tremendus, picking up the data slate with a satisfactory purring of cogitator circuits.