Tatterdemalion

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Fengye!

“Help me,” the Maid mewls. The realization of what she has said, of what she has admitted, of how far her pride has dropped, hits her like a bar of iron a moment later. The blossoming of it over her face is a masterpiece. And you were right! Her pride was indeed about to be broken. But not just by Jazumi.

Take a String on her. You have brought her tumbling, tumbling down to earth, and she will never forget the way she feels right here, right now, hating you and craving you, reduced to this blushing, needy little mess.

And then Jazumi gets her arms in a lock and it’s all over. A third N’yari all decked out in fake-feathers on her leathers grabs you from behind, and brandishes pale rope from the mountains that brush against the spine of the sky.

“What a fight~!” Jazumi is grinning as she puts a knee between the Maid’s shoulders and slips a loop around her wrists, ignoring the frantic kicking and the burbling complaints. “Once we find Machi again, we have to introduce you! You could be a trainer!”

Then the mud explodes underneath her.

---

Giriel!

Something’s wrong. And the worst part is that it might not even be somebody’s fault! You don’t have the information on hand to know whether the N’yari did anything to spiritually defile the region, or whether some foe (like the fairy) has pricked the world until it is irritated like a sore, or whether the drainage of essence through this glade has just been backed up for too long.

But some lesser spirit of this place has taken too much essence and imbued itself into the clinging mud. Jazumi and the Maid vanish inside of it as it half-forms various limbs and a maw to roar with. Twice your height, half-falling with each step, it begins to— lurch away?

No, that’s not right, either. What could it want with either of those two? Why would it manifest and then refuse to engage? Unless it already had what it wanted, but…?

---

Kalaya!

“The Sapphire Mother is a goddess,” the witch says, and there’s no respect to her tone. She says it the same way you might say that someone is a professional courtier. “Too busy with the responsibilities of her station to look beyond them properly. Besides, compromised.” She refuses to elaborate on that. Instead, she proceeds to summon a thing that is like a stretched-out weasel with the nose of a mole.

(Her summoning is… well, a little worrying. Lots of murmured commands you don’t quite understand, said in a tone that makes you itch to do whatever she’s ordering. The little you in the back of your head, the lesser soul. Truly, a witch among witches.)

“All we have to do is follow. Come along, swans.” The weasel is already streaking off towards the woods: deep, dark, dense and dangerous. You just got out, after all. But Ven’s slipped her hand into yours and it’s easy to just follow, isn’t it?

If you do, if you let her lead you into more peril, mark an XP.

---

Piripiri!

Now you have her. You’ve stoked her essence to the boiling point, and now you just need to let her burn herself out. She’s not used to fighting someone who can redirect her blows rather than rushing head-on or trying to dodge, she’s not used to someone who knows how to fight a duel, and most of all?

Only the demigoddess, and only just now, squeaking a breathless warning too late, is aware of how you have brought Han to the very edge of the hungry river, which is a slow, deep well of water essence. Fire burns so, so hot— but water douses it.

(And isn’t that perfect, knowing the demigoddess’s nature? Truly beautiful.)

Extinguish her before she burns herself up. Then maybe she’ll be able to listen.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Mirror!

“Smaller? Ha!”

The inside of the cockpit is a vast temple. (She is making the mistake of editing as she goes. Shadows shift, warp, dimensions sliding into place. Space is a toy to her, a concept as soon imagined as made real. But she cannot make up her mind. She wants to impress you, needs to impress you, does not know how much of herself to reveal, how much of the face she shows Dolly to show you.) On the far side is the idol within the idol, Smokeless Jade Fires in warrior attire, garlanded and bearing her lance, legs crossed, the back of the fingers of her free hand resting against the cyclopean flagstones. Within the false self is the shape of the true self. Within the shape of the true self is a self that burns.

She limns herself in her namesake, light flickering shallow in her helmet’s eyes.

Before her is a ring, set in the floor. Clearly where Seven Quetzal operates the mecha. The pattern of the ring is fire, coalescing into hands frozen mid-grasp, whorls suggestive of eyes. (She cannot decide how to decorate the walls. Don’t pay attention to the flickering at the peripheral, the twist and shunt of space.)

“Am I small enough now, Whispered Promise?” Shadows drift from the floor, cast by flickering torches, and her eyes flicker in their depths, and then she is here, again, at the edge of the ring, making an inviting gesture with her good arm (as the other remains wrapped in her cloak, refusing to acknowledge her limitation). She thinks she has you. She thinks this is where she is strong and unassailable. She will have her revenge on you for being confusing and proud; she will meet your danger with the thrill of helplessness. Her shadow is the impression of a dozen arms. There are no controls here, no buttons, just her.

Which means that if you are to control her, rather than being a conduit through which she may pilot herself, you will have to convince her otherwise. Through a dance. Through command. Through the subtle shiver of her shadows and the way her fingers flex, compromised. (She is compromised by want. You remain clear. Here. Hit her here. Do not let your chin droop. You have the knowledge she craves, which can only be taught through the secret names of the body.)

---

Dolly!

—is already halfway up out of the chair, banging her shin, being laughed at, squeaking, tail fluffing up, hands on her shoulders sitting her back down and sure she’s got the cushion for it and doesn’t hit her tail on the way down but she still exhales and that’s when the hand wraps over her mouth, traps the heat against that palm, traps the head tilting back over the back of the seat, tilts the seat back until it’s balanced on two legs and her tail’s wrapping around one in a vain physical reaction to being unbalanced, except she can’t fall, because Valynia is grinning down at her, resting the whole chair and all of Dolly’s weight on one thigh.

Her breath is coming like a scared little hare hopping in and out of its— no, hares don’t live in burrows, they live in grass nests, and if you have a group of them it’s called a husk, and are distinct from rabbits in that a hare is born ready to run while rabbits are born blind, and this all means something in the context of the pattern in her fur, but the facts just fumble through her fingers as she stares up at Valynia, who slowly tuts her tongue, and the breath washes against the side of Valynia’s hand, and Dolly’s free hand is stupidly gripping the seat of the chair instead of doing anything useful.

And all she gets from Jade, so far away, is the sensation of craving… approval? Impress her? Is she doing it wrong, Jade? Of course she’s doing it wrong. You’re not here to show her how to do it. How to be brave enough to use her body. How to be seductive and beautiful and desirable. (Which. Valynia. She definitely doesn’t. Right? She desires Dolly but as a stepping stone to Jade and also as a trophy and hey remember what she said about hanging you up dangling in the cockpit? Remember that?)

“And here I thought I could trust you,” Valynia says, her tail slowly swishing behind her, her voice dripping in faux betrayal. “Were you just trying to take advantage of our hospitality?”

“We can be much less hospitable,” someone says, from the other side of the table.

“Just like with Erys,” one of the Terenians adds. “She doesn’t know how to submit like a good girl yet.”

“Well,” Valynia says, sweetly venomed, drizzling her purr over Dolly, “we can’t have a security risk running around, can we?” She lifts her palm, only to slip her thumb between Dolly’s lips, pressing down her spice-addled tongue. And Dolly’s mouth is still too numb for her to be able to do anything halfway seductive with that! “No. We. Can’t~”

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

The smile on 3V’s face is almost infectious. Almost. The tablet lies forgotten on her lap. It’s giddy. She’s giddy. This is the side of her that does the research. Because opening with that? That means there is something here. A shadow on the water. Something that demands to be understood, dug into, chewed on. And maybe it’ll hurt her later, sure. But right now? Here and now? She grins, and leans forward, blind to food, blind to November, blind to anything but what’s been dangled in front of her.

“Okay,” she says. “I believe you,” she says, and means it. She really does. Her fingers drum on the side of the tablet, impulse without thought. “But you don’t open with that unless there’s one hell of an explanation following.”

Breathless Dead

“Of course we can’t take them,” Redana says, busy in the dark. “You can’t take anything from Hades. You have to bargain for it, or experience it.”

Out she comes with two of their prizes, which had been buried underneath all the sharks. A writing stylus with a treble clef as a counterbalance, doubtless made in honor of Apollo’s blessing upon those who write beautifully. A collection of sheets, bound in yellow and pierced by metal rings, each one of them cool and crisp. With one in either hand, she sits down (in front of a perfectly good bench) beneath the four dresses.

“But that doesn’t mean you can’t see me in them,” she adds. She’s always like this, isn’t she? The yellow cover folds back with a sigh, and she rests the stylus against the virginal page, white as the moon.

She’s not a good artist, but she tries. She’s a better designer than Bella might remember, however. She’s had over a year to practice with her own clothes, a year alone without a maid to look after the particulars. And halfway through her first sketch of the athletic gear, she glances up and pats the ground next to her.

Not a command. An invitation. A way to tell Bella that she’s welcome to come and rest her head and help her with the design work. These relics might not be usable after so long, but that doesn’t mean two girls can’t remake them with modern materials, modern adjustments, and carry the meaning of them across the Rift.

All context for them has been lost, and yet they’re still here. Redana doesn’t have the thought formulated that clearly, but the shadow of it is over her fingers as she works and perched on the tip of her tongue as it parts her lips. What was there can be found, or made new. Even here, in death, there’s something worth interpreting.

Won’t you join her?

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Dolly!

Valynia knew what she was doing, marking her prize. It meant that even though she could toss said prize to the jackals, she could reel the prize back in. Getting too fresh with the new meat would be an implicit challenge to Valynia (probably the name, based on context, based on compliments, based on comments while she was being squeezed and weighed up). So she’s spared her most lurid scenarios of what might happen with eight Hybrasilians, two aliens, and a captured high priestess.

But when she’s sat down, she’s still huffing hard through that red scarf, and her hair is frizzing in her face, and she smells like half a dozen pirates cheekily getting their scent all over her. Her eyes are a little unfocused, and they widen when the soup comes in front of her.

Oh. Of course. They have to prove that they can handle the heat, because that’s how they maintain their face among their peers. And if you complain, you might get nothing.

All eyes are on her as Valynia ties the scarf around her throat and tucks it neatly behind her. Even more marking, more claiming, more attempts to provide her with what Jade can give her in spades. (Except Jade won’t give her half a dozen pirates rubbing their cheeks on her while she squeaks, won’t give her the taste of new cotton in her mouth, and won’t make her parade around a brand for everyone to see.)

She picks up the spoon. Puts the spoon down. Brushes her hair out of her face one-handed, ignoring the pirate who whistles and asks if her highness needs a fancier spoon. Freezes as Valynia drags her fingers through her hair, hits a knot, tugs just a little bit. Feels her scarf-covered throat exposed, a flash of yellow above the red.

“Go ahead,” Valynia says, tying a ribbon into her curls. “Unless it’s too much for you~?” Implied in the trill: an amused threat. Things will get worse if she refuses the soup, not to punish her but because Valynia is playful. Dangerously playful. Not constrained in the ways that even Jade is.

“You’d be surPRIsed,” Dolly says, her voice cracking like frost under her feet in the pre-dawn morning during that one really cold winter snap. Her fingers are already most of the way to her mouth by the time she checks herself, which has the small-spotted gremlin sitting on the table to her left going into hysterics. To salvage the situation, Dolly bravely stuffs a mouthful of soup into her mouth.

And then her nose starts running.

“Mmm! Mmmm!!” She sticks the spoon messily back into the soup and starts waving it in her face as her tormentors burst out into a cacophony. It’s so hot! It’s so hot! It takes a moment for the mouth to catch up! And then it’s!! Would Angela burst into flames if she had this??

“Awww, good girl,” Valynia purrs, dragging her claws up the back of Dolly’s neck in a way that makes her bang her knee into the table because there there there that’s where Jade lingers, too, and thank the goddesses that the table’s thick and the soup’s barely disturbed.

To her credit, she makes it halfway through the soup before she’s too much of a mess in every direction to finish. And to Valynia’s credit, she only threatens to soak her gag in the leftover soup.

And to Dolly’s credit, again, she is keeping the intense, intense forbidden moans under control. No making just-for-Jade noises in front of a room full of pirates watching her and making fun of her but in a way that’s much more visceral and, and hot, maybe because Jade’s going to come and pluck her away from Valynia once she’s finished her seduction of the mean rude handsy possessive (possessive, oh no, mmmpfh) pirate intent on embarrassing her in front of a bunch of other pirates, but in a way where she insists on having control and being the final authority on how far Dolly gets pushed, and the kittenish ribbons in her hair, and the occasional tug on the scarf, and let’s be honest, the soup isn’t the only reason her face is on fire.

(But Jade will harbor no competitors. Even if she needs Dolly to be a seductress, right here, right now, somehow twisting Valynia around her little finger, which would probably be easier when she’s not got her nose stopped up and her eyes full of spicy tears, because she doesn’t look seductive at all, and that’s ridiculously unreasonably distressing— even if that’s so, at the end, Jade will still take her treasure back. And that treasure needs to protect her heart so that she doesn’t prove unfaithful, even while she is, tactically, being a seductress.)

If Dolly was cool, she would have told Valynia to “save the leftovers.” That would have been so cool, so composed, and she’s going to be so angry when she realizes she should have said it later tonight. What she ends up saying is more like “I’b forry, I can’f, I can’f, pleaff…”

[Dolly is Smitten with Valynia hitting her guiltiest pleasures, now that she’s lowered her emotional defenses on her Holy Mission. She also rolled a 6 on eating hot soup, but as that is not an actual move, she gains no XP.]

---

Smokeless Jade Fires!

Upside-down. The whole world is upside-down. This minx, this diva, this legs-and-stretches, this fish-climbing-waterfall, is telling a story even harder than Jade herself can. Is. She could. She’s just worried, is all. Hot flashes of arousal. Mewls melting into a thick mouthful. Eyes on her, eyes on her, eyes on her.

The thing is Jade that Jade knows this story Jade~ or this kind of story oh, oh, Jade~! and this one is dangerous, snakewise, a coil of rope. The one she needs. The one she needs.

She pounces. The arc of it, the shape of it, is awkward. And when she has projected herself close, she cannot help but feel that thighs tensing she has somehow gotten it wrong. Hands on the pilot, but unsteady, tenuous. Her off arm feels full of needles.

“I shamed the Red Band. I! Out of an empty sky, my fire!” the red band, the red band, the red band— “I, struck, fell swooning— and they, shamed, stole my—“ prize “prize!”

(Not a prize. It’s the wrong word. Not won. You can’t win Dolly. Unless she’s playing for the prize every waking moment. Heap her in pleasures, rain gifts on her, beg her for the shining facet-ruby of her mouth heart.)

“I turn to you. I do not care for your peril. You will do.” Her hands are not where her hands should be. The dress is a shifting terror field of hungry dead-star-wolves. a guilty hunger for hands. “You will. I need you.”

The words hang in the air. They are crystals, glimmering, bright. Piercing.

“If I do not have her returned to me, I will die. I will devour myself and hang in an apple-tree. And if your refusal costs me her, I will drag you down myself!” down on knees and cheeks and hands “I do not bargain, daughter of Fishers, wave-dappled! I will give you what you want, because I am generous, I am indulgent, I am—“ a pleading look, a kitten’s kneading, a throbbing heat “—obeyed!”

The whole world is upside-down. The pilot-she-needs has three weapons: her impossible smile, her terrible control spike, her intoxicating dress. She is a goddess. She is drowning. She is in control. She is bones. She is to be obeyed. Her skull is set in the branches. Dolly is a fire made of hands and want.

She draws herself up, huffs, stretches arms (and arms, and arms, and still it does not help the phantom feeling, no matter how many ring her as a halo). “Beg forgiveness, and I will overlook your impudence, Whispered Promise! Deny me, and I will devour you, and the glory of my service will pass to one less suited for the task!” Her eyes are terror lights. And yet she still feels smaller than the rest, the crowd, hot, present, on all sides.

What does she want from the pilot? Immediate obedience, so that she can have her Dolly again, as soon as possible. Deference, because she is a goddess, and that is the cornerstone of her self-definition. It would be better to have asked what she does not know that she wants: someone to touch her in the ways that Dolly does not dare, to actively want her, to help her make sense of the lust roiling through her. Dangle Dolly in front of her, treat her like a goddess and claim yourself to be a myth in turn, or rather do not deny her either Dolly or divinity, and you can lead her by a leash wherever you please. And would it not be pleasing?

How can her focus be caught? Ropes, to convince her that she is held. Touches, hunger, kisses. Convincing her that she is in a story about a goddess and that it has a happy ending no matter what indignities befall her. Promising her that the only way Dolly can be saved is to follow exactly as you say. Presenting yourself as a sage, someone who knows more and whose strange commands have an underlying meaning. Or simply asking her to bless you, and to be sure that her pilot-blessings are thorough and intentional.

What does Smokeless Jade Fires come to believe you love most, Whispered Promise?

Breathless Dead

The statues are draped in night, and milk-white pearls, and the stones of the underworld. They stand guard, faceless, with their courier’s satchels hanging from one shoulder. This one covers its head with rose-colored satin; that one has blue canvas fitted tight against its frame. Beneath their eyeless watch are relics from a bygone age: untailored clothes, unfitted to a specific body, their hues and compositions permanent and unchanging.

Well, except for this dress, which changes its hue depending on where you look, from what angle. And this dress, which Dany swears is blue and Bella swears is yellow. And this, here, where— pass your hand over the sequins— there is one image, and then another. Creativity. Problem-solving. When all that creators had were base, simple materials, and so they had to use tricks to make the most out of what they had available to them.

It sprawls on and on, stairs rising into the glass-partitioned higher levels, and here and there there is a change, something different, something out-of-place: a chamber full of trays containing mechanical cartridges, a display of ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER DOLLAR plates and small decorations of the Tunguska, a bubbling fountain, a room full of empty cages.

Once there were lights here, presumably. But they are all gone. It is as heaped in shadows as a Kaeri feast. It is a world of sound, and texture, and outlines provided by Auspexes. It is a world of exploration, of hide-and-seek, of sudden discovery. Not “come look at this,” but “come feel this.” And then, stepping out into the grand corridor, where faint starlight trickles through a high vaulted ceiling, and revealing what was hidden.

(The statues do not look away from their changing. They do not blush at what the girls get up to in this dark, in lace, in a fortress of last defenses. But even they can only debauch so much, these two, when there are more treasures to be found. Is this, then, yet another of the vaults of Hades?)

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Mirror!

“I told you to come as a pilot!”

The goddess is having trouble coalescing. The edges of her are blurred, wisping into fractal smoke. She is taller— no, she is cheating. Her feet do not touch the ground. They are vagueries. Nothing about her is entirely solid. Not her eyes, which are roiling molten sea-under-empty-sky-at-dusk, lit from within. Not her attire, which is halfway an archaic warrior’s regalia and halfway a pilot’s jumpsuit. Not her fingers, which have the suggestion of sharpness more than actual claws. One arm is pulling a yellow cloak in tight against her frame, curled fingers resting against her breastplate. Her tail(s?) serves as background, inkbrush smears on the world. No, the world is collapsing into smears, the light eaten by the irritation of a goddess.

“What is this? An attempt at— ah. Ah.” She sharpens perceptibly. The danger of her eyes dims. She brings the other hand up and laughs behind it. (She acted before she thought. She is not as patient and calculating as she presents herself here. Not unexpected, given her matches.) “Oh, of course. Do excuse me. I— I neglected to consider that. Of course you would. How could you not dress to please me?” The fuzziness refuses to leave entirely, but as she works herself down from her initial venting of frustration, fine details slowly begin bleeding back into existence.

The hand lowers. (The one that does not hold the cloak. The one that does not correspond to her idol’s missing limb.) “You look… acceptable. Whispered Promise.” (The growl suggests that is not the word that she had on the tip of her tongue. The rumblepurr of the bass, a plucked string. Fashion is a weapon and your cast has struck true.) “Yes, you will serve nicely.” (Her voice doesn’t have the reverb you’d expect from the speakers. It’s likely that she’s speaking directly into your mind; that nothing has been heard by the crew.)

She turns her head, and cold blue fires burst into life, two by two, marking a passage through the dark. The ones floating in the air are obviously marking the staircase up into her guts. It would be easier if she wasn’t cutting down the already-low ambient light.

“We leave immediately,” she declares. (As if the mecha is in fit condition to go anywhere.) “My pilot must be retrieved.” Her voice is a husky, staggering scrape against steel. She desperately does not want you to ask questions or to ask what is making her so full of tension. Both kinds of tension. The anxious kind and the fun kind. (She is aroused and thinks she can hide it from you if she keeps you running after her commands, too eager for headpats to question her. As if she can simply outrace the Whispered Promise who thought herself greater than a goddess, in need of a handicap to be on an even playing ground.)

---

Dolly!

Her? Really? Her??

But it’s a sweep. Like pushing furiously on a door to keep it shut, only to have the person on the other side jump back and let you swing the door out from behind you, knocking yourself onto the ground in the process, and this is a good analogy even if most doors do not in fact work like that, because the moment when pushing stops being a challenge and instead becomes dangerously easy, when your feet slip out from under you and your stomach lurches, is exactly how Dolly feels as it sinks in that Jade… wants her to succumb. Or, no, it’s like sitting at dinner and feeling very good for refusing to even look at the sweet dumplings you want, only for your big sister to scold you and tell you that until you eat those dumplings, you don’t get to leave the table, because it was making her feel good, struggling and being such a good girl and being so tough and strong and refusing to succumb to temptation, only to have Jade push her with murmurs and a plumping-up of her chest, which means that… she’s… supposed to. succumb. to the temptation. And the fact that she feels so much confusion counterbalances the excitement, so it’s definitely not, absolutely not her assuming… not when she’d been so good!

She lies very still, not squirming, even though it takes so much concentration, even though the scarf is tugging up against her nose with every inhalation, even though her mind is going to go pop like a bubble if it works itself up any more. Then, obediently, tip of her strapped-down tail curling, she nuzzles her mouth against those fingers, letting out a soft, stuffed mrrrrp.

Oh, nyo, you got me, she tries to say with no way to use her body to explain for her, just drooly chirps and tiny purrs and this little bit of head movement. Please, tell me more about the city you’re going to found for my goddess. I’m such a good girl. Surely good girls don’t have to be tied to beds? Surely good girls can privately work on seducing their captors on behalf of their goddess without having it dragged out in front of a bunch of rude, rowdy, handsy pirates? And surely you won’t make following my girl—my—my goddess’s orders absolutely mortifying??

Because, pirate-whose-name-she-doesn’t-even-actually-know-and-who-she-just-thinks-of-as-hot-handsy-disrespectful-pirate, she. She forgot. Where she was going with this. But you don’t know what you’re getting into! Sure, she somehow accidentally seduced… is that how seduction works? If you’re just living your life and your goddess falls in love with you for some reason without you ever being aware until she kidnaps you? But now, oh, now she is going to be! Intentional! So you might as well give up! As soon as you help her up from the bed, even if she has to hop, she’ll seduce the heck out of you! With! Her eye flutters that you just can’t see behind her sunglasses! And her wide range of noises that she can make with her mouth full! And her… jiggles… in skimpy outfits… you know, if you have any around! You might as well convert right now, it’s basically inevitable! She’ll even! If she has to! You know! Show you what she’s learned from Jade! In bed! So there!!

(The thought of working over a hot, bossy pirate for an expectant Jade nearly makes her inhale her gag stuffing.)

[Dolly. Dolly, Dolly, Dolly. You still have -2 to Entice. 6, sweetie.]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

That little nugget of Blue Lore is something 3V seizes upon. Oh, she does not say. Oh, she does not say. Blue (teasy, conflict-demanding, interesting Blue) is the one who wishes she was not human. What does that say about who she was before? Not romanticizing the digital nature of being an android (the way that Green does), but a body she used to have. And that’s hashtag relatable. Every change you make to your body, isn’t there a part of you that wonders whether you made the right choice at all?

Particularly because, for November, it wasn’t a choice at all.

She lets the statement hang in the air. It’s very tempting to deflate it. She’s got a line on the tip of her tongue, a quote that’s close, but it wouldn’t serve any purpose but to briefly trigger dopamine for referencing a thing. So she lets it hang. Then she gives November’s shoulder a squeeze.

“Everything is hard. That’s why we’ve got to stick together, especially when the rent is due.” And that shakes a thought loose, clattering down her spine. “Speaking of— Euna, I need to ask you a few questions. There’s something that’s been nagging at me lately, and I’m trying to tug at it, see if there’s anything on the line. Do you have a moment to talk about real estate? Because I gotta know how you got the property in the first place.”

Breathless Dead

Amphitheaters

Down in the dark, in the mouth of death.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Dolly!

Sure, the Banders did tear the purse out of her hands. Certainly, it’s why she’s strapped down very securely to the bunk right now, only able to move her head and flex her extremities. And, admittedly, it might not have done much. But the sound of the purse smacking into the side of the pirate’s head had been so, so deeply satisfying. That was something she could hold onto. A little defiance. A little bit of heroism. Because everything else suggested that she was helpless, doomed, and out of her depth.

This wasn’t even her first kidnapping! Jade had insisted on having her snatched up off the street by the huntresses who had first seen her and heard her demands, her first requirement from the world: bring me Dolly! But this was different, because she had a frame of reference. She knew who these pirates were, sort of, and they were much more interested in her.

Or, well, at least one of them was.

Maybe this wasn’t so different, if you ignored that Jade had been watching her all this time, and this pirate had known her for, what, a few days? Unless she’d been spying for longer? Unseen, covetous, just like Jade, trying to be the flesh-and-blood answer to the goddess— but if that was the case, surely she could do better than this. This was just…

What’s the word for it? Ticklish. Making her fruitlessly strain against the straps, trying to get away from the claws running furrows through her skin like animals chasing each other through a hydroponics field, unable to squirm away. Helpless. Her toes curling and her heart racing. A voiceless, shapeless tension building inside of her. Glaring through chic sunglasses because Jade isn’t silly. She’s the furthest thing in the world from silly. Insult her, sure, whatever— but don’t you dare, you handsy flustering tantalizing smugly grinning pirate, insult her goddess!!

(How fragile is Dolly’s defiance? Even she doesn’t know. It hasn’t been tested yet, pushed, beyond making her melt in public. Her captor probably hasn’t even thought about what she could tempt Dolly with. Not like Jade, so thoughtful, so indulgent. Anything that’s working for Dolly, at least thus far, seems to be just a coincidence, something that this arrogant Bander happens to enjoy herself. And nothing she’s done is something that Jade couldn’t do.)

So unseen glares, and helplessly heaving breaths, and wet, angry mewls through that scarf, are all the order of the day, even as she struggles and fails to squirm underneath those maddening claws. Not yet afraid, and not yet tempted.

---

Smokeless Jade Fires!

The holiness of her fills the idol. A hundred eyes open and stare, all throughout its systems. Instant comprehension. The arm feels odd, this time: a dull ache, a soreness when she tries to move it. But she still has her own. Removing parts from the idol does not strip her of what she is.

Her Bride is gone. None of the eyes can see her waiting for her goddess’s return. Her tail wraps around one leg, pulling tight. When she closes her eyes and reaches out for Dolly, something is—

wrong

“Where is Dolly? Where is my Bride?” Her voice echoes through the hangar, over the sound of drills and hammers and torches. Akar? No. It cannot be Akar. The trace of claws through fur. Dolly’s voice, deliciously, achingly muffled. Incoherent words, a honeyed tone. Defiance. But distant, far distant, through curtains, through interference, and no matter how she screams, her sleeve will not respond.

Something is wrong something is wrong something is wrong. She needs a pilot. A failsafe. Someone who can join her in battle against whatever star demon stands between her and her Dolly (because the idol was built for a pilot, because interfacing with the idol directly is clumsy and unacceptable, because these goddess-slaying weapons exist and her Dolly must be recovered). Ksharta? (no, what if she is not ready, what if she is overwhelmed, what if she is HURT) unsuitable. Angela, not yet broken in. Likely to fight, to be stubborn. Who could possibly be skilled enough to be worthy of piloting alongside the goddess, but be disposable enough that Jade would feel no hesitation in putting her in danger? Who is here now, who can be called at a moment’s notice?

The tease. The pilot. The off-marked. Talented. Unbeaten in the tournament. A stranger, but one who owes Dolly a kindness.

---

Mirror!

Whispered Promise.

The hangar is moodily lit. The mecha is half-covered by a vast tarpaulin, draped like a cloak. Indicator lights pulse; it is drawing in power. Guzzling it.

Present yourself before me as a pilot. Speak of this to no one; destroy this. You will be rewarded as I deem fit, until you are satisfied.

Terse, hand-delivered from Seven Quetzal’s team to your own, printed out on stock. Characteristic of the haughty goddess who has won two matches, one by the barest claw— and has just received a humiliating, scandalous draw.

Is this an audition? A divine booty call? The latter seems unlikely; gossip would have informed you that she approaches other pilots through her own. But perhaps she is looking to level up. To discard the pilot who failed her. Is that what you have come to see, Mira? To see if Smokeless Jade Fires thinks she can steal you from the God-Smiting Whip?

Cameras gleam in the half-light. Something that calls itself a goddess is watching you. Present yourself, and you will be offered a bolt of memory weave. (Not a glove, like the cute jaguar priestess wears. A very recent purchase, from the looks of it. Never used before.)

You are summoned. But the power of the response is yours.

[Smokeless Jade Fires has attempted to use Same Wavelength to inhabit Dolly’s senses, and has failed with a 6. Why? And how does this make their position more perilous?

As a consolation, she ticks to 5 XP and picks up Help Me~~! for both of them. But mostly Dolly.]