A/N: Second semester of school has begun. Meh. So my updating might be irregular and this half of the story needs to pick up ... gah.

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Though Lloyd now lived in Duke Fabre's household as a resident craftsman that could make anything from jewelry to swords and armor, Luke didn't see him as often as he had seen Guy when the Sigmund swordsman had been a servant. Both led busy lives in the manor, and only saw each other in the morning, in the evening, and when they practiced swordsmanship and fonic artes. Natalia had also recommended that both Luke and Lloyd should have formal training for healing artes, as she had. Lloyd was an accomplished healer but unpolished, and in the way of healing Luke had only Guardian Field, a laughingstock compared to real healing artes.

Luke found that before he decided to do something with himself while he lived under Duke Fabre's roof, he had too much time, and now he actually had responsibilities and--dare he say it--expectations, he felt he had too little. If this was the pressure of merely a duke to be, what must it be like to be in Natalia's place as the crown princess, heir to the throne of all Kimlasca-Lanvaldear? An entire nation, a world power, the leading industrial country all looked up to and depended on her as future queen. Next to that Luke felt like an insignificant little nothing. Duke Fabre thought he might be pushing Luke to do better by rubbing his incompetence in his face, but Luke had always been able to do that on his own.

The first time Luke really had time to just sit back and chat with Lloyd was when Duke Fabre sent him to Belkend for an inspection--alone. All other times Luke had gone to Belkend, the current duke had always accompanied him. Being sent to inspect Belkend alone was a relief to Luke, and also a fright--this meant Duke Fabre trusted him, as his son and heir to Duchy, regardless of Luke's personal insecurities of being a replica. The land of Belkend could be easier to harder to manage depending on how one looked at it--the entire city, residents all, were directly under government supervision, no private homes (not in the traditional sense), no children playing in the streets, only fon machinery. The whole city was basically a giant research lab complex.

On the ferry en route to Belkend from Baticul, Luke and Lloyd talked. Luke felt he hadn't much to talk about, just being busy in the whirlwind of activity it took to prepare himself to be duke after his father. Lloyd spoke of some of his clients, they were mostly nobles, so he made things like jewelry for women customers, or maybe some nobleman wanted a decorative sword to hang in his hall. Pere had been an unexpected help in that regard--in addition to being Guy's old sword instructor, he knew his way around a smithy himself. When Lloyd asked Luke if he had heard from any of the others, there was no answering reply.

Luke had gotten no word whatsoever from his companions--his friends. No letters, no visits. They were all probably busy like him--Tear in Yulia City, Guy in Grand Chokmah, Anise in Daath, and Jade in the Malkuth military. With Van gone, there wasn't much to worry about worldwide except for the occasional border skirmish, but with the peace treaty in place those were put down relatively quickly. With the lowering of the land, the true sealing of the miasma underground, Auldrant was a new world. Though there was some questioning of what to do about the Score. Ion had ordered complete halts on all public readings, but still the people clamored for their prophecies. Natalia had said to Luke on her last visit that she wanted to propose a summit on what to do about the Score, to which her father already agreed.

They came to Belkend soon enough, the city as cloudy and grey as it always had been on Luke's prior visits. They went to Governor Viridian's building first, to hear a report from him before Luke would begin a formal inspection. Mostly he and Duke Fabre were concerned with left over data from Van's fomicry research, how much of it remained, and whether or not it was dangerous.

Standing at the table, Luke skimmed over the printed report the governor gave him: all was completely normal on the surface.

"But Governor," Luke said, putting the paper on the table, "something's been bothering me. How did Van get to use the Belkend labs for his research? This is Kimlascan territory."

Governor Viridian had a strained smile. "How, indeed. Dorian General Grants is from Daath, but he requested to borrow the labs under normal procedure. Even the Duke could not question it at the time--if he had refused, Daath would have stopped reading the Score for Kimlasca."

"Ah." Luke said, clicking his tongue. Things like that had happened time and time again in Auldrant's history ever since the three world powers began using the Score as a political tool. He went to the door, where Lloyd waited, leaning against the wall, hands in his pockets. "I'll be going to inspect the labs now. Is that okay?"

"Absolutely, Master Luke."

"I don't really like this city." Lloyd said as they entered the complex of laboratories.

"Why not?" Luke asked, passing all the fon machine labs--the ones he really wanted were deeper in. "It's not the most likable of cities, but once you get used to it ..."

"It's so ... mechanical. But I guess is that they wouldn't let me come here when I needed a refill on my medicine."

Luke stopped dead in his tracks, instinctively pivoting his foot to go down an alternate corridor, Lloyd abruptly stopping and turning to catch up. "They wouldn't let you get more medicine!? Do you have any left?"

The answer made Luke cringe. "Just one caplet."

"Yulia's Score." Luke swore, and the journey to Dr. Shu's lab could not have been longer.

It was amazing that Lloyd had managed to make his medication last for so long, for when Luke told Dr. Shu that the brunette had the same condition as Tear, the doctor was surprised, for Lloyd had never personally visited this medical facility in Belkend. Luke's gaping jaw was left to catch flies as Dr. Shu ushered Lloyd in the other room, wanting to perform an examination--Lloyd and Tear were opposite genders, and of different body types and weight. Lloyd taking Tear's medicine probably had not been as effective than if there was a dose prescribed particularly for Lloyd.

In the meantime, Luke decided to get on with the inspection. After informing Lloyd and the doctor, he went on to the replica labs.

The office Van had been using and its contents had been seized the moment the Dorian General had vacated it, but the shelves of books had been nothing more than Jade's already published books and papers on the theories of fomicry, nothing that wasn't already public information. Luke knew that the hardcore information would lie in the computer files. He wasn't very tech-savvy before, but in his previous visits to Belkend with Duke Fabre, he made a point to learn about operating computation fontech. That moment when Jade said in Ortion Cavern, "I doubt Luke could have handled something like this," hung heavily.

The first three computer rooms beheld nothing of interest, only records of visits to Ortion Cavern and the mining of fonimin, an ingredient necessary for fomicry of the legal and illegal kind alike. It was the final room with enormous computation fontech that held the kind of red tape data he was seeking in this inspection.

It was mostly fragmented data, as if Van's men had done a half-baked job of cleaning up before they had hurriedly clear off before the Kimlascan army came in to intercept them. Luke couldn't discern much, but it looked to him as if they had built in these labs fomicry machines, and scaled them to impossible sizes, the massive facilities that Van needed to replicate the entire world. But nowhere in the remaining data did the record state where the facilities were built, and where they were when they were finished. Ah, well. If Van's plan died with him, then there wasn't much cause for concern. He moved to irrevocably erase the data, when one fragment caught his eye. It was the newest item in the records. His jaw dropped--they were incomplete, but they were lists of the newest replica data taken from people just before Van's Belkend operations were shut down.

But in the end, he couldn't make sense of it. Jade would know, but was a Malkuth military officer. There was no way he could convince Duke Fabre to let Jade come into Belkend, and he dared not attempt to transport the data outside the lab. Somehow, it would get intercepted sooner or later, and this was dangerous information to be had. People's replica data ... if this got out, there would be more displaced replicas like Luke, orphans with no family, no place to go, no real life to live, not even as replacements as he had.

A jagged frown on his face, he deleted the data.

On his way to the Dr. Shu's medical lab, Lloyd came rushing to meet him, Governor Viridian at his side.

"Did you get your medicine?" Luke asked, brow quirked. Lloyd impatiently nodded.

"Yeah, but listen! Duke Fabre wants you to return to the manor immediately--"

"Did something happen?"

"Yes ... someone stole Van's sword from the manor."

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A/N: I know it's rushed ... but it's been way past the deadline for this chapter.