"Hey, Kyle, do you still remember that person?"
"Forgotten him long ago."
"I haven't even said who it is yet."
Kyle stopped what he was doing. He shot the little man a vicious glare before speaking. "Don't go looking for trouble, Hodge. We barely managed to get out of the Candlelight Society. I don't want to go back in there."
"No, no, I just suddenly thought of him again." Hodge smiled sheepishly. "He always had so many interesting stories. Honestly, I don't know where they came from. Those terms were interesting too—universal gravitation, some kind of law... What a pity. We'll never hear such interesting stories again."
Kyle fell silent as well. After a long while, he replied in a low voice, "He's dead."
Indeed, Theus the worker was dead. Everyone knew that.
The Candlelight Society claimed he had been a cultist, and that the stories he told had been blasphemous. Kyle did not understand what blasphemy was.
He only knew that the last person willing to tell them stories had disappeared too.
Sometimes, he even felt indignant. Did telling stories make someone a cultist? Then perhaps cultists were not so bad. At least after listening to all that strange stuff, days when he was tired enough to die had not seemed quite so unbearable.
Sadly, none of it could ever go back to the way it was.
Neither man spoke again, quietly applying grease to the machinery.
"Come to think of it, the factory here is strange. The steam engines look completely different from the ones in Rhine, and I don't even know what that thing over there is for..."
"That's a blast furnace. It can roast pyrite ore and produce sulfuric acid and steel at the same time. The slag can also be used to make concrete," a