[b]Mosaic![/b]

Turn your eyes down. Zeus is there down in the dirt with you. 

"Therefore, through a constant shifting of rhetorical focus -" she chuckled at an old, grim joke. "Weak people. Strong people. Don't you see that's the thinking that all this is built on? Now you're strong, built for labour, outperforming Heracles as you haul a starship from Poseidon's maw. Now you're weak, disarmed and observed, a mortal before an oppressive Sky. Was Heracles strong or weak when madness made him devour his children? Was he strong or weak when he carried the golden apples to his hated enemy?"

The Thunderer looked into your eyes; deepest indigo and flecked with purple. "Your strengths [i]are [/i]your weaknesses, Mosaic. Your weaknesses [i]are [/i]your strengths. The ancient playwrights knew it when they penned their tragedies. Modern tyrants forget it when they pen their screeds. You too have the opportunity to walk the same path of tragedy that's haunted you all your days."

"Or," she said, and looked up into her sky, "you could do the one thing you have never been able to do. You could look power in the eye without blinking. See past the radiance of the throne to the woman atop it. Imagine yourself in her place."

[b]Ember![/b]

You see the [i]Plousios [/i]emerge from the waves.

The chains of sweating labourers pull it onto a long carpet of null-friction neomaterial, the brutal and arcane manifestation of technology at its height. The massive armoured beak of the ship, the chipped gold and red and black paint as proud as the House of Hades, the riots of colour as corals and crabs drop from its rising surface. Seawater pours from rusted macrocannons. Treasure spills from open cargo bays like dripping blood. It is mighty. It is as familiar as the grave. You remember your claws breaking that coffin open from the inside.

Nothing dies in the deathless domain of Demeter. Does that extend to the spirit of this undead ship? Does the heartbeat you felt beneath your fingertips still stir? Does the voice of the ancient craftsman still resonate in your ears, telling you the secrets of bringing metal and stars to life?

You can feel it in your heart. The space in this ship's heart where you belong.

[b]Dolce![/b]

There is a sound like nothing you've ever heard before. There's a sight like nothing you've ever seen. A crackling blue magical fire ignites in the corner of the room, and where it spreads you can see through into a different place like looking into a cinema screen. You look into a place filled with armoured soldiers.

Immediately they're piling through the gap, shoulder to shoulder, shouting things like "GO GO GO" and "PERIMETER SECURED" and "MARS VICTORIA". They're all over you and past you in that wild, fast paced way that warrior servitors on a mission are like. 20022 does not even let a ripple show in his tea.

And then, when the room is lined in every particular with snake-masked soldiers, the Royal Architect steps out.

He was old. Even if his primitive design of glittering lights, plastic-alloy and holograms didn't make him feel as exquisitely dated as a blackpowder rifle, he moved with a hunch and a walking stick. Despite the obvious signs of age, he moved with a similar quickness to the soldiers - their nervous, paranoid energy mirroring his. Rapidly he moved into the room closing the portal behind him, floating camera drones surrounding him on buzzing little wings, and stopped with one arm folded behind him to look down at Bitemark. Then he turned and moved over to the table where the two Synnefo sat, moving an arm twitchily to snatch at the cup of tea that 20022 had already poured for him. His robotic mouth did not open - it just glowed in time with his words - but he seemed to appreciate the smell of it.

"You -" he snapped his fingers at Dolce, the jerking motion almost making him spill the tea. "- you. You're an atypical design. Different phenotypes, wool is tinted yellow rather than violet, horn structure, excessive posterior design. All traits of human-variant Synnefo strains." The orblike lenses of the camera drones closed in. "Are you a spy? An Assassin? Give me your hand, I need to take a blood sample."

[b]Dyssia![/b]

The [i]Sellarfane [/i]is retro.

A RVX-05 Assault Dropship barely seats a thousand in one cramped hangar bay. Chemical-fueled plasma afterburners with eight demi-reactors on a cycling rig - enough to recover from seven direct ELF storms. An externally mounted rack of plasma torpedoes held in grav-spheres and four projector arrays to guide them in. In its prime this would have been a mass assault landing craft, a ship that could endure the storm of a blockade. It could slip onto a planet or space station's surface and deploy a thousand highly armed supersoldiers into the heart of enemy territory, clearing a path and landing zone with precision guided torpedoes. It was a ship designed in the fires of a total galactic war, a ship designed to be expended in the tens of thousands, a ship that was an intimate part of an organized Doctrine that had plans from its manufacturing to its death.

Cool. Stylish. Uncomfortable. And even retrofitted with modern materials, it was a shadow before the [i]Slitted[/i], the flagship of the Crystal Knight. Without the fires of war to pressure the design, warships bloat beyond all reason; armed space stations, weaponized resort moons, temple-complexes designed to be implements of tyranny more than weapons of war. There's no chance this relic will survive an engagement with the [i]Slitted[/i]. Ships like the [i]Slitted [/i]killed almost every single RVX-05 Dropship ever made and absorbed their mass to repair their hulls. Mars has made it clear who his favourites are.

But with a drunken, manic enough strategy going in, Dionysus can offer you and your legion the element of surprise.