The High Priest of the Holy See, Archbishop Valerion, did not take kindly to the sound of steam-whistles drown out his morning hymns. As the Western King cowered in his embassy, the bells of the Great Cathedral began to toll—not the rhythmic call to prayer, but the jagged, frantic alarm of the Excommunicato.
By noon, the Upper See was a sea of white-and-gold. The Inquisition's paladins, armored in blessed silver and wielding staves topped with sun-crystals, blocked the main thoroughfares. At the center of the Grand Plaza, Valerion stood atop the steps of the Cathedral, holding a scroll sealed with the ancient wax of the First Prophets.
"Priscilla Vane-Crest!" his voice boomed, amplified by the resonant architecture of the plaza. "You have desecrated the sacred springs! You have mechanized the flesh of the fallen! You are a void in the eyes of the Light! By the authority of the See, I strip you of your name, your lands, and your soul. You are cast out!"
The crowd of nobles, already terrified by the night's "Boiling Point," let out a collective gasp. In Veridia, excommunication was a death sentence. It meant anyone could kill her without sin.
Priscilla didn't hide. She didn't send a messenger.
The heavy iron doors of the Lower See's service lift groaned open at the edge of the plaza. Priscilla stepped out, flanked by Silas and Alistair. Behind them, fifty of the "Unseen" emerged, their faces blackened with soot, carrying heavy brass canisters connected by rubber hoses to the venting grates of the city.
Priscilla was dressed in a suit of reinforced black leather, her hand-cannon holstered at her hip, but in her hand, she carried something new: a megaphone made of polished brass and powered by a vibrating diaphragmatic coil.
"Valerion!" she shouted, her voice amplified into a metallic roar that shook the crystals on the paladins' staves. "You talk of light and souls while your people starve in the damp! You call my science a void? I call your 'Light' a dying candle!"
"Blasphemy!" Valerion shrieked. "Paladins, seize her! Purge the heretic!"
The paladins surged forward, their sun-crystals glowing with a blinding white radiance. But Priscilla didn't flinch. She signaled to Silas.
Silas didn't draw his guns. He reached for a lever on one of the brass canisters. "Release the 'Conductive Fog'," he murmured.
With a hiss, a dense, metallic-tasting gray mist erupted from the canisters, rolling across the plaza like a tidal wave. The sun-crystals hit the mist and scattered, their beams refracting into useless, flickering sparks.
"Alistair, the frequency," Priscilla commanded.
Alistair stepped forward, holding a device that looked like a skeletal hand made of copper wires. He began to crank a small generator at its base. "The silver in their armor is an excellent conductor for a low-frequency oscillating pulse," Alistair noted with a clinical smirk. "I call this the 'Shepherd's Staff'."
He touched the device to the wet stone of the plaza.
ZZZT.
A ripple of blue electricity surged through the conductive fog. The paladins, encased in their "blessed" silver plate, became human lightning rods. They didn't fall; they froze, their muscles locking in agonizing contractions as the electricity hummed through their armor. They stood like statues, twitching rhythmically to the pulse of Alistair's machine.
Priscilla walked through the frozen ranks of the holy army, her boots clicking on the electrified stone. She climbed the steps of the Cathedral until she was standing eye-to-eye with the High Priest.
"Your 'Light' is just energy, Valerion," she said, her voice dripping with a lethal, baddie charm. "And energy belongs to the person who can harness it."
She reached out and snatched the excommunication scroll from his trembling hands. She held it up for the entire plaza to see, then touched it to a sparking wire on her belt. The parchment vanished in a flash of blue flame.
"I'm not cast out," Priscilla said, her golden eyes burning with a terrifying authority. "I'm taking over. From this moment, the Cathedral is no longer a house of prayer. It is the Central Hub for the Northern Power Grid. The 'Breath of the Saints' now belongs to the Architect."
She turned to the terrified nobles in the plaza. "You have a choice. You can stay in the dark with your ghosts, or you can buy your light from me. Silas, secure the archives. Alistair, I want the High Priest's solar converted into a laboratory by sunset."
As she walked into the darkened nave of the Cathedral, the "Unseen" followed her, dragging heavy cables and iron pipes over the sacred altars. The "Silent Mouse" had just evicted God from his own home, and she hadn't even broken a sweat.