#hinky

Zip cleared the heavy dust off the lid of another sealed crate, pried it open, reached in, and hefted a robust shotgun in spotless condition. "This thing isn't as... colorful as I remember."

Javier looked up, pulling his arms out of the crate he was rummaging through. "Matador-type, right?" Snatching up his inventory datapad, he recorded the contents of Zip's crate with a few terse taps. "Probably that batch came from the factory unshaded, or with some temporary production default shader. Final colors meant to be applied later. We d—uh, I mean Häkke does that all the time with batches that aren't going straight to market."

Zip looked down into the crate, eyeing the multiple twins of the shotgun in his hands. "So how'd it get here?"

"How'd any of this get here?" Javier shrugged at the crystal-laced cave walls around them. Low light from their compact lanterns glinted suggestively along the geometrically precise crystalline outgrowths protruding here and there from the ruddy rock of the Cosmodrome steppe. "All stashed a long time ago, seems like. Smugglers' cache, probably. Obviously they never got back to it."

"Smugglers? How'd they steal all this from the foundries?"

Javier sort of smiled laughingly without laughing, showing his teeth. "Judging from how long this stuff has been here, and the age of all these models, I'd say whoever squirreled it all away did so more than ten years ago. You remember what things were like back then?"

"I was just a kid ten years ago." The shotgun suddenly felt large and cumbersome in Zip's hands.

"Well," Javier continued, rocking back on his haunches, "they'd barely started calling it 'the City Age' at that point. The City was pretty well built up, of course, but after Six Fronts and Twilight Gap, people had only just gotten used to the idea the Last Safe City might actually reliably be, y'know, safe. As for the foundries, they were mostly just getting to the point of acting like big businesses rather than crafting operations. Their factories were still just built-out workshops. That's when guns like these were made." He thoughtfully ran a hand down the long stock of a classic-looking sniper rifle propped on the cave wall beside him.

"What does that have to do with smugglers?"

"Heh. Nothing, not exactly. I'm just painting you a picture, so you understand what the landscape was like."

Zip blinked bemusedly. "Landscape?"

"Yeah," Javier nodded. "See, back then, the foundries operated a bit more loosely. Less formal oversight, let alone regulation, of anyone helping arm Guardians and the City militia."

Javier paused and looked to Zip, as if waiting for him to say something showing he caught the drift. "Are you saying," Zip began haltingly, "the foundries used to work with smugglers?"

Another smile, this time concealing his teeth. "I'm saying a lot of things about the foundries' business used to be... hinky. Maybe a lot hinkier than you'd think."