Tatterdemalion

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

FreshNewTasteOf3VEnergy: I’m on it. He’s been at my place for the past week, actually.

She’s already rearranging the room, shoving the coffee table which is the death of all paperwork to one side so that she can fold out the couch. One hand(‘s thumb) types at blurred speed while she locks the frame in place with the other. No exclamation points. Not today.

FreshNewTasteOf3VEnergy: I’ll talk to him as soon as I can. I think he’s been working on some kind of academic paper. Only been leaving at odd hours to clear his head. You know how brains people are.

Food. She’s going to need extra food. Easy to digest, healthy: soups, station bananas… soups, station bananas… soups… bread! For dipping in soups. She’ll go shopping herself, rather than leave a digital trail via courier.

FreshNewTasteOf3VEnergy: I’ve got the medical billing.

Because hospitals are still required to provide invoices, and to accommodate those in need, and it’s just recently that the guidelines requiring them to inform patients of this fact went lax. There will be no $370 suture charge, for instance. Not when 3V is done with it.

FreshNewTasteOf3VEnergy: I am outraged at whatever caused this. I would say so to anyone. Anywhere, even.

She doesn’t know, but the sharp knife of anger inside of her, twisting under her ribs, might as well have some better purpose. And anything that would put Junta in the hospital and require surgery is likely a good place to stick it.

TSL: Sjakal

Nahla!

Grace-of-Heaven’s delight shone. That look of admiration, of acceptance, of joy: that will linger with you, Nahla, child of the north. But then she was pulled away to attend to Taima (a flimsy excuse for Taima to get to work seducing the Sultan), and now…

Now you have, once again, time to yourself. Time to get ready for Ruz’s inspection of you, and then time to… just exist.

Is it difficult, Nahla? Can you handle being alone in the lap of luxury, or do you seek out other members of the harem so that someone has need of you? And if you can be alone, what do you do? Who are you without someone to please, Nahla?

---

Soot!

Rosethal pulls you into one of the side chambers of the palace, and shoves you up to the couches set up around a table in the middle of the room. As your eyes adjust to the gloom, you realize that you’re not alone in here: there’s at least half a dozen Fire Wheels, playing with knives and bottles of wine as they wait for their game of cards to resume.

Their… game of cards.

“Here’s my stake,” Rosethal says, grabbing you from behind. “How’s that?”

“Yeah,” one of the Fire Wheels says, pushing her hair out of her face as she leers at you. “That’ll do to keep you in the game.”

Navigate this very carefully, Soot.

---

Silsila Om!

So when someone mentioned Hai Lin, what they meant is that Hai Lin is here. And so it is, poor hungover Silsila, you find yourself facing down a dozen Palace Guardsmen, led by their impeccably dressed leader.

“Hello, Silsila,” she says. She hasn’t drawn her sword. She doesn’t have to. Make a wrong move and you’ll start a whole fight, one that’s been close to boiling over for a long time. “I’d like to invite you to lunch.”

---

Birsi!

The gag comes out, a wet and suspicious mass, and is slopped down unceremoniously on your feet. An extra bit of incentive to behave.

“What are you doing here, sweetie?” Bes takes a seat in front of you, crosses her legs, accepts a glass from one of her sons. “And how did you get in?”

“And why didn’t you fight back?” Jekkan adds, watching your reaction carefully. Lie at your own peril— but think carefully before revealing any secrets, either.

Breathless Dead

That’s what it feels like— as if the search across the ship, the time spent drinking coffee with Beautiful, the trek through the vaulted halls of the Plousios, the slow accumulation of more knowledge— it all bleeds away, swirls down the drain of thought, is blasted away to nothing in the face of the sun.

Redana stumbles forward. She hits something. A chair, maybe? She walks through it. Doesn’t matter. The world is vast. The world is a face. The world is incomprehensible. Her heart is in her throat. Think of something, she thinks to herself, over and over.

She’s at the head of the table now. Dolce blinks at her. Bella stares at her, red-and-yellow against blue-and-green. She is her body. Her body does not understand what it is doing. She needs to say something. She had so many things she was going to say. They were important. She needs to say them. Bella isn’t saying anything. Olympus.

She opens her mouth, dumbly. She licks her lips. Coughs, the once.

“Hey, Bella,” she manages. The worst thing anyone has ever said. She blew it. Her brain explodes. Hey, Bella. Like they’re on speaking terms. Like nothing at all happened. Like she’s about to ask Bella what she wants for dinner. Bella is going to run away and hide and everything beautiful will be ruined. She’s sweating. Her hand is warm where she’s leaning against the table. Hey, Bella. She needs to have something else to say.

“…I didn’t know you knew Dolce?” Perish. Perish. Perish. I didn’t know you knew Dolce! Her mouth is dry. She’s smiling weird. It’s frozen on her face. Beautiful, come back, Dany does need an assassin, she’s taking out a hit on Princess Redana Claudius For Embarrassing Herself In Front Of A Pretty Girl, And Also For Thinking Of Bella As Just A Pretty Girl, But She Is, So Also Impugning Bella’s Honor Just While We’re At It.

She’s nothing like the Bella that terrorized her on Baradissar, feral, vicious. She’s nothing like the Bella that kissed her on Salib, lush and hungry and explosive. She’s here. She’s almost (almost) the Bella (her eye) that Redana (her clothes) remembers from Tellus, but… changed. Changing. Different. Can she learn more? Please? She’ll listen this time. Promise.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Smokeless Jade Fires does not carry her lance as she exits the hangar. Rather, she emerges flanked by her pack, each one tethered to her will. Her jackals! She was meant to be nothing more than the pattern governing one of them: sleek, adjusting their position midair with minute movements of their vents, lightly armored but packing a bite. She does not rely on them— refuses to rely on them— but they have their uses, and she refuses to deny herself the use of them where appropriate, either. She will fight with claw and lash, with the strength of her idol, with Dolly’s grace, and she will use her jackals to deny Ksharta Talonna a place to hide.

The jackals’ patterns are simple, almost childish; Jade runs her fingers through their algorithms, whispers approval, encourages them to optimize object avoidance, and sets them loose. She runs an idle claw up Dolly’s back, encourages her into a relaxed stroll without hesitation, and opens her mind to

running lashing whipping branches
light dappled on the water
the worldshape of echolocation
a net woven through with light
eyes above and eyes below and eyes across
vent, boost, correct
world as motion
world as speed
world as scraped
world as known
and
THERE

Jade barks a tangled knot of intent and it becomes a slug fired from the jackal’s jaw, punching through: a vine, bark, the wood beneath; scraping: chips from the tree, paint from the shin.

The pack contracts, whining, howling, as Ksharta Talonna explodes from her nest and swats the drone out of the sky. Jade half withdraws out of the pack (it’s all pattern algorithms, they’ll flush her out, hit her as she crosses a path) and urges Dolly into a run; she needs to be faster, needs to reach the inflection point before Ksharta Talonna does; she licks almost viciously at the back of Dolly’s legs and rump with a thought that cracks, and she shivers at the sound that threatens to explode out of her bride: the squeak, the groan, the helpless protest that she’s already going as fast as she can, because that’s not true, is it, Dolly, you can go faster, there’s a good girl, keep up the pace or else~

After all, don’t you want to look your very best for your peers? We’ve an audience, Dolly. Chin up, leash taut, mouth stuffed, hands clawed, moving in a blur that’s as close as you can come to the sublimity of lingering in the head of a running jackal. Good girl, good girl.

[Smokeless Jade Fires has rolled a 6 on Defying Disaster with Wit to make flushing out Talon look good and effortless, and I am putting Jade’s plan of an ambush on the line; perhaps Talon is making a deliberate feint, or plows into Jade in unfavorable ground (perhaps a river crossing is involved). Regardless, they mark their second XP.]

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Piripiri!

Oh, Emli doesn’t blush! She’s been trained very well. Smooth as butter, flicking a stray lick of hair over her shoulder with an ever-so-slightly shaky hand. “It was before,” the northerner says, and isn’t her slight twinge of accent adorable? “I don’t know how long I spent there before, well, the crash, the plummet, the, the terror!” A technical truth, hiding the simpler one: it wasn’t much time at all. That’s the direction of the misdirect; people assume that any unaccountable length of time must have been long.

“What happened?” Now she’s pivoting, changing the subject. Except… no. Maybe? She might be sincere. She is softhearted. But you can’t be sure. “Is everyone all right? Did Lady Cathak save us?”

What did happen? Who really deserves the credit for saving lives on the barge, Pipi?

---

Kalaya!

Petony is not a woman given to much introspection. “I wanted to kick ass,” she says, pretty much immediately. “Why do you care so much?” But there might be more to it than that; something complicated underneath that she’s just not sharing with you. Not unless you use that mind of yours, think hard, and suss her out.

She doesn’t want you to, though. She doesn’t want to hear that you can’t sleep or more questions or any nonsense like that. She wants you to shut up and sit down and pretend to sleep so she doesn’t have to worry about you, and so that she doesn’t have to grapple with questions over how culpable she is for putting you in that position, and how she feels about the whole thing. She wants to be free to go steal someone’s wine and drink until it’s gone or she’s passed out. And you’re standing between her and just that, so if you’ve got a plan, it had better be a good one.

---

Giriel!

Go ahead and take a mixed beat on Comfort and Support, as if Naji had opened up. And she does. She curls up on that massive tail of hers and sips tea with all the demure elegance of a proper maid. Maybe she’ll make it in the world yet. It’s always wonderful when someone makes the world a little bit brighter by being themselves.

But then, oh, here comes the Hero, distraught and disheveled. “Giriel,” Agata says, with a smile. “Giriel, I’m so glad you’re safe.” She takes you by the hand (dregs of tea are nearly spilled) and squeezes it firmly. “You can find them, can’t you? Han and Lotus, they must have been tossed from the barge, they need our help— you can find them. I know you can.”

And you can. That’s true enough. But it will require bargaining with those things that know, the spirits of the high airs and the wild rain, and you would need to be at your best to avoid even more disaster coming down on your heads.

But just look at Agata. Does it look like that’s what she wants to hear?

---

Zhaojun!

“I will never be worthy of that scepter,” the Maid Confined hisses, bitterly, “not until I defeat you!” And she hisses, her stockings torn, her eyes wild, her mood feral.

She flips you over, has you by the wrists, knots the ruined stockings around them— this, a compression of minutes of pathetic, clawing, desperate fighting, and fumbling, and rain getting everywhere, because it’s the Flower Kingdoms, and the rain does that, and the Maid spits and fumbles with the hair flopping into her eyes.

Then she stands up and tries to roar. It’s not very good and her throat goes hoarse halfway through. “I won,” she says. “I won, I…”

She stops. You turn yourself up on your side. She looks small, frustrated, like a mortal. Then her eyes alight on you. “But you haven’t admitted I won.”

She scoops the mask up— she drops the mask in the mud, makes a keening noise, wraps her fingers up in her apron, picks the mask up again. “If you want this back,” she says, “then keep up.”

How badly do you want to keep that mask, Fengye? Because she’ll walk you until you’re both exhausted, at a snail’s pace, into the reeking jungle.

(And if you give out, exhausted, broken, unable to keep going… she’ll double back and drag you to somewhere that’s almost dry. The world does not get to defeat you.)

---

Han!

“I’m just saying, Han, that between the cats and the musicians,” she says, as if that was not one time, “you seem to attract trouble.”

Then, suddenly, a redirecting, an ambush from another angle. “But maybe I am being too harsh. If she’s this bedraggled and desperate, maybe she’d appreciate seeing a sister in the veil, hmm? I could offer the poor dear some help, maybe even come with you. Wouldn’t that be just blooming?”

And she does the sassy little head tilt of I Won And You Have To Grumble But Behave Now.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

GIVE A DOG A BONE

Hider

I kept waiting the whole night for somebody to say something ridiculous so that I could look at them with sudden, uncharacteristic shock and ask them: “Are you Sirius?”

And I was consistently denied the opportunity, left and right and straight down center, so now only you, my adoring fan, get to know how terribly (un)funny I am.

Sirius Drinks is the sort of place that wants to be there for you, no matter what you need it to be, no matter where you find yourself. You might be reminded, if only faintly, of the fires at the bottom of the Ash in Night and Falling Stars: a Novel of the Outside, where fallen angels work to love those that nobody else can or will. Except if Sirius Drinks is Hell, then the sinners are unionized, working hard to love each other, and haven’t committed any sins save those against the mores of society. Sirius Drinks is a place where you can let your inner animal out, and where the human body explodes into a hundred different directions on the evolutionary tree.

There are much worse things that you could be than a furry, you know, if that gives you a touch of the heebie-jeebies, if that brings to mind politicians ranting about litter boxes in schools and zoophiles trying to groom your pets. Everyone I saw at Sirius Drinks that night, dancing and gyrating on the sound-curtain-segregated dance floors (wild tangos flirting with arhythmic styles of yesteryear, artistic remixes of FAEWYL-D, and, inexplicably, at one point, Tom Sawyer (Bass Boosted)) was there just to be themselves, and to ask others: will you look at me? Will you admire me? Will you envy me? Will you want me?

The sort of questions that everybody asks themselves, and ones that I, dear reader, am no stranger to myself. I couldn’t help but ask the audience the same things when I hit the dance floor, even though I’m 98% human and 2% rad as fuck. (I still haven’t figured out the appropriate amount of animal-themed clothes to wear to a furry bar that doesn’t come off as appropriative, but maybe next time I’ll bring some ears and a clip-on tail. Switching out my babies for some big fluffy paws is probably a step too far, though. Or a scamper too far?)

Now, here I’m supposed to tell you more about the food, the decor, the prices, all the things that swirl around to make a good review, especially when those things can be quantified so that they can be pit against each other. (Philistines! The unscored review is a dying art.) But if I’m being honest, I didn’t actually get around to trying out the menu (next time, I promise!), one which seems to cater to every step on a voyage of love (a mixed metaphor I refuse to apologize for), from bar grinding to first dates to birthday parties to anniversaries, to the point where there’s more than one kind of cake under the dessert menu. I could talk about the almost-privacy of alcoves and how they entice the eye to peer and try to catch a glimpse of what might be happening behind (or under) the tables. I could even make a big deal out of the fact that there were several different sizes of stall in the facilities, and make salacious suggestions that they’re to accommodate flings instead of unusual bodies.

But I don’t need to rely on implication and rumormongering, dear reader. I’ll just admit it.

I ended up being marched out of Sirius pinned between my girlfriend on one side and an enthusiastic, generous, and boundlessly energetic wolf on the other, a state of affairs that continued for the rest of the evening in a secondary location (one which I was, on the whole, rather glad I was abducted to).

The work of Hell is holy in this life. So, too, is the work of Sirius Drinks, which pulls out all the stops to be a place where the big bad wolf is right at home, and it’s Red Riding Hood who has to adapt herself to the environment. If you see me there, feel free to say hi— just don’t unclip my tail!

That would be Siriusly rude!

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Here they are, finally almost eye level; Dolly has hopped up onto an inconspicuously placed platform designed for that little bit of extra height needed to be roughly equal with aliens. Her dress is rumpled, her tail curls and uncurls behind her, and when she curtseys in her best imitation of the TC fashion, it’s a little shaky.

“Smokeless Jade Fires thanks you for the entertainment tonight,” Dolly says, eyes flicking up to Angela’s face for a moment and then sliding off and away. “And she would like you to know that…” She swallows, lifts up on her heels for a moment. “She has her eye on you, Angela Miera Victoria Antonius. If you impress her, she may permit you further… privileges. So good luck!” The last sentence is a blushing, rushed jumble.

The power is clear. Dolly is full of fire from tip to tail, racing, lancing, Jade’s hands holding her back, and she leans against them just to feel their firmness. The, the titles that Jade is whispering in her ear. They should not feel so good for how rough they are; exports from the TC, where fidelity is much more important, where courtship is restrained by so many rules and chasing pleasure is frowned upon.

“And thank you for your company during the show,” Dolly blurts out, and Jade stiffens. It wasn’t intentional, but her leash ends up wound around Jade’s knuckles, and Dolly, a little too late, realizes what she implied.

She hops off the pedestal, bites down on a squeak (ears flattening as she tries to convince herself no one else heard that crack) and then scampers away through hot, intense judgment into the cool night, Jade pulling her along faster, faster, faster.

---

“Drones,” Smokeless Jade Fires says, lazily rolling her hips. Dolly pulls the chain connecting her (wirelessly locked) cuffs to the headboard and whines, feet digging into the sheets. “She’ll recognize the jackals faster than an alien would, but we don’t need a lingering advantage, just a decisive one.” With a wave of her hand, maps of the battlefield paint themselves across the bedroom. With a flick of her tail, Dolly is granted the sensation of Jade expanding and throws her head back against the pillows, squealing. “Ksharta Talonna won’t be caught out on the trails unless we flush her out into them. Here. Are you listening?” Her nails dig into Dolly’s fur, leaving no marks beneath; Dolly tries to lift her head and nod, but the sensation of the next buck of Jade’s hips lays her out.

“Tch,” Jade says, hiding her mouth behind one hand. “I don’t have to worry about Angela Miera Victoria Antonius, do I?” Dolly doesn’t even have to think about shaking her head; Jade does it for her. “So what if she could buy you dresses? So what if she is an oversized, gangly, exotic alien? So what if…” She can’t finish it. She can’t admit that Angela might have any advantages over her; she can’t forget Dolly eagerly sniffing, leaning forward, wanting to bury herself in softness. She drags her claws along Dolly’s side, rump, thigh, and Dolly obediently turns over onto her side. Another thing that Angela could just do without having to show Dolly what she wanted. Jade leans over Dolly, shows off with a complex trick: pushing her face down against the mattress, both telling her right cheek it’s being pushed and her left cheek that it feels the extra pressure of the mattress. Thwap, thwap, thwap goes Dolly’s tail on the bed. Huff, huff, huff goes her breath through her nose. She clenches furiously around nothing at all.

“Mine,” Jade says, to herself, to Dolly, to the night, to Ksharta Talonna, to Angela Miera Victoria Antonius. “Mine mine mine. My priestess. My champion.” My love. My crush. My favorite, no matter how I want to play with Angela. Look what I do for you. Ignore how any observer would just see you writhing on your bed. Let me be a part of your world, tonight, every night.

She relents, eventually; guides Dolly’s leg up, lets her feel it settle on a shoulder. Dolly can’t hold it long, but the noise that comes out of her nose is like a kettle boiling over. “Drones,” Jade continues, dragging talons down the maps, which run with rivulets of color representing the jackals. “And then you will vault from the trees, my dancer.” Dolly’s hair is tangled branches scraping across the white moon. And what if Angela Miera Victoria Antonius might be watching? Let her envy. Spacing? Oh, she knows spacing. Let this be the space, then.

Feeling the strain, she lets Dolly drop her leg back down, but pushes her harder, until her (her! her!!) Dolly is melting into her arms, alone on the moondappled bed, and Jade lets the feedback, the shared summit, echo through her self. Dolly closes her eyes and listens to Jade’s breath, feeling the realistic drape of Jade’s body over her curves. Jade shuts her eyes in turn; she knows the room’s dimensions and furniture, enough to mimic them in her thoughts, but she chooses to forget she knows them.

Is this right, Dolly? You should be in a temple; you should be wreathed in miracles and signs. Is this enough? She read all your stories. This is what you wanted, but your goddess has to play so many tricks to give you what you dreamed of. And if she were to drop into herself and exercise her will on your behalf, what would that even look like?

Would it look like being Angela Miera Victoria Antonius’s trophy, Angela who can hold that leg up on her shoulder, Angela who smells like enticement, Angela who was there with her when Jade was attending to her damned duties? (That drive she was given, of course, even now is being scanned overnight; it will make for morning perusal, unless something ends up flagged as a hazard to her idol.)

Smokeless Jade Fires, goddess, mistress, buries her smallest face in the thought of her Dolly’s hair, pulls her arms tight around her bride, wraps her tail around one sweaty ankle, and runs her fingers almost thoughtlessly over the concept-construct wrapped tight over Dolly’s mouth.

Hers. Hers hers hers. Even if she shows her love off, even if she whispers exotic insults in her ears which accuse her of sexual availability, even if she arranges a play with that Angela (whose vexed, sincere face works through the vaults of Jade’s thought), even if she’s offered things that even Jade can’t give her no matter how hard she tries. You promised, Dol— you promised, Seven Quetzal.

You promised to be married to a goddess.

That means you’re not allowed to abandon her.

Please.

TSL: Sjakal

A new day dawns. The world changed overnight; it spun and worked in its gyre, like a falcon under the eye of Heaven. The world, as if exhausted by the hard work, breaks slowly into being again, and most of the morning is gone by now. The Adamant, of course, has been full of hard work since dawn, but for almost all of you, that labor has been invisible, beneath the walls and behind the floors.

---

Nahla!

Tickling.

That’s the cover story for why you are completely unwelted from a corrective crop. It’s an accepted form of correction, particularly because of the strictures of the Faith: it’s hard to cause the kind of permanent harm that would see her right to own you revoked with feathers, fingers and tongues, but it’s easy to provoke pleas, muffled screams, and the white-hot lack of thought which is, ultimately, the goal.

This was followed up with Grace-of-Heaven supervising you on a run through the harem gardens: bouncing, jingling, and straining until it was impossible for you to seem too well-rested. A perfect scheme.

So now, here you are, slumped in the shade of an olive tree, driven to your limits, adornments still dangling (and, in some cases, weighted). Grace-of-Heaven daintily kneels next to you, the image of a proud, noble owner, chin lifted just so.

“So, the problem,” she says, her voice low enough that Lila Isa can’t hear her as she suns herself nearby, on very full display. “Is the Fire Wheels! How are we supposed to really, really appreciate Sjakal with them being brutes?”

It’s not a rhetorical question. Not really, not for you. You have to assume she means for you to provide her with an answer. Why else would she have said it?

---

Soot!

“You!”

Rosethal snaps you out of a reverie of images and flowing brushstrokes with a snap of her fingers and a clash of her bangles, advancing on you in the narrow hallway. An ambush from behind!

“You’ll do,” she says, hooking you by the arm. She hasn’t recognized you, it seems? What else would that mean? And, oh. Now she is pulling you. Now you are being pulled.

Where were you going? Is it more important than staying in the good graces of Rosethal?

---

Silsila Om!

You wake up sticky, in a pile of several exhausted Fire Wheels. Wine bottles and dreaming pipes lay scattered about, detritus of a riotous time. It goes without saying that you are in a state of some déshabillé. (Were you on top, in the end, or on the bottom?)

The only reason you are awake, in fact, is that someone has said (into your head, which rings like a temple bell): “something something Hai Lin.” Which demands some sort of rather unfiltered response, doesn’t it?

---

Birsi!

Your arms ache. It is too much to ask that they fall off.

The strappado keeps them pointed up, behind your back, forcing you down into a bow, folded over at the waist. You’ve faded in and out of sleep, repeatedly awoken by the strain in your shoulders— and the throbbing of your cheeks and thighs, where your captors made you dance from foot to foot with the kiss of a firm palm and a singing lash. Your mouth is crammed full of volunteered, unidentified items, held in place by perfume-soaked rags, the fumes of which fill up the corners of your weary head. Your hair is loose and lank and only half-dyed.

Finally, someone enters the shack where you spent the night. You can only lift your head so far, but from the look of it, it’s a woman that fills the whole narrow doorway with her curves.

“So this’s the Firehead that snuck past my boys,” Mother Bes drawls, and chucks your chin with a tap of her pipe. “A Firehead with all that fire leaking, from the looks of it. Did you work it out of her, Jekkan?”

“I put her through her paces,” Jekkan, the woman who caught you, drawls, entering the shack behind her. “She’s not a Fire Wheel. They would have broken by now. All spark, no steel— which is very interesting, don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” Bes says, turning your face this way and that with the pipe. “Will you be a good girl and answer a few questions for Momma, dear? We might even be able to see about a change of accommodations…”

Do you respond, Palace Guardsman, through that drool-soaked mass between your lips? Is it desperate and pleading, or do you try to salvage some scrap of your dignity in this close, cramped shack?

Breathless Dead

”She came in a box.

“I’d asked Mother— Nero, Hermes— for a friend, because I was alone in a great big palace built just for me. Everybody was bigger than I was, and none of them liked me. Some were scared of me, some resented me, some condescended to me, but not one of my teachers wanted to be my friend. The stakes were too high, and I wasn’t good at learning, and I didn’t want to learn anyway. But I wanted— just someone to be with. Someone who would understand. Someone like me.

“So we made a deal. If I memorized all my material in these little handbooks that my teachers made for me, made me recite from memory, testing to see how much I could learn by rote, THEN I would get a friend. She’d see to it personally. And I did it. I worked harder than I’d ever worked. I made the words cram inside me until they were the entire world. I earned the little jewels they set into my crown badges, one by one, four to a row. And then, for my birthday, the best birthday I ever had—

“The box was covered in rose-pink waves, and trimmed with lace, and I broke it on accident. I tried to pull her out of the box, but I didn’t realize how heavy she was going to be, so I fell in and crushed all those waves beneath me. Looking back, she was scared. She hissed, her tail got all, you know, like that. But my head was full of workbooks crumbling into joy, and I thought she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. All those jewels on all those crowns (bronze, silver, gold, in their ranks on my sash) and I would have thrown them all away if it meant I got to hold someone like me.

“So I pulled her over and insisted she have some of the cake and kept touching her hair, her hands, her tail, so happy that she was real, that I would get to keep her, that I had a friend now, and after the cake I decided to show her the entire palace, dragging her along and explaining everything to someone who— she had to listen. I get that now. But I was a child and I was just so happy that I got to share it, all of it, and she kept looking around with her eyes so big and round, and holding her tail in her hands, and slowly following everywhere I ran to.

“Except when it was time for bed and I pulled her into my bedroom for the second time, she tugged her hand out of mine and screamed and ran into the darkness of that great big house, and I stumbled after her into the dark, and the dark was so big. I think it was supposed to help me sleep. All the lights came from the walls and the ceiling, and they pretended to be a sun crawling across the ceiling, and after sunset bathed everything golden yellow and burning orange, it snuffed out and everything was dark, no moon, no stars. And I fumbled through the halls, hissing her name, because ANYTHING could have been in those shadows, snakes and dragons and things with claws, and eventually…

“The only thing that made sense was that I did something wrong, and I didn’t even know what it was. Which meant that it was my fault. I’d gotten my first ever friend and now I’d lost her because I made a mistake, and Mommy wasn’t going to give me a new one unless I crammed even more books into my head, but I didn’t want a new one, I wanted my Bella, with her soft hands and her soft hair and her jingling bell and her eyes like gold, and I sat down in the dark and just… I sobbed. It was ugly and loud and I was making a mess on my hands and face, but I was more miserable than I had ever been in my whole life. And she didn’t come back, and I fell asleep sitting next to the wall after all my strength left me.

“But when I woke up, just before dawn, she was sleeping next to me, all curled up, head on my arm, and I promised— and I don’t know if she heard— her ear twitched—

“I promised that I’d never make her run away again.”

TSL: Sjakal

Nahla!

Down below (oh, so far below), Gími and Grace-of-Heaven are watching what unfolds intently! The greasy street urchin has Grace-of-Heaven by the hand, and keeps looking around, as if, perhaps, trying to decide whether to stay for your sake or to scamper away with that precious treasure you entrusted with her! Oh, poor Gími! Torn between her desires, inflamed by you, and the fact that she’s got a massive payday by the hand!

You need to do something, or she might very well succumb to her baser nature and see just how much she can upsell the Sultan for, to very interested parties! Possibly sliding down a column to rejoin them, no matter what that does to your dress? Or subtly promising her rewards for her services, once you are reunited?

---

Om!

“Me? I struggle for the people of Sjakal,” Bowlyn says, straightening with a flourish and a wicked grin. “Protecting them from oversized, moronic brutes like yourself!” From underneath her cloak, she flings something at your face, and it explodes into a multitude of bright, flashing colors. You take a step back, reflexively—

And tumble off the roof.

(You will survive, but— will that force you back into your smaller state?)

---

Soot!

Bowlyn grabs your hand and then pulls you in close for a relieved-to-be-alive kiss, her mouth warm, her grip firm.

“Come on,” she says, grinning. “Before the Sultan’s attack dog chases us.” She’s abandoning her original goal, because… because she’s scared? Of something about Om, at least.

Or maybe she was just terrified, knowing you were alone on the roof with that rampaging Host.

---

Birsi!

She shoves you up against one of the (formerly) white stone walls of the circus. Not angrily, but inexorably, with all the relentless strength of the tide rolling in. She leans in close, and you can smell cheap perfume layered over the scents of her body (there, at her neck, and beneath her breastplate).

“Well,” she breathes. “Why don’t I show you and you can find out? Little Fire Wheel. Clever little thing.”

You are in grave peril of disappearing into the 78 Heavens.