Sweat slid down Emray’s furrowed brow as she gingerly set a small oriculum gem into a complex brass and silver contraption before her with a pair of tweezers. Her tinted goggles were suction cupped to her eyes and her hands ached from having to hold it steady, but she had come too far to botch her work now.

Gently the gem was set into the silver facet, sending small arcs of teal energy coursing across the device. The armored fingers of the gauntlet flexed with the sudden surge of power, the intricate runic inscriptions glowed, and the whole device hummed with the soothing drone of activation.

“One step down,” Emray muttered to herself, pleased that the entire thing hadn’t exploded in her face. Her last predictions gave a greater than zero chance that it would.

Emray slid the brass plate of the arcane core closed and latched it shut. A small translucent panel diffused the light coming from the gem, giving it an ethereal quality and ensuring she would know when to replace the gem inside. If her months of tinkering and calculating were to be trusted, it would take more than a year for it to run down.

With deft, practiced hands Emray slid the slender fingers of her right hand into the gauntlet. The reactive leather liner closed down around her hand, making a perfect fit that could accommodate anyone from an elf to an orc. The fact that it wasn’t crushing her hand like her first experiments with reactive materials was a welcome relief.

“Two steps down” Emray muttered with a touch of nervous excitement on her voice. She could feel the tingling of the energy the oriculum was putting into the gauntlet, and it tickled her palm.

Gently Emray flexed her hand, examining the articulated brass fingers as they clicked and clanked together. She opened and closed her fist, feeling the energy flow to the fingers and then back to the palm with each repetition. With a final turn of the screwdriver to tighten down a few of the gauntlet’s moving connections she reached her empowered hand to the subject of her experiment.

Over on a small metal tray sat a whole raw chicken carcass. Emray had bought it during her errand running for Professor Marigold and let it sit in the dormitory larder to thaw slowly. Its vacant eyes stared up at the ceiling before the gauntlet shaded them over with its metal grasp.

With a sickening squelch the chicken’s head and neck were ground into sludge as the gauntlet pulverized it. With a wicked smile Emray threw a punch at the chicken, and she could feel its bones and sinew crack and snap with agonizing precision before the force of her punch launched it a full fifteen feet across the room. The chicken splattered against the wall with a horrendous smack, letting blood, fluid, and organs spray across her laboratory.

“And, three steps down,” Emray said, smiling ear to ear as she wiped chicken bits off of her practical submission. “When Marigold sees this he’s going to be ecstatic!”

With a spring in her step and her heart pumping in the way it had when she received her acceptance letter, Emray quickly cleaned up all the chicken effluvium before burning it in her disposal furnace. The process was a good opportunity to test the adaptive reflex enchantment she had placed into the runic components. She normally had all the athletic coordination of a trout, but with her gauntlet she was easily landing shots from across the room without hitting the rim of the furnace.

A knock on the solid oak door roused Emray from her revelry, and not even seeing Elifas’ gormless face on the other side could dampen her spirits too much.

“What was that sound?” Elifas asked, her voice sleepy and distant. “Sounded like you threw something against the wall. Are you alright?”

“That, dear Elifas, was the sound of achievement,” Emray answered. “Please, come in and bask in the culmination of months of work.”

Elifas’ feet padded softly against the smooth stone of Emray’s laboratory. The devil-blooded girl stared in sleepy wonder at the various odds and ends hanging from racks on the walls, the smoking furnace and the failed prototypes of Emray’s gauntlet being chief among them.

“I’ve never been in here before,” Elifas said as she worked a screwdriver in her hand. “It smells like grease, metal, and sweat. Smells like work, both of the mind and the body,”

“Astute observation,” Emray said, mildly impressed. “The state of this room is the testament to my accomplishments, and the hours and hours I’ve sunk into this project.”

Eventually Elfias’ eyes fell upon the gauntlet, glowing dimly with the soft teal light of its resting state and set onto the specific pedestal Emray had designed for it. She ran her red fingers over it, the warmth of their color contrasting against the cool teal light in an odd way.

“This is your practical submission, I take it?” Elifas asked, her voice still in a dreamy tone, like she was only half there.

“Indeed it is. It’s designed to adapt to fit any wearer, augment their manual dexterity and physical strength, and the oriculum coursing through its wiring allows it to function as an arcane catalyst while simultaneously leaving the wielder’s hand free for other tasks. I’m guaranteed to get advanced to at least the lower floors of the Tower of Skill for this one, if they don’t just give me my contract with the military right from the gate.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Elifas stated. The phrase hung in the air like a bad smell, and Emray’s jovial attitude quickly soured.

“And what makes you so sure?” Emray asked, incredulity heavy in her voice. “I’ve worked for months on this, it’s going to pass for certain.”

“Oh, its going to pass, there’s no doubt about that. Professor Marigold is going to love it. But it’s not going to get you advanced out of this Tower, nor will it get you a military contract.”

“And again, how do you know?” Emray repeated, incredulity turning to anger.

“Call it a hunch, but something is going to prevent further scrutiny of the finer points of this article of war gear. That is what you designed it for, right?”

“So what if I did? What does it matter to you?”

Elifas turned to face Emray, and in the light of the work bench Elifas’ face was cast in a ominous shadow. The shadows framing her oddly gaunt face weren’t what most perturbed Emray, however. It was her eyes, pale orange, lacking pupils, and at the current moment staring into Emray’s soul and a thousand feet beyond it. It felt like Elifas was staring through the cosmos itself, and Emray couldn’t tell if it was from being woken up at such a late hour or something deeper.

“Emray, the military is not the place for a mind as sharp as yours,” Elifas stated as if it were fact. “You are destined for far greater things than warfare, no matter what your family has told you.”

“What did you just say?” Emray asked, a ringing in her ears and a vein bulging in her neck.

As quickly as the state had come over Elifas it seemed to vanish, replaced by her ever vapid expression.

“I’m sorry? Did I say something?” Elifas asked, shaking her head. “Did I zone out on y—"

Emray’s hand had already struck Elifas across the face before she was even cognizant that she had moved it. The slap echoed off of the stone walls and floor, followed by a harsh scraping of wood as Elifas stumbled backward over the chair at the workbench. The devil fell into a heap on the floor, hand clutched against a brighter red splotch on her left cheek. Her horns scraped against the floor as she shuffled her self as far away from Emray as she could get, one of the silk legs of her pajama bottoms tearing in her haste.

“What was that for!?” Elifas begged, voice thick with betrayal, anger, and hurt.

“Don’t you dare talk about my family ever again,” Emray ordered, pointing an accusatory finger at Elifas on the ground. “Don’t you DARE!”

“What did I say?!” Elifas pleaded as tears started to fall from her odd eyes. “Please, what did I say, I don’t remember!”

“You know damn well what you said, infernal! Now get out of my lab before you say something else you won’t remember!”

Elifas scrambled to her feet as fast as she could, running for the door as sobs and wails poured from her throat like water from a faucet. Her cries echoed down the hallway as what she had said echoed around Emray’s brain.