Tatterdemalion

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

“That’s right,” Constance says. Agreement! The test has been passed. There can be rejoicing! Let everyone come back in and let the true revels begin! “A creature of violence deserves nothing more. It was a thief and a murderer, sworn to no banner.” She strokes one long and pale finger down the length of the skull.

The clink of her spoon on the bottom of the soup-dish is too loud. She takes a dainty sip, and then sets the spoon back down into the soup.

“You should stay,” she says, still not looking at Robena. “What follows you will come in its own time, whether or not you are indoors and out. Catching the fox is worth a night here, at the very least; and maybe you can win a place at the table again tomorrow with your talents.”

She speaks with an understated authority; did she judge the hunt of the fox? Is this a judgment? Did she, perhaps, advise the lady of this castle on how to receive the mendicant knight? Perhaps it is because Constance is a river-daughter and a descendant of giants. Perhaps it is deeper sorcery.

But if that is the case, can you trust her, Robena? Surely you remember the look of horror emblazoned on her fair face when you sunk your axe deep into the king’s flesh, splitting muscle and splintering bone with one terrible blow. Why would she forgive you? Can she be expected to know what you have done this past year, if you do not tell her?

If she means you ill, if she thinks you a fox yourself, if she has not forgotten the way in which Pellinore crumpled beneath that dolorous blow, then it would be prudent to explain to her, to convince her that you have changed, you have atoned, you are going to make right—

Unless she has already forgiven you, and would look on you with pity and contempt for begging her pardon freely given.

She reveals nothing. So like her. Maddening, even. That she is so willfully reticent on how she truly feels, how she clings to her family’s past grandeur like a protective cloak, walking through the world so self-assured that she is in the right, that she has the right to pass judgment— if she truly is, and is not simply another guest of the castle, that is.

Constance gives away less than looking into the ice and the black waters below. Answer her, then, or challenge her, or plead with her, or shut yourself away and refuse her potential, hidden judgment. The choice, as ever, is yours. It has always been yours, Robena.

Sunshards

Rose, High Priestess of the benevolent goddess Sai a’Niz, has some very simple principles. If the mind is a chariot, then the reins have been loosed and the driver chained to the car as the horses of the heart run free.

The deepest, most central desire of her heart is to Be A Good Girl. Approval, acceptance, affirmation: she yearns for these like the cat yearns for the fresh-baked bread. When her goddess commanded her, speaking so clearly that it was as if the words were whispered directly into her ear, she obeyed without question. A Good Girl doesn’t have to worry about making decisions for herself, not when she has— when she has Sai a’Niz to make them for her.

The path before her is so easy and simple: kneel here and wait for the dragon. Until she arrives, feel the ropes constricting all around you, the ones that will fall off when it’s time for your line. You’re into gags, aren’t you? What a cute monk you are! Okay, you’re gagged, too. So gagged. It feels amazing. Until the dragon princess arrives, you can’t make a squeak. Your mouth is so full and so securely shut. Doesn’t it feel amazing? You should thank your goddess for being so nice. But you can’t tell her, so you’ll just have to think about how thankful you are super hard! And... be sure to watch the princess! She needs an audience, doesn’t she? She wants someone reverent and attentive to pay attention to her! And that brave knight, too! She needs an audience for all those dramatic winces and struggles!

Rose (just Rose, only Rose, a small name for a dainty flower) loves this. The commands of her radiant and helpful and super innocent goddess are good, and they feel good, and following orders feels good, and she melts into obedient bliss. She kneels, and she feels the tight ropes squeezing her and applying pressure all around her, and she knows she can’t make a sound through her bulging layers of scarves, and she watches the princess and acts as her audience, and it all feels so good that she wishes deep down that the dragon princess take her time.

(To all involved, princess and knight and wolf, Rose from the River kneels and smiles. There are cute and girlish ribbons woven in her hair, and her sleeves run from wrist to mid-upper arm, and her white dress, dripping with golden ornaments in the shape of fox tails, is caught about her midriff with an ornate, ostentatious clasp. The slits on either side reveal princess-crushing thighs. She kneels, and smiles, and shifts her weight oddly, always keeping her wrists and knees together. The smile is silly and sweet and blissfully happy, without any of Rose from the River’s self-consciousness or brooding or even her projected field of being in control and cool. It is completely without artifice or cunning. And the way she melted into it as Cyanis whispered in her ear, well...)

But Rose is also a girl who knows what she wants, and what she wants is girls. Pretty girls. Brave girls. Girls who will take care of her. Girls with dark hair and dark eyes and the prettiest laugh in the whole world, so unexpected and, for a moment, unburdened; girls whose fair skin dimples around rope, whose face and ears go flushed while being loyally and obediently observed. Girls with silly snortgiggles and messy blonde hair and valiant hearts; girls who deserve new experiences (and what is a High Priestess but a very new experience?) and to be pampered and flustered until they squeak. Girls girls girls girls girls.

Rose takes deep breaths into her extremely muffling gag. Her golden necklaces rise and fall like empires. Even if she has been commanded to be attentive and watch, there’s no rule that says she can’t be worth paying attention to, either. The slow drape of her eyelashes is worth all the silly words she could say, when directed at the Princess and the Knight. Please, Princess. Please, Knight. Enjoy looking at her as much as she enjoys looking at you.

Because Rose knows she wants to help. That’s why she’s here, after all. She might not remember how she got here, or if she’s ever done anything daring with a sword, but she knows she’s here so she can help the Princess and the Knight. And following her goddess’s orders is the best way for her to help them, so she’s going to do it! And the way it makes her feel warm, the way heat suffuses her, the knowledge that she’s helpless in her impossibly secure bondage... that’s just a bonus. Really. She wouldn’t lie to you. She’s a Good Girl.

So please, appreciate her! She’s doing all this for you! She remembers that much, after all! All for you, her shining stars, the second most important people in her life (and pay no attention to that whisper of heresy suggesting that maybe, just maybe, she might care more about them than the omnibenevolent Sai a’Niz...)

[Rose from the River slams down a 10 on an Entice. It’s aimed at Chen, but Yue is invited to join in~]

Breathless Dead

”Hey, Redana! Whatchu reading?”

Redana jolted, and not just because Mynx had fooled her right up until she opened her (Bella) mouth. The shapeshifter’s grin was wickedly playful, and Redana’s brain went into panic mode. She had a plan! She’d had a plan! All she was going to say was “studying for my Practical” and Bella would hum and then she’d either start asking questions about the battle (because Bella wasn’t allowed to join her for lessons, and always wanted to know more), or she’d remind Dany to get some water and stay hydrated before swish swishing away. But Mynx respected the boundaries of neither god nor princess when she was feeling impish, which made it all the more vital that she not come over and see what Dany was actually reading, hidden in her textbook. All Dany had to do was just tell Mynx she was busy prepping for the practicals. That was all she had to do. Just do that.

“Nothing,” Redana blurted out. “What are YOU doing here?” Inside her heart, she fell over like a toppled statue and imploded on herself.

Mynx hopped up onto the bed, twisted in midair, and hit the mattress so hard that pillows went everywhere, and in the process ended up with her pretty catgirl head bouncing on Dany’s chest as she took a look, and Dany couldn’t awkwardly slam the textbook shut fast enough, particularly because of the book that was inside the book.

“Purrincess,” Mynx said, doing her Silly Bella Voice, “why are you reading A Princess In Scales? Is it informational and edificational? Is it moralistically uplifting? Can you tell me what happens?” She looked up, smushing her ears(?) against Redana and stuck her tongue out in a blep.

“I just... you know, I... there’s some Azura strategies in here, and descriptions of their society, and it’s a lot more vivid than, well...” The block paragraphs were making her eyes glaze over. The graphs were worse. And the adventures of Myran of the Ceronians through Azura space, rescuing princesses and fighting janissaries and foiling the plots of wicked viziers and making love under blue-litten suns (whatever blue-litten meant), was a lot more engaging. In the story, the Azura were understandable: the good ones were all pretty and breathy and schemed against, while the bad ones were sinuous and cruel and condescending and in charge of all those schemes that Myran kept barreling right through, ruining elegant plans by being too honest to tempt and too brave to count the odds and too direct for them to plan for.

“I getcha,” Mynx said, winking. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell Bella.”

“Won’t tell me what?” Bella asked, in the door frame, carrying some new sheets up from the laundry (as a favor to the servitors down there, because Bella was kind, too).

“Mew mew mew! Mew, mewmewmew?”

Bella stared for one moment at Mynx’s outrageous smile, and then (when Mynx took a breath to start again) threw the folded sheets overhand at Mynx (and Redana). Mynx slithered cackling out of the way, and Redana very much did not. Fortunately, they were coming undone by the time they smacked her in the face, drowning out Bella’s gasp of horror at her own impetuous sheet-throwing and Mynx’s hiccuping laughter.

***

New sketchbook. New schematics. New Redana. Sure, she’s tired and wired and grumpy, but all of that is drowned out to a vague irritation as she listens to Iskarot’s tirade. She’s got a plan. She’s got a plan. She’s going to Myran this.

The Plousios in her sketches is a juggernaut, a falling star with radiating vents and engine shunts and thrusting jets, fell-prowed and layered with plating. In design, it is something like a thunderbolt. It is a ship for a princess who never, ever wants to be held back again. Try and get in the way of this. Try to stop it as it is loosed from the bow. Get out of its way or be wrecked in its wake.

So what if she’s gutted the Plover launch bays? So what if the SP launchers are reduced to simple broadsides? One Plover and its royal pilot will be enough. One away team will be enough. This ship, this crew, they can’t and won’t be stopped. They’re going all the way to Gaia, no matter what gets in their way.

Redana raises a hand, because she’s got to know. “Magos,” she says, trying to balance both respect and commandfulness. “On Tellus, our information about the Azura is somewhat limited. Have any elements of the Hermetic Fleet[1] come into possession of, uh[4], new information?”

***

[1]: what a weird thing to say, even after being at ground zero of one of their paracausal weapons. What’s next? Dolce leading a fleet of war-chefs[2]?

[2]: Bella peeling away her cuteness and safety and kindness and leading killer owls to throw her in a miserable hole to stew all the way back home[3]?

[3]: stop stop stop don’t cry stop it you’re at a meeting for Oizys’ sake

[4]: tripped at the finish line. We were this close to greatness!

***

Plousios

Refurbished in Imperial Style. A Simple Design, easily repaired after damage, powered by the heart of a star.

An AIRSHIP capable of going anywhere, and a CRAWLER capable of handling any terrain in space.

CANNON 0
ENGINE +2
HULL +2
CREW +2
Notable Crew: [1 Choice, TBD]

Captain Vasilia must assign the members of her crew to Offices.

The Plousios has Five Gear Choices, only one of which Redana may select.
# Hardened Hull (Armor, 2-Use)
# -
# -
# -
# -
# -

Breathless Dead

Bella found her, because of course Bella found her. It was impossible to hide from Bella in a place that her best friend couldn’t sniff out. And that hurt, too.

Not because she wanted Bella not to find her, but because the two of them knew every single hiding place in the Princess’s Estate. There would never be more. All it took was for Bella to go through a process of elimination, one after another. No more mysteries, no more discoveries together, and they were even too big now to get into the air ducts.

So Bella found her there, curled up on the gantry in the garden, head on her knees, shoulder on the hard metal, impossible to see from below. Redana deliberately didn’t look up at her best friend, trying desperately to cling to her hurt instead of feeling like a silly girl with silly dreams.

Then Bella tucked in her skirts, shuffled down next to her, and fit herself into the small space between railing and princess. Her forehead hit the back of Redana’s head and stayed there, warm and unrelenting in its gentle pressure.

And then the purring started. A quiet rumble, like the engines of a starship, farther away than she’d ever see. The purr that made the warmth tingle through her body, the one that always made Bella look down and away, ears twitching.

“Will you always be with me?”

“Yes, my princess.”

“Do you promise? Really promise, Bella?”

“I promise.”

And Redana believed her, and that’s what broke everything.

***

Redana crumples her face against one hand and starts crying, because the softness isn’t right. Because it’s not her Bella, back when she was silly enough to think that Bella cared. Because she’s missing that embarrassed purr that should be there. Because Dolce feels like wool blankets and pillows (for hitting Bella with) and home, home, the home she can’t go back to anymore, the home she gave up everything to get away from, the home where she was safe in gentle illusions as long as she broke herself, over and over, in the arena of logistics and essays and memorization. The home where her prowess meant nothing but medals and trophies on display in an empty hall, and her deficiencies meant everything.

The home where none of her decisions meant anything, given up for a world where they meant everything.

“Fuck,” she says, almost incomprehensibly, as she pushes Dolce away, her other hand sunk into his floof. “Why did I think I was ready for this? Idiot.” That last, at least, is understandable, hissed with an uncharacteristic venom. But it’s clear, too, who she means.

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Constance Ním, daughter of the Bristol Avon, looks long upon Sir Robena Coilleghille, the Bear Knight. Her eyes are dark as the fens, and betray just as many secrets. She does not flee through the open portal behind. The candles flicker in their sconces.

When she walks forward, her footfall leaves no sound, but far off there is the crunch of snow. When she pulls the chair back that she may be seated, the merest brush of her fingers sends it groaning and grinding. And when she sits next to Robena Coilleghille, her breath, too, that is silent for all that the knight can see the condensation on her lips.

Then she draws from her trailing sleeve the small, white bone, the yellowing teeth, impossibly already clean. She sets the skull of the fox on her plate, the sockets hollow and delicate, the teeth interlocking.

“Was it helpless when it died?”

She does not need to say too. She does not need to ask Robena if she drove her weapon into the fox’s back with a sickening crunch. She looks down at Robena’s broad, broad hand and does not touch the soup.

Sunshards

Of course Rose recognizes the shining light in Chen’s eyes. How could she not? That joy, that hope, that belief in fox wishes: she would have to have a heart of stone lying leaden in her chest not to recognize it and love it, because once she knew it, too. And it is certainly for Chen’s sake that, instead of putting her foot down immediately and informing Cyanis in no uncertain terms that she was banned, yes, banned from doing any more fox mischief, and that they would figure out a more practical plan all on their own, one that would not get hearts racing and so beguiled with delight that they would miss the delightfully wicked fox crimes being carried out right in front of their helpless eyes, Rose just blushes darker and thornier and feels her own heart start to race with that familiar excitement and longing. She should not! She should be strong! She should, at the very least, carry out her duty as a mendicant monk and supervise Cyanis in her granting of a wish.

But what Rose instead does is hum thoughtfully. So thoughtfully! One might almost imagine that she was developing some sage insight, not sweating like an ordinary girl (all apologies to Yue, who we are sure sweats a simply ordinary amount when in the presence of Hyra). “Well,” she says, her voice slightly huskier than usual. “One prize might not be enough for a globe-trotter like Jessic. And we can’t let dear Chen here get dangled as bait alone. Her plan is... sound.”

And then she turns to Cyanis suddenly, back to looming, full of doom. “Little fox,” she says— no, she declares, tipping Cyanis’s chin up to look at her. “If you carry this out and then make an attempt to run away, then I will make you regret your choice to flee justice. But if you carry out the wish of Princess Chen, to be the lure that brings Jessic here, I will regard it as Service to the Community. Consider carefully the fact that we are likely to be peers for a very long time.”

It should be obvious to see, despite any protests to the contrary, conflict war across Cyanis’s darling little face. On the one hand: tie everyone up and then escape from the monk! On the other hand: have both a grateful princess and a monk in your debt! On the third hand: make Chen, Jessic, and Rose in your debt with a successful hand-off and then get pampered as a fox should be in the Sky Castle! Oh, look, resolution. Wasn’t that quick?

“Cyanis, pure-hearted fox,” Rose manages to say without a hint of irony, “I offer myself into your hands. Secure me alongside our dear Twinshard Chen, spare no expense in making sure I am truly helpless so that Princess Jessic has no reason to suspect treachery, and...”

Rose closes those great golden eyes and lets out a shaky sigh. “Please take this collar off my neck and then give me a makeover. A dragon-attracting makeover. I suggest Royal Concubine or High Priestess, but you know best.”

Now this. This is a surrender. To admit that she needs Cyanis’s help to remove the collar, then to give her free reign over her wardrobe, all but begging her to be strict and stifling and be impudent in showing off how helpless she can make one of the pilgrims of the Way? To allow herself to be put into a position where Cyanis could walk off with all her belongings (and some cute new floral panties) and leave Rose from the River shouting “~n, ~n!!” after the fox?

Chen isn’t the only one unable to hide the sparkle in her eyes, suffice to say. After all, is it not said:

The river from the mountains runs clear,
the window of the palace is wiped clean:
so too is the heart of a maiden
when awoken to her secret desire!

Rose then turns and shares a long glance with Hyra, and then offers one hand to Yue. “You are, of course, not required to join us,” she says, doing a remarkable job of seeming composed. “But it behooves every young adventuress to take the plunge and explore new experiences in a safe way.” And what could be safer than the hand of the monster who binds her own heart?

Fellowship: The Heart

Jackdaw!

A Victory of Crows was manifested in the latter years of the Hlon Dynasty by the mystic scholar and cult leader Birthing-from-Stones. That is to say, the book was made of and from him by his disciples, a method to stop the great rented way torn by the rites of Hu Xian, who sought in that otherplace a final vindication in their long rivalry.

Can you see them in their green tunics, Jackdaw? The rise and fall of their axes, the white-hot terror of acting as a cordon, even as Birthing-from-Stones writes on each page he draws from inside himself, his eyes lucid even as his body shakes feverish with its transmutation of form. Blood on snow, red on white that becomes black, as the trees loom huge and hot and hateful, as the crows laugh. There is no sophisticated argument to be had here about the value of the extant world and its right to not be overwritten, to be a palimpsest like the many-layered Heart that hangs below all the possible worlds. They fight for the simple reason that we treasure what we have, and will not dive into some new world without thought, without consideration, without knowing some small thing about how our lives will change-- unless we are like Hu Xian, who became a slash of red and white, who emerged in a glory of eyes and tails at the eleventh hour, at the very stroke of her doom. Shake out the red, watch it clot to black, let the snow slump under the heat.

But by then it was too late for her. The nameless disciple lifted A Victory of Crows from the crumpled remnant of Birthing-from-Stones and drew Crowhame through the rent and into their master's final argument. The oral tradition that sprang from that spiritual surgery was, incidentally, the birth of the Urlokan Parade-Opera, with its fearful masks and procession of actors from one side of the stage to the other, though conventions have certainly changed since then, and the stock archetypes that you'd be familiar with now have little to do with the gods of Crowhame who marched, tumultuous and disdainful, into their new prison, and last of all Hu Xian digging more rents into the world with her claws, obliterating two dozen eyewitnesses with her wild omnidirectional glances, but unable to resist the gravity of the place prepared for her and her new family.

How lucky for you, Jackdaw, that despite the great pressure of the world within that bursts frothing forth into monochrome horror, the book was made from the start to be closed! Once you have the right leverage, the right place to stand, it is conceptually simple to shut the book, and in the process, to draw back the world from its high-pressure outlet. And now, of all times, is the only time that you can! Without suffering greatly as you force your way deep within, that is. Every moment you wait, the Professor (as much statue hacked out of white stone as person, now) becomes definitionally further and further away from you all, buffeted by the world surging out all around him.

Or you could destroy it, tear out the spine and obliterate not just the Dark Carnival and the Grail but an entire layer of the Heart. Not even Crowhame can overwrite the entire Heart, but you would very certainly be making a new landmark in this alien geography, one that would be greater than the Flood could ever dream. Of course, you and everyone here would then have to very quickly self-select for survival, and most of the unfortunates that found themselves in Crowhame would find themselves defined by relation to the attention of a god. This is bad. You do not want this. You do not want your existence to revolve around how you are acted upon by the Flayed, or the Wheel, or the Long, or the Eyewitch.

Especially because time is not native to Crowhame. It is a contaminant. In deep Crowhame, all things happen forever and ever and ever.

Wolf reaches out and squeezes your shoulder. She gives you a ragged, keen growl; she’s out of spoons for words. But when you pull away, you can see the space where the connection between the two of you is Not. And in Wolf’s hands, that’s as good as a chain.

***

Coleman!

The Ringmaster is discovering the limits of violence. He is an invincible honking war-sage, a concentrated murder-wind that snaps bones and tears leather-skin and smashes down the Flayed over and over and over again. But the definition of the Flayed is that it is changed into new forms by the application of violence (inflicted with Lucien or otherwise), and it unfolds with every blow, stretches new taxidermy-limbs and claws and clutches at the sky to pull itself back up. Under its idiot smile he is changing, too. If nothing is done, then eventually the Ringmaster will seize the Flayed and twist its open ribcage in two directions, and then with a mighty heave he will rip his monstrous self apart as the Flayed stays still, and then it will scoop him up in its labyrinth of hands and begin to make him a new creation, and all that purple will leech out until the clown-doll is all red and white and black.

It might not even want to hurt him. It is very literally not of this world, after all.

As for what might happen if you got involved? Depends. The damn thing would probably react very... unproductively to being hit with Sasha. Hey, kids, who wants to see what it looks like when an immature train gets its furnace twisted out of its steampipes? And the Ringmaster probably wouldn't be very grateful in the moment. Or afterwards. Until the very moment it all goes wrong for him, there won't be any doubt in his boiling bones that he's winning this fight. If you're hoping that you might have the Dark Carnival owe you a favor, well, you'd be better off asking Jackdaw to fake a miracle from the Grail. That'd probably do something useful.

Above the Carnival, the impossibly huge head of the Long looms, and all else begins to fall under its vast shadow. You don't want that thing to get involved, either; it's tough to fight something that you can't, by definition, see the other end of. The longer this goes on, the more risk that nobody's going to be able to get them shoved back into the book and still be able to get out before the door closes, if you will.

***

Ailee!

"I should cash out," Surma says, but it's amicable. The look she gives you is sly, calculating. You become a bookhunter for two reasons all tied up together, after all: you owe an astronomical amount to the kind of people who make that a health hazard, and you have a lust for adventure. The sort of adventure where you win it all or lose everything. "But, oh, look, my prize is gone. Shoot. Too bad I don't know anybody who might point me in the direction of a consolation prize."

There's her pride, too: she's not some innocent like Jackdaw, easily spun round on herself. She has standards. And she expects you to damn well show her respect if you want her time. She's not going to huff and puff about it, but when she looks you in that glowing eye and doesn't so much as flinch, that's what she's saying.

Breathless Dead

"Yes," Redana says, distantly, staring a hole through a countertop. "Yes, that's a good idea. I know that. All the information's there, Redana," she adds, reciting by rote. "All you need to do is take it apart, evaluate each piece of the whole, and for Athena's sake, apply yourself. So. There's the Alcedi, and they're good... sailors. So they can sail the ship good. And then there's the hoplites, and they can handle the security on board the ship, as long as they're only supposed to be in one place, so maybe if we have, like, an obvious way in, we can just have them wait there for boarders? And we have the Priests of Hermes, who keep looking at me and asking me what the ordained configuration is, because I'm supposed to know, because I did the same sem-- I did two semesters of naval command in case of Outside Context Problems causing an actual honest-to-Olympus war out here, and sometimes it's the really strong ships that can remain powerful and strong and unbroken that hold together an engagement, and sometimes it's the fast ships that can evade SP and carve apart leviathans bite by bite that turn the tide, and all this is useless anyway because I'm not trying to prove why Decadion's[1] ridiculous 'jousting lance' strategy is no longer viable in the current engagement environment I'm trying to make sure you don't all die in space because I wanted society to be better[3]!"

Is Redana shouting? Redana's shouting. At herself. Dolce's faded into the background; there's just her and the specters of tutors in the shadow of Athena. The white of her eye overlarge, she takes the work of hours, her sketch of the heavily-armored Plousios, and she crumples it into a torn mess in one hand, because what good is it, anyway?

What good is she, anyway?

And there's no Bella here to put her hand on Dany's hand and give her a gentle purr. How pathetic is she, missing a crutch like that? You fell for it, honey, and here you are aching for an actress's affection! An actress who tried to hurt you! Who never... who never...

She unclenches her fingers and splays them across the crumpled, torn page. "...I'm not your god," she mutters, once again not to Dolce. "I'm just a girl who's not smart enough for this."

***

[1]: Opinions vary as to whether this admiral was a subversive genius, a lunatic who fundamentally didn't understand the subtleties of space combat, or simply had the misfortune of having his treatises survive to a different age of the universe. Regardless, "you should never be close enough to see your opponent until the battle is decided" and "it is not the wind even when it is the wind" are both hotly-contested koans from his work[2].

[2]: "I don't have to win, I just have to make you lose," on the other hand, is largely considered to be his last transmission, added posthumously to the Book of the Drake.

[3]: And yet she uses her society's spaceships. Curious.

Sunshards

Rose from the River cups her drink in both hands, legs folded, impossible to read. Even the fact that she’s still wearing the collar (it has resisted repeated attempts at removal, and may in fact have been jammed in all the chaos) doesn’t seem to phase her. She has much the same gravitas as a statue of one of the nameless saints, which is why Cyanis is leaning on her for support.

Dear little fox! The night outside looms with existential horrors that cannot be tricked or pleaded with, things without hearts to appeal to. Things that aren’t so much dead as never were alive. Things with gleaming eyes and cold hands. Rose is a comforting pillar of stability in the darkness, because what’s the good of being arrested by a monk if they won’t even protect you.

“Yes, poor Jian,” Rose says, lifting her eyes from the inky dark of her drink. They glitter like the eyes of a ghost. “There are all sorts of dangers like that in the world, children of the new age. I think they are more frightening to me than the punishments of Hell, for at least those can be understood, even if they are unfair. It is possible, sometimes, to come out the other side.”

Cyanis heaves a shaky sigh of relief under her breath. That’s a comforting thought, at least. That’s when Rose goes in for the kill. “Though when I met the Principle of Hidden Promise in the deep places of the world, she told me that her darling Klarissa was racking up more debt faster than she could pay it off, as demerits for misbehavior and low quality work ramped up. And this, too, I recognized. It is the nature of the world that was to impoverish its victims, then set traps for them to keep them in their place, desperate and willing to work. So now there is only the choice for the Countess.”

Here, Rose takes a sip of her drink and settles back into silence until Cyanis pipes up: “The choice?”

“Well,” Rose says, very seriously, “there are... opt-ins. A veritable menu of toys and humiliations and extra services, designed by the demoness herself. Every one signed for, every one a permanent addition to her routine. What do three inches of skirt matter if they bring you closer to freedom? Or three inches of your height, for that matter? And since you’re so busy anyway, surely you don’t need the right to relieve yourself without permission, or to be able to talk whenever you want, and what’s the harm of the kitty-ear headphones constantly playing a... curated playlist? There is a way out of Hell, yes, but it narrows as you climb, and eventually you are likely to find yourself... stuck.”

She examines her audience, all the more shaken by her simple, ostensibly factual account, and manages not to smile. Who is to say whether this is true or not? Have they climbed down into the ancient burrows and dallied with technodevils? (And let little Chen remember that Rose herself was once one.) Surely, after all, a simple monk could not be drawing this scenario out of her own fantasy.

“I met the Scales of Meaning some time after that. She informed me that the sophont once known as Countess Klarissa (whose new name I will not share in such innocent company) had accepted, at that time, one hundred and eighty-seven amendments to her original contract, that she would be free within one thousand and seven days barring further demerits or amendments, and that the chances of her choosing to leave her service by the end of that period were seven to three thousand and two.”

Cyanis is a wide-eyed bundle of floof as Rose’s voice becomes low and gravelly. “But at least for her there was that seven. A possibility that she could save herself from her fate of endless humiliated toil. The ghosts of this world... they are not as sophisticated. They do not play games. And they do not give chances, even chances designed to make you even more theirs. So, companions... I pray that the devils find you first.”

And then, the killing blow, the line that makes Cyanis fling herself into Yue’s arms in a trembling bundle, the sepulchral hiss of ancient stagnant water and molding cubicle labyrinths that sounds horribly wrong coming out of Rose from the River’s throat: ”After all, we have a special place prepared for every one of you.”

After holding it a beat, she clears her throat, hocks up something phlegmy into the shadows, and takes a long drink. “I hope you appreciated the voice,” she croaks. “I don’t really do it anymore.”

Breathless Dead

Oh no, Dolce. Now you have Redana's attention. She's sitting there looking at you with those mismatched eyes like a cat that's making up its mind whether to lick you or to go full feral Silly Mode. "Okay," she says, still drowning you in attention. "So what did you have in mind? Do you think we can compensate better for the heavily armored ramming configuration or the lightly-armored lightning strike design?" She flips another page and hovers her ink pen over the paper, not so much as blinking. It is Dolce's time to shine. "Because I need to give my presentation on this in, uh, six hours? Yeah. Six hours."

She definitely has not slept in the past eighteen hours, which would make her upcoming presentation a little... difficult. Especially if she doesn't make some sort of decision on this right now. Which means it's all on Dolce's fluffy shoulders to help her come to a conclusion and be able to pass out. But what if he makes the wrong decision now? It's not like he's an expert on upgrading starships, after all. Maybe what Redana needs is confidence to follow her instincts, but what if she gets irrationally upset that he's dodging the question? And what is that third sketch up in the right corner that looks like some sort of... pleasure barge? Not on topic, Dolce, focus!