Tatterdemalion

Fellowship: The Heart

RESPONSE LEVEL: 5

***

Lucien!

Whoever made this place (if it was made at all, and not just spat up from the depths of the Heart fully formed; if it is not some trap, designed by a blind idiot predator to lure delicious adventurers inside) was really interested in three things: books, squids, and books being held by squids. The motif is everywhere; verdigrised tentacles weave their way between damp, overstuffed shelves, and vast beaks loom above doorways.

There was also an infestation of giant, barnacle-infested crabs. Emphasis on was; their mottled shells lie broken on the ground, each one easily half the size of you, crushed and corroded. Someone fought their way through here.

There are signs that the stacks have been rifled through, now that you’re looking more closely. Books lie discarded everywhere, though here and there are neat stacks, carefully aligned: The Cup of Fortune; The Cricketer’s Cup; Cuprum Tools of the Meronni; Owl Be Back: The Daring Adventures of Lucien Roue, Continued. Wait, what was that last?

You pick it up and flip through it idly: it ends with Lucien Roue walking up a stairway in the Tyrian Spire, setting off a trap, taking a holy pie to the face, and falling down the stairs screaming through a burning throat and trying to claw off his skin until an errant spur of weathered stone breaks his spine.

...charming!

There is an epilogue in which the Vainglorious Witch, the Drowned Seeker, the Promised Conductor and the Grail Questor set your body out on a spur of driftwood and set it alight from afar.

And that’s when the terrible, terrible noise comes from below.

***

Ailee!

When you pull Jackdaw up from the water, she’s too heavy. Dangerously so, in fact. But you put your back into it and haul her up into your arms. She feels like she’s made of lead. Waterlogged or not, she can’t be this heavy.

Though, really, thinking about it, this isn’t that bad. You were worried, like, a shark made out of trash would burst out of the water and try to tear your head off. More stupid parlor tricks from a stupid garbage goddess.

When Sasha runs, you’re pulled back onto the shore without a hitch, right up until Sasha hits a hard stop.

***

Coleman!

It’s something like a lobster, but put back together wrong, and with quite a few replacement parts. It’s the size of Sasha and then some, and it exploded up out of a hole in the floor, dragging its exoskeleton along the wet tiles. Exoskeleton, armor, shell— it has something fastened all around it, splintering rotten wood and cannons and salt-swollen ropes.

It fires a cannonade that brings Sasha down to one knee, a barrage of fire from one side of its body, belching out acrid smoke. It opens its mouth, showing a nightmare throat full of pincers and spines (so that fish or kobolds can’t swim back up and out) and screams: a terribly, horrifically person sound. Those eyes, too, rolling and crying thick salty tears— each and every one of them is a person’s eye.

Take Damage.

The Wreck

Rotten Armor — if the Wreck retreats inside its shell, it cannot take damage or suffer Cuts unless the shell is destroyed.

Wet Powder And Hateful — if the shell is destroyed, there will be a massive earth-shattering kaboom, causing extreme damage both personal and environmental. The Wreck will, miraculously, be unscathed.

Claws That Catch — the Wreck is Melee, Dangerous, and can snap anything between its claws.

Breathless Dead

Redana is watching the winds. Even the warning of Hades himself must slowly sink in through her consciousness; her mind is swirling magenta and indigo. Her gold cascades down behind the port in her helmet, the end of her hair knotting into a thick sapphire knot counterbalancing the wreath of lilies. Even holding out her hand into the gale threatens to unbalance her; if she throws herself heedlessly across, the winds will steal her away. She is not afraid. It is a different sort of hesitation: am I ready? Have I seen enough? Have I missed something? Yes, thank you, Auspex, it is fast. She could hardly notice.

"I'll be careful," she says, but she doesn't think through what it means to be careful. If she was being particularly careful, she might invite the Nemean to interpose herself; to become, for a moment, that towering amazon, confident and strong and effortlessly heroic. But it means more if she does this herself. "I can do this." This time, Mother... this time, Hades will understand. She can do this. She can do this. Throw herself against the headwind, let it shove her into place, roll on the shoulder... she tucks the plug into her belt. It will be both a lifeline and a way to keep her hands free.

For a moment, she rests the hand of her thoughts on the stovetop of Bella, looking up at her while she balances on the athletic beam, smiling so bright. You can do it, princess! I believe in you! And she had done it, first try: she had dashed down the beam, caught the rings hanging from the ceiling, vaulted onto the climbing wall... "I'm sorry," she murmurs to the Bella in her memory. Memory Bella doesn't hear her; she keeps clapping, hopping up and down with glee, looking up at her for once, smiling so happily. "If Bella was here, she'd tell me to be careful, too. And she'd be hopping from paw to paw, and telling me how the dust is actually a health hazard, so maybe we should find another way around. But she's an itsy bitsy scaredy-cat, isn't she?"

The howling of the wind is the only answer. There's no squeak or stammer, no blush and no Bella telling her that she'll get in trouble if you're a daredevil, Dany, I mean, Milady... there's just the wind, and the mourning howl that makes a shiver run through her limbs, because she can hear the pain. Someone, out there, in the wind, is hurting so big that it fills up the whole world. She peers out as far as she dares, but doesn't see the mourner. "Besides, Dany, what would you even do to help them? You need to get the Plover working before you can help anybody."

She backs up, licks her lips, braces one heel against the spot where two tiles meet. Then she lunges forward, leaps-- and activates her mag harness once she's past the point of no return. Even if the wind tosses her away, she'll end up pinned to something that she can climb down from, and that should stop her from having a sliding landing. The harness will keep her steady. A perfect plan.

[8 on Overcome. My pitch: the only reason she makes it is because her gloves and boots are designed for grip in situations just like this; marking one use of her Spacer's Uniform.]

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

Jason!

This scene is fucked. You’ve got a general idea of what interacting with a superhero is supposed to be like; you were a freshie when the aliens showed up, after all. They save you. If they get the shit kicked out of them, they tell you it’s not that bad, worry about yourself. You stuck your neck out for the Great Betrayer, the person who was scheming with the Annunaki the whole time, and you’ve heard the only reason she’s moonlighting now is because they screwed her over back, and, like, that’s not noble, that’s just getting even. And here she is curling up into a ball and your heart’s still going seven million miles an hour.

You’d almost, you know, convinced yourself that you were cool. The sweaty palms you could ignore. The cold feeling of dread you could shove to the side. All you had to do was win the gladiator fight. They might even have mercy on you if you won one fight, or was it three?

“I could have taken it,” you blurt out. It’s seductively easy to blame her for the horror leaking back into you. You could have died! You could have died! “Nice job fucking it up like always. Cool to see you’re still finding new and exciting ways to ruin things for everybody, I guess.”

You toss your sword at the wall and flinch when it bounces back and skitters on the floor.

***

Marianne!

Jerioth flops into your arms like the catch of the day. It’s instinctual and almost effortless to shift and make sure the force of impact ends up distributed across her body, rather than dangerously concentrating anywhere— especially with that useless, gaudy jewelry hanging from her head. Someone should take those. They’d make good souvenirs.

“Grrrrfff, glllrrmph!” She weakly pants out further complaints and dire curses upon you and your whole family, each and every one completely incomprehensible, and the deeper she digs, the more helpless she feels, the more her eyes start to widen and her chest to heave. If she had her voice, it would be as easy as pie for her to order that troll to crush you. As it is, it’s looking at you with those dull, glowing amber eyes.

What’s the plan, Marianne? Was it to cow the cow, to make sure Jerioth understands what the consequences of saying one word off-script will be? Or was it to go and daringly fetch her little Shalomit, too? Or, perhaps, to offer the troll freedom and a weapon with which to rampage?

***

Mra’al!

The pain breaks your concentration; thoughts come flooding back in as your mane flattens. You’re lying on the floor, and your back throbs, your ribs screech and burn. This little girl, this child has claws. And what sort of huntress does that make you? You burn with shame, with anger.

Your Inquisitor trusts you! She hand-raised you! She shares her food with you, and this is how you repay her: you play with your food and damage the holy armor she arrays about you.

You roll to your knees, see that you have destroyed the windows of the djinn’s eyes; red-hot wrath fills you. You have failed! You have caused destruction to this most holy device! If you had been faster, this wouldn’t have happened. You surge forwards, a bola in your left hand and your rod in your right—

And then you hear your Inquisitor’s whistle. Keep her here, then. That’s the inflection.

Mra’al

AFRAID
[X] ANGRY
GUILTY

• Act with primal, thoughtless perfection
• Make a sudden, decisive entrance or exit
• Make them feel like prey
• Spring a trap

***

Set!

It is time to go to the rendezvous point, because ops here are busted. You managed to send the Lynx hurtling into the monitors: unfortunate, but not like you could have done anything else. Now there’s not much more info you can get from here.

Also: because you just heard an Annunaki signal, and she’s gone from trying to catch the mouse to trying to cut you off. If you take your eyes off her for a moment, if you don’t make this a very smooth portaling out, there will be Trouble, and that is a promise. She’s spinning a pair of bolas, and those hurt when they wrap around a limb or two; if they slam into your head, you might even black out.

Breathless Dead

"All is hushed / all is hushed / for the song of Orpheus..."
- Ashes Ohvan, "Fragment for the Underworld."

***

A shiver runs through Redana, her skin pricking as a silence fills her up. She embraces that silence, the one hiding behind ordinary silences, and lets go of the grips on the controls. She leans forward and feels the shiver on the back of her neck as she watches the slow eddies of fragmented, twisted debris. Flotsam and jetsam. She never remembers which is which, but she loved saying those words while she read to her purring bedmate, a better solace at night than any stuffed lion. Flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shore of Cloudcuckooland, and with them came November, missing her shoe and her way...

The colors seep inside her. The impossible violet of the gun barrels, against the mottled slate of void-scarred adamantium. The cold blue and indigo of the... oh, what's the scientific name? The whale trails. Poseidon's paints. The sapphire crystals that drift by, each one glinting where the light of distant stars catches them. The silence grows to fill every part of her, and her eyes water with the force of it. She stares. Every scene, every detail, needs to be etched down inside of her. This is what is wordlessly demanded of her by something so, so much vaster and more meaningful than her. So what if she's a hero? Some things are much, much bigger than heroes. This is less than a fraction of a percent of the wonders that the universe holds, and what is she in comparison to this?

How can something be so meaningful without having a meaning? How can something be so important without being made? How can she be expected to go back to Tellus and rule over cramped tenement buildings and starving servitors in alleyways and issue permits for acceptable genetic modifications that do not dilute the essence of humanity when this would go unbeheld? How could Mother limit humanity to subculture wars and silly shirts when...

She's crying, now, soundlessly. Her elbows are pressed up against the glass, and her eyes are wide, but not wide enough. They need to see. They need to see everything. She needs to be able to rise to the implicit challenge, the command, the roaring need for this to be acknowledged. It is alive, the whole and totality of it, a living thing made up of unliving things, a genius loci, and her perception of it is what causes it to stir in its sleep. It was always waiting for her to be here, in this moment, shivering and crying because it is beautiful and alone and nobody was here to see it, and if she goes back, then this will still be here, forever, unseen. And that cannot be so. No, it should not be so.

By the time the Plover shakes with the impact of one of the vast iron-bound chests of plunder and tribute, gathered by violence and tossed free by violence, Redana has stopped crying. She's wiped her eyes and sat back in her seat and taken up the grips with trembling fingers, still overwhelmed by seeing the genius loci, but able to activate the thrusters. Sputtering, shaking, the Plover course corrects ever so slightly; it would be a waste to fly all the way into the Vespine's wound, carved into its helm, when she will need delicate handling inside its vast hallways. Each passage she floats down is shaped like a hexagon, with broken mirror tiles on every side; in its heyday, it must have looked like a glimpse of infinity.

She drifts lazily into the hangar, and sets the Plover down carefully as close as she dares. Pop the plug's hatch; pull the helmet out from under the seat and pull it over her head; smooth down the seals built into her clothing that keep the chill out. And then she swings the hatch open and steps out into that abandoned cathedral, silent save for the almost imperceptible rumble of the still-beating heart. She crosses herself in a silent measure of thanks to Hermes, and then takes the plug in both hands and begins the march to the port.

Fellowship: The Heart

Jackdaw!

in the great grey room
there was a train engine
and a green ribbon
and a picture of--
the academy tower at dusk
and there were disappointments sitting on chairs
and two drifting kittens
and a pair of mistakes
and a little toy house
and a brash little mouse
and your parents' expectations for your life
and a quiet old name who was whispering: "hush"

goodnight room
goodnight moon
goodnight academy tower
goodnight light
and the green ribbon
goodnight disappointments
goodnight chairs
goodnight kittens
and goodnight mistakes
goodnight little house
and goodnight mouse
goodnight parents
and goodnight expectations

goodnight nobody

goodnight life

and goodnight to the name who is whispering: "hush"

goodnight stars
goodnight air

goodnight sorrows everywhere

***

Team Heart!

Sasha bellows her happiness with a toot of her horn and surges up onto the makeshift pier that once was a landing on the great ballroom stairs. Books tremble beneath her, but she's up and at 'em! Congratulations, all of you successfully made it: Coleman, Sasha, Lucien and Ailee! Now's the time to cheer!

...

Hold up.

Jackdaw is back out in the water, and she's floating. She's floating face-down. Did she fall out? Is she the price that the Flood demands? Questions swirl about, but the fact of it is: Jackdaw's out there, and her coat should be dragging her down, but she's floating almost peacefully.

Taking from the Flood, again, will doom you to disaster. The reasonable thing, the sane thing to do is to leave Jackdaw to float and bob until she slips silently beneath the water. That's how you survive in the Heart. Take her back, and there will be disaster; there will be a reckoning; all that you have done thus far will be child's play.

And you will all be, just a little bit, more like creatures that can survive in the Heart.

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

Shelomit!

“AS-TER-EE-ON!!” Flesh, striking on flesh; ragged cries from perfumed lips; stamping heels and a wave of delight. You are drunk and delighted and The Destroyer’s fist shattered the drink alcove; sapphire wine spills out, pooling in the tile-lines (whatever they’re called) and turning your head. “AS-TER-EE-ON!!” Watching her unleash everything she’s got at this new challenger is better than being high; the angles twist your brain to watch, and you cling unsteadily to your BFF, Debrah. “AS-TER-EE-ON!!”

Then, all of a sudden, The Destroyer screams, grabbing at her Berserker Collar, and guards start swarming her in the arena. “Your excellence,” a snotty little Lynx in Marduki red says to you. “We’re evacuating the gardens on suspicion of—“

“Shut up,” you say, and shove him backwards. He crumples down the stairs. “ASTEREEON,” you shout at the arena. “Win! Beat them up!”

The Lynx’s Thornback— there was more than one? She puts her unworthy little branches on you. You backhand her, head thumping full of wine, and then get distracted as someone on the other side of the arena throws an entire cooler of white sunrise and spirits onto the diamond, all of them already on fire. Yes! Fire! In honor of The Destroyer!

“Let The Destroyer fight,” Debrah screams, and breaks a bottle over the Thornback’s head.

***

Canada!

Oh. You’re not dead.

There was a moment when you thought, maybe, this time, you actually were, when Asterion lifted you off the ground and suplexed you head-first and you thought, wow, the ground is coming at me really fast—

And now you’re staring at the top of an elevator. The roof? Or is that on the outside? Regardless, you’ll be fine in a minute, now that your brain’s not being pounded into guilty pieces. Just need a quick breather.

Somebody else is in here, too. From the vague shape in your peripherals, and the sound of their shaky breath that’s going to become crying in a minute, it’s not Asterion.

And that’s when the elevator jerks to a halt. “All non-essential services are on temporary lockdown,” Caphtor cheerfully lilts through a speaker. “Like... please wait for us to handle, you know, the problem?”

***

Mra’al!

Hunt! Your spinal mane stands on end; your mind is a white-hot claw. Your ancestors hunted great horned, tusked beasts on the broad savannahs so that you, in this moment, could fulfill your holy purpose. A shield slips over conscious thought like a vestigial eyelid; you react faster than thought, following the commands of your body.

There is a peace, here, without thought, without awareness. A holy emptiness. Your rod is a part of your body; you use it to push off a viewscreen and rake your claws where the prey will be. She reorients, in time by a fractional second, and fires at your face; you snap your arm into place and let the blast resound from you, then duck out of the way of the shot returning. Clever tricks! You are clever too.

Your own escalation is instinct; your unconscious mind knows your armaments by heart. The pellets you scatter around the room break into choking, coiling incense.

It cuts off your senses as much as it does hers, save that humans (furless, foolish, mewling) do not have spinal manes, or tufted ears; you feel her, and in her moment of confusion, leap.

***

Heb Ur!

There are supposed to be seven of you who check that the Troll is here, every quarter-hour. But because the Temple is aroused, and there is an attack from Below, you are reduced to three: yourself, your clutch-sister Mek Ah, and the twitching runt Nga’al, who is granted a measure of Rushing River by his quartermaster. His eyes are, as usual, wide and watering.

The Troll is here. One stony foot is chained to the wall so that it does not wander off. A net serves as its veil; silk would be wasted on these animals. You carry out the inspection: all is in order.

“Did you hear that?” Nga’al’s ears lie flat on his head, his eyes darting, the whites yellowed. You and Mek Ah stop and listen. There is nothing. Degraded Rush-addict. It is not your place to question the quartermaster, so you instead direct your heart’s displeasure at the weakling, too incapable to serve in his place without his stimulant. A growl gets his attention.

“Nothing. Useless shak.”

***

Marianne!

Jerioth struggles vainly in your arms. She nearly alerted those guards: two Salamanders and a Lynx. It looks like Canada did her job, and drew guard patrols elsewhere; this is half the size of the patrol you’d normally expect here.

The Troll, however, is a problem. Silicon-based life, multi-limbed. Set would love to ramble about them, but for your purposes? They’re strong, take orders from Annunaki and only Annunaki, but don’t tattle on resistance fighters; if you avoided tripping its orders, you could do a musical number about your plan right in front of it.

Jerioth’s face is hot and sweaty under your fingertips. You lift your thumb, letting her suck in air frantically, before pinching her nose shut again. This way, even you can barely hear her frantic, furious grunts. You need those guards out, that troll neutralized, and Jerioth humiliated even more before she plays her part. (And, technically, one of the ab-Ereshkigali— but you have a plan for that, too, right?)

What’s the play, Phantom Thief?

Chuubo's GMD: Love and Shattered Alchemy

[Storytime: 2/9
Adventure GET: 3/21
Up to Date: 1/15
Something To Deal With 1]

There is really only one way to get to know somebody in a situation like this. Think about it! The rain’s pouring down outside, the sky’s a dark grey that barely provides illumination, and in here there’s warmth and soft lights and people who are going to be my friends, probably, unless it turns out that they are my nemeseses by the will of fate. Maybe it’ll be maid girl? Her air of flustered refinement will slip and be revealed as a mask as she ties me to the giant minute hand on the Horizon belltower, Big Benjamin, and leaves me to watch as the even more giant hour hand gets closer and closer...

Which makes it even more vital that I get to know her now, so that I’ll have ammunition for heroic banter as she cinches the knots and I hide my pocketknife in my fluffy, fluffy tail. Without heroic banter, she’ll never be distracted enough not to notice!

So I hop up on one of the stools, the wobbly one, and put my elbows on the counter. “Truth or dare??”

The maid totally looks me in the eye and says “dare.” That’s what happens. Don’t listen to her if she tries to tell you otherwise! That’s just her regretting her pick.

So it has to be a dare. She’s brave, letting me, Rinley Yatskaya herself, pick a dare! If she knew me, she’d know better! But she doesn’t, which is the whole reason we’re doing this, so I have to pull out all the stops. Do I dare her to chug from a bottle of Old Indescribable? (They make it here in Fortitude out of seaweed and Outside dust, and the taste is indescribable! At best, I’d have to tell you to imagine making out with an elder god with a tentacle face, who’s slept at the bottom of Big Lake since the beginning of time but has been awoken by the alignment of the stars once more, who has toe-curling morning breath. That’s Old Indescribable!) Do I make her hop down the street on one foot with one hand over her eye, doing Balor’s Walk? No good, it’s pouring outside, her dress would get ruined. I’m not that mean!

But the lights give me an idea. A light bulb flickers over my head. (Thank you, faulty electrical wiring!) I hop off the stool and scamper over to the light switch. Click! The lights go out, and the only light’s the faint grey of the rain and the flickering light of the camp stove. Click! That’s me, with a flashlight. (Which happened to be over with the other tools for refurbishment, because if you have to get into nooks and crannies, you really want to see what you’re putting your hand into.)

“A long, long time ago,” I say, as the cook grumbles about how they’re supposed to make food in the dark, “it wasn’t safe to walk in Fortitude at night. Specifically, between midnight and three in the morning. Because if you saw the Witch, it was already too late. She wore purple and a white, white mask, and a tall, tall hat. And if you tried to walk past her she’d walk behind you and close her long, long fingers around your wrist. And she’d whisper in your ear...”

I let my voice drop into a sepulchral whisper that echoes eerily in the dead quiet room. “Give. Me. Your. Face. Then... they’d find you the next morning, wearing a white, white mask, and nobody would remember who you were, not even you. That’s because the Witch was you, now. And people only figured out who was who when the Witch abandoned a face and took a new one. Everyone started being suspicious of each other! Because the Witch loved to cause accidents that weren’t really accidents, to say cruel things that she allegedly didn’t mean, and to destroy beautiful things for the sake of destroying them.”

Outside, lightning flashes! Thunder rolls, so close that the room trembles.

“Of course,” I add, lulling everyone into a false sense of security, “Rinley eventually ran into her at 2:45 and a plan, and when she tried to take his face, he whipped out his shaving mirror. When her fingers touched the silver, they bled right through. Quick as a wink, he ran that mirror up her arm, over her head, and then right down to the ground, but... he failed at the last minute. He couldn’t bear to stamp on his shaving mirror! It had never lied to him, and always told him how handsome he looked (which was very). But that gave the Witch a chance to escape into the world every mirror connects to, and now... if you stand in a dark room and say her name three times in front of a mirror... she’ll hear.”

You could hear a cushioned penny drop.

“So, your dare... is to say her name three times in the bathroom mirror,” I say, hoping to send a thrill of terror down my new friend’s back. “Melanie Malakh, Melanie Malakh, Melanie Malakh.”

Breathless Dead

Okay. No problem. Think of it as racing. You like racing, like, Redana? All this is, it’s just a nine-hundred meter dash with extra obstacles. You can do this in your sleep.

She steps deeper into the corridor, does her warm-up stretches. (Body of a champion! You sharpen your sword before a battle, should you not prepare your body before you unleash your potential?) One, two. One, two. Stretch that hamstring.

Then she sprints—

The world doesn’t move in slow motion. She’s not that fast. But it’s obvious that she’s one of the finest classically trained sprinters on Tellus: her limbs move like pistons, her core is rock steady, her breath cycles through her in a great wave only to be expelled once more a moment later. She is lean, pared down, and focused. Too late, one of the skirmishers manages to get a bead on her, and tosses a bola at her legs.

Watch as she does a perfect mid-sprint jeté that Bella would be proud of[1], letting the bolas strike uselessly at the ground beyond her.

And then, as the Phalanx finally starts a useless maneuver to bank and follow her, she’s already flung herself up into one of the many openings open around floor level.[2] She pulls herself up gantries to the rudimentary bridge in the Boar’s center, and then slams down the emergency switch that reignites the engines.

Then it’s just a matter of using the mag harness to hold her steady while, with a terrible screech and rattle like the battle at the end of the universe, the Boar careens across the hangar. All she can do from here, without turret access, is engage the thermal cutters in bursts (so that she doesn’t cut through the floor and collapse into a lower level). They’re firing when she hits the opposite wall with a surprisingly wet crunch and crumple, and once her mags have stopped chirping frantically at her, she deactivates the harness and works her way out.

The hangar will, uh. Well, where there’s a will, there’s a way! Nothing some elbow grease can’t fix! (Molten slag drips down into the pipes below.) Besides, this is a lot more important than something like “having a place to park smaller ships inside of a larger ship.” The smaller ships can just go on the outside! With the determination of someone who’s done exactly as much thinking as she plans to do, and a quest from a god pressing upon her brow, Redana lifts the hatch of her Plover.

She flips a cover open and slams on the Cable Release. Parts of the hatch flash warning as the battery power kicks in, as Redana straps herself down and lets her limbs nestle into the controls. But there’s no cable whipping dangerously behind her as it coils; it’s still sitting, waiting, in the fertility idol hips of the Hurricane.

For a second time, Redana charges across the hangar, the jet set directly behind her roaring to furious life as her Plover’s feet lift off the ground and she flings herself into the storm-in-waiting, the void of Poseidon; her auxiliary boosters kick in as she slams her output to maximum and is shoved back in the pilot frame by the reacting force, potent even through the dampeners.

The first warning she’ll have of the ELF barrage will be when the roar of the jets cuts out completely, and then her hatch’s viewscreen will begin to flash red in reaction. (It’s not electric in nature, but rather thrice-tempered smart glass, you see.) Then she’ll just have to trust in momentum; that Poseidon won’t drive her off course with an errant wave; that she’ll crash onto the deck of the decrepit man-of-war that slowly grows in the viewscreen, rather than being fished out by the Armada.

“This is the will of my father,” she whispers to herself, and clenches her fingers tighter around the controls.

***

[1]: everyone knows that overwhelming pride makes one’s heart beat hard and fast; that it makes one stare, awe-struck, at the ripple of well-defined muscles underneath skin, before suddenly blushing and looking down at one’s feet; and that it makes one grab at one’s apron and start kneading it with one’s claws. Just ask Bella! She knows all about pride.

[2]: there is no THIS SIDE UP label on a Boar.

***

[12 to Get Away.]

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

Marianne!

“Animal!” The spoiled tyrant spits out, struggling to sit up under the weight of her ornaments, her decorations, each one shaped and beaten and burnished by the hands of slaves.

(When did this all start? Were they ever innocent, once, like Tamytha, or did their “gods” spit them out into existence fully formed and cruel? When did these self-proclaimed gods reach out to the stars in order to strip them to the bone?)

“Don’t touch me,” she hisses, more bestial than you. Her eyes are burning with indignant terror and the desire to rake her nails across your skin. “I will see you muzzled and brought to heel for the glory of the goddess! Submit and spare yourself the rod!”

(crack, crack, crack. “This one... nnngh! This unworthy one...” crack, crack, crack. “Stop, please, please, she’s sorry, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again...” crack, crack, crack.)

“Our Lady is inexorable! The whip and the lash and the leash and the bowl are her tools! She tames the wild brute and brings forth rich fruit from its loins!” She crumples back onto her elbows, losing the battle against the weight of her own hair. “Bow before the blessed one of Ishtar,”” she screams at you, lips flecked with spittle.

And underneath that scream is an unspoken whisper: I am frightened, and I should not be. This is not the way the world works. You have made the world wrong and I hate you for disrupting my perfect, pampered world. How dare you.

***

Canada!

You feel more than see the eyes of the ostensible gladiator behind you. He (scratch that, we don’t know their pronouns, let’s use they)— they are torn up inside. And why wouldn’t they be? The Great Betrayer is saving them from a Lioness. A war goes on inside them: do I attack her from behind? No, that’s stupid, she’s saving my life. What, are you stupid? She’s going to kill the animal and then kill you, you need to strike her down, do it.

Then the Lioness snaps its jaws inches from your face, you make a less than dignified throttled squeak, and that’s when the kid makes up their mind and steps by your side, prodding it back with their saber. They glance at you (their eyes are brown and soft) and in that moment, the Great Betrayer is offered trust again.

Then everything goes wrong. The world refracts into sharp angles. Perspective warps and yawns; you can’t tell whether the Lioness is a mile away or close enough to kiss. The elements of your body decohere. You send a missive to your eyes to close to stop some of the dizzying input.

So, you’re in a lot of trouble. You’ve handled Asterion’s Labyrinth Green before in training, but this is different than usual: unstable, unrestrained, and incoherent. The only silver lining is that the Lioness, immeasurably distant, has (from the sounds broadcast directly into your ear) curled up into a ball and is making distressed, agonized yowls. And, in your other ear, you can hear the ragged breath of the monster who walks the Labyrinth, and she’s pissed at you.

Put yourself between her and everyone else, your Savior commands. Let her fists hit you over and over again until she runs out of fists. It’s what you deserve. You failed, and now the only way to redeem yourself is to let Asterion beat the stuffing out of you. Then everyone will understand you didn’t betray them on purpose. And even if they don’t forgive you, you got punched for them. That’s what counts.

No, Mundane sighs. Asterion has never, ever been so lost in that maze that you couldn’t help her out of it. Sure, the head injury looked really, really bad. Sure, you were certain she was dead when she went limp like that and the charioteer stepped on her spine and ground her heel down. But if you tell Asterion your true feelings about her, love will save the day. You don’t need to get punched any more.

Fragmentation of self is a common reported side effect of exposure to Asterion’s LABYRINTH GREEN, your Superior mumbles from the closet she’s been shoved inside deep in your prefrontal cortex. Just don’t listen to Savior.

PUNCH HER BEFORE SHE PUNCHES YOU, Danger yells.

***

Set!

The Lynx walks in like she knew you were in there all along, rod extended and held at a deceptively casual angle. Her top is made of two bands of interlaced leather strips crossing over her breastbone in an X; a delicate mesh hangs down beneath it, so fine as to be almost invisible, connecting at its lower edge to a girdle and a loincloth which reaches down to her knees. A similar, more tightly woven mesh serves as detached sleeves and leggings, down to the rings on her fingers and toes.

You know better than to strike that mesh; it’s reactive. Good way to knock yourself out, or blast yourself through a wall. See that slight shiver running through the translucent fabric? It’s been activated.

Her veil is a short thing with a magnetically weighted lower hem, for staying in place no matter the circumstances; the matching magnets are in her ornate collar. Her fur is fine, silky yellow, and patterned in long white stripes, with a spattering of dark spots along her throat.

When she sees you, her eyes narrow in that excited, focused way the Lynxes have. There was something she was going to say, but she drops it in favor of falling onto all fours and charging. You drop through a portal, emerging behind her, and— whoa look out that nearly slammed into your skull, the head of the rod blurring past your own head as she effortlessly redirects herself.

You can try to keep her busy, but that’s a dangerous game she’s likely to escalate hard. You can try to fight her properly, but if you shoot her in the mesh it’s coming right back at you with interest, and she’ll be happy to follow it up by slamming that spinning rod into the side of your face. Or you can *blip* away, but if you’re not fast, she just might be through the portal you leave behind before you can close it.

But you definitely have 100% of her attention. The problem is that this means she’s 100% into this fight, and the moment you make the wrong move, she’ll pounce and refuse to give you room to breathe.

Breathless Dead

The most efficacious location for the head of a spear is in the place where your enemy will be. Be as the false-wolf, who waits with his jaws open in the burrow of the hare.
—Llameth ar Violé, Third Dynasty tactician

***

Ack! Redana presses herself against the bulkhead and wills herself to be invisible, as her auspex informs her through neural jolt that it is ready to give her volumes upon volumes of data: the number of men and women in the chamber beyond, their species, their medical histories, the ethnoaesthetics of their panoply, their resting heart rates and their likelihood to engage in criminal activities. If she disengaged the throttler, she’d be sitting here for hours trying to sift through the overwhelming amount of information. Heaven only knows how Mom handles it.

Okay. Breathe. Be quiet. (Redana presses a hand to her mouth, not trusting her ability not to talk out loud.) Jas’o has already breached the hangar. It looked like there was a Boar[1] that had punched through the left hangar wall, and now there’s guards just waiting for panicked crewmen to surge for the skiffs. Which means that her best option for escaping is probably... the Plovers are designed to trade with anti-ship weaponry, though the best defense is always not getting hit. If she tried to burst out in one, though, they could just reel her back in by the cable. Unless... there’s some on-board power capacitors. They’re garbage in these circumstances— one shot and she’ll be floating dead in the water.

Unless.

Auspex, how many active reactors remain around the Eater of Worlds? Thank you. She closes her eyes and drags the information out. Okay. If she slingshots herself out, fully expecting to be hit but with too much velocity to be intercepted, and she has a rebreather on, and aimed just right... she could do it. The alternative is fighting an entrenched position using only the element of surprise.

(The Nemean[2] roils against the edges of her consciousness, but she bites down upon the thought. If she mantles herself inside, if she becomes glorious and shining and irresistible, she will be a beacon, and she cannot channel her divinity indefinitely. Jas’o will just have to wait and then peel her off the floor where she’s collapsed. No. We’re not becoming her today.)

So all she needs to do is find... “A path to the Plover.” It’s a Hurricane frame with belchers slung underneath the forearms and a Chors Anti-Denizen Longsword; the latter’s designed for killing void monsters and severing power cables, but the former’s an excellent if uncomfortably vicious way to clear a room. It’s non-lethal for Plover combat, but no one in here happens to be in one. Maybe they’ll all get behind shields and let themselves get blown away by the choking, furious smoke clouds, and nobody will get killed by the fragments of the pulverized slug the cannons destroy and accelerate?

Okay, how about a version of the plan where she holds off on firing those in an enclosed space and just barrels through. Then if anyone gets hurt, it’s because they’re Standing On The Landing Strip, which everyone knows you aren’t supposed to do with Plovers live. Yeah. That eases up on the knot in her stomach.

***

[1]: spacer slang, short for “Boarpedo,” short for “Boarding Torpedoes.” Recursively, many now have boar iconography alongside the peans to Artemis engraved along their sides, pleading for her to send these darts true into their quarry’s heart.

[2]: the Nemean is hers by the will of the gods. However, to explain her in a way you would understand, look to the Nocturne school of philosophy[3], which states that the gods always abide by the rules of the cosmos, their mother, and it is only their omniscience that allows them to do anything they like; if we understood as they do, had we ten kalpa to memorize the interplay of everything in existence and everything not in existence, then we could travel across the universe in a step and conjure forth being from nothing. In this framework, we may think of the Nemean as being the superposition of an unrealized potential, drawn forth from possibility into realspace by the Will of the prime instance. It is, of course, nonsense; but it is nonsense you may understand.

[3]: ”Ah! Of all I have heard this night, I love this delightful fancy most.”
—The Phoebus Dialogues.

***

[7 on Look Closely: tell me about the route to the Plover. How can it hurt me? How can it help me?]