Sierra & Oddball
Lore
February 1st, 2024
Reading time
Sierra, despite her workshop being a cheerful chaos of plans, tools, and piled-up instruments, navigates it with disconcerting ease. She is described as a goldsmith, and her delicate hands work meticulously, with the precision of a watchmaker, to craft and assemble, shape and create. To aid in her endeavors, she can rely on Oddball, a drone of her own design that came to life after being exposed to the currents of the Tumult. Beyond her engineering skills, Sierra is also a talented Alterer, having become an expert in manipulating Constructs, the modules used by the Axiom to control Alteration. It is thanks to all these strengths that she was selected to serve as a vanguard in the Expeditionary Corps.
Yet, at the outset, nothing destined her for such a career. Born within a Lyra caravan, she followed her father Efrén from city to city, leading a nomadic existence. Her father managed a small shadow theater within the troupe, delighting children with stories of princesses and ancient heroes, fables and tales from ages past. She listened as her father spoke of mythical cities: Madrid, Venice... and also the one known as the City of Light. When she wasn't helping her father manipulate threads and lights, silhouettes and sets behind the narrow backstage, Sierra watched the audience, marveling at the faces of the children, alternately joyful, sad, worried, or laughing.
It was by no means a solitary existence. She could rely on the other children of her Clan, with whom she played daily once their everyday chores were done. They claimed to be explorers, traversing mountains and valleys in search of wonders. They pretended to discover new places, with dangers, of course, but also incredible marvels. In the City of Light, buildings were made of gold or tears of the Sun. In their imagination, its streets were covered with trees bearing golden apples, their treetops populated by splendid birds... Come dinnertime, Efrén laughed heartily as he listened to his daughter recount their epic adventures of the day. He often teased her, saying that she could have easily become a Bravos, much to his daughter's vexed gaze.
Unfortunately, her life took a complete turn when the Tumult invited itself into her world. While Asgartha was considered stable for generations, this didn't prevent some Tumult anomalies from appearing here and there within the peninsula. And Sierra found herself at the forefront of one of them. As their caravan rattled along the roads, they felt a jolt shake the vehicle, as if the ground had roared. After securing the furniture and drawers, Sierra stuck her head out of the window to see that other Lyra were doing the same. There was a strange smell of iodine and camphor in the air. Just as she thought things were settling down, another shock rattled the caravan's walls. That's when she heard the Caravan Shepherd urging everyone to take to higher ground.
At that moment, the ground began to undulate, to fracture. Horses reared, and some wagons smashed, crushed between rocks emerging from the ground. From the earth erupted a cacophony of plants, water, flames, masses of flesh... An anomaly was being born from the underground, boiling like a spring as it rose to the surface. Sierra and her father jumped out of their mobile home, trying to avoid the iridescent pools of Tumult oozing from the ground. As the terrain transformed into water, then into organic or mineral matter, the different densities caused some areas to collapse, others to expand. Both struggled to stay upright in the face of the violence of the earthquakes, the frequency of the topographic variations.
While some Lyra had managed to reach the edge of the singularity, others had not been so lucky. Fortunately for them, Sierra and Efrén were about to find shelter. That's when a terrible pain shot up Sierra's legs. She fell face-first, struggling not to lose consciousness. She saw her father's horrified look as he pulled her by the arms to safety. Turning her gaze, she saw that she had stepped into a pool of Tumult, and her legs were chaotically mutating. Her left leg liquefied into a trail of pebbles, continuing to scatter and transform. Her right leg, on the other hand, was partly transmuted into knotted wood, from which colorful feathers and rusty nails sprouted. She screamed until darkness overcame her.
She woke up much later, with a parched throat and a fevered mind. Lifting the sheets, she saw that there was nothing left of her legs but stumps surrounded by foul-smelling bandages. She began to panic, scream, and cry, with her father's embrace unable to console her. She remained bedridden for many weeks. The Sahanka of the Khamsin Clan had come to their aid, but despite their efforts, the Clan's healers couldn't save her legs. They had to resort to amputating the affected areas, as their integrity had been entirely compromised by the Tumult. Efrén did everything he could to feed her, to massage her painful thighs with ointments. He listened to her moan, scream at the world, despair... but he didn't allow her to wither away. And one day, he carried her to the front of the lodge that had been loaned to them so she could once again gaze at the sky.
But this small joy was accompanied by new sufferings. The pain of watching other children play outside without being able to join them. The frustration of being unable to move freely. Efrén tried every means to occupy her mind: asking her to help rebuild his theater, to sculpt and paint new puppets... Even though she most often agreed, all these activities brought her no happiness at all. Then one day, her father woke her up at dawn and asked her to get dressed. He took her in his arms and carried her throughout the journey. She saw a bustling city below the Sahanka. Verbera, located on the edge of the Muir Concordia. The city seemed to be in celebration, with music resonating through its streets. There were brass bands, parades, processions, and floats…
Efrén informed her that they were here to find her a wheelchair or any device allowing her to regain a semblance of autonomy. And what better time than the Prodigium to find something like that? The Axiom's World Exposition overflowed with fascinating machines, incredible mechanical wonders. The fair was a mishmash of odds and ends, of spectacles and presentations each more extravagant than the last. She discovered numerous scientific marvels: the fascinating and terrifying kelonic plasma arcs, articulated cranes capable of lifting gargantuan weights, all in a deluge of smoke and hissing vapors. All her senses were once again alert, trying to assimilate all these feats.
When they arrived at the prosthetist's workshop, he warmly welcomed them. He listened to Sierra at length, with an expression of sympathy. Then he excused himself for a moment before returning with various prosthetics, from the simplest to the most complex. The artisan, named Hamisu, spoke to them about these Grafts, the most advanced of which responded to the will of their wearer. But their cost was prohibitive, and Efrén could only afford rudimentary devices. However, when the prosthetist attached the racing blades to Sierra's thighs, she began to hope. To walk again, and perhaps to run... After a few adjustments, she was able to take her first steps. And although unsteady, the simple act of standing brought tears to her eyes.
They spent the rest of the day enjoying the Prodigium and its technical wonders. They watched the parade of floats, each displaying new creations from the Axiom: new models of airships, image projectors, material recyclers... They ate ice cream on the beach, looking into the distance, across the sea, at the distant silhouette of Arkaster, the capital of Asgartha. But what captured her imagination the most was a simple trinket displayed in a store window. A slender silhouetted doll, no taller than a hand, repeating a few dance steps in a loop. She watched it, captivated, amazed by its mechanical grace, astounded by the precision of its movements…
Back at the caravan, she began to imagine new tools to enhance her father's performances. Why not use gears and pistons to maneuver the puppets? Why not use powder and smoke to impress their audience even more? Every day of their stop in Verbera, she sought out Hamisu to learn two or three new things about mechanics, pyrotechnics, or kelonic batteries. Efrén took advantage of this stay to finalize their new caravan and simultaneously performed many shows in the city to fund his projects. The goal was to leave as soon as the Clan was back on its feet, but somewhere, Efrén suspected what was going to happen.
The closer the departure day approached, the more Sierra's expression darkened. Even if he didn't entirely agree with the approach — he believed that all these additions harmed the simplicity of his art — he had accepted that his daughter build a smoke machine or spark projectors or visual effects to accompany his plays. He could see that the young girl had a knack for these things, even if he wasn't as enthusiastic about them as she was. One evening, he went to see Hamisu himself, asking him to sponsor Sierra within the Axiom. The old man agreed to his request, if it was truly something the young girl desired from the bottom of her heart.
In the morning, after helping Sierra continue her rehabilitation, he asked her to sit with him over a cup of coffee. It was at that moment that he suggested she join the Axiom if she wanted to continue her technical apprenticeship. She was, of course, free to follow him when he left, to pick up their life where they had left it. But Efrén felt that what she had discovered here had given new meaning to her life. Tears rolled down Sierra's cheeks, and she embraced her father. Even though she took the rest of the day to think about it, everything was already clear in her mind. Yes, it would be heart-wrenching, and her father would be terribly missed, but the prospect of being able to continue building and crafting filled her with joy.
A few days later, she stuffed her backpack and hugged her dad one last time. Father and daughter cried hot tears, and Efrén promised her that he would visit whenever he passed by the vicinity of the capital. She lingered for a long time, watching the caravan move away until it disappeared on the horizon. Then she turned towards the city, Hamisu's workshop, and the station that would take her to the capital. The prosthetist taught her all the basics she was supposed to know to qualify as an Apprentice. She learned about the properties of Kelon, the basics of programming, and how to melt metal, use various machinery, and more.
All these skills allowed her to secure, when she finally reached the capital, a position as an Apprentice within the Foundry, the Bastion of the Axiom. Six years later, after impressing the judges, she managed to join the Parallax, the Axiom Guild specifically working on Alteration. At the end of eleven years of intense apprenticeship, she reached the status of Journeyman when she presented to her hierarchy the first automatons she had devised, as a tribute to her father's puppeteer profession. But everything changed when she met Oddball, the Chimera that would become her Alter Ego. Studying it awakened a curiosity in her about what existed beyond the borders of Asgartha... Or was it the nostalgia for travel, dormant within her, suddenly resurfacing?
In any case, she began to feel an attraction to the unknown, wondering how her engineering and Alteration talents could serve the Rediscovery Endeavor. She started to reconsider her dreams and childhood games, thinking about the City of Light that had fascinated her so much when she was little. The drone never left her side, and they both developed a strong attachment to each other. So it was only natural that they connected through the Musubi, to further grow their deep friendship. Few were fortunate enough to be in such close contact with Chimerae. She began to reflect on her life, on everything that had led her to this point. It seemed to her that the threads of destiny had brought her to this precise moment, for a specific reason... as if the Tumult, through this, had invited her to meet it once again.