The darkness of the amphitheater was not that of a poorly lit place.
It was a chosen darkness — worked, calibrated, alive. It enveloped the two hundred empty seats like a velvet mantle, allowing only five islands of soft light to exist, each falling from the invisible ceiling with the precision of a theater spotlight. Five beams. Five seats. Five silhouettes.
Blurred.
Not in the sense that one couldn't see them — one saw them very well, their outlines, their posture, the way each one occupied the space around them. But something in the air between them and the rest of the room blurred the details, erased the features, transformed each guest into a presence recognizable only by their movements and their bearing. A broad-shouldered man in a feathered coat drumming his fingers on the armrest. A slim, straight silhouette, hands crossed on knees, looking at the ceiling with sustained attention. A man of an almost luminous whiteness, motionless as a statue someone had placed there. A dark-haired woman holding something between her fingers and turning it slowly. And a tall man in a white coat, arms slightly spread, whose posture alone communicated centuries of accumulation.
On the side of each seat, a thin rectangular tablet diffused a discreet glow.
None of them were looking at it yet.
They were looking at each other — or rather they were looking at the blurred silhouettes of the others with the calculated caution of predators who have just realized they are in the same room as other predators. No panic. No immediate aggression. Just that particular, suspended tension of people accustomed to dominating their environments and who were recalibrating in silence.
It was in that silence that the curtains opened.
Elias Voss did not enter. He appeared.
That was the only correct way to describe it — he was in the wings, and then he was on the stage, and the interval between the two states had been so naturally occupied by the movement of his steps and the rustle of his jacket that none of the five guests could say exactly at what precise moment he had become visible. He was tall — not the raw height of a soldier, but the held height, that of a man who had learned very early that space was conquered by the way one inhabited it. Black suit, white shirt, a deep bordeaux tie. White pocket square folded with geometric precision.
He stopped at the center of the stage.
Hands behind his back. His gaze traveling across the five beams of light with the same quiet attention a conductor rests on his musicians before striking the first measure.
Then he smiled — not the commercial smile of a salesman who wants to please, not the forced smile of someone concealing nervousness. The smile of someone who is exactly where they decided to be, and who takes a satisfaction from it they don't judge necessary to hide.
— Ladies and gentlemen, he said.
His voice carried without effort in the amphitheater — clear, steady, with that particular quality of voices one listened to before having decided to do so.
— Allow me to introduce myself. I am Mister Voss, auctioneer of this sale. You will notice that your silhouettes are rendered indistinct to your neighbors' eyes — this is deliberate. Your anonymity is guaranteed for the entire duration of the session. No one here will know who you are. No one will leave with your face in their memory.
A pause. Short, precise, calculated to let the information settle.
— My voice reaches you translated into the dialect you understand best. You may speak freely — your own words will be translated the same way for your neighbors. No language barrier. No misunderstanding of interpretation.
He allowed another silence.
— Now, I invite you to consult the tablet placed to your right.
There was a moment.
One of those moments where several people simultaneously do the same thing in radically different states of mind, and where the air of the room fills with all those superimposed reactions without any one of them crushing the others.
Five hands reached for five tablets.
The Joker was the first to pick his up — a fluid, almost casual gesture, the gesture of someone who was not afraid of what they were going to find because they hadn't yet imagined what it was.
The screen lit up.
His host name appeared at the top — The Joker — followed by a point balance. And beneath, in clean, detailed columns, a list.
His gold. His personal reserves, converted into MC&D points with an exchange rate displayed in the margin. His weapons — not just current stock, total stock, current production included, every batch of SMILEs in progress converted into a corresponding value. His subordinates — the officers, the men of rank, each individually assessed according to criteria whose origin he did not know but whose figures seemed, with growing unease, terrifyingly precise. The Devil Fruits in his personal safe. Active contracts. Debts owed and owed to him.
He stopped scrolling.
Went back to the beginning.
Slowly.
His face, behind the blur that made it unreadable to the others, betrayed nothing. But something in the way his fingers had become motionless on the edge of the tablet — an imperceptible rigidity, a slightly too strong pressure — would have said a great deal to someone who knew him well.
Not fear. Not yet.
Recognition. The cold, clear recognition of someone who had just understood that the organization that had invited him here had not made assumptions. It knew. Everything. In the detail, in the figures, in the ramifications.
And it had invited him anyway.
That detail fascinated him almost as much as it unsettled him.
The Silver held his tablet with the stiffness of someone trying not to show that his hands had slightly tightened.
His collection. Piece by piece, object by object, with descriptions that matched exactly his own inventories — those he kept in a coded register that no one but him had ever opened. The legal artifacts. The less legal ones. The artifacts whose very existence would have been enough to earn him an immediate and unconditional conviction from the Ministry of Magic.
All there. All listed. All converted into points with a precision that left no room for negotiation.
He set the tablet on the armrest with a facade of calm and discreetly slipped his right hand into his inside pocket. His fingers closed around the smooth, familiar wood of his wand — not to use it, not yet, not in a place whose rules he didn't know, but to have it. To feel beneath his fingers the certainty that something still obeyed him in this unknown place.
He picked up the tablet again.
Continued reading.
And stopped dead on a line he had not seen coming.
Estimated life expectancy : 23 years, 4 months, 12 days. Convertible value : 4,268 MC&D points.
He reread the line three times.
Slowly.
The idea that his own remaining lifespan had a monetary value — that someone, somewhere, had judged it useful to calculate it and display it like any other asset in an investment portfolio — produced in his mind something that was not quite anger, not quite stupor, but a blend of the two with at its core a note of something darker that he refused to examine too carefully.
He didn't move. He continued to hold his wand. He continued to read.
The Reader didn't move much either, but for different reasons.
She had seen the list of her possessions — few things, in truth, and their converted value in points was modest. She had expected that. She had not come with the intention of buying.
It was the life expectancy line that stopped her.
Estimated life expectancy : 41 years, 7 months, 3 days. Convertible value : 7,614 MC&D points.
She read it once. Reread it.
And something in her eyes, behind the veil of blur that made her face unreadable to the others, changed. Not fear — Robin knew fear and knew how to recognize it, she had carried it long enough to become an expert. It was something else. A cold, lucid temptation, the kind one looked at head-on without being swept away but without pretending it didn't exist either.
Her life in exchange for answers.
She had spent every day of her existence since the age of eight looking for a truth the world had decided to erase. She had lost everything in that pursuit — her family, her freedom, her safety, entire years of fleeing rather than living. She had learned not to become attached to things because things were invariably taken from her.
Her life, then.
Did she really hold on to it?
She closed her eyes for a fraction of a second. Then opened them. Set the tablet carefully on the armrest and looked at the stage with the expression of someone who has put a subject in a box and closed the lid — not resolved, not forgotten, just set aside for now.
The Emerald was going through his tablet with a speed that had nothing to do with nonchalance.
He was reading fast because he had already understood what he was trying to understand — the depth of the surveillance he was subject to — and because each line confirmed an answer he didn't like. His powers, estimated and quantified with a precision that implied direct and prolonged observation. His personal artifacts. The active spells on his room. The runes he had drawn that very morning around the envelope.
That very morning.
He stopped on that line. Reread it.
A muscle in his jaw contracted imperceptibly.
But what was really occupying his attention was not the tablet.
Since his arrival in this amphitheater, a part of his mind — the part that never fully switched off, that analyzed continuously in the background — was mapping this place. The magic that composed it. The invisible architecture that kept it functioning.
And what he found intrigued him deeply.
This was not Asgardian magic. Not Elven, nor Dwarven, nor Vanir. Not human sorcery in any of the variants he knew. This was something lateral — an approach to the manipulation of reality that started from the same foundations as the magic he practiced but had taken, somewhere in its development, an entirely different direction. Like two languages descended from the same ancestor but become mutually incomprehensible.
He wanted to understand that.
The life expectancy displayed on his tablet — indeterminate, divine status, non-convertible — drew a small inward smile that no one saw.
At least that.
The Collector was not reading.
He was inventorying.
Both hands flat on his knees, the tablet held at eye level, he was going through the list of his possessions with the method and precision of an archivist performing a control check — point by point, category by category, mentally cross-referencing each entry with his own perfect memory.
And he was finding things.
Gaps in his own collection he had not noticed. Specimens whose estimated value in the tablet differed significantly from his own — and in a direction that suggested the evaluators of Marshall, Carter and Dark knew properties of certain objects he had not yet discovered. Cross-references between pieces he had never thought to connect and which, seen from this angle, formed patterns.
It was fascinating.
It was deeply, irritatingly fascinating.
He stopped on the life expectancy line — several millennia, Celestial status, convertible — with the same detached interest he accorded a bookkeeping entry. Neither offended nor amused. Simply notational.
He set the tablet down.
And for the first time in a very long time, he noticed he was looking at the stage with something other than polite patience.
Impatience.
Elias had observed all of this.
He had not moved while the five guests discovered their tablets. He had remained at the center of the stage, hands behind his back, and he had watched — postures, the infinitesimal variations of tension in shoulders, the moments when a hand tightened or stopped, the gazes that briefly rose toward him before returning to the screen. He read a room the way others read texts, with the fluency of someone who had spent decades being invisible in rooms where people had no reason to watch themselves.
He cleared his throat.
The sound was discreet but precise — the cough of someone who doesn't need to raise their voice because attention will come on its own.
Five heads looked up.
— I thank you for your patience, he said. You are here, I imagine, for one of two reasons. Either the greatest secrets — those that the institutions of your respective worlds have judged too dangerous to be known — or artifacts of a nature so singular that they have been banned, forbidden, or simply erased from all official memory.
He paused, and something in his gaze shifted slightly — not a threat, not a warning, but that particular nuance of a man about to say something he knows to be true.
— Tonight, you will have both.
He turned toward the wings and made a brief gesture with his hand.
A cart emerged slowly from the shadow — metallic, elegant, mounted on silent wheels, pushed by no one visible. It stopped at the center of the stage beside Elias with the precision of an object that knew its place. Over it, covering entirely what was beneath, a perfectly motionless black velvet cloth.
Elias let the silence work for a second.
— Our first lot.
He placed his hand on the edge of the cloth.
— What you are about to see is not a machine in the sense you understand that word. It is not a tool one uses and puts away. Nor is it a living being in the biological sense — though the boundary, you will find, is blurrier than one might think.
His voice had shifted slightly — still steady, but with beneath it something that resembled a deliberate drop of tension, like a musician who rises a half-tone.
— What you are about to see has existed for a long time. Longer than most of the civilizations that tried to understand it. Some of those civilizations are no longer here to testify to it.
A pause.
— What you are about to see wants to be possessed. That is not a metaphor.
He removed the cloth.
The machine was small.
That was the first thing — the almost disappointed surprise of something that did not match the space the words had prepared. An assembly of cogs and pistons and small articulated arms, resting on a dark wood pedestal, barely forty centimeters tall. The metal was a color that shifted with the angle — dark, then slightly golden, then almost black again.
It did not move.
It made no sound.
And yet.
There was something — something all five guests felt in their own way and that none of them would have described with the same words, but that was there, undeniable, like a very slight pressure inside the skull. The persistent impression of looking at something that was looking back.
Elias let that impression find its way.
— SCP-882, he said at last, as one pronounces a proper name. A designation attributed by the organization that catalogued it before Marshall, Carter and Dark acquired it. It grows — slowly, patiently — with each contact with metal. It draws curious minds. It occupies them. It retains them. — He paused. — Several researchers who studied this object had to be forcibly removed from the room it was in. They did not want to leave. Not because they were afraid. Because they did not want to.
The Joker tilted his head slightly.
Curious, yes — the thing was undeniably strange. But his mind, always pragmatic, always calculating the application, was looking for the angle of use and not yet finding it clearly. A machine that retained people? To what end, exactly? He continued to watch with the attention of a man who was waiting to understand the commercial interest before deciding whether he was interested.
The Emerald was not really looking at the machine.
He was looking at the space around it.
The magic emanating from the object was of a nature he could not properly qualify — not an enchantment, not a curse, not a spell in the sense he understood those terms. Something more structural, as though the object itself was an anomaly in the fabric of reality rather than an object to which magic had been applied on top. The distinction was fundamental and he wanted to understand its implications.
The machine interested him as a subject of study.
Possessing it, on the other hand — he had no particular desire for that at the moment.
The Silver was looking at the machine with the eyes of a collector in spite of himself.
His first reflex had been to classify it — alchemical artifact? golem construction? runic magic of unknown manufacture? — and the failure of this classification annoyed him more than he wanted to admit. He knew artifacts. He had devoted his life to knowing them. The fact that this one resisted all his usual categories produced a professional irritation that resembled, to his great displeasure, fascination.
His right hand still held his wand in his pocket.
The Reader was looking at the machine but seeing something else.
She was seeing the question no one was yet asking — who made it? Not how it worked, not what it was for, but what civilization, at what era, with what intention, had produced something like this. The object was manifestly very old. Predating anything she could reference. And if the organization selling it tonight had catalogued and studied it, somewhere in their archives there might be answers.
She made a mental note of the question without letting anything show on her face.
The Collector had leaned slightly forward.
Not much — a few centimeters, barely perceptible to anyone not specifically observing him. But his eyes had changed. The distant evaluation of the beginning had given way to something more direct, more personal. He felt the machine from where he was sitting — not physically, not with his ordinary senses, but with something older than his ordinary senses, something he had developed over millennia of being in the presence of rare things.
This machine was real.
Not in the banal sense — everything was real. But real in the way very few things were. Authentically, deeply, irreducibly itself.
He wanted to possess it.
It was as simple and as ancient as that.
— Bidding opens, said Elias, at one hundred MC&D points.
A pause.
— For reference, an artificial Devil Fruit of standard quality is worth approximately one hundred points. A conventional military-grade weapon is worth between two and three points. That will give you an idea of the scale.
He let a silence settle — the silence of a room calculating, weighing, deciding.
It was The Silver who raised his number first.
A measured, almost cautious gesture — the gesture of someone bidding out of curiosity more than conviction, who wanted to see how this system worked before committing to it seriously.
— One hundred and ten points, said Elias in a voice that carried without effort. One hundred and ten for The Silver.
A few seconds.
The large man in the feathered coat, without hurrying, raised his.
— One hundred and twenty for The Joker.
— One hundred and twenty points, Elias announced. The Joker at one hundred and twenty.
He let the figure resonate in the amphitheater with the care of a goldsmith setting a piece on a table. No haste. No artificial pressure. Just the number, and the space around it.
It was in that space that The Collector raised his number.
And said, with the quiet calm of a man who was not accustomed to being resisted for long :
— One thousand points.
The silence that followed was of a different quality from the previous ones.
Not the silence of a room that was waiting — the silence of a room that had just received information and was taking time to process it. The Silver interrupted a gesture he had begun. The Joker went motionless for a fraction of a second. The Emerald stopped looking at the ceiling. The Reader looked up from the tablet where she had begun to note something again.
Four gazes — blurred, indistinct behind their respective veils — converged toward the white silhouette at the back of the room.
Elias did not smile.
He let the silence live for two more seconds — one more than an ordinary auctioneer, one less than a staged performance — then opened his hands with sober elegance.
— One thousand points for The Collector.
He waited. Looked at the other four. Numbers lowered. Numbers that would not be raised — each for their own reasons, each having calculated in a few seconds that the figure placed was not worth the confrontation, that the first lot was not the last, that patience was a currency better spent later.
— One thousand points, going once.
A pause.
— One thousand points, going twice.
Another pause — longer, for form's sake, for respect of the ritual, for the satisfaction of letting each silence carry its own weight.
— Sold.
Elias inclined his head slightly toward The Collector — a brief, respectful gesture, that of a man acknowledging a decision made with authority.
At the back of the room, the white silhouette settled imperceptibly back into its seat.
No visible satisfaction. No triumph. Just that slight modification of posture of someone who has just obtained what they wanted and who is already thinking about what comes next.
Elias returned toward the cart.
The black cloth was ready for the next lot.
End of Chapter 3