If there ever was a man who had made an art out of saying both everything and nothing in the space of five words or less, it was Sol Badguy.

Part of that could certainly be attributed to the circumstances, as a war offered entirely too many situations in which, "Fuck," was the only accurate assessment to be made. The other part was that Sol was naturally disinclined to exercise his vocal chords, preferring to rely on a combination of rude gestures and guttural noises to get his points across. Since people, for the most part, were naturally disinclined to stay in the company of three-hundred pounds of angry-looking fire user any longer than they strictly had to, most never acquired the degree of fluency in swearing and offensive body language necessary to realize that Sol was able to give even a grunt a surprising amount of depth.

Ky had stuck around.

After many years of whisper-shouting orders, arguments and the occasional, "You know what I'm wearing, it's the same thing I wear everyday, as do you, as does the rest of the army, now get off the emergency channel, please and thank you," across various battlefields, he'd become fairly good at guessing the course a conversation would take purely from the intonation of the first word out of Sol's mouth. In fact, Ky might have considered his degree of accuracy a little embarrassing if it hadn't so often spared him either a massive crater, a massive migraine, or both.

So when Sol called, "C'mere a sec," his compliance came wrapped in about sixty percent guarded curiosity and forty percent pure indulgence.

Abandoning his perusal of a shelf of half-disintegrated books, Ky craned his neck to figure out where Sol had gone off to. He'd last seen him sorting through crates of blacktech at the far end of the storage chamber, though that had been some time ago, before Ky had become absorbed in deciphering the subjects that had commandeered the interest of people during the Lost Age. (To be fair, the title "The World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais" alone raised so many questions).

"Yes?"

The question was purely perfunctory; there was no mistaking the slight drawl in Sol's voice, lowering it from his usual pitch. With anyone else, Ky could have dismissed it as a quirk of speaking in a cavernous space, but with Sol, it meant he was plotting, and the only times Sol was plotting was when he was trying to turn Ky into a one-person social experiment. And depending on his mood, that could either be a genuinely interesting object lesson, or—

"Take a look at this."

Okay, the last time Sol had sounded so deliberately casual, he'd turned the Furaiken into something that was blunt, purple, and vibrated, so this was clearly going to be a social experiment on Ky's blood pressure instead.

The best course of action would have been to ignore Sol, grab his sword and spend the next hour walking around with his shields up to avoid falling victim to one of Sol's juvenile pranks. After all, this was the man who hadn't let the alpine tundra deter him from dyeing Ky's entire supply of clean uniforms a truly vibrant shade of pink. However, a side effect of spending so much time on deciphering Sol's intentions was learning how rarely Sol's humor wasn't tangled up in ruefulness and cynicism, and the past couple of weeks of chasing PWAB leads hadn't exactly afforded a lot of opportunities to brighten the mood.

Shaking his head at himself, Ky grabbed the Furaiken, wove a shield spell, and set off into the second tunnel to the left.

In comparison to the floor-to-ceiling chaos of the main storage area, the corridor proved to be rather empty save for a barred iron gate (now unhinged, likely courtesy of Sol) and a bunch of heavy drapes, their once-scarlet hue faded to a dull brown. A strange place to put decorations, but then again, whoever had built this bunker had also thought treatises on fromage frais worth preserving for the ages. Whatever Sol had dug up in its recesses was sure to cost him his dignity, and a slice of sanity, to boot.

Past a moldy carpet, an impressive but thoroughly spoiled wine collection and another banged up iron gate, the tunnel opened up into a stone-walled room with a high ceiling, smaller than the storage area but still big enough to house several pieces of furniture. Sol was leaning against a long wooden table, digging through a ratty cardboard box. He looked up when Ky stepped across the threshold, lips twitching into a smirk when he caught wind of the shield spell.

Ky raised an eyebrow, and, when Sol failed to set off a complicated booby trap, slowly let the spell thin and disperse. "So, what did you want me to see?"

Sol gave him a long look, but finally settled for gesturing at the room at large. "Look what I found."

Dutifully, Ky looked.

It wasn't like he had expected a straightforward answer, and he'd been much too focused on possible pranks to do more than check for exits and buckets of who-knew-what over the door. The ancient lighting in this part of the bunker had been confined to decorative candelabra, their dim light giving the place a gloomy air more reminiscent of a crypt or a vault than a bunker designed to shelter people from the Gears.

That seemed a little peculiar, if not particularly interesting.

He shot Sol a sidelong glance, who shot a sidelong glance right back, eyes gleaming with a kind of mirth that had become rare as of late.

Whatever benightedness he was meant to discover, it would cost him more than a couple of brain cells that could have been expended on useful things, like finding clues or salvageable materials.

Ah, well. Noble sacrifice, that was what it was.

Upon closer inspection, the ambience of the room wasn't the only peculiar thing about it. The furniture, too, was deliberately crude, metal coffers and a high-backed wooden armchair that seemed more like something that ought to adorn an Inquisitorial interrogation chamber than an everyday living space. Even the table Sol was propped didn't seem intended for work or dining, its surface slanted at an angle and some kind of winch-like mechanism near its head allowing it to be lowered and tilted at will.

To one side stood a featureless carving of a wooden horse, though its sharply ridged back reminded Ky more of some kind of mechanical device than an actual statue. Riding implements had been scattered over and around it rather carelessly, though even a casual once-over revealed that the craftsman had been no equestrian. Apart from an excessive amount of crops in different shapes and sizes, the bridle and saddle were much too narrow to fit an actual animal, and whoever had designed the riding boots had clearly never thought of the possibility that the rider might need to extract their legs from the stirrups at a moment's notice — the stiff, tight fit and absurdly high heels were a pair of shattered ankles just waiting to happen.

What was more worrisome than the poor quality of the horse gear, however, were the things lurking in the dim recesses of the walls. At first, Ky had dismissed the various flails, pokers, and bulb-shaped objects as tools and containers, but now that he was paying close attention to their make, it became that these couldn't be used as farming equipment. Too soft or brittle, too unwieldy, too adorned with unnecessary spikes… and then, of course, there were the chains, enough to secure and hoist a standard-issue magic cannon — some thin and nearly decorative, others with links the size of a human hand, wound up in thick coils. Some were even hanging from the ceiling, swaying and clinking faintly in the draft.

Ky frowned.

From the looks of it, whoever had built the place had anticipated a fair amount of misconduct among the bunkers' inhabitants-to-be, and also subscribed to a brand of torture that would have won them the eternal admiration of the Holy Roman Inquisition.

"Well, what do you think?" Sol said, still sounding pleased with himself despite the apparent grim purpose of his discovery.

"I think," Ky said slowly, feeling like there was something he was supposed to get and failing, "that the ideas of the Inquisition appear to predate the Inquisition."

Sol blinked at him in a way that said this was one response he hadn't anticipated.

"What?" Ky asked, confusion winning out against his better judgment, which was telling him to just let Sol be the only one in the know.

"Guess they don't cover this kind of thing in Sunday school, huh."

The insinuation was as old as dirt, or at least as old as their first meeting, when Sol had taken every opportunity to needle him about any and all aspects of himself. For one reason another, he'd never felt the need to retire this particular jab, despite some of the decidedly un-Catholic things they'd done in the years since. Over the years, Ky had become very good at not dignifying it with an answer. "I'm sure I could agree or disagree more efficiently if I knew what on Earth you are talking about."

"It's a sex dungeon, Kiske," Sol said with the air of someone who was being forced to explain an obvious joke and was starting to find it not funny himself. "Somebody was planning on boning their way through the apocalypse. Vigorously."

Maybe, just maybe, Ky would have felt some vestiges of embarrassment at intruding on somebody's privacy like that if the very idea hadn't sounded bizarre. "I'm going to regret asking, but what about this—" he waved at one of thetorture racks, "—allows you to come to that conclusion?"

If he hadn't known better, the expression on Sol's face was starting to resemble a pout. "S&M, Kiske. Seriously, your country invented the whole thing."

Giving him a dubious look, Ky sifted through his memory in search of the term, chasing down half-forgotten watchfire conversations he'd overheard on some quiet night or another, soldiers regaling squad mates with their conquests for lack of anything else to do.

"Ah. So that's what… wow. Alright. People in the past really did have lots of time."

"Penny dropped?" Sol asked. Sometime during Ky's exploration of his mental dictionary, he had walked over to the chests against the far wall and was rummaging through them, their contents squeaking and rustling suspiciously.

"I suppose…" Ky said, still not entirely sure what to make of this revelation. "Is there a reason you wanted me to see this? Because, well, to be perfectly honest... I don't think I want to go to all this trouble."

To his surprise, Sol got a breath stuck in his windpipe and doubled over coughing. "Oh man. Oh man, you think I was—"

"Well, given that I can't even fathom the things you want me to be embarrassed about, I assumed that was your intention." Ky hummed contemplatively. "Anyway, this seems like a lot of effort just to get the job done."

Sol made another wheezing sound that Ky was starting to recognize as barely repressed laughter, and thumped his fist against his thigh.

Ky wrinkled his nose and let his gaze sweep around the room again, trying to cast all the instruments of torture as accessories in acts that, to him, seemed to have very little to do with sex. "…I can't imagine hanging upside down to be very comfortable."

"That's kind of the point," Sol started to say, but by then Ky was making an earnest attempt to understand the issue.

"I mean, I've done it," he mused. "Not while doing that, obviously. But I imagine dangling wrong side up from a Gear's jaws to be slightly more rigorous."

"You're pretty hot when you're all judgmental, anyone ever tell you that?"

Sol had, on more than one occasion, and it still made as much sense as the first time, which was exactly none.

Ky would have spared him an eye-roll if he hadn't been so preoccupied with trying to imagine in what world all the pain those devices could inflict might be considered stimulating. During the war, he'd done the lacerated back and the bruised ribs routine on a nearly weekly basis, and each time had failed to instill in him the desire to try again. And no matter how depraved Sol was pretending to be, he didn't seem to find Ky's black-and-blue inkblot tests to be much of a turn-on, either.

"I'm not judging," Ky said, without heat, stepping closer to inspect one of the alcoves, which turned out to be a makeshift wardrobe.

Perhaps looking through a closet was rude to whoever had deemed these clothes important enough to survive the war, but Ky firmly believed in investigative empiricism for things he didn't understand.

The passage of time hadn't been kind to the garments stored behind the flimsy curtain, lacquer cracking and flaking off, seams of sequins and imitation chain mail unraveling to the floor. Bemused, Ky singled out a kind of corset made almost entirely of belts, the oversized buckles now rusted through almost completely. The belts themselves were studded by tiny metal spikes that came off when he brushed his fingers over them, the glue brittle with age.

Something about the gaudy non-practicality of the outfit brought to mind the Order dress uniform, and the many official functions he had spent wearing it — the ridiculously high collar hugging his neck in a vise-like grip, the thigh-length lace-up boots that always took half an hour to get on and off, and would barely allow him to move faster than a leisurely stroll. Apart from his personal discomfort, though, the uniform had made him nervous, the way it restricted all natural movement, forced him to compensate, to shift his stance and abandon all hope for quick and fluid swordplay in case of a surprise attack.

Trying to apply what was basically the closest thing to a full-body tourniquet to bedroom fun just seemed counterproductive. Which, according to Sol, was the point he was failing to get.

Shaking his head, he moved back. "I don't get it. This doesn't make any sense."

"It's porn, Kiske. We've had that discussion before." Sol briefly turned away from his rummaging to lift two fingers and wag them at each other. "Porn. Not a math problem."

"Why would that exempt it from making sense?"

"Making sense is kind of… optional. People don't usually read Best of Tentacle Hentai Deluxe Volume Five for sense."

"Best of what?"

Sol held up a frayed magazine, its cover faded to a silhouette that seemed to depict some kind of writhing abyssal hellspawn of a Gear doing something to a flesh-colored blob that might have been a nude person a good two-hundred years ago.

Ky pointedly redirected his bafflement at the equally puzzling but infinitely less faux-pas-inducing rack of clothing. "That's just so many kinds of bizarre and impossible I don't even know where to start."

Behind him, Sol huffed in what sounded like partial exasperation and amusement. "'s not like you can still see anything." The ancient magazine rustled. "Oh hey, I think that might be a boob."

"That's nice?" Ky said, doing his best to wrap his mind around the fact that there evidently was a market for these things, or at least, there had been a market once upon a time, when people had been under a grave misapprehension concerning what Gears generally liked to do to humans, naked or clothed. Which… alright, perhaps he was being a little judgmental here, but that was only because he'd met his fair share of tentacled nightmares on the battlefield, and the last thing anyone in their right mind should want was to meet the business end of their suckers. Their razor-bladed, man-sized, face-shredding suckers.

Something must have shown in his expression, because Sol gave a thoughtful "hm" and started digging through the boxes again. "Alright, maybe that wasn't the best example. Most of this stuff used to mean something a bit different. Probably should've started you off on the repairman porn or something, let's see…"

"…I take it that in this strangely specific sub-genre of things that make no sense, the Gears are replaced by household appliances?"

"…you have a surprisingly dirty mind, Kiske, but no. It's just the setup."

"I was only trying to extrapolate," Ky said. "And besides, why would it have a setup? I thought you said these things were specifically engineered to make no sense whatsoever?"

"Well, you gotta have some context," Sol said, waving a hand to illustrate precisely nothing. "It's part of the kink."

"Which is… repairs?"

"No. It's usually just… repair dude shows up at some place for work, girl greets him in a negligé or something, and the fun proceeds from there."

"Well, that's wildly irresponsible. Does he at least fix the thing he was called for?"

Sol rolled his eyes. "Not the point. Not the point in the slightest."

"So there was no reason to introduce this plot element in the first place."

Huffing out a laugh, Sol dropped whatever he'd been looking for, kicking the chest closed. "Guess not. C'mon, let's head back before your porn meta retroactively erases every boner I've ever had."

"Given how you're so apt at making no sense, I have complete faith that you'll come up with an appropriate replacement. Or inappropriate, as it were," Ky said drily, drawing the closet shut and following after him.

They returned to the main storage area in silence, splitting up once again to resume their self-appointed tasks of Sol shoving gutted blacktech parts into his duffel bag and Ky skimming the rows of poorly preserved books for anything salvage- or readable. His mind wasn't on it, though, still preoccupied with the conversation. Of course, Sol had only been trying to get a rise out of him, perhaps hoping for an embarrassed rant of some kind and completely forgetting that Ky had difficulty seeing what all the fuss was about in the first place.

Which, of course, was the crux of the problem.

Usually, Ky was able to chalk up his superb lack of imagination to the fact that he had more important things on his plate than his own pleasure, or that, in his opinion, location still trumped mechanics by a mile and a half. A bed with freshly washed sheets and an actual mattress that he slept in while not injured and didn't have to roll up and carry a hundred miles was still one of the most blissful things he could think of. Everything else was just a bonus. Sol tended to pick up his slack in the imagination department, at any rate, but it was times like this that Ky actually began to wonder.

Normal people, he was pretty sure, would have taken a look at the dungeon and felt either mortified or inspired, instead of getting stuck puzzling out what could possibly be considered attractive about Gears or people repairing things.

He chanced a glance over his shoulder to where Sol had settled cross-legged on the floor, grumbling every now and then when a piece of blacktech proved particularly obstinate.

Hm.

Mostly everybody else, it seemed, didn't think about it and just went with the flow. And while Ky was good at going with the flow when it came to the important things, an appreciation of erotica was nowhere near the realms of "people are dying right now so fix it" and "people will be dying pretty soon so keep it from happening." It shouldn't matter, he knew, and in the grand scheme of things it didn't, yet he couldn't help feeling like his teenaged self had skipped a step in the assembly process of maturity somewhere, leaving his current self to bang two parts together that wouldn't connect.

"You really don't get it, do you."

Sol had stopped packing up and was watching him, an undercurrent of amused curiosity in his voice. Ky chose to accept it as the peace offering it was, even though he'd only been a little annoyed with himself. He replaced the tome he'd been holding ("A History of Abandoned Shopping Carts in Eastern North America," another bizarre and alien topic, go figure) and shook his head, smiling wryly. "Not really, no. I told you, out of uniform I'm spectacularly boring."

The limiter made a meaningful lurch towards Sol's hairline.

"Oh, you know what I mean."

Sol rolled his shoulders in a "maybe, maybe not" gesture and said, "Well, if it bothers you that much, we can make a pitstop in the next town. Rennes? Rouen? Anyway, we could get you started with a pack of sexy poker cards or whatever and see what happens. I think there's even an underground guy version around now, so you've got options."

Ky scrunched up his eyebrows, fishing for a faint recollection — off-duty soldiers hunched across a table in the mess tent and playing for a pile of small change, salacious grins dying down once they realized the presence of the High Commander, who'd really just wanted to grab dinner and be on his way for a tryst with the paperwork. "Oh, those. I did have one of those in my possession for a while."

He didn't say and I couldn't see what the fuss was all about with that, either but it came across anyway.

Sol was giving him a look that, on any other person, could have been described as scandalized. "You?"

"Hm?"

"You, Sir Stickass, owning instruments of sin and depravity?"

Ky rolled his eyes, hard. "If you want to classify aesthetic nudes as sinful… Anyway—"

"No, no, hold up," Sol said, rising to his feet. "First the kitchen tools comment, now the sexy cards? I'm seeing an all new side of you here. Details, now."

Ky shrugged. "It was an accident, more or less."

"Uh-huh."

"One of the inquisitorial inspectors took them off one of my men and… deposited them with me, along with a lengthy list of all the grievous violations of good Christian morals in my battalion."

"Uh-huh."

"I tried to return the cards once he left, but no one knew who they belonged to."

Sol made a derisive noise. "Can't imagine why."

"It's not like I would have faulted them for it," Ky sighed, lips quirking ruefully, "even if I had the time or energy to do so."

Sol didn't really bother acknowledging the statement. "So what did you do with them, anyway?"

"They probably got lost or destroyed along with one of my various desks somewhere along the line. I don't know, I forgot about them after a while. Maybe they got sent back to the requisition office and somebody else is now putting them to their intended use."

"Not what I meant."

Ky blinked.

"Come on. You can't tell me you didn't at least look… oh who am I kidding, of course you didn't."

"Naturally. Even if I'd felt like it, which I didn't, it would've been rude to just go ahead and stare without permission."

Sol was looking at him as if he'd grown another head. "Only you would be able to worry about the emotional health of a sexy card."

"Somebody had to model for those cards."

"You do realize that those models wanted you to stare when they posed like that. Probably you specifically."

"I doubt it."

Sol held up his hands in mock surrender. "Suit yourself. The Kiske Wank Bank is still a fully bonded global authority."

"Let's pretend I know what that means, the fact of the matter is it would have been rude." Biting his lip, Ky paused. "And at the end of the day, it would still be a picture of a stranger. I'm not sure what's supposed to be so enticing about looking at somebody you don't even know."

"So it'd be okay if it's somebody you do know?"

"In that case, I don't see why I'd need a picture for it," Ky said. "Seeing how you so rarely wear a shirt. Or pants."

Sol was grinning as if he'd just revealed a juicy secret instead of a perfectly obvious fact. "Flattering as that is — and I will be getting back to you on that — that's hardly a fantasy."

"Oh, right, it's supposed to be illogical and highly improbable. Alright, you, without a shirt, being infallibly polite and temperate for twenty-four hours."

"Hah! That's not improbable, that's impossible. Next."

"I'm sorry," Ky conceded. "That was the best I had."

Sol smacked his face into his palm, which lost some of its dramatic effect on account of the limiter getting in the way. "Where, oh where, did I go wrong?"

Ky gave a noncommittal hum, resisting the urge to point out that he'd informed Sol of his limited entertainment value way back when they had first started out. For one, that had been a long time ago, and for another, there was no way, after all the back-and-forth about his lack of imagination, that it wouldn't come out sounding petty. It wasn't like he was genuinely worried about his lack of sexual imagination, after all, more baffled and a little curious as to the reasons, if there were any at all.

The sounds of more shoving and zipping kept him from wandering off in his own head. Sol had shouldered the bulging duffel and retrieved the Fuenken from where it had been propping against a mound of discarded mechanical husks. "Well, whatever. I'm done here, so let's blow this joint. And since this is a day trip, who knows. We might just find you a fantasy on the way back."

"I'm afraid to ask how you're intending to do that," Ky said, only half seriously, allowing himself to be steered towards the exit and into the bright, warm outdoors.

Sol pulled the door closed behind them, its steel frame starting to glow red as it melted shut.

"Well." A kick put a sizable dent into the door and startled a flock of thrushes from the underbrush, but it remained stuck. "For starters, I'm granting you full ogling rights, which, by the way, are totally a thing. And then, we're gonna do a bit of empirical research with those oh-so-unlikely scenarios, starring yours truly."

"I don't believe this is going to—"

Waving off his protest, Sol started off in the general direction of the town. "First one. Plumber."

Ky blinked, and decided it was probably against the rules to point out that neither of them currently owned a house. "…No."

"Mailman."

It was probably also against the rules to mention that Sol had, on more than one occasion, set his paperwork on fire. "No."

"Cable guy."

"...What's that?"

Sol scowled into the middle distance. "Bad example, forget about it. Um, let's see. Butler."

"No."

"Teacher."

"No."

"Birthday cake stripper."

Ky made a face. "Please don't retroactively ruin every cake I've ever had."

"OI!"

The genuine look of affront on Sol's face made it really hard not to break into a fit of giggles. "Actually, I can think of a fantasy."

"Oh yeah?"

At some point, he was going to have to think more about how this immediately put a stop to all the huffing and playing around, effortlessly netting him Sol's full attention. There might be a way to exploit it for some greater good, like delicate diplomatic maneuvers that hinged on Sol shutting up and not greeting anybody with an up-yours. Then again, mixing diplomacy with such smoldering looks as Sol was currently giving him was probably a bad idea.

"Yes. Red velvet strawberry shortcake," Ky said, unable to keep his voice from taking on a dreamy note at the thought of such a treat. "There's this patisserie in Rouen—"

Sol deflated. "That's… not a fantasy. That's just your war trauma."

"I don't have a war trauma," Ky said, "and you didn't let me finish. That patisserie sells the shortcakes in little boxes, so we could just grab one, find a quiet place, and I'd hand you the fork."

"Wait. Wait. Your fantasy is me feeding you pastry? Whipped cream debauchery and all?"

"No, that's your fantasy. But I wouldn't mind acting it out."

Sol gave him a sidelong glance. "Because cake, right?"

Well, at least this flirting thing was getting easier.

"Because cake."