Mcmolly

Amygdala Circuit

As time made its convoluted way along, measured by the glow of the moon and the blackness of the water, Quinnlash was a good host. They fished with blunt bait, drank pouch after pouch of melonberry, and watched as the shadowy figures of Deelie and Safie swam to and from the boat, laughing and chatting, saying things that were honey to hear but did not quite stick to the mind. Few details ever did, and often these dreams faded altogether in her first waking moments; but this one would be different. This one, Quinn would remember.

As the world began to blur, and untangle, Quinnlash smiled at her one more time. On the distant, hilly shore, the white deer rose from its rest and shambled off, casting a final look their way. As it vanished beyond the crest, to lands unreal or unmade, the dream ended.

---

“This is bullshit.”

Besca could feel the spirit leave Toussaint’s body over the phoneline. The man was exhausted, and she ought to have had more empathy for him—he had, after all, been perhaps the only one in Casoban fighting to maintain the alliance with Runa—but after five days of nonstop conference calls, haggard negotiations, and incessant reminders that the fate of her country relied on her ability to not fuck this up, she wasn’t sure she had anything left to give. Even her indignation was exasperated, resigned.

After five days they had a deal. It was a shit deal, but it was the only alternative to the immediate dissolution of their alliance, and more importantly, the only thing keeping Casoban from running gleefully and permanently into the arms of Eusero.

And as was the way these days, even victory felt like defeat.

“It’s what we have,” Toussaint said with a sigh. His voice was hoarse and quiet, he’d slept as little as she had. “It’s all they’d agree to.”

“It’s still bullshit.”

“You may be willing to starve for pride, Darroh, but I will gladly eat shit if it means my country survives—without being cannibalized by Eusero.”

She laid her head down on the table, and Toussaint let her groan and swear until they were left in silence.

“Darroh,” he probed, eventually.

Besca sat back upright, pulled over her tablet. “Give me the details.”

There was shuffling on the other end as Toussaint sifted through what must have been twice his weight in papers; she had a similar stack occupying every other seat and half the table on the bridge. Neither of them had read through the finer points of the deal entirely, their job had just been to craft the mold, and prove it could be done at all.

“You’ll send Loughvein first—”

“Oh fuck off.”

“It’s not negotiable,” he said, and went on before she could object further. “Loughvein first. She’ll do three weeks, then return to RISC, and you’ll send St. Senn over next. Three weeks, rotate, repeat, until six months have elapsed, or Casoban has replaced the Saviors and pilots it’s lost since the attack on Hovvi. Whichever comes second.”

“But no more than a year.”

“It’s two years—we talked about this before dinner last night.”

“Fuck,” Besca muttered, scrolling through the notes on her screen. Indeed it was two years, though she hardly remembered agreeing to it. “Fine, whatever. If it takes you two years to replace a few Saviors, you’re fucked anyway.”

A sigh. “Right. During their rotations here, they are, for all intents and purposes, CSC pilots. They will receive no orders from RISC and will have no direct contact with any Runan officials.”

“Except me.”

“You are almost the dictionary definition of a Runan official.”

“You’ll make an exception.”

“For the Commander of RISC? You don’t think that might present an opportunity for conflict?”

“I won’t call as their fucking Commander then,” she said. “But I will be calling.”

“Darroh—”

“Or it’s off, Toussaint. Restrict the time, monitor the calls—I don’t care, but I said this the moment you pitched the idea. I get contact.”

“I can…” he paused, sighed. “I can probably squeeze in some sort of wellness check. Happy?”

“No.”

“Me neither. As I was saying, while they’re here they belong to us. That means they close singularities, they fight duels, they run fucking marathons if that’s what it comes down to.”

“You put Quinn on TV, you’ll regret it. Girl’s not cut out for the spotlight.”

“Noted. Not my call, and whoever I tell will ignore it, but, noted.”

“And the alliance stands?”

“The alliance already stands. I’m told this will go a long way in ensuring that doesn’t change. That’s all I’m told.”

Besca swiped harshly on her tablet, then shut it off. “Sent you my signature. Seal it. How long do I have?”

“If I can get this cleared today, they’ll likely want her here tomorrow.”

“Goodbye, Toussaint.”

“Commander Darroh.”

She hung up, took a deep breath, then leapt to her feet and threw her chair onto the ground with a loud “Fuck!”

Every cell in her body screamed for rest, but they’d been doing that for days and she could ignore them a little while longer. There was so much to do; get back to the Board, arrange transport, alert the PR department who would cram three weeks’ worth of emergency meetings into the next ten hours finding a way to spin this as a win to the Runan public. She would do none of them—not yet.

Instead she bolted for the dorms, driven faster by every wasted second. It was early, she half expected Deelie to be off in sims, and Quinn to still be asleep. But as she burst into the common room, all three of them were sat at the counter, eating. The air smelled of pancakes and syrup.

Eyes turned to her, happy, confused, concerned. She wished she could have smiled back.

“Girls,” she said, finally aware of how ragged she was. “I’ve got news.”

Amygdala Circuit

Dinner was…strange. Not bad, but certainly off. The girls had no doubt grown used to the relentlessness of Besca’s work stealing her away some nights, but after such a momentous day, the dorm felt distinctly lesser without her to eat with them.

Dahlia tried her best with the recipe, but was still a learner and with Lombardi cuisine she was treading new ground. The sauce was a bit thick, the noodles a more standard spaghetti, and the garnish decidedly past its expiry date, but with Quinn beside her at the stove, eventually, dinner was served. She even haphazardly threw some leftover chicken in the microwave for Roaki’s plate. It was unseasoned and practically bone-dry—Roaki didn’t care, she ate it with the same ravenous vigor that she ate everything she’d eaten since leaving the medical ward.

Together they all sat at the counter, eating in intermittent silence. The TV stayed off, but Dahlia put on some music from her own playlist—an assortment of smooth, jazzy piano numbers, and what might have been acoustic covers of metal songs. They talked briefly about the singularities, but Dahlia quickly turned them to lighter, mundane topics. Roaki quite literally licked her plate clean, sparing them whatever horrific contributions she might have made to the conversation.

As they finished up, Quinn handled the dishes while Dahlia found a movie to put on, and set up the couch. An old romcom she’d watched a few times with Safie—something she elected not to mention as Quinn nestled into the pillows and blankets. Unsurprisingly, Roaki hobbled herself back to her own room and shut the door, which didn’t bother Dahlia in the slightest. She curled in beside Quinn under the blankets, happy as could be.

Neither of them stayed awake to the end.

---

Calm waters on the lake. The boat floated upon the moon’s perfect reflection, so bright it seemed the light was rising up out of the lake. In the distance, Hovvi was alive with the same ambiguous activity that, normally, Quinn would never have paid mind to. Tonight, though, she was aware of it—of the slight but pervasive offness that reminded her she was asleep, and this was a dream.

On the shore, the towering form of Ablaze sat with its legs dangling in the water. The pale deer sat at its side, a white smudge comparatively.

A soft, excited giggling filled the air.

“We’re real,” came her own, familiar voice, as Quinnlash appeared sitting across from her on the boat. Her face beamed with childish glee, in her hands she held tight onto a pouch of juice—melonberry. Between them was a small cooler filled with more. “Look what we did. We protected everyone. We killed the monsters. We did it and it felt so right!”

She took a long sip from her drink, squeezing the pouch empty with a contented sigh, before breaking into another fit of giggles.
“It’s our purpose. Helping. Saving. Protecting. We did it. We did it together.”

Heiseina: Memories Long Forgotten

---

Mio smiled, but a part of her was sad to have given up so easily. She’d become so accustomed to spending these festivals alone that, the idea of not only attending, but attending with company seemed so strange, so outlandish, but also so enticing. She knew better of course, but she couldn’t shake feeling that she ought to have put up more of a fight—not with Haruhi, just with herself.

It didn’t matter though, shortly after, a strange voice filled the front of the smithy. Mio didn’t pay it much mind; most of the village spoke to her as little as possible, and she wagered she knew only a handful of voices well enough to remember. Haruhi’s curiosity however was piqued, and like an observant squirrel, poked her head out of the back to see. That didn’t last long. She retreated almost immediately, so suddenly that she dropped the freshly-fixed hoe—which thankfully held up to the fall—and tripped over herself.

Mio wasn’t the fastest person in the village, but when you worked with hot metal and roaring flames, it paid in flesh to have good reflexes. With a lurch she caught Haruhi by the arm as she fell, and held her without much trouble; the young farmer was toughened by a life of hard labor—made notably harder by her own self-imposed limits—but was still smaller, and nowhere near as heavy as the anvils and steel pipes and pallets of work that Mio moved around on the daily.

Of course, once she’d pulled Haruhi upright, she realized she was not only touching her, but grabbing her. When was the last time she’d grabbed anyone? Haruhi’s arm was…well, not quite thin thanks to her farmwork, but Mio could feel flesh and muscle yielding under her fingers, felt, she thought, pulse and bone deeper down. She’d bent metal rods thinner than this with her bare hands.

How would Haruhi bend?

Mio breathed sharp, and let the girl go with mortified shock.

“Sorry,” she muttered, mind threatening to tilt into a whirl of guilt and self-loathing. She was spared only by the reminder that they had guests—guests who had, apparently, spooked Haruhi.

Peering out into the smithy, she took stock of the crowd. Keiko was still here, along with Fumiko and, of course, Tsubasa, who was face to face with their guest. He was…well, even Mio could recognize that he was a stranger here; scarred and weathered like beaten leather, he wore an outfit of metal over his clothes, painted red with a fiery hand on his chest.

He handed Tsubasa what could only be described as a weapon. It made Mio’s heart race in a dangerous way, as did the strange device at his other hip. She listened to him speak about a lord, about negotiations—he said 'we' which surprised her, how many were there?—and then about—

About…

Who was this man? She peeled her eyes away from the things he held, looked to the others. Over the years she’d become very good at picking up people’s discomfort, even, and especially, when they tried to hide it, whether out of politeness or fear. To Mio, this looked like fear. Keiko especially seemed to be angling for a retreat, and for a moment she wondered if their guest would let her leave.

She decided not to wait to find out.

“One moment,” she said quietly to Haruhi. She didn’t want to leave the girl alone, but she also wasn’t sure if it was best she follow. In the end, she decided to trust Haruhi’s instincts, which were surely much sharper than her own.

Mio made her way out into the smithy proper, emerging from the smoke and shadows to stand with Tsubasa. She tried to make a subtle barrier between the man and Keiko, who she hoped would take the opportunity to slip away, and studied the stranger in silence.

---

Tags: @Lemons @Asura @Hero @Maxx @Queen Arya

Amygdala Circuit

Roaki flinched again. Well, Quinn wasn’t crying anymore at least, but, was this better? Anger, grief, even merciful vengeance, she had tasted all of them. But gratitude? A wholly alien dish, whose flavor she didn’t know if she wanted to swallow, or spit back out like the poison she figured it was.

The list of things you did to your enemies was short and simple: you killed them. The list of things you did not do was much longer, and complex—a frustration she had expertly avoided by following the Do list. You didn’t spare them, unless you meant to torture them. You didn’t talk with them, unless you meant to insult them. You didn’t eat with them, unless it was their last meal or you meant to poison them. And you most certainly didn’t thank them, unless…

Well, she couldn’t even think of a reason.

Quinn had to be careful. If she stopped treating Roaki like an enemy, she’d lose sight of the fact that they were supposed to kill each other.

“Whatever,” she said with a click of her tongue. “Better than crying all over my sheets, I guess. Just don’t forget about it—you need to act while you’re still mad. Otherwise you’ll get yourself all worked up, then bitch out at the last second. And that blows.”

Eventually Dahlia emerged from her room, calmed but exasperated. “I’m cooking tonight,” she called. “Gonna try to get the smell of my laundry out of the kitchen. What’re you feeling like?”

“Meat!” Roaki shouted.

“There is no world where that question was ever directed at you,” Dahlia said. “Quinn? What’s your stomach rumblin’ for?”

Amygdala Circuit

Roaki snarled, flinching back and swatting at Quinn’s hand. Humiliation was familiar to her now, and while she couldn’t let it slide from the lizard, she had no choice but to take it from the girl who’d bested her. Their spars in sims were one thing, but to actively fight back? The lion’s share of her knew she was unworthy of something like that.

Still, just because she was done trying to kill Quinnlash for the moment, didn’t mean she would blindly follow her commands, especially something so ridiculous as apologizing.

“I’ve torn out hearts for lesser slights,” she spat back. “Consider it a favor that she still breathes”

Across the room, Dahlia opened the fridge, where three pairs of shoes came tumbling out onto the floor. She muffled a furious shriek behind her teeth.

“Seriously?!”

Roaki bit her bottom lip, thinking hard. “I had an insult about cold feet, but you two took too long and I forgot it. Just—hey! Just pretend I said something biting! Maybe cry—you’re good at that!”

Dahlia held a shoe over the sink, shaking out handfuls of ice cubes. “What is the matter with you? Who does this?!”

“Next time maybe you’ll think twice about throwing me out of my own room!”

“Next time I’ll just throw you into the washer!”

“Then you can grab all your clothes from space after I airlock your whole closet!” Roaki snapped. “You don’t want to play vengeance with me, lizard. I'll win.”

Scooping more clothes off the floor, Dahlia went about replacing her things with a grimace and a flurry of grumbles. Roaki sneered victoriously and hobbled back to the couch.

“Well, did you figure your shit out?” she asked Quinn, entire debacle already forgotten. “All that blubbering better have been worth something.”

Amygdala Circuit

She didn’t know? Dahlia could have slapped herself; of course Quinn didn’t know what to do—how could anyone be expected to know what to do in a situation like this? Putting Follen’s apparent deception aside, there was modium in Quinn’s head and, apparently, it had been there a long time, perhaps since she was little. A nugget of the what was perhaps the deadliest material known to man, lodged inches from her brain and she was still breathing.

Dahlia disabled the scan, the constant warnings were making her anxious. She sat back on the bed, staring blankly as the dark returned.

What should they do? Follen was still held up in the hangar, and would likely be bogged down with paperwork and meetings for the rest of the day. Besca would be lucky if she saw the dorm before the weekend, but would most likely be spending her nights catching powernaps on the bridge until whatever new international storm was brewing passed on.

That left the two of them—well, technically the three of them, but damned if she was gonna count the creature. They’d have to weather this on their own for now, which was, well, unideal, but that was practically the definition of their job.

‘Well, you can’t just sit here.’ She thought. ‘You’re the big sister, act like it.’

Dahlia pushed herself up off the bed. Whatever the plan was, they couldn’t just coop up and cry in the dark until Besca came home.

“C’mon,” she said, taking Quinn gently by the wrists to get her to follow. “Lets have something to eat, give ourselves some energy to think with.”

She pushed the door open, letting the light back in. It did make things a little better, a little more open, and—

Her foot caught on something and she stumbled to the floor, managing to catch herself with her good arm. Kicking back, she saw it was…her…shirt? A little graphic T-shirt with the faded name of a band she listened to when she was little. But this had been in her closet, hadn’t it?

Crumpled up before her were a pair of shorts, which she was certain had also been in her closet.

So had the long-sleeve shirt on the table, and the four or five pairs of pants tossed over and around the couch. The dozens of socks. The undershirts. The sweaters, the coats, all twisted inside out or crumpled and strewn over the common area, the TV, even the kitchen—where the microwave was on and through the light she could clearly see at least two pairs of underwear rotating on the popcorn setting.

Across the dorm, another shirt came flying out of the open door to her room. Dahlia stared slack jawed as Roaki hopped out, holding a bundle of socks in her hand, and an expensive dress in her teeth.

“Oh my GOD!” Dahlia shrieked. “Roaki! what the hell?!”

Roaki spat the dress onto the floor and tossed the socks up to scatter across the room like rain. She held herself upright, and met Dahlia’s eyes with a fearsome glower.

“No one picks up Roaki Tormont without consequence!” she declared. “Mark my words lizard, your suffering will be long and brutal!”

Amygdala Circuit

Confused, and increasingly concerned, Dahlia nonetheless obliged and leaned close to Quinn’s face. A synthetic whirring echoed briefly in her ears before vanishing in her aural blind spot, and with a blink her eyes brought faux clarity to the dark. A seamless combination of night vision and rapidly-refreshing AI-generation took in and deciphered everything just as fast as the eyes she’d been born with. It mapped out Quinn’s face, twisted in pain and grief and anxiety, and then further, it lit up the empty eye socket.

It seemed normal for modium scarring. Discolored, gray flesh like water splashed on dry concrete. She knew from experience how uncomfortable it could be at first, but this was old and healed and as much a part of her as the rest of her skin. Then, further in, it highlighted something…else. Something small, hardly the size of a fingernail, lodged into the flesh at the very back of the socket.

Dahlia had never had reason to doubt her implants before, but when a preemptive scan warned her that she was looking at raw modium, she figured there must be a glitch. She blinked, the overlay reset, scanned again. Again it returned modium, warned her to back away. Dahlia gasped hard.

Her first thought was simple and animalistic—run. Quickly her human mind caught up and told her she needed to drag Quinn to Follen’s now because she was about to die. Then the logical mind followed, and reminded her that she should already be dead. Long dead, burst into a statue of volatile steel.

But here she sat, with her, both of them alive.

“What…” she mumbled dumbly. “That’s…but…is that from when you were little? But…but you should be…”

She recalled Quinn’s babbling, and a pit formed in her stomach. “He…? Do you mean…do you think…Follen knew?”

He’d have to, wouldn’t he? They’d have scanned Quinn before the modioscory, to say nothing of the numerous scans afterwards. There was no way Follen hadn’t known about it. So…so why hadn’t he said anything?

“What…what do we do?”

Amygdala Circuit

Progress came slow, but it came. Dahlia let go of Quinn and leaned back to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with her. She was intelligible now, which was good, but it didn’t make what she was saying any easier to understand—not a particularly uncommon thing either. Looked under her eyepatch? What could there possibly be to see or feel that wasn’t just…emptiness?

She saw the strands of hair in Quinn’s hands and a worried sound escaped her. She rubbed Quinn’s head gently, relieved that there wasn’t any blood to feel. For Quinn, there hadn’t been any pain to feel, either. Her silent passenger must have reached up to numb the roots. There was nothing else though, no other sensations or alien thoughts. She was often quiet whenever Dahlia was near. Listening, content, basking.

“Tell you what?”

The hand massaging her head snaked down to her cheek to thumb the tears away. In the dark, Dahlia’s synthetic eyes glowed with pale blue concern.

“What didn’t they tell you, Quinn?”

Amygdala Circuit

While she wasn’t comfortable using a word like ‘accustomed’, Dahlia had been learning how to handle Quinn’s lower moments as they came. She couldn’t always pull her out of them, but she had at least built up a better understanding of their severity. Frankly, it didn’t take much to wring the tears out of Quinn, so being able to differentiate between a mild upset and a breakdown was important.

This, for instance, seemed rather serious. The key tells were in her voice, her posture—she checked her arms for nail-marks and was relieved to see them unmarred—and most of all: the fact that Dahlia had no idea what she was talking about. Cohesion was not one of Quinn’s strong suits at times like this. She spoke in a thin babble and it was hard to understand her. Something about her eyepatch, something about someone hating her, not telling her something.

That was all fine. For the moment it didn’t matter what she was talking about, and wouldn’t until she could collect herself enough to say it clearly. What did matter was being there, giving her an anchor to pull herself up with.

“No,” she said, meeting Quinn’s rising aggravation serenely. “Of course not. Shh. No one hates you, Quinn. Just breathe for me, okay? Just try to settle, we can work through this.”

Amygdala Circuit

Oh, great. She was crying. Always with the crying—honestly, how did Quinnlash get anything done? She was important, right? Important people had tight schedules to keep, and Roaki was certain that if she could see Quinnlash’s, there would be slots dedicated to breakdowns at the top of every hour.

This was why people got betrayed. Quinnlash was bleeding and thrashing around in an ocean full of sharks, eventually someone was bound to come along hungry. God, but it had to be an act—especially after today, after what she’d done, killing all those Modir. You couldn’t be that strong and this weak.

“Well you can’t just do nothing!” Roaki said, exasperated. She stayed where she was, away from Quinnlash, just in case whatever cry-virus she had was contagious. “If he thinks he can get away with it he’ll keep doing it! It doesn’t matter if you’re strong or not, if people think you’re weak, they’ll treat you like it. So if you’re too much of a weichei to kill him then you should at least march down there and fuckin’ clock him in the jaw or something! He’s nothing—you’re a pilot.”

Deep within Quinn, there was the rare rumbling of agreement with the Helburkan girl. It seemed someone was still riding their bloody high from the battlefield. It didn’t get the chance to settle though, as outside there was the shuttering of the dormitory door, followed by a familiar voice.

“Quinn? You here?”

Footsteps towards Quinn’s room, then faster footsteps until Dahlia appeared in the doorway of Roaki’s. She seemed panicked, eyes settling first on the curled up, weeping form of her sister, then turning sharply to Roaki.

“What did you do?”

“Oh, yeah, cause normally she’s such a rock.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know. She’s mad about that snake doctor—I told her she should just kill the prick but I guess she doesn’t wanna.”

Dahlia stared at her a moment, took a deep breath, and marched in. “Okay, I need to talk to her. Alone.”

“Yeah good fuckin’ luck with that. I don’t think she’s gonna—” Roaki lapsed into stunned silence as Dahlia lifted up by the armpits and carried her out of the room. Momentary silence. “PutmethefuckdownyoufuckingassholeIllripyourheartoutofyourfuckingchestwithmyteethdoyouhearmeIlleviscerateyouIwillbreakeveryfingeronyourhandsnoonepicksmethefuckupareyouseriousyouwillbegmeformercyIfuckingswear—”

She thrashed but Dahlia was stronger than she looked, and held her out far enough that even with half her leg she couldn’t kick back far enough to reach her. She was eventually dumped unceremoniously onto the couch with a surprised yelp, and could only watch as Dahlia strode back to the room and shut the door.

Inside, Roaki’s threats continued, muffled, before they faded into blissful yet also troubling silence. Dahlia didn’t seem to care, she just came over to the bed and sat down beside Quinn. Arms found their way around her, pulling her in close. Deep breaths, warmth, silent, lingering joy that they were both still alive.

“What’s wrong, Quinn?” came the quiet question, accompanied by a squeeze around her. “Talk to me.”