Phoe

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Her hand takes Valentina's firmly. Her fingers work magic; these soft, sliding touches massage every crease and bend in her digits without ever seeming to move themselves. Her hands are very strong. Her fingers are very talented. Her claws are short and neat, do you see? She makes promises for the end of the evening (if she likes what she sees), without ever opening her mouth to speak. Not to interrupt, and not to answer. Her eyes are trained up on the stage. She is watching the river dancing across that model's chest.

She could defend the show, of course. It's trivial to take the time to explain why these young artists deserve a chance to try things for an audience full of glitz and expectations enough to draw the eye of the rest of the galaxy. Innovation was sewn from the threads of a thousand, a million different failures, this was true. It was further the case that poorly targeted criticism could sometimes upend a creative's desire to continue creating, and further true beyond that that a party like this one was capable of attracting at least one or two incautious critics. That was fair, right?

But it did not follow that unproven talent needed to be walled off and weeded out before it was presented to the public. On the contrary, so-called experts were extremely vulnerable to biases built up over a lifetime of work and displayed marked tendencies to pass over the transgressive in favor of what their experience taught them which could set a field of exploration back decades or even lifetimes. Wisdom of the Reeds, went the saying. Well, the shorthand. The full aphorism was 'I hide myself among the reeds, to surprise my prey. My prey hides itself among the reeds, to hide itself from me. We watch the thousand heads bobbing, and together go hungry.' An expression with many interpretations, to be sure, but the relevant one at the moment was that information imparted by a large (often overlooked) source was typically richer than what your own instincts or history taught you. Though really, it depended on who you asked.

The point, of course, was that these young artists deserved the wisdom (and the test) of the reeds. For them, the benefits outweighed the risks. For them, locking them away until they'd cleared a pleasing shape out of their fields for easy viewing would be criminal. For them, those stars who blazed brightest would inspire and light the way for the minds that were to come in after them, and that could only happen in the place where every eye was gathered. I can do this, too. I could do this better! And then it will be my name worn by all the pretty girls, nyaha!

Mirror doesn't say a single word of this out loud. She's watching the drones flit about this model's body. She's envisioning the platinum dress as interlocking plates of alloyed armor and imagining herself piloting it. How does it differ from her Nine-Tails? How is it the same? Were there advantages to way this artist had gone about replicating her -- if indeed she was replicating anything -- what lessons would she bring home to Slate in the morning? Ah. Champagne. The afternoon, then.

Mirror plucks two flutes from a passing tray with her free hand, and through the magic of incredible finger strength doesn't drop either one of them. She finally turns her eyes away from the stage to look her date in the face as she passes one drink to her with another promising squeeze and a smile that only mildly threatened the use of teeth. A thought pops into her head, or rather it comes rushing back to the surface after having dived down a moment earlier to make room for unspoken conversations and eccentric dresses.

Aha! So 'Milady' was correct after all! After Valentina's reaction to the honorific in the battle she had been worried her grasp on TC linguistics was weaker than she thought. But not the case! How exciting, to discover nuance! A whole hidden dialect tucked away on Alcard somewhere with rules for politeness and situational use that sounded positively [The Stars, Bound In Chains] compared to the dusty drawl and spicy bursts that average humans were famous for! What a fantastic treat after what had been a deeply trying afternoon. She should really say thank you.

"I think..." she says instead.

They're the first words she's said in several minutes. She speaks them with deliberate slowness, as if the meaning of them was more important to convey than it was to explain why she'd been practically ignoring her date since they'd said hello. She looks up with her flowing, liquid eyes that are so similar to the patterns that had been playing on that dress before it left the stage. Her lips curl into an enigmatic and appropriately catlike smile.

"This is wonderful!" she finishes, pushing the drink on Valentina with slightly more deliberateness, "That means you'll have my full and undivided attention during your favorite part of the show. I'm working as a model tonight, you see? And I'm not to be called to perform until the third act. Since that won't be until after the fashions you're excited for, I'm sure you won't mind at all, right? We'll only be parted for a short while, and you'll get a much prettier date out of it in exchange."

Mirror drains her glass from full in a single flourish, and twirls the empty flute about her fingers. She snatches it up with her paw and drags her tongue along the surface of the glass, never once breaking eye contact. The most important part of the evening was yet to come, but first she wanted to see this woman, and be seen with her, by everyone she could come across.

"Come on, let's walk. Let's talk. I'd love to know all about your home, for instance. You must have so many occasions to wear a ballgown, I can't even imagine how magical that must be. Oh! And as the night carries on? You mustn't be afraid to kiss me, dear heart. These lips are yours tonight. You sure you want to waste them~?"

Breathless Dead

There's no mirth or kindness when she laughs. But when she tosses her head back to hear it echoing off the cavernous walls, there's no stopping it either. It's cruel, mocking, and seemingly endless. Every time she seems about to run out of breath, or at least run the joke to the end of its course, Bella takes another look at the squid miserably clutching its finery and she doubles over all over again.

But can you blame her? Gods, can you really blame her? This is too perfect. If someone wrote it as a story to explain the exact curve of her life, they'd choke trying to find a better metaphor than this. Not only did Redana run away to a disaster cruise where she needed sea monsters to fill slots that should be staffed by a proper crew, she couldn't even get the right monsters! It'd be a mercy to kill this ship. It'd be a kindness to scuttle this entire voyage before the gods got bored and let them all fall into a star or something. It could only be a matter of time.

And yet, her tail is still. There's no itch filling her claws, no desperation to her breathing as her laughter finally quiets. Her blood doesn't quicken with the urgency of a hunt. There aren't any names left on her skin, so what was supposed to push her forward. She was the monster who hunted monsters, but these ones sniveled and begged for her help, in the name of her... of the Lanterns. What was she supposed to do?

Bella's face turns serious as she watches the crabs shuffling about the tide pools. There's patterns to their movement: the sort of thing she could have spent weeks staring at as her life slowly crumbled around her. Not that things felt much better now. She means to huff, but winds up sighing instead. Around they go, in circles, into lines. Carrying treasures from the deep. Guiding and guarding. Not unlike phalanxes, if you just put shields in their claws. Again, so very like home.

"Don't call them 'mice'," she snaps, "Jil and her Lanterns are strong. Much stronger than your fish fry brigade could ever hope to be. All I did was recognize that. There's no magic in it. You're stuck hiding on the wall waiting for a miracle that's never going to come. You're pathetic. Worse than trash."

Bella stretches out her neck until it crunches, and rolls it around until she feels the tension finally leave her alone. She pinches her nose between two fingers, closes her eyes, and drinks deep of this soup of brine, toxic fear, and incompetence. She needs a new project, that's the only reason why. If she's not going to be dead, something has to take over for the useless arts and crafts now that she can't just steal an entire ship's worth of materials whenever she feels like it. Besides, one spare shaving out of this place and the whole fucking ship would probably collapse in on itself. So there wasn't anything left but this.

Her tail flicks with annoyance. Her eye glitters with amusement. Her lips part in a smile that's almost kindness. Not that she notices at all. It melts into a smirk before it can register.

"So you're demoted, starting now. If I'm stuck on this piece of shit tub I'm not going to have it running like it's trying to catch fire. Which, by the way, you're doing a great job of even with the salt bath you're running down here. This ship is carrying the Imperial Princess across the stars; you could have lived a hundred lifetimes inside that rotting filth you called home and not tasted honor even a tenth as sweet. So fucking act like it. If I find you hiding while there's work to be done again I'll kill you on the spot, and that's my last warning. Even Apollo loses his patience in time, and your god is much less forgiving."

Bella wades through the waters as crabs part around her. She meets the Assistant Secretary's one visible eye with the crimson glow of her Auspex, and flashes teeth when it flinches.

"I am not accepting your offer, by the way. I'll do this until it gets boring, and then I'm ditching you. Better take notes. Now, run me through everything. Forms, function, capability, don't leave anything out."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

The Gods-Smiting Whip looks like a towering monument in the repair dock. Without a pilot or an active power source, the overwhelming impression the swift and fluid mecha gives off is that it was never made to move in the first place. It looms over the team of cats scurrying about its feet like an ancient god long since fallen out of worship. Even in this place that smells of grease and grinding metal, it is easy to imagine it grown over with a tangled growth of vines and flowers after a hundred years of neglect or more. These could be children scrambling and swinging around its limbs, laughing as they sing their working songs. Those mighty tails seem like discarded relics of some old building, maybe nothing more than a passing traveler's garbage littering the forest floor as they lie scattered about the ground with their paint flaking to reveal the dull metal underneath.

You'd have to be an idiot to think this was a machine of war. You'd be a fool to call it a labor of love of a work of art. It is a mess, plain and simple. The vulnerable carcass of a dream that died long, long ago. Nothing more.

"Mm. Bad. Insufficient. Start over."

"You're not serious, boss? I thought we were almost done! You can't even tell there was a hole anymore, and Tail Five is testing at ninety seven percent optimal capacity! For one night's work after all you put her through I'd say that's pretty--"

"Hm? Ah. No, no. Not you. Not... This. Personal project, sorry. Last minute revision, always tricky."

"You ever wonder if maybe the reason your dates always end on fire is because you keep calling them 'personal projects'? You don't make kittens with spears."

"...As if you have any idea how I handle a spear."

"I mean if it's anything like how you handle a welding stick, I don't really need to."

"Slate."

"At least as far as these delicate human flowers go, your technique's rough enough to break them every time you make it past the door. For a Zald I bet you're perfect, but for the sweet little thing you're chasing right now?"

"...Slate."

"Well, really when you're ready to stop messing around, I guess I've seen you with a wrench too. I'd be happy to suffer through a shower if it'd get those fingers of yours inside of me like I'm your precious Nine-Tails~"

"Slate!"

"Oh. Uh, s-sorry boss. I take it too far?"

"Distraction. Leave."

"No I know, I know, I thought we were doing the routine she I just, well, got a little carried away, please say you're not mad!"

Mirror curled her fingers toward the top of hey palm, and held them there until the muscles quivered from the effort. She lifted her arm and wordlessly gestured toward the gate. Slate's calico pattern ears drooped, and she leaped several steps back as if pushed.

"I'm not... fired, am I?"

"Finish on my own."

No more words passed between them. Slate shrank into herself and slunk away toward the safety of the rest of her crew, gathering them up and gliding away in total silence. It was the only way she knew to patch things up. Mirror twitched her tail and pulled her hand along its length to soothe the ruffled fur. It took four passes before it took.

The Gods-Smiting Whip looked just as lifeless as it always did without the crystal fire drive plugged into the conduit at its main tail unit. Just as discarded, forgotten, and incapable of judgment as could be. And yet, the way its head sat tilted like it was, it seemed to Mirror like it had been watching her the entire time. It offered no advice or comfort, not even as she forced open the cockpit and climbed inside.

"...A rough technique. Possible solution. Mayze profiles as aloof and brilliant. Interviews rare and generally exclusive. By design. Easier to maintain. Know all this, of course. Am this. Reviewing facts. Stupid Slate. Regardless. Short leap to... what is the word? Crazy. But, different. Implied intelligence. [Starlight-Kissed]. Eccentric! But a rough technique. Rough."

Without power, the dance of her fingers on the controls was pointless. But she adjusted each switch and stomped the foot pedal with so much force that she could hear the shriek of dying metal and the roar of her spear drinking from the drive of another mecha. To her mind's eye, it looks just like the Lonely Star.

"Cruelty, as an art form. No. Incorrect. The goal is violence. The Huntresses, turned to creation. Understood, commencing audio-only imprint."

Her voice turned sharper and faster after a cough. One false start. Two. She curled her fingers again, and the voice of Mayze Szerpaws filled Mirror's cockpit.

"You were expecting me tonight, weren't you? Poor darlings, maybe next time! But I am here, in a much realer sense than you understand. Pull your eyes to the stage, and gaze upon my latest true form!"

The laughter meant she was doing it right. This would work out after all. Only the ablative plating left; Slate and her team would handle the paint. That left just enough time for Mirror to focus on herself. A perfect date ended one discarded layer at a time. And she never let a date end imperfectly. She crawled out of the Gods-Smiting Whip, and made sure to leave the lights on as she left. Slate would understand, just as soon as she was brave enough to come and check.

******

Her eyes light up when she sees Valentina. Mirror crosses the distance of the room as if gliding on a patch of ice, so smooth her head hardly seems to bob despite how quickly she's moving. Her smile is playful, her tail raised in delight. She bows deeply in imitation of (some semblance of) TC etiquette and takes her date by the wrist as she rises. Her lips brush against the back of that hand, soft as a drop of dew on a lily. Her sandpaper tongue is rougher as she drags it all the way up to the wrist, but her cheek is downy soft again as she touches it where the gesture ends. She tilts her head up to look her date in the face, as tempting as it might be to keep her gaze at her natural level. Her own face wears a look of deep seriousness and concentration bordering on a scowl. Only her eyes are smiling.

She has come dressed modestly, for her. A fitted suit and vest clings to the curves of her body in a deep, monotone burgundy fabric that shimmers in the light of the room but otherwise does nothing to excite the senses. Her body is the only star of the show, and that a tightly covered secret. She flashes no hint of her firm chest, having buttoned herself all the way to the neck, where she's clipped a bright red collar decorated with tiny, dangling golden chains to complete the effect.

At some point she'd cut out the elbows on her sleeves to allow for a tiny flash of her snowy fur patterns, as well as diamond shaped gashes from the top her ribs to the middle of her waist on either side of the vest and jacket. Stuffy. Positively prudish by the standards of her own public record. But there's a certain debonair charm to the way she carries herself just the same.

She's painted her claws pink, lavender, yellow, and white, and drawn a simple glyph under her right eye in red dye: two prominent dots, which in the language of Fisher culture means she is here to win a battle. Depending on the tradition, they might be a window to the soul to expand her consciousness and grant her special prowess in combat, or they might mimic an eye so that something watching her as if through water would be fooled about exactly where she's looking at the moment. Ask he which tradition she belongs to some other time, and if you're lucky enough to do it in a bed with her arms pressed tight around you, she might even answer.

She has not worn heels in an attempt to compensate for her small build. For a Hybrasilian, Mirror is on the taller end of the register at nearly five foot even, and she will not insult her pride by adding height where none exists. Not here, in any case. Indeed, she's come nearly barefoot; her only footwear is a set of black lacquer straps that wrap around her ankles and the soles of her feet, leaving her heel and toes exposed where they can respond to all the subtle curves and scraps of information dotted about the floor of The Jungle. This is the simplest way in any estimation to make yourself into the kind of shadow you have to use your eyes to see. You can only watch, or she'll vanish without a trace.

Her snowy hair is pulled into a strange ponytail made of two wide loops, with another pair of locks kept loose to frame her face on either side. She fidgets with a onyx ring on her left hand, and directs her sight as directly as she can to Valentina's eyes. This, again, is her smile.

"Good evening, dear heart. I should warn you, I'm here working tonight. Sorry I didn't tell you sooner; I couldn't figure out how. I might be stolen from you later in the night, but don't worry about a thing. As beautiful as you are, I very much intend to steal you right back."

Her expression hasn't changed at all, but she takes a single step closer, where Valentina can hear the purr creep into her voice.

"I have to say, I'm curious. I didn't have you marked for a, how do you say it? A fashionist? I don't know much about this sort of thing, are there... artists you are looking forward to tonight?"

Huntresses of Hybrasil

"Ah? The fashion show. I see."

Unexp... well, no. Quite expected, actually. A large part of the motivation to suffer through all of the networking and politicking to put her work in the show in the first place was the promise that "anyone who's anyone" would be there. And since by definition everyone alive today was in fact someone (fully synonymous with anyone she was certain, the vagaries of human linguistics notwithstanding), it stood to reason that everyone would, in fact, be present. Which naturally included the very lovely Valentina de Alcard.

Nevertheless, problematic. Mayze Szerpaws was meant to be in attendance, to give a talk over newest designs even, which implied that Mira of the Fisher Clan, whose star name is Whispered Promise could and would not be. In actual fact, a disaster. Mayze's presence was absolutely essential to the continuing and advancement of the work. To reveal the nature of the dual identity would be to completely erode the point of establishing the identity in the first place. So much effort, absolutely wasted. Untenable. A disaster of myriad proportions.

And yet.

The Gods-Smiting Whip lifts slightly and its cockpit unfolds in a theatrical but wholly unnecessary burst of steam. Its uninjured arm reaches into its chest and plucks its pilot delicately out. It raises Mirror on its outstretched palm toward the Lonely Star's face, where Valentina's perception would be the clearest.

Her hair falls like a snowy avalanche behind her. Her jumpsuit has been strategically slashed full of holes across her arms, chest, and legs to bare her most striking fur patterns. The clingy material shows all much of her as it hides, maybe even more. Her signature watery eyes dance with delight as she flashes a flirtatious grin and dips into a graceful bow.

"It would be my pleasure, sweet maiden. Let the models dance how they will; we two will shine the brightest of any stars in the sky. A date, then! You don't yet know what you've purchased with your prowess and your beauty, but you will. I promise you, my darling. I will leave you burning hot enough to forge a new pathway between our worlds."

Her smile widens, flashing dangerous and pearly teeth, and Mirror backflips onto Nine-Tails' arm before she scrambles boldly up onto its shoulder. There were things in life worth risking the world for, and one of them was a woman's sighs. Her screams, mmmm, those were worth even more on the right night. The work was exhausting; play must go twice as hard to cover the difference. Besides, this was a wonderful opportunity to test her macros. She lands lightly on her mecha's shoulder and tosses a tiny wave backwards as she starts to fly away.

"Your evening may not go the way you are envisioning, Valentina de Alcard. But if you're a good girl and play along with what I have in mind, that might not be a bad thing at all~"

Seven tail modules form a stairway to the heavens, and Mirror climbs it until she vanishes from all but the most determined cameras in the arena.

Breathless Dead

A hundred tiny treasures skitter about her feet. Bella wades further into the dark and the wet, never once stopping to look at them. She still remembers how it felt the last time someone came to her in grandeur, bearing gifts to win her favor. She remembers this same smell of fear, the only scent that anyone would debase themselves in before offering a creature like her tribute. The only motivation that could be trusted. She still remembers how that ended. And those were far prettier baubles, then. Much more queenly gifts.

She steps around each one of them without breaking her stride. Her teeth grind more with each clacking pincer reaching up for her attention.

But she stops, to read the letter. She pauses to read it again. She stands there with her tail slashing through the humid air, and takes the extra time to tear the note in half no fewer than four times. The pieces turn lumpen in the water, nothing more than ugly clumps of uglier promises. She walks past these, too.

"...Tell me why."

Her eyes are gleaming in the dark. Her claws are glistening in the damp. But her head is tilted, in curiosity.

"I have never betrayed the Empire. Not for the Princess, and not for Mother." (the word spills like hot ashes from her mouth. she uses it anyway) "What the fuck makes you so special that you think I'd do it now? Tell me why. Why'd you offer? What's your game? Tell me. And if I don't like your answer, I'll pull your guts out and use them to mop this ship dry. Redana and her band of dipshits seem very lax on their cleaning standards. I am not."

She offers a mocking curtsey to the darkness. The wet. To the crabs in all their sizes, and the voice that thought speaking to her through them was wise. She grins with a feral longing to be unleashed.

"I was originally designed to be a maid, you know. You are nothing new."

Breathless Dead

Of course she'd seen Eurydice. Of course she knew the story. Of course she did. Hades doesn't give back what's his, isn't that the lesson? Coming back from the dead should be impossible. Or at the very least, dramatic. A journey across the entire galaxy to bring back the lost, an impossible task as the price. Destined for failure and tragedy, always. And if not, if not, if someone really was stupid enough to cross into the land of the dead and beg for a single soul back, and if they were earnest and gullible enough to abide by all the rules and somehow actually made it happen? It'd be the kind of sensation that would get written down in history books and performed for holos across a lifetime's worth of lifetimes.

She never would have guessed that miracles could be so boring. There had been darkness. Blackness, really. A void with no thoughts and no feelings, no light and no sound, nothing to touch and nobody to notice in the first place. To call it the sensation of floating would be wrong and stupid. There hadn't been anything at all; just a patch of total nothing slapped over what could have been a minute or a year without any extra effort. And then from that endless nothing, she realized that her legs hurt.

That's how Bella figured out she wasn't dead. Whether she was meant for eternal punishment or reward, it'd feel different than just her legs falling asleep. And if she's not dead, she might as well breathe. The air tastes of rust and dryness. Clean, but only in the unpleasant sterile sort of way that meant someone had been desperately trying to scrub this place not very long ago. Well then. If she knows where she is, might as well open her eyes.

The Plousios is not the grand, crumbling temple of death Bella had imagined through her straining eyes the last time she was here. But there's no other place that this could be. It might've been a grand ship, once. Pride of an entire armada or... whatever else Humans might have once used star ships for, back in whichever fantasy time it must have originally been built in. The ceilings in this room are high enough to make a palace, and yet somehow claustrophobic. The colors are bright, compared to the Anemoi. But unloved. Everything here looks either pitted or greasy: Zeus' rainbow by way of an oil spill.

Bella huffs. She was meant to be a dead woman. Or if not dead, then a prisoner forever. But when she sits up, nothing catches on her wrists at all. No lashes or bindings or cuffs. Not even weights, except... no, there is something pinning her legs in place. She looks down to see a tangle of messy golden hair flopped across the covers over her knees. And the Imperial Princess sleeping beneath it.

Bella whips her head around first this way and then that, eyes darting around for signs of other people in the room. Some sort of trap. But there's nobody here except Dany, with her exhausted face made innocent again by the spell of sleep cast upon her, and the ridiculous squish of her cheek where she'd slipped on top of Bella's kneecap probably an hour or more before. Dumbass.

But here. Here still. Holding onto her, carrying her up into the skies, kissing her for luck until all the monsters had disappeared, and now... Here. Bella's fingers press into each other for long minutes, worrying at her knuckles or brushing against her lips or doing anything at all other than sitting still, or touching the one thing on this whole stupid ship that they really want to. She watches the princess' rhythmic breathing with a hunger in her eyes that can't be hidden anymore. After so many years, maybe not ever again. But in any case right now, there's no one to hide it from. So she sits. And she watches. And Redana sleeps.

She doesn't realize she's doing it, at first. There's so much to focus on that her own hands don't really matter for shit, do they? After the endless boredom of the Yakanov she's forgotten how to stop herself from filling quiet moments with little games, little chores, little projects. Just to do something. But the feeling of Redana's hair in her fingers is so soft that it pulls all of her attention to what she's doing, and once it's there how could she ever focus on anything else?

On Tellus, she wore special gloves to hide her mutilated fingers from the Princess. Over and over and over again, Dany had asked about them. And over and over and over again, Bella had answered that they were tools to help fight tangles. She wore a lot of tools over her fingers, come to think. Scrapers to smooth away oil from the skin before a wrestling match. Small blades for clipping split ends. Absorbent cloth to wipe away water and grime so that her princess would always look her best. It was stupid, every time. None of it was a match for the power of her hands.

Over, down, around, and through. The memory of a shared childhood guides Bella's fingers through one of the most complicated braids in her repertoire. The one she tied for Dany every time something bad or scary happened to the two of them. When Her Majesty had harsh words for her daughter, this was the braid she wove to make the Princess strong. When a test loomed over her, this was the look that would let her throw herself at the examination like a warrior. Hundreds of times, she's pulled these locks into this shape. She could do it with her eyes closed. Only she won't, because that would mean not seeing the girl who ran away. Maybe she'd mistake her for someone else, given the impossibility of it all.

Her fingers run out of work to do. With it comes an unpleasant tightness in Bella's chest. Her stomach feels filled with lead. But the great loops of hair are tied into the fine, tight plaits of the prettiest fishtail braid Bella knows how to tie. Even with her dirty clothes and the smudges and burns all over her face, Redana looks regal again. Every bit the princess she's supposed to be. Bella's teeth clench. Her fists wind tight enough to rip out clumps of hair, if she hadn't caught herself in the nick of time. Every breath in this place tastes staler than the one before it.

It's the bed. She's been here too long, however much time it's actually been. That's what it is. But she waits, even still. She watches for Redana's eyes to open, thinks about what she might say. Maybe she could open with a smile. Her intestines writhe like serpents inside of her. Her body pulls taut and rigid from her neck down to her toes. Bella flicks her fingers through the empty air, watching what claws she still has slicing through the air.

Fucking dumbasses. She snarls and slips her legs out from under Redana. She watches the most beautiful face in the world slump against the dingy sheets. Like finding pirate treasure tucked inside a napkin. She rolls her eyes and lifts Dany off the chair she's been stubbornly plastered to, and lies her in the bed. Your turn to rest, idiot.

Dany's lips open as she's moved. She mumbles something, and Bella freezes. For luck, she said. For luck. For a thousand different times she'd let a little debt build up, and now, and now, and now...

Breath swallowing breath. The heat of two pairs of lips, wet and begging for a tongue to brush them. The feeling of bodies that want only to press so tight together that they absorb each other. Two becoming one. Bella hesitates, a whisker away from the kiss she's dreamed of since the first time she saw those lips smiling at her. Her body turns to ice.

She turns, and runs instead. If only there was somewhere left to go.

*********

Bella's legs are soaked up to her shins. She's not even found the deepest part of the pool yet. Crabs snip at her priestess robes (the only outfit that belongs to her on the entire ship) as she passes by. Cold and clammy and uninviting. Everything is death and salt. Everything is misery and doubt and fear. Everything is tentacles, paranoia, and whispers.

For some reason it feels like home.

"...All this time they've been running from me in this? Fuck me, the Empress could cut me in half for failing her and it'd be less than I deserve. This. Seriously, this?! What the fuck have you been doing, Dany? Do you not have a single dipshit in your entire misfit brigade who knows how to clean up? Gods."

A wet tearing sound echoes through the sloshing water and empty halls. Bella lifts the battlecrab that had dared to claw the back of her skirt open up out of the water and squeezes until she feels the carapace start to splinter in her grip.

"Try it again! Just fucking try! Next one of you gargling little shits even thinks about it, I'm gonna turn this whole damn ship into a pot and boil the lot of you! Test me. Try it again. I dare you."

Had it been any other opponent, the sharpness of her words could only do so much to cover the awkward way she pulls her legs together, or the bushing of her tail. Gods, what an awful place. Gods, but isn't it exactly what she deserves.

...Gods, why does it remind her so much of Tellus?

Huntresses of Hybrasil

The head of the Gods-Smiting Whip pivots to point its cameras at its own shattered arm. If lifts that arm up and pulls its fingers into a fist one by one, testing how many of the individual servos and signal transmitters remained functional through the damage. One... on and a half fingers' worth. Her tails detach from either side of the arm, shuddering as they hover from the tremendous amount of power that just routed through them. They almost seem droopy as they glide back to their neutral positions behind the main body.

"...I see."

Mirror pivots the trident in her mech's good arm and, pivoting on a dime, lobs it high into the air. A moment later her ambush-tails come rocketing back to her, and she snatches one out of the sky without turning to check her position. All of her focus is on Valentina de Alcard and the Lonely Star.

"Compensating for lost power and combat capabilities. Get it right this time."

She takes the tail and rams it through the hole in Nine-Tails' arm, which sends bits of armor plating crumbling to the ground below. There's a nauseating screech in the air as she rips open several more connectors to make room for this bizarre addition, until after one horrifying moment she finally sees the hand shut down completely and go limp. A twist of the arm, a sharp thrust toward the ground: with a rush of blue light, the lodged tail fires an unfocused burst of light from both ends of its rifle-like structure. The light show flickers and extends into the shape of a massive kite. With a new shower of sparks it transforms, now a solid thing of raw light and power. No longer an arm, but a shield.

Utter disaster. She rockets forward with her arm extended out in front of her, twisting at odd angles as she flies to stay out of the direct path of that deadly barrel as it winds back up for what would surely be the victory shot from this range. Utter, utter disaster. This shield functionality was what she originally meant to test in the first place, it's why she baited the shot. She simply hadn't considered the possibility that she wouldn't finish the configuration sequence in time. She planned for a full power burst, she wanted it... she'd caught her mouth on the barbs of her own pole.

Sequence one: shield slam. No more room for error. She entered this fight as a scientist, fought like a scientist, and then very nearly died like one. A prideful opponent. She'd expected patience, an opportunistic mindset. The sort of guileless cleverness you found in someone skilled enough to solve puzzles by slicing them in half, but then let that make them forget how to do it the more useful way. Somehow the reality of the woman in front of her was even cuter than that. Well, know what's good balm for an injured pride? A demonstration of the skill that gave her the space to conduct tests like this in the first place.

"Enemy targeting array: offline. Initiating close combat sequence, type three."

What follows is a demonstration. What follows is a dance. What follows is a lesson in what happens when you fight someone who has studied the properties of neural mesh much more diligently than you have. The Gods-Smiting Whip slides smoothly through the river and pops up underneath the Lonely Star. It kicks both feet into the riverbed and whips its shield-hand up into the face plate of the enemy mecha, and then lifts with its back to force the Lonely Star up into the air.

A flurry of punches and kicks. She pauses, poses, as if smiling, and in that precise moment her trident comes hurtling back down from the heavens. She catches it perfectly. Now her shield batters the colossal length of that deadly rifle first this way and that, and every time the momentum of the strike carries her off step she lights a thruster and spins around to slash with her beam weapon. She takes one arm, then the next. A leg. The chest, the stomach, the chest again. And again. And again.

Every strike looks brutal to the cameras, there is no doubt. And the damage she causes is readily apparent. Her whirlwind cuts the Lonely Star's fighting capability in half without so much as needing a napkin to confirm the math on. But these strikes are calculated much more precisely than that. Where Nine-Tails strikes, it does so with an eye for how Valentina's mesh suit in her own control rig will respond to the shocks. Hard enough to trigger a sensory mute, but careful not to let any one strike numb her completely.

This is a form of dance that Mirror has tested extensively. A thousand hours of training to create this one specific skill, shown only to worthy opponents with superior talents of their own. Valentina's world is transformed into a song of teasing fang bites and flicking swords. Slicing off her armor, piece by piece. Exposing her. Admiring her. And in the spaces where she's bared, the shield touches her and sends waves of energy rippling through the Lonely Star that her suit will interpret similarly to fingers on her skin. Touching. Caressing. Squeezing. Pinching.

It's over. The only question is how dignified her opponent is in defeat. The Gods-Smiting Whip pins the Lonely Star in among the rocks of the riverbed, pressing its lithe frame against the torso of the TC mecha, slowly sliiiiiiding along it with a shower of sparks and a scraping of paint. Her shield arm is planted deep into the earth, and her weapon arm is bend impossibly behind her, pointing that trident straight at the cockpit. Half threat, but half invitation.

"Well fought, Little Warrior," Mirror purrs over the public comms, "Would you like your reward now, or later?"

Floating behind her, seven tail modules spread out in undulating patterns. They ripple in what might be amusement or might be pride. The tip of each pivots toward the Lonely Star, and gleams with the promise of untold pleasure. The kind that only comes from submission.

[Fight w/ Daring: 9. Mirror flirts and takes a string, and seizes superior position]

Breathless Dead

What happened? She must have closed her eyes without realizing it. There had been a moment, she was sure of it, when she was flying. Held. Kissing. Falling. Hunger and terror and desperate passion pulled her down into the depths of a pair of lips that had haunted her dreams since she was a teenager, and then... what happened? She had meant to take in the whole scene herself. She was supposed to drink in every fraction of every second and burn it into her memory so that however long she had left to live, this at least would stay with her.

But there had still been work to do. The great beast who had once been the Master of Assassins was still roaring in her ears the entire time. An invincible opponent. An immortal opponent. But all she could remember is the sensation of falling, and now... it's as if the hydra never existed. The storm that marked the excellence of her preparation and her prayers, gone but for an arc of soft light in a prism of colors as if to mourn its passing. The battlefield that proved her dominance and terror is gone as well. Something happened. She can't remember closing her eyes. But one instant turned into the next and the entire world had transformed with it.

All that's left is... a garden. Not the kind that Sagakhan was so proud of, the wilting land of death and terror that she tended so obsessively for so long. This was a proper garden, like... no. Not like Redana's little paradise in the Tellurian palace at all. For the first time in her life, Bella's memories fall short of the reality around her. The colors here are more vibrant and beautiful than anything the Imperial miracles could conjure back home. The petals flutter more softly and more perfectly, turning the swirls of the gentle zephyr into a physical thing she can watch with her eyes, a dance of pinks and whites and yellows. The smell is sweet. So bewitching and wonderful that it makes her mouth water, and not even the passing bounty of Demeter on the Yakanov can rise to match it.

If... if there could only be a butterfly or two, this would be paradise. She might ask for music, too, piped softly into the air to help her Princess focus on her reading. She'd sing herself, but she. She can't. Remember any songs just now. The desire flutters out of her as nothing more than nonsense humming, and the magic of the gods is that to her softly twitching ears it sounds melodious and sweet. Somehow she's captured every lullaby and masterpiece she's ever known inside this ridiculous crooning.

Bella falls silent a moment later. It hurts. Singing hurts. Breathing hurts. But, the way it hurts is unlike anything she's ever known. This must be what Beautiful felt like when she was jabbed through with that needle carrying the Lethe. The hot stab and the burning feeling of something sticky and pervasive, like sap, and then... peace. The inevitability of it all is soothing, somehow. She sighs. She doesn't want her body to shut down like this. She doesn't want her body to stop feeling anything. Not when the sensations were finally the thing she had been dreaming about for her entire life.

She drags her arm up as high as it will go. Her fingers clumsily paw at Redana's face. Even in this perfect garden, she can't help but smear that perfect face with blood. Typical. But she can't bring herself to care. The feeling of her skin is soft and warm. If she wrapped her hand in Her Imperial Majesty's finest silks it wouldn't compare half so well to the wonder of this stupid girl's skin. Finally, she finds her grip. She squeezes, harder than she means to, to hold on. Her touch is so light it might not be noticeable at all. Bella laughs: a shaky, breathy, weak noise. Her grin is lopsided and exhausted.

"I... finally... caught you. Princess. Now you... can't..."

Ha. What a joke. All the weight of Bella's body slumps forward unsupported by any meager power she might have left inside her. Only Redana keeps her from dropping into the garden and sinking beneath the flowers like the rest of the dead and dying. Already, she can't even feel the sensation of being held. Being supported. All that's left is that calm inevitability. But that's ok. That's... ok. It's enough to see it with her eyes. It's enough to know it happened. Even if only once, before the end.

This is what she deserves. So many of the bodies here were names on her list. Murder was forbidden. No higher law existed in the Empire. Her secret purpose was no excuse, not now after she'd discarded her own flesh and denied her own transformation into Artemis. She had brought only death and misery with her on this journey, and the list of names stretched so far beyond the ones they'd asked of her. Lanterns, Kaeri, Magos and Coherents both. King Jas'o and the frenzied queen of Ceron. That pirate woman. She can't even remember the name.

Ivory Smile. Mynx. Oh, Mynx. If you were... if you could... no. It's too late. Her eyes are already falling shut, no matter how hard she wills them open again. Her head feels so heavy. The last memory of Sagakhan, her mother, swims through Bella's veins. Dragging her down, and down, and down again, until surely even Redana won't be able to hold her up anymore. After so much wishing for it, now it is finally time to die. Or perhaps some miracle will come to save her? She would shrug, if only she could. It doesn't matter. If she takes one more breath or one million, it doesn't matter. She will be a corpse or she will be a prisoner, and she'll deserve it either way. So much pain. So much misery.

And for what? In the end, she hadn't managed a single damn thing. That was the thing that really made her want to laugh, if she could just manage it right now. After all her effort and frantic scrambling, after every plan and scheme and choice, after each close call and bloody toll... she'd only wound up in the same place she would've anyway.

If she'd just.

Gone along.

In the first place.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Something most people don't understand about puzzles is that they are actually weapons. The ultimate weapons, in fact. The faster you solve them the harder they hit, especially in warfare. Technically speaking this arena-level play fighting wasn't that, but the principle applied in equal measure to kittens testing the sharpness of their precious little teeth on each other's ears as it did to holding back a Zaldarian battle line. Information was power. Data was a sword and a shield. If you understood the nature of your opponent's strike, then...

"Evasive maneuvers, shifting power to left leg rear thrusters. Flip and flop, run and drop, as they say."

The first strike was irrelevant. The second was largely immaterial as well. The Gods-Smiting Whip bent at an impossible angle: one leg dangling in the air as if broken while the other drags the main back down toward the canopy in the direction of the river bed. The blast from the Lonely Star is enormous, more than powerful enough to puncture Mirror's frame clean through if it landed a direct hit. But Valentina's aim was perfect, which is to say incomplete. She led her shot to compensate for humanoid reflexes, humanoid movement capabilities. When Nine-Tails moved like a machine it converted a kill shot into so much superheated air.

"Excellent! Very well done, Milady!"

That was the proper way to speak to human nobility, right? The Consortium's society was enormously complex and consisted of a frankly nonsensical crisscross of ladders with ascending and descending hierarchy that seemed immune to common sense adjustments for familiarity and physical closeness. They each had social roles (defined as birth traits? Bizzare.) and defaulted to the assumption that everyone they met would automatically treat with them with according levels of respect or disrespect depending on myriad cues they simply refused to signal. It was even possible, though unlikely, that Valentina de Alcard was not qualified 'nobility' at all, in which case Mirror was committing a major taboo just now. But then, to what purpose was the designation if the visitors to a planet weren't afforded the distinction?

Well, that would be a puzzle for the Kiss and Cry, she supposed. In the meantime she made a spiraling dive for the tree cover, twisting out of the way of a second shot that was only slightly less accurate than it needed to be. Oh, beautiful calibration! She'd figured out the nature of the movement in just one demonstration! Mirror couldn't have asked for a more fun playmate to open her time in the arena with. It was only a shame they were operating on such different layers of the same puzzle together.

"Target lock acquired. Synchronization levels holding. Stabilizing. Destruction rains from the heavens."

The Gods-Smiting Whip takes the river, landing in a three point stance on its right knee as it plunges the beam trident into the rocky riverbed with a rush of boiling water and the soft shuddering of earth accepting a temporary scar. Just as it crashes, tails one and two unleash a barrage of energy bursts from their original position in the canopy above.

The first clips the side of the Lonely Star's giant weapon barrel. The second passes a whisker's breath away from its face plate. The next twenty two are total chaos. Rocks split clean in half as gleaming coal-like embers and dirt sprays in every which direction as shock after shock after shock of energy churns it up and spits it in the air like a great beast crawled out from mythology itself. The air turns to muddy steam that's quickly whipped into a whirlwind by the pattern of extreme heating and cooling happening to the poor air all over. But this level of assault is only sustainable for a few brief moments. The tails slink quietly down toward the ground, out of sight. The wind dissipates.

And the Lonely Star is completely untouched. Not a single shot fired from the entire barrage did more than mar its paint job a teeny little playful bit here and there, like cutting little scraps of clothing from a duelist to show your admiration in a much more ancient sort of ritual. Instead, Mirror has carved patterns into the ground on every side of her opponent. She's painted the Lonely Star into a box and dotted the entire thing with stylized heart symbols. As if that was the entire point of the exercise.

Nine-Tails rises to its full height, as two more tails float off of its back and seem to lock onto the mech's left forearm. It lifts its trident to the skies.

"I want to commend you for your choice of positioning. You claimed your territory with the precision I would expect from a huntress, I can't pay you any higher compliment than that. All the same, I'm sorry. I need a favor from you, cutie! See, my Nine Drive System is missing a lot of combat data. Data I need to finish it, understand? Of course you understand, good girl! So if you wouldn't mind..."

Mirror smashes her trident against Nine-Tails' forearm with an explosion of multicolored sparks. She settles into a deep stance and braces for impact, raising the arm like a shield in front of her.

"Full power, please. And don't forget to aim~"

[Defy Disaster: 5]

Breathless Dead

Since the day she'd had the Auspex implanted, it had always shown her where to go. Omn had called it the Golden Path - a series of pulses of light that flitted across her vision even when she shut her eyes, always leading her across the fastest, most efficient path from one place to another. The more attention she paid it, the more details unfolded across her vision. She could will it into faint, ignorable specks or make it open a pattern so specific it told her exactly where, when, and how to place her feet to unerringly bring her victory. Or if nothing else, opportunity.

Bella is focusing now. One. Two. Three steps, and that's all there is. Just three steps. She turns her head, looking above and to every side. She frantically spins around, still holding Redana's wrist, but the terrible hydra is all she finds waiting behind her. Three steps, into the middle of this strange, awful hole. And then nothing. She feels ice fall into the pit of her stomach. No, but of course. There's no longer victory to be had. Her opponent is an immortal monster. Her mother. So this is where the eye of Hermes was leading her this entire time. Her mouth turns drier than the desert this planet used to be, and all her tongue can taste on the air is ash.

She'd been running from death since almost the moment she was born. Starvation and torture at the hands of the Kennel Master, or the hideous fate that waited for her inside the dark confines of the box. The humid, fetid bogs and jungles festering inside the Eater of Worlds. The dark and claustrophobic openness of the lonely floating grave called the Yakanov. In the end she fled from every single one. No god terrified her more than Hades, whose priest she was forced to murder. Whose priest she failed to save. Even now, with death a certainty ahead of and behind her, a cowardly servitor finds no hero's nobility quickening in her veins. Her heart pounds frantically against her fate. Too little, too late. The lord of the dead stands there waiting. A shovel over his shoulder. And three steps left to her for the rest of her life.

Two. She's long since run out of bile to cough up. Venom eats away her strength and replaces it with the sensation of ten thousand needle teeth clamping down around her insides with powerful jaws to guide them. Skin and organs split, and blood leaks internally. She can feel it pooling in her arm. Come on, is this really how she's gonna go out? She chokes back a scream, but it dribbles out as a whimper. No closure. No happy ending. Just the conclusion of her misery; the proof that she was first and only a wicked monster. No matter how hard she tried to be anything else. Too many sins to count, Bella. Pay up. You did save your coins to pay for the ferry, right? Or was even Tartarus too good for her, compared with eternity trapped inside the close and crushing dark?

One. This is it. The time she has to say goodbye. To say I... to tell Redana the words etched across her heart. To burden her princess with one last thing before the end. Or perhaps, one last chance to redeem herself. The Auspex is the eye of Hermes. The path must be telling her to stand her ground here. In falling, she could save Redana's life. That wouldn't... be so bad. Maybe then, at least, the gods would forgive her for this life she lived so impiously. If only she'd learned how to pray. She glances around one more time. No steps. No Apollo with his insufferable eternal smile. No Artemis in her crisp moonlight suits. No Hera to squeeze strength into her shoulders. Just a cigarette, where Aphrodite used to be. And Hades, all alone.

Bella squeezes Redana's wrist as tightly as she can. It's time you idiot, let her go! The ember of that cigarette butt burns as hot as any star. She twists her fingers deep into the skin, trying to claw herself free only--

Only she'd given up her claws. XIII's claws. And nobody trusted Bella with her talons anymore. Her heartbeat stumbles. Bella feels herself fall as if from a great height, tumbling over and over again into herself without her feet ever leaving the ground. Why? Why, why, why? Why had they taken her claws from her? What did she do to deserve mutilation like this? What did that little girl do wrong to deserve so much pain? Sagakhan had told her it was all to grow her perfected body, but that was already rotting into the sands. So. Then. What if?

Was it... for this?

"Redana, what the fuck are you dooIInG?!"

Bella's feet leave the ground. Her arm is pinned between hers and Redana's bodies, and the only thing she can think to do with the other is throw it tight around the Princess' shoulder and cling. No more steps. There are no more steps for her to take. No more steps, and nothing to do, except be held. And then be kissed.

She feels the warmth of Redana's lips as they press indelicately against hers. Her tongue tastes blood, and for once Bella has no desire to spit it out. She feels no nausea, even as her mouth finds the corner of Redana's that's been split almost entirely open and she's forced to contemplate the texture of a wound on her palate. She holds her eyes open, so she sees Redana's close. It's a private moment that belongs only to her. Their tongues dance, and the expression that paints Redana's face is... relief. Fire roars hot to replace the ice inside her stomach. Hades recedes farther, and farther, and farther away as two children of Tellus take to the sky as if on wings.

Bella is still watching her princess when she opens her eyes again. 'For luck', she says. Moron! Idiot! Stupid dipshit royal dumbass!! Heat colors Bella's cheeks as a fresh surge of pain crawls up through her chest. She snarls as she watches the ground pass below. She clings to Redana to try and hide a coughing fit.

"You still read," she sputters, "Too many fucking stories."