Anarion

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Giri nods at that. What else is there to say, one's hardly going to argue against a person whose stance is "yes, leave the innocents out of it." She beckons the Golden Banneret, then, tugging Azazuka's body along by the arm if need be so she's not left behind either. Scampering with foxes is one thing, but there's still a contract left unfinished and Han has quite the head start if Sagacious Crane was to be believed. Giri doubted they'd waited for a lavish breakfast with Han's sister running about, after all.

"Alright then, let's go."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Solarel

A repair drone geist doesn’t get a complete humanoid form even as an aesthetic flourish. What you’re holding is instead something like an electricity spirit with a form not unlike its repair drone, although a bit thinner and shorter, like it nestled at the center of the drone. That means a round body with irregular borders as the electricity of the thing oscillates, with just enough features to represent a face and indicate direction of attention and activity for interactions.

“I…um…n-name?” the geist says, confusion rippling across its form as you press close to it. You can tell that it can feel the electrical energy from your hands, that so recently ripped it free of the drone swarm. It’s obvious in a visible shudder that runs through it, causing its borders to flicker. This is not a complex geist, but it has an understanding of the power you hold over it.

The bot swarm itself is now in a loose holding state floating above you, having ceased all work without its animating geist. The geist glances up at its bot swarm as though for inspiration “M-my designation is repair #1328, small and medium electronics repair protocol.”

If geists could blush, you imagine this one would be the brightest red. You’ve utterly overwhelmed it and it's struggling to manage even the most basic processing functions while doing its best to be compliant and a very good geist for you.

Assume that you’ve got free rein to enact a plan without anything else dropping in on you. How are you going to use this to approach the Kathresis?

***

Isabelle

Name? Name name name name? The word seems to bounce around your head like its a bouncy super ball thrown in a cathedral. Distantly, “M-my designation is repair #1328, small and medium electronics repair protocol” comes to you, but it’s like background static, an echo from somewhere else. Perhaps where Solarel is?

There’s a swirling of intent as you think about the oddness of the request, and then there is some understanding. You are dealing with a semi-autonomous drone system, organized for the convenience of the Trak’tho, under the primary control of caretaker and guardian spirit Tre’lasani. This generates images in your head of beings comparable to the spirit’s looks, vaguely Terenian humanoids with feathered arms. There are no words as such, this simply comes to your mind as a thought, like remembering something that was niggling at you until just a moment ago.

Messaging out of the planet is a simple matter in the abstract, you understand that you simply need to request it and a broadcast array can be activated from within the cavern system. There are two major problems though.

The first problem that you have is that this is very old technology, and that technology doesn’t have any data whatsoever on the new technology that your ships and stations use to communicate. That needs to come from you. Would you consider yourself enough of a comms expert to manually determine the right frequency and wavelength to broadcast for in-system communications to reach the intended recipient?

Your second problem is that off-system and off-planet aren’t the same thing. You’ve taken a hyperspace jump to reach the Aoi system, and getting a message out of Aoi can’t go any faster than the jump back to Akar can go. So whoever you’re trying to reach, immediate aid is going to be limited to Aoi system resources. That means a lucky passing Terenian transport ship, a small Terenian mining outpost, or perhaps a Zaldarian hold if you’re really feeling up to gambling.

It also occurs to you unbidden that a century is too short a timespan to demonstrate appropriate understatement in your circumstances.

***

Dolly

The chefs allow Ksharta to work. It’s kind of hard to say that it’s because of your bold statement. The way Ksharta is stomping around, well, you’ve seen kittens in your family get willful before and the options once they get in that mode are to let them have their way until they get tired or let them scratch and break everything they come across…also until they get tired. The chefs are not fools.

They are, perhaps, having their work disrupted though. They’re cooking for a large, mixed cook hall, so you might understand why they’d have gone for a somewhat bland, conservative recipe. Who knows if everyone here can eat their food. What Ksharta is doing will probably make it taste great for you (seriously, the Huntresses loved Ksharta for a recipe, she’s good at this), but it might drive off the Terenians and Zaldarians from Hybrasilian cuisine. Who knows, maybe the chefs here are even in some sort of competition with each other. It would make sense given that they were each working on separate types of food. Of course, it’s just as likely that it’s a more innocent explanation, like letting each chef work their specialty and then the visitors get to choose their preferred fare.

This is not to say that you were ignored. You invoked important Hybrasilian religion. And while, sure, these random chefs, long-stationed on Akar, aren’t going to be familiar with the details of Jade’s story in the way that folks back home might be, they get that you invoked a goddess’s protection and they’re not going to casually ignore that. It would be bad luck!

For her part, Angela laughs quietly into her gag. She’s been enjoying the whole spectacle and is just soaking it in. Maybe she’s trying to find weaknesses in Jade through all this?

Speaking of Jade, she’s a bit distanced from all of this, since you’re sitting by yourself holding Angela’s leash for a few moments while you take things in and stay out of the way of the kitten on a warpath. How much of what’s happening is Jade actually receiving, and through what filter?

***

Mirror

Marcina looks a little intimidated. Not actually scared, but there’s a physical reaction to that intensity of yours. Perhaps it’s that she’s very small and so, outside of a mecha, she’s learned to be careful of her physical space in a way that’s subconscious at this point. Maybe it’s that as a former champion and even before that a favored child of TC (surely raised in an environment that rewarded and exalted her for her natural talents) she simply isn’t treated with this sort of speech very often and so it surprised her. Perhaps it’s an affected reaction.

You can see the calculation happening behind her eyes as well. Whatever physicality your words have created, the woman before you is giving them her full attention and she is thinking very carefully about them. In fact, she probably responds to intimidation with this sort of calculation. You can almost see the words come into her head and start spinning about, being prodded and dissected from different angles until they’re stripped naked and fully explored. You can see, too, the building excitement as she does that analysis. It expresses itself in the slight lightening of her knuckles as they press into the arms of her chair.
She makes no move to take the money. Instead she says “I’ll still be paying for the drinks, though you’re free to leave the extra tip here if you like the service.” Then, casually, almost as an afterthought, she adds “you’ve been extraordinarily careful in your matches to date.” It’s a statement, not a question. She lets it hang there as she finishes her own drink, indicating that she’ll soon be going.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

"So, do you want to take her with us?" Giriel asks once Sagacious Crane has disappeared into the inn to get her sister. They'll have a moment while she works the door. "Once we have Han with us, I doubt we'll be able to shake Sagacious Crane. She's always been the sort of person who thinks it's her job to tell everyone else how they ought to live. Not unlike the Dominion, really."

Giri laughs and hands Piripiri her teacup back, drained of its contents. If they're to pack up and leave, she'll be ready, or if they're to wait for Crane, she's content to relax and watch the wind blowing the grass between rainstorms.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Solarel
The spirit has shaped a repair drone from a nanobot swarm. It appears as a solid drone, spherical, about half a meter in radius, but when it approaches a camera, it ripples and buzzes in flux. It shapes itself an arm from the nanobots to begin taking the camera apart. Perhaps the spirit thinks itself cunning, drawing from the resources of the station/facility/planet in this way, or perhaps it’s simply steeped in the use of nanobots to such an extent that it would entirely rely on them rather than have fully fabricated drones for this sort of function.

Regardless, the nanobots are efficient. They can extend a scanning appendage, subsume the camera, fabricate any necessary wiring, and then replace the fixed camera. The entire process takes only a few moments. There may even be several such swarm drones operating at the same time, limiting your ability to safely double back along the cave routes.

You can interrupt the drone at any time. It’s animated by a single simple geist of the same nature as Annika’s and obviously of this locale. It’s focused on a single function doing repairs and that function does not include area scanning for you.

This also feels like the tip of an iceberg. You’ve mostly run out of space in this facility. It goes several levels, but once you get deep enough you’re in natural earth and that eventually hits solid rock unconnected to any other cave systems. It seems like you’ve got three or so cave levels (some dip up and down but about three) and then at least two research levels and since you haven’t gone up perhaps it extends upwards a bit more. But all told this area you’re in is something like a large park in overall size and that’s it. The implication of flying a shuttle into the planet for this suggests so much more, but it’s not all right here.

Of course, thinking through what Annika wanted is a question for later, when you have finished being hunted/hunter. Right now, the question is what your play is with the drone?

***

Isabelle
“Heee, heeee!” Annika laughs. Despite being a Zaldarian who seems really into the black capes and mysterious cult aesthetic, she laughs with a high, girlish joy to her. “It worked, Crescent, do you realize what this means? It can work without Zaldarian geists, the biologic systems of the Terenians and perhaps even the Hybrasilians with the right catalyst can function with the Trak’tho technology!

She giggles with an infectious joy as she gathers herself to enter the facility door, before gathering herself. She and Crescent begin to stride off, but seeing you standing there somewhat stunned, she stops again, obviously mulling back over what you said, trying to think of the problem before she thinks she’s got it. “You are not in need of medical attention, the facility is adequately sterile and the cut will not be infected. Now come, we need to try and catch up with the facility guardian. Perhaps we can placate it before Solarel does anything else to anger it! Or at least collect data from her untimely destruction.”

She beckons you onwards, Isabelle.

Meanwhile, the nanobots sing in your blood. You can feel them like a…well it doesn’t hurt exactly. Do you know the feeling when you drink something cold and you can feel it move through your body from within? It’s kind of like that but moving up. It is surely too late to amputate the arm, this is going straight to the brain. But it’s useful. The immediate thing that you’re getting is a station blueprint. Perhaps that’s what the designers thought would be most useful for someone who was accessing its systems for the first time, and everybody loves a map on their HUD, right? Though this isn’t a HUD per se, it’s more like you just have a good mental picture of the place as though you’d walked through it twenty times, except that you shouldn’t have that information. There’s more you can get here, there is so much more. Too much actually, it’s an information overload problem and whoever designed these nanobots was aware of that so it’s not going to start dropping tons of information on you. You’ll need to ask for what you want and provide them with some kind of direction.

Meanwhile, what you’ve got is that this particular facility has six levels. The top level is personnel quarters, the level below that is laboratory facilities, the level you’re on now is entry and testing, and the three levels below are natural caverns used for storage and relevant experimentation.

Oh and Annika and Crescent are getting away, and they might be your only ride out of here.

***

Dolly and Jade

“Jade!” Ksharta shouts before realizing it. Not Dolly, no. You can tell she liked it, the first kiss was a bit of a surprise, but she was hot for the second one, hot for the apology kiss, hot even for the public embarrassment of it because no, you haven’t wildly misread Ksharta Talonna and sometimes kisses are just very good no matter what the context.

But, she was trying to do something right now, and the chefs are snickering and everybody is staring, and Angela is laughing to herself through her gag, which is going to make quietly having a nice cooking session with these folks a lot harder.

And Ksharta Talonna, in even this short time, knows whose feet to lay that at and it’s not Dolly. So, despite her piety and her service, in the moment, when the kiss is done, she shouts “Jade! I am trying to do some cooking! Goodness!” And then she humphs, turns around, and walks over to the chefs, doing her absolute best to make sure that she doesn’t overheat completely from shame, even as her brain catches up to the fact that she just mouthed off to a goddess oh god oh no she’s committed blasphemy oh Ksharta what you done it was nice why did you get mad at a goddess aaaaaah!

But she can’t turn around now, Dolly would see her blush, and the chefs would laugh at her, and she does want to fix the food, which is good but not quite right. “You need more spice” she says loudly, as she walks up to the chefs, ignoring their snickering and their looks. “And more herbs, this is too plain and you’re over-relying on the way Hybrasilians are conditioned to eat meat! Put in some pepper, and something more earthy, like this.” She starts walking past chefs and picking up ingredients from their station, adding them to the big soup cauldron.

She’s on a warpath now because if she does anything else, she will collapse utterly into self-deprecation.

***

Mirror

You’re given a bubble of space with Marcina as you draw the glyphs and speak. Others are drinking nearby, engineers, training pilots, reporters, everyone who forms the sort of host around a champion. But she has given you her full attention and part of their social agreement to be allowed access to her is to respect that. This does not mean your work is not remarked upon, but it does mean that you do not have a reporter who has made a perfect recording of this whole conversation. It’s for you and Marcina.

For her part, she listens intently as you work. One hand on her chin, leaning forward, eyes open with only an occasional blink. She takes a drink when you pause then leans forward again, and the scent of her breath is a faint aroma of pepper and cinnamon so near you.

When you’re done, she sighs. “Maybe you’re right. I want you to be right.” There’s a building intensity to her words in that, a deep heart of fire. “I want an opponent who fights like you claim you can fight, who will devour the Jormungar itself. Show me something to learn One Day Defender.”

There’s the heart of it. A driven girl like Marcina Villajero, she wants an opponent who can teach her something new, that’s what she hopes to get from you, why she recognized you and called you over. It must be an odd sort of hell for her. A studious girl who was eager to learn and grow and build her skills. Happily willing to compete for her society, with a keen mind and an undeniable talent who became The Best. Who do you study from when you’re The Best? Who can even be a peer? She doesn’t want Adriana’s business empire, nor Isabelle’s charities. She might have a family and friends she cares about supporting, of course, but her drive is all internal and to reach such a pinnacle when what she wants most of all is still to grow and to strive? That is a special sort of hell. She loves to excel, Marcina Villajero, and that means there is a great generosity to her character because she needs others to excel up to her level for any of it to mean anything at all.

To you, the same question you asked her. As you answer, tell her what you truly love most.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Dolly and Jade

Ksharta smiles a small but genuine smile. “I had fun tonight. It was a lot more…um…wild than I’m used to. I mean, I mostly, um, well I hadn’t really been doing much since I joined the competition. I’d just make dinner privately, maybe talk to the engineers, read a bit, go shopping once in a while. It’s been weird not being part of the Huntress Lodge or my family. So, this was… wild but it was nice. I’m still…I mean, even if I add Jade to the goddesses I worship, I’m gonna give it my all next time we fight. I’m not gonna let you get away with the same tricks.” She smiles a different smile then, one with some teeth. “I could have won that match if I didn’t get flustered, I’ve been thinking about it, I mean, when there was time to um…think.” She blushes, the color darkening the stripes on her face, but she lets it ride. She allows herself to relax and purrs contentedly for a moment.

Even Angela lets her have this moment and does not interrupt with any squeals or groans. She’s clearly treating Ksharta as the follower in this whole setup. Not blameless, but far more innocent than you two.

Ksharta’s reverie is broken when she picks up a bowl and starts eating her own food. “The chefs here aren’t that great,” she says. “Let me just…I mean, if it’s okay with the goddess, I think I could improve their recipe a little bit.”

She tenses as if to stand, but looks to you for permission to go, and perhaps for companionship?

[If you want to roll a comfort and support, you can help her. She’ll appreciate that a lot.]

***

Mirror

Several of the guests laugh when you force down the cinnamon liquor. It’s not particularly mean-spirited as these things go, you’re simply providing some entertainment by committing as you did despite your obvious discomfort. A few of them will respect you more for it. Marcina does not laugh. She does not smile. Her demeanor is a little cold and she looks pained in fact.

She lets you recover, lets you speak your piece, but her answer is to the drink first, not the competition. “That was very stupid of me. Please accept my apologies. Your herbal drink is on me as well. I, and most people I know, find the taste of cinnamon pleasant, it’s no hardship and I am no steel queen. It was very stupid that I should assume a Hybrasilian would have the same tastes, and that I knew of you but not of your people. A mistake I’ll fix tonight.”

She doesn’t seem to mean the conversation with you in that statement. There’s no prompt for any further information, no demand to tell her about Hybrasil or important facts she needs to know. If anything, the sense you get is that she’s going to finish hanging out at the bar and go hit up a library of some sort rather than sleep. Perhaps she has access to a private collection or a source for the latest information coming into the system.

She sips her cinnamon and spice liquor and smiles at the taste of it, allowing it to lighten her mood, though her composure does not really slip at all. Then she holds up three fingers. “I am interested in you because your mecha is unique and so I think you are unique. I watched your last two matches and I looked up what I could of the pilot of that mecha. I’m not sure I entirely grasp the title of ‘One Day Defender’ from the war reports though, nor how you found your way to this competition.”

She lowers a finger, then lowers her whole hand briefly to take another sip, before returning to holding two fingers up. “I am seeded into the quarterfinals because of my victory last time. I’m in the upper left bracket. If I recall in the first round of eliminations, you’d want to be, hm I think it was 8th to face me as quickly as possible. Though of course we could meet in the semis with a variety of placements and in the finals in any event.”

That she states matter of factly. She has every confidence she’ll at least make it to the final and nothing she’s seen of the matches thus far has shaken it. She lowers the second finger. “Being eaten is not my wish, but it would please me to face you sooner and learn in the proces. You shouldn’t throw any matches though, each pilot ought to compete to the best of her ability in every match she’s in, should she not?.”

She stops, the question is not rhetorical. She wonders if you share that opinion.

[If you want any confirmed reads on Marcina, you can roll dice, or take her responses and demeanor as they appear.]

***

Isabelle

There are several feelings that occur to you at this moment. The first is that you just did something very very stupid. The second is a searing pain in your hand. The spot where you slammed it sharpened right as your hand came down and, well, we won’t get into the details, but you’ve got a deep cut on the lower edge of your hand, right about halfway between wrist and pinkie finger. The third is a strange, tingling sensation running up your arm quite quickly, and the fourth and last is something almost electrical between you and the door console.

Annika’s staring. So is Crescent. You aren’t aware of this because the nanobots that have entered your bloodstream are very busy doing something. Something strange, something that you’re not sure nanobots are supposed to be able to do. Something a lot more complex than a few people controlling some clothing with a wrist watch.

Annika grabs your hand then, the cut one. Grabs it hard, holding it like a pincer with her own. You feel something, one of the geists she’s been carrying. Some kind of exploratory program, distinct from the one that Solarel stole, but still similar to this facility somehow. She holds your hand tight as the geist interfaces and then, you can feel the door???

“Open it” she says. And you can, you know with absolute certainty that you can will the door to open. Do you?

***

Solarel

You see impatience. When you go through the floor, the Kathresis and its spirit crashes after you, heedless of the collateral damage. The spirit is using vision to guide its machine, and the rain of metal and dust that it creates by moving too quickly is the perfect cover for you to slip away. It gives you space to move, a head start before it knows your direction.

You run. You cut cameras with precision. This level is more natural, tunnels shaped and carved by nanobots following the easiest lines in the rock, the softest routes, avoiding structural supports. It feels less like a test facility as you go further down and more like a living planet. Not…literally, probably, but like the natural forces of cave systems and waterflow were long ago merged with the nanobot AI in a way that simply sculpted these caverns and continued to sculpt and resculpt them to maintain stability and some small amount of beauty.

Most of that beauty blurs by though, and it will have to be some other time that you stop to properly shine a light on the strange crystals forming on the walls down here or the pools of water that reflect nothing because of the perfect darkness.

The Kathresis still tracks you, you can tell from the whine of its crystal fire drive. A few times, it seems to even be close, the spirit trying to guess your route by where it is losing vision and you’re forced to rapidly change direction, doubling back on yourself and cutting into different corridors. Deeper and further, places with fewer cameras or none at all.

You can maneuver here, but any break you make for more developed areas will be tracked. You’re playing cat and mouse now. Which one are you?

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Giri sips her tea, glad for the cup to hide her own blush. It was not entirely without pleasure to be noticed in such a way, but it was also humiliating. Crane would probably think Giri was into this. She might even be right!

"Sagacious Crane, as I live and breathe" Giri says, once she's lowered the tea, a smile playing on her lips. "I didn't recognize you either without your usual priestly radiance, your goddess must have had quite the trial for you with her foxes. Oh, how is little Han doing? I saw her a week back or so at a tea house and she seemed to have found herself a girlfriend, of all things. Can you believe it? Why I remember when she was running around covered in mud pretending to fight off an invading legion by herself." Giri chuckles. "Not that I'd give her better odds than our knights, mind you, but the spirit was there and she has grown up so fast, hasn't she?"

Giri pauses, both she and Crane collecting themselves a bit. "As for me, I suppose I'm enjoying myself. I'm giving my Hymairean...companion..." (slight hitch on the choice of words there) "...a tour of the region. Somewhat unintentionally, I must admit, our river barge ran aground some ways back. I suppose it hasn't all been enjoyment, we've had quite an exhausting journey. I don't know that we have the time to really regale you with it properly. It feels like we've been to hell and back though, if I'm being honest." Giri's lips twitch just a little at that and she barely resists the chance to glance backward at Piripiri.

She is wondering though. Is this what you're hoping for Piripiri? The little small talk might pry out a hint about where Han is. Or it might meander for a while, letting the young dragon drift further and further away while our banneret plays hide and seek with a fox.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Solarel

“What are you?” the spirit asks. Fury still burns in its voice, but there is a sense of wonder, of curiosity in it as well. It doesn’t wait for an answer though. It points and power arcs from the back of the Kathresis. Engines that you could not see flare to life, the white fire of its drive so near the surface that behind it the metal blast plates seem to twist and warp like a heat mirage.

In a single heartbeat, the Kathresis dashes across the room towards you.

It’s beautifully fast. Its crystal fire drive system, set in such a small frame and absent any weaponry that needs to be actively ready, is going entirely towards speed. It's nearly upon you before you even have a chance to test your newly acquired weapons stock.

However, the spirit tries to direct it to avoid the sensitive scientific instruments, giving you a moment as it diverts around those tables towards the lockers. It banks left of you, passes through a gap in the space and comes for you at a partial angle as it runs along the wall, its right hand outstretched to grab you, the spirit perched on the right shoulder staring you in the face, one arm still upraised.

“You threaten my domain, and now you dare to claim a titan as your own. Even this small one will show you the truth of your weakness.” The spirit shakes its head. “But be assured, you have intrigued me. When I have crushed you properly, I will keep you here for interrogation and study.”

It's over if locks you in its grip. What do you do?

***

Isabelle

Crescent laughs, but Annika nods in a way that tells you that you are not the first and will be far from the last to imagine making love to an AI in a sturdy robotic frame.

It’s odd though. What you said about the security actually seems to be right. It wasn’t right before you said that. You were quite sure you were bullshitting on that point, at best a data spike inserted into the control panel should have offered you a new interface if you could bypass the security, but it shouldn’t affect the security itself, at least not without some kind of virus loaded into it. The beautiful advantage of direct hardware access is that at the end of the day you can put anything you want onto it if you know enough detail about where to put it. But what’s happening now is that the controls seem to be offering you an interface that’s got nothing to do with what was on the data spike directly. Instead, it’s responsive to how you made up the way it should function while the recording continues to play.

“No Amber” Iralina called. “I want no stars for my own, and I would not see you go so far. I want only you, your strength, your touch. Please, stay here with me.”

“Of course my dulcet heart, If it would please you, I shall never leave your side again.”
There’s an insight here, lurking just under the surface in how all this works. You might blush at the thought that Asil would probably already have it figured out. But you’ve done a lot of work on mecha plans, AI reactions, all the things that one could justify to themselves they ought to know as a pilot if they really enjoyed the engineering aspect of the work to a debatably obsessive degree. So, try something and see if you can grab at it.

***

Dolly (and Jade)

It takes a moment to bring your head back to reality. You sit down, sure, but even when Jade lets off enough of her tantalizing to let you eat a bit, your head is still spinning with thoughts of Mirror and Mayze, of dress designs and Jade’s combats and mysterious thoughts of girls whose spots didn’t form the right pattern and what that ought to mean.

The food’s half done before you even realize what you’re eating. Ksharta got you some of the meat in the soup broth. It’s good, very salty with a hint of Hybasilian herbs that give you just the slightest hint of euphoria to go with the meat and salt. Ksharta’s been scurrying off and back. She wasn’t sure what to get for Angela, initially brought her the spicy food because it was being made by Terenians but she hadn’t liked that one bit and Ksharta had raced off for water and settled on just bringing her the roasted meat, which she had busied herself cutting into small pieces to feed to Angela. The latter was bearing it with dignity.

Ksharta notices that you’re noticing her for the first time in a few minutes. “So, uh, is this how your evenings u-usually go?” She’s trying to sound cute and light, but she hitches a bit on it. You know enough to know she’s really saying this was a lot, right, it’s not just me? It’s a processing kind of question, but she’s already grinning and trying to move past the awkwardness of it. “I mean, not that you’d need to answer that or anything. I mean, I’m not sure if I’m even asking Dolly or Jade or um, should I be posing it formally to Jade’s high priestess maybe? But I mean, well, I guess it doesn’t matter because it’s a dumb question. And I mean, this was fun, is fun, we could do more! But um, also what do we do with our um…prisoner after dinner?”

So many questions for you Dolly! Some of them maybe even good ones!

***

Mirror

It seemed right to leave the planet after that whole exchange. Eventually you need to question your hangar crew, go back over anything they heard, even sounds that might have seemed innocuous. And you’ll need to get Slate up to speed on all the information you just shared and your new…acquisition. That will be fun, probably.

But going back to the Hangar is work and you have time before that. Even so, it somehow seemed right that you leave the planet. So you find yourself on Akar Prime, not at the jungle but at the Saloon by the spaceport.

It’s an interesting place and steeped in Terenian aesthetics. Well, if you could call them that. The spaceport and the saloon were part of the mining colony and that meant cheap, functional, and quick to build. So you get a lot of exposed pipes, open radiators, and square shapes with hard corners. Even the bar itself, built as a sort of central hub into the space, is square with four distinct counters and staff only entrance/exit sections on two of the four sides.

They did try to decorate to counter this somewhat. The tables are small and round in contrast to the surrounding walls. This makes them look almost a little sad, like they didn’t get the square memo and showed up dressed in the wrong style to the decor. The bar is doing a bit better. It’s lined with five tiers of shelves in its center, with hundreds of differently shaped and colored bottles with all sorts of interesting drinks in them. Some of them are tall and lithe, others squat and wide with big stoppers set into them. Some seem to have a bit of their own animating energy from within the bottle, and a few even glitter and shimmer in the dim light that shines translucent through them.

The attraction, aside from the scenery, is that Marcina Villajero is staying here for the present. Her actual quarters are upstairs, somewhere in the third to fifth floor of the building, probably higher up and in a fancy room. She is the champion of the last arena season, after all. Yet despite whatever fame or fortune her victory and previous wish may have brought, here she is fighting again. She won’t actually be competing in the round robin you’ve been in, of course. She’s seeded into the elimination matches as the current champion. Which, perhaps, explains why she has time to enjoy a drink and entertain some hangers-on.

She’s established in a table near the bar, a tall bottle at her table with something bright red about one third already emptied out. People are packed around it, a few sitting, most standing or squatting nearby. And the champion herself…well the rumors are true. She’s absolutely tiny. You’re actually taller than she is, she barely crests five feet and if she weighs more than a hundred pounds, it would be shocking. The short hair in a pixie cut really makes you think of ancient Hybrasilian myths of small forest-dwelling spirits who would waylay the unwary, and the bust-revealing short black dress she’s wearing does not dissuade. She looks like she’s enjoying her drink though. She’s conversing with a man who’s kneeling next to her chair about something.

The party seems to have been here for some time and some of these folks might be security for her. If not, people are being damn respectful all on their own. Nobody is going up and trying to demand her attention, they’ve simply gathered around her and have now started mostly conversing among themselves in a general din of noise.

Despite her distraction, she sees you when you come past the bar, pauses with the man, and calls out to you. “Hey, you, Hybrasilian. You’re Mira Fisher, right? Pilot of the Nine-Tail God-Smiting Whip? Come have a drink, my treat! Whatever this is, it tastes like cinnamon and fire.” And she grins and holds up her glass to you.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Solarel

You and your extraction geist snatch the authorization geist with an outstretched hand. The heat of your passing shimmers the air as you draw past Isabelle, Crescent, and Annika. The spirit shrieks “stop” after you, and you feel the floor slope down away from your direction of movement, but you’re too hot and the changing slope melts beneath your feet, giving you a firm foothold as you race through the door and onward.

The next rooms are a blur. You race across flat metal flooring as scattered square containers fly out of their neat stacks half-melted, unable to withstand your speed and momentum, not worth dodging around. Another door slides open, the floor and walls are natural rock in this room, moss growing up near the ceilings, wet and damp from some natural source of water. Little drops of it sizzle to steam as they touch you. It feels good, even though you can’t afford the time to wait. The room is filled with workstations of nanobot gray with tables, chairs, and small computers set into natural alcoves, haphazard around the room in their facing. Some sort of odd device is connected to wires leading up one of the walls, but there’s no time to go that way. You cut right following the cavern’s natural wall, there’s another door right there, a small connecting room of some kind, but your heat won’t let you stop to think about it. The physical lock on the other side’s door melts off as your arm slams into it and the door bursts open to some kind of laboratory or testing room. Both together, perhaps.

It is here that you are forced into a halt. You race across the open walkway of the room, but the door on the far side refuses your access geist and it is too thick to melt, especially as the heat has already begun to dissipate from its most molten. The room is large, nearly twenty meters across and almost as wide. There’s a door where you entered, and another on the far end that has stopped you. An open middle walkway that you’ve just run past. One side wall is set with multiple reinforced metal plates, most of them heavily burned and scoured, along with testing stations and monitoring devices every meter or so. Some kind of weapons testing location most likely. The other wall is covered with storage lockers (perhaps full of weapons) and the space is lined with several two tier workstations: long tables at chest height and then storage shelves at head height. They’re fully stocked with various tools, microscopes, beakers, burners of various sorts, all types of meters and readers for gathering data.

Before you have much of a chance to scour the room, though, the ceiling above the weapons testing area, perhaps less reinforced than the walls, parts open. It was made of all nanobot materials, this is a more developed rather than natural room, but it’s still surprising to see it open that way.

From that ceiling lowers a god. It’s not a particularly large god in Zaldarian standards, perhaps three to four times your height all told. It’s built with subtle bird-like features on the face and body shape, and metallic feathers lining its arms. It has no weapon to speak of, at least not visible, simply its feathered arms, long legs for its height, and a bulky crest atop its head that looks rather suited to headbutts.

Perched on its shoulders in an ethereal form is the spirit from before, its eyes glowing balefully. “You are ruining my facility. Mine! The Trak’tho left it to me! I will bind you here and make you beg me to fix every burn and break you’ve caused. And if she comes back while it is in such disrepair, I will make you prostrate yourself over every inch of burned and twisted metal so that she doesn’t have to trod upon this…this desecration!”

[The spirit is marking Guilty]

***

Isabelle

First there is chaos.

The heat of Solarel as she seizes the geist from Annika is palpable. You can feel it slam into you in the form of gathered air from her run. But then she is past, snaking her way deeper into the facility. The floor slopes, and while Solarel pushes past it melting holes into the metal, you three find yourselves sliding to the center of the room. But then Solarel is through and the odd guardian spirit disappears, leaving you at the bottom of a slope pressed against Annika’s soft black robes while Crescent sits hunched on all fours, tail flicking as she looks around trying to make sense of the predicament.

Then there is calm.

Nobody says anything for a moment while you and Annika untangle and try to sit up. The slope isn’t all that steep to reach the door if you go at an angle, though it’s slick apart from Solarel’s melted spots. You’ll quite literally need to follow in her footsteps getting there.

Finally, Annika grins. “She hasn’t changed a bit, the crazy bitch. No wonder the Empress cut her loose.” She shakes her head but the grin doesn’t leave her face. She looks rather like an owl fluffing its feathers as she glances about. Then she starts climbing up. “Well, come on Crescent, we’re going to miss the show if we’re not quick. We’ll need to get the door open the old-fashioned way, hopefully the Traktharan spirit is too distracted to notice us tinkering with the door controls absent my entry geist. You, Terenian, I don’t suppose you’re any good at hotwiring?”

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

There is a moment of silence as Crane's comments hang in the air. Giri is waiting for Piripiri to answer, she doesn't entirely understand how politic they should be here and is choosing not to direct the situation. But she feels a tug at the leash, prodding her to respond. Perhaps she's the only one with the full context.

Still, what was she supposed to say here? That she had seen Han transform, that the vaunted Vermilion Beast was Crane's younger sister? That hardly seemed Giriel's secret to give out. And as for Zhaojun, if Giri had heard these comments yesterday, she'd have vociferously agreed and started plotting how to catch the damned spirit! But now she wasn't so sure. It seemed like she needed something different than simply being caught and bound, there was so much pain and desperation that Giri had glanced in her heart.

Well, she was prompted to speak, so she might as well speak. "I know...something of both the Vermilion Beast and the heavenly spirit that you speak of. I think that..." Giri stops and takes a sip of her tea, not sure how to finish the sentence. "I am certain that both were present at Kingeater Castle, where my companion and I also recently traveled. And that both of them, in their way, helped us fight against the demons threatening our realm."

Giri lets that hang there, stating it as a fact. Who knows what Sagacious Crane has or hasn't heard. Whether she considers Giri a reliable source, whether she wants so much to believe that demon attacks are nothing but rumors from superstitious farmers that she'll delude herself. Or perhaps whether she'll simply accept the truth of it from Giriel and move forward.

Regardless, she continues with her momentum. "I think it difficult, even for a skilled priestess such as yourself, to truly judge who is a brute or a thug. I have found myself surprised several times in recent days. And I think with things as they are," here Giri spares the briefest glance for Piripiri that yes she means the incursions of the Dominion as much as the demons, "I think a bit of brutishness is the least of our problems."

Giri sips her tea and waits to see what Sagacious Crane has to say. She didn't share their errand of course. She's the bound one here, that's Piripiri's job if the goal here is simply to interrogate everyone they meet. Giri's more interested in the bigger picture.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

"You think duty is determined at birth!" Well there was more to say there, but then there was another jump and they were at an inn.

If Giri had been faster on the uptake, less distracted by the conversation, the mode of travel, and everything else going on, she'd have realized who she was looking at and called out Sagacious Crane as I live and breathe! and offered her warm regards. But Crane is looking a bit worse for wear and in the instant it took Giriel to recognize her properly, she felt Piripiri tightening the hold on her leash, and beginning her own introduction, even setting out tea.

Well, she seemed to have the situation well in hand. Who was Giri to point out that the Golden Banneret had very pointedly not fulfilled the terms of her spell yet, that she had very clearly specified being taken to Han specifically and being taken to Han's inn when Han wasn't visibly present was clearly not the end of the deal. But they had traveled fast and hard, the Banneret was distracted by a fox (a very natural state of affairs even for a heavenly spirit), the inn seemed inviting enough, and the tea even more so.

Besides all that, Giri still had something more to consider. The idea that duty was determined by birth filled her with revulsion. She had trained for her profession. She had chosen her life. Of course birth limited her options. Being from a small mountain village had ruled out the nobility and if she wanted to herd anything other than sheep and goats she would have had to move somewhere else. But even so there were options. Every village needed a smith, a tailor, and a cobbler, and they needed apprentices. And of course the mountain witches like her mother needed apprentices too. But she had never been forced. She wanted to study magic, she knew she could have gone and learned to sew or bake or wield a hammer instead and she hadn't done it. A guard should go into service because they want to be a guard, and if they don't like the local lord, they should travel somewhere else, or hire out as a mercenary instead of a guard. She wanted no part of what the Dominion seemed to be offering.

She truly felt the freedom of the Flower Kingdoms as she thought about all this. And today, this lovely morning, she expressed that freedom by saying nothing while Piripiri served the tea.