Continuity Note: This story takes place during the Zandalari history of the character now known as Ninyreese. It is preserved here as a legacy chronicle of the soul’s history before the transformation.
The merchant in Dazar’alor’s lower market had been talking for three minutes about import routes through Mechagon’s waste-processing sector when Kiyareese stopped listening and started walking.
She had already written down the reference. Stolen Royal Vendorbot, workshop sector, rotating position. The notation was in her coat pocket — inscription cipher, fast — before he reached the part about the schematic availability window. He was still talking when she left. This was not rude. She had heard everything relevant and her legs already knew where they were going.
First-Strike found her at the harbor an hour later, which was how he always found her: by following the scent of engine oil and forward momentum.
“Tracking-Seven. On point.” The designation came out as she walked, low and easy. First-Strike fell in at her left knee, his footsteps clicking a familiar counterpoint to hers. He had been with her since the sea years — built in the first year, because she had been lonely and raptors were home and she had components and twelve days of open ocean ahead of her and no better use for the time. She had never said this. He had a designation. The designation had become, over time, a term of endearment by accident. She had not addressed this. He understood his role. She respected the arrangement.
The Crossing #
Gazlowe’s expedition was staging at the south dock and the noise reached her before she rounded the corner: goblin crew voices, the diesel-and-salt smell of an operation already half-assembled, the particular controlled chaos of a man who runs excellent logistics that look disorganized from the outside.
“You Kiyareese?” He was shorter than the stories suggested. “The engineer. Heard you work fast.”
“Already three steps ahead, mon. What’s broken?”
Three haulers and a bilge pump. She fixed them before sunset — the fast hands, the fault located before the diagnostic ran to completion, the cipher notation on the move. Gazlowe watched and said nothing through the first two repairs, then said “huh” after the third, which she took as professional acknowledgment. Passage negotiated. She understood this kind of currency.
The crossing to Mechagon took two days.
She put the armor on before they docked.
The plates went on in sequence: leg rigs first, torso chassis, the pauldrons clicking locked at the shoulders. The internal conduit lines woke as each connection closed — dark red, pulsing at the joints and along the chassis seams, the kind of glow that caused ambient reassessment in anything with survival instincts. The Re-origination Pulse Rifle went across her back last: dark gunmetal chassis, Titan script gold-inlaid along the barrel for calibration, not decoration. At idle charge the barrel and scope housing burned that warm amber-gold, the color of something old deciding whether to be patient or decisive. She had built the rifle herself, around a recovered core fragment she would not explain the acquisition of. The shot it fired sounded less like a gun and more like a conclusion.
First-Strike stood at her side and watched the armor sequence the way he always did: with the still attention of a creature that understood transformation and did not require it to be explained.
By the time they entered Mechagon harbor, the warm engineer who had fixed the bilge pump was not the silhouette at the rail. The crew gave her more space without being asked. She had designed it for exactly that.
Work Days #
Mechagon was everything the schematics implied and three things they hadn’t.
The Schematic: Blingtron 7000 was held by the Stolen Royal Vendorbot — a mechagnome market unit running a circuit through Rustbolt’s workshop floor on a schedule that was nearly predictable once you tracked it for two days. She tracked it for two days, annotating the route in cipher, identifying the optimal intercept window. The dark chassis helped during these observations: mechagnome vendors recalibrated their price assessments when they registered the armor’s silhouette, then settled into reasonable when First-Strike sat down beside her with the patience of a creature that had internalized waiting as tactical advantage.
She did not negotiate much. The schematic was worth what it cost.
She did not open the scroll immediately. That would have been unprofessional.
She opened it thirty-eight seconds later, around a corner, alone. She contained her reaction. The containment was partially successful.
The Shoreline #
On the fourth afternoon, Gazlowe’s crew drifted toward the water.
They found her already there.
The armor was not present. The rifle was not present. What was present, sitting at the edge of a flat rock shelf where Mechagon’s shoreline opened to open water, was a Zandalari woman in a simple wrapped cloth — practical, no fastenings that could catch on machinery — feet bare on the stone, hair down. Loose and long, not in the battle-tie that kept it clear of the joint systems. First-Strike was beside her in the sun, half-asleep, the tip of his tail moving with some private dream-logic.
Gazlowe’s crew stopped.
The frame the dark plates had hidden was all Zandalari — the specific build that comes from lineages of people who stood at the prow of hunter-fleets in open water and didn’t move when the swells came. Wide shoulders, long arms with the hunter’s natural stillness at rest. Substantial in the way that doesn’t ask permission and doesn’t require commentary. The light fell across her the way open-air light finds Zandalari skin: held the warmth in the tone, turned it amber-gold, the same color the rifle glowed at idle. Her hands were in her lap — ore-dust still under the nails, mechanical oil still faint across the knuckles. That never fully washed out. She had made her peace with this fact some years ago.
She was watching the sea.
Not the way she watched things when she was noting everything — that quick, total attention that catalogued exits and structural loads and wind direction before she sat down. The other way. The way where the notation stopped and something under the warm and the fast and the already three steps ahead, mon came to the surface. Quiet and wide. The sea had been doing this since she was a girl in Zandalar — something in the scale of it, the refusal to be solved. She did not explain this to anyone. It did not require explanation. Some things were true without requiring a citation.
“Didn’t know you were a beach person,” Gazlowe said from behind her.
She didn’t turn around. “You didn’t ask.”
He stood there. Looked at the water. Decided correctly that the right move was to let her have this. He was a man who occasionally made the right move. The crew dispersed. The afternoon held.
First-Strike opened one eye at the noise, ran his own threat assessment, closed it again.
She watched the water.
Blueprint Season #
She found the Vendorbot on its fifth loop the next morning. Schematic in the pack. The transaction was clean.
Blueprint Season — her cipher notation for the productive window when materials aligned and the build became inevitable. She had been in them before. The gap between the schematic in hand and the finished machine was still weeks of work and a supply run she was already mentally drafting. She did not find this discouraging.
She walked back through Rustbolt with First-Strike at her heel and the morning crew around her, running the calculation quietly the way she always ran it.
Ninety-Seven.
Not the failure count. Not the question of whether it was enough. A measurement — how far the project had come, how much further the work extended. The schematic was one component. The component after that was already visible from here.
The work always continued. That was not a comfort and not a burden. It was just the shape of her.
Zandalar Forever.
First-Strike’s footsteps clicked steady beside her on the workshop stone.
She was already thinking about the build.