Thanqol

Return to Thellamie

Wouldn't Tsane look absolutely darling in an apron?

Consider her for a moment. First and foremost, she is a wizard. She has the hat[1], has the robe[2], has the staff[3], has the attitude[4].

[1] A wizard's hat is distinct from a witch's predominately due to the colour and the accessories. Tsane's hat is dark violet with jagged hot pink flourescent stripes. It is attached to the top of her head with some sort of Contraption that allows it to rotate without friction. Gives it a mildly hypnotic effect.
[2] Tsane's robe looks like she's wrapped in a particularly abstract random-splash painting. The base chassis is something like an oversized white lab coat, but she's wrapped it in overlapping paint glyphs, all of them 99% complete with their broken circuits running down along her side. With the stroke of one of her arcane markers she can complete the glyph and activate one of her coat's pre-prepared spells. More of these glyph patterns run around her arms and body, magic marker tattoos ready to go off with the flick of a pen.
[3] Staves are complicated pieces of arcane technology. All magic is an imperfect manifestation of a heartblade, so a pseudo-heartblade is essential to strengthening the diluted effects. Tsane's is a large violet lantern made of heavy glass and white gold, lit with a pink fire - matching her hat if not her coat - dangling on a chain from a large crooked shepherd's staff. Like the hat, it gently rotates without end.
[4] Attitude is essential to wizarding. Any fool can cast magic missile, it takes a true practitioner of the arcane arts to feel like you have the right to sink your arms into the quintessence of reality up to the elbows because you think you saw a fish in there and are sure that eating it would enhance your sorcerous abilities. There is a fundamental hubris to thinking your brain can build a better sword than your heart can, and Tsane is standing like she thinks she has learned every lesson there is to learn from her previous encounter with Maid-Knights and that the women before her are no threat at all to her new, enlightened, stratagems of combat.

To extract her from these things would be a perilous challenge indeed. But once you, once you have mentally disarmed and disrobed her, you can notice less well advertised features. Silky straight black hair. Sharp edges of teeth whenever she speaks. Soft arms that would be unable to escape this shoulder grab no matter how hard she struggled. A reflexively defiant attitude giving enormous opportunity for punishment. And, of course, the combination of fox and wizard creates a sublime air of total moral justification. Both of those things desperately need to be taken down a peg as a matter of course, but getting to humiliate someone who combines the two?

Why yes. She would look good in an apron.

[Entice! Four!]

"Not a pleasant time?" said Tsane. "Pleasant for whom? Because the Hero of Ages has business here, and will not be stopped simply because you are too incompetent to keep your house in order."
"Um," said Kalentia.

Perhaps an apron and a gag.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"No, it would be a sin to end your own life," said Assassin. "Though - that becomes theologically complex in the present day. Mankind, after all, built the physical structure of Hell below the earth. Once the souls of the damned made do with mere rivers of fire, content that the agony of their damnation was not interrupted for commercial breaks. I truly wonder how the Son of God would have fared had he arrived a few millennia late..."

He lets the thought rest. The questions may be theologically interesting, but they pass far beyond his authority to experiment with.

"Suffice it to say that I am able to prolong my martyrdom by opting into a large - but not limitless - supply of feedback forms, commercial intermissions, and review-writing for every product involved in my execution," said Assassin. "And while I do so, I still have some limited ability to get messages out. So to answer your question; no, Adam's lair is in fact deep underground, near the heart of Hell. And be wary, for he is one of the worst of all demons: the Demon of Righteousness."

The cats lounge, curling their tails, making the silhouette twist in wry amusement. Richelieu is broken upon the wheel of irony, animated by their disaffection.

"His job is to stand before the Devil himself and tell him that he is justified. To explain that everything he did was not only necessary, but virtuous. To do this, the Demon must be righteous himself - and he will be. Personally, he is above reproach, sacrificing and intellectual and balanced, exactly the kind of person who can claim a mantle of moral authority. To see the true nature of the man you must look at his friends, and at his silences."

The Namespace of the Rose

Data Recovery!

SEQUENCE 03
10> GOTO SEQUENCE 01-60
20> THE TRASH CHUTE
30> THE MANIACS. BLASPHEMERS. BARBARIANS. PHILISTINES. MONSTERS. BRUTES.
40> THEY THREW THE COGITATORS INTO THE TRASH CHUTE

Tradecraft!

Oh~h? One must respect the discipline.

Those cogitators, the private possession of an Archmagos? You could buy an army with those. And yet, every one of them was ripped out and thrown down into the garbage. I almost do not know what to say. Whoever did this was either very, very smart or very, very stupid. Perhaps both. View everything through those lens.

There are several possibilities. Perhaps this was an act of fanaticism. If the Archmagos was corrupted by the xenos, or the Ruinous Powers, then destroying their cogitators may have been a way to excise their taint. Or perhaps this was an act of profound self preservation - the assassin threw away the cogitators in order to ensure the Skitarii response would run to the perimeter, leaving the interior uninvestigated. If that was the case, that means that they could have left exactly the way they came - dropped the grenade as they left, not as they entered - and still be in the cathedral right now.

Architecture!

All of this tower is a single tooth. Tusk, rather. The ivory is not fake, it's grown - biotech, ascending up like a tree. Its roots run deep underground. Pray that they do not have a teeth's nerves.

That is to say, there is no way to hide doors or rooms here. There are also no imperfections that would make good hand-holds, so climbing the exterior would be extremely perilous. Though - it is a small thing, but the Archmagos teleported exactly five meters to the west. I am under the vague impression that displacer field teleportation is random in direction and distance, but if she teleported five more meters to the west then she would have gone outside the tower and fallen to her death. If the assassin had been a bit slower on the draw, and if the device had time to reset - perhaps that would have been a more reliable way to kill an armoured Archmagos than landing a one in a million shot to the head?

Notice!

The killing bolt shell was painted blue. Same type of paint as the door, different colour. That's weird. You don't normally paint your bullets.

Breathless Dead

The world in Nemesis' jaws is not a no-name chunk of flesh ripped from the throat of an alien civilization.

It is a world of the Restoration Crusade.

At the end of the Age of Knights, after the fall of the High King, a powerful clan shattered their own webgates and sealed themselves off from the galaxy. For a thousand years, during the rise and fall of the Atlas Cultural Sphere and the Imperium that followed it, they built their own civilization. A continuation of the old virtues of chivalry, paired with the traumatic reaction to being on the receiving end of an apocalyptic total war. For generations they advanced their technology, militarized their society, and sought every atom of potential that existed within steel and chivalry. Their blades were honed against lesser alien civilizations but their goal was always this: to prove that ordinary men and women, fused with technology, hardened by experience and lifted by virtue, could defeat the horrors of Biomancy on their own terms.

A mountain range falls like a velvet curtain; behind it, a formation of Knights. Not the gold and ivory marvels of bygone age, these are boxy, grey and industrial, everything lovely cut away and sacrificed on the altar of More. The massive reactor-mech screeches and glows, engine creating a fourth sunrise. Magnets flicker and fade and blades the size of houses scythe into the Wolves.

A crushing flank maneuver follows. Treads scream, tanks smash through forests, turrets already turned to target enemies in a predetermined kill zone. Just before the hammer falls, the dagger slices - airframes cut through the sky, trailing ribbons of fire that cut through the earth and transform the soil into poisoned knives. Infantry with jetpacks race behind, weaving through every gap, investigating every bush and crevasse for hidden soldiers. Assisted by machine intelligence, lifetimes of practice and discipline, and the most profoundly meritocratic culture ever devised, the maneuver is perfect. There are no gaps, no failures of co-ordination, no hesitation or morale shock. Warriors drilled from the moment they could walk take the field, a crushing fist of metal driven directly into the chest of their most hated foe. Thousands of bloody doves emerge from fields of corpses.

"Look," said the Shogun with a smile, "at what they must do to imitate a mere fraction of our power."

And it is true. No Ceronian trains so. There is no need to, any more than a woman must train her stomach to digest what it is fed. The calculation of war does not happen in the minds of officers, nobody has ever needed to explain to a Ceronian how to react to an artillery barrage, the Shogun for all that she is their leader has never needed to give a single order throughout her reign. The Ceronian penchant for art in battle does not in any way represent a lackadasical approach, instead the depth of military understanding is so deep that there is room for playful flair. The mechanics of action can be taken for granted, all that's left is the meta-war of reading the minds and souls of their enemies.

And this war is not fought alone.

Some have thought the Ceronians are a hive mind, a single distributed entity carried across trails of phereomancy. That was not Doctor Ceron's design. Instead they are an entire ecosystem; specialists emerging to fill every possible combat and social role, flexible enough even in the moment to adapt to new opportunities. The pack keeps some outcast, bullied and predated upon, to ensure that there are stealth hunters and intellectual outsiders. And yet, when the circumstance of war aligns with their privately developed specialty, they wordlessly seize complete control over battlefield command. Proud alphas lower their ears, lie flat and unquestioningly obey the instincts of the girl who knows how to play dead.

This was Doctor Ceron's genius: to divorce war from desire. This is the perfection that prevents Aphrodite from devouring his lover. Though later there will be time for desire, for pride and humiliation to make itself fully known, for positions to be reasserted or overthrown, as long as Mars stands upon the field the wolves fight without ego or pride. And for all the grey paint and small unit tactics of the Crusade, that flicker of pride that still burns in their hearts is what the wolves exploit time after time after time...

*

Even the Shogun is not immune to knowing her Place. When the War needs her to pick up a rifle and join a solid projectile fusillade she does so without thinking. When she must detour to place an anti-Knight mine on a deserted stretch of road deep in the backlines it is not the sort of thing that she's even consciously aware of happening. Sometimes she passes by mass formations of Ceronians without so much as a blink of the eye, all of them instinctively knowing that the War does not permit them the space for a leadership contest at this moment. The skyline burns, macrocannons pouring fire into orbital plates, the howls of wolves jamming every frequency.

But then a shield bursts. A city collapses, pulverized under its own amplified weight as gravitational pulses fixate on it. Immediately every Ceronian's internal calculus changes - and that is when the heavy weapons emplacements swing around from guarding the road to fire on the Shogun and her companions.

The Namespace of the Rose

Virgid!

[Occult Studies] You are not permitted to know of anything that may interact with the operations of a Displacer Field. In fact, you seem to have a suspiciously large number questions about the operations of Displacer Fields. I have my eye on you.

[Data Recovery]
SEQUENCE 02
10> ELECTRICAL THOUGHT MUST BE CAGED, IN IRON AND PLASTEEL AND SHACKLES
20> THESE CAGES HAVE MASS.
30> THIS MUCH ELECTRICAL THOUGHT MUST BE CAGED IN QUITE A LOT OF MASS
40> WELL OVER A HUNDRED KILOGRAMS. MAYBE TWICE THAT.
50> THAT IS A HEAVY BURDEN EVEN FOR AN ASTARTES.

[Outdoor Survival]
Yeah nah mate, no way you're carrying that much weight and climbing down that tower. You'd slip and break yer neck. A glider wouldn't cut it either, you'd need a jetpack or a grav-chute to shift that kind of weight around. You can get stealthy versions of them but they're not easy to find, and someone would have seen that...

[Data Recovery]
60> GOTO SEQUENCE 01-01
70> I HAVE BEGUN TO THINK THE UNTHINKABLE
80> IT IS POSSIBLE THAT THE DEVICES MAY HAVE BEEN DESTROYED RATHER THAN STOLEN
[Spend a point to precisely locate the remains of the Cogitators]

Return to Thellamie

Tsane!

In Yukisworld, they have a concept called 'evolution'. Under 'evolution', species branch and adapt in order to extract every spare molecule of nutrients from their environment; transformation directed by hunger. In Thellamie, it is quite the reverse: the dragons of the world hunger, and they generate the environment to satiate that hunger. Put it another way, the creation of the world is but the nesting instinct of dragons. The branch upon which the nest rests are the laws of magic and physics, the outer layer of sticks are the forests and the plains, the inner layer of feathers and downing are the animals and people.

And, of course, the flecks of decorative tinsel and glass, shining beautiful in order to attract mates, are the maids.

Tsane has heard some challenges to her theory in the past. People insist that some god or gods built the world instead as a gift for them, or claim that there are higher purposes to life than acting as warming insulation for a dragon against the forces of unreality. These she dismisses as misplaced pride and insecurity. Others argue that there are reality bubbles without dragons at all - yes, certainly, not that you can see. Perhaps their lair has not been found, or perhaps they are out hunting and courting. Some people take objection to the idea that there is an objective standard of beauty, and that it is the maid. Tsane assumes that these people are blind and navigate with some sort of echolocation.

The point is, to research the many and varied ecosystems of Thellamie it is not enough to collect a taxonomy of ants and lizards (no matter how cool lizards are). One needs an understanding of the greater ecosystem at work, how the dreams of the Outside are filtered into material reality, the anchor points and how the world forms around them. There is no place for pride or ideology in science. If it is simple truth that the highest thing that you can accomplish in life is as a beautiful ornament for a dragon's nest, then the only question left is how to best realize that.

So it is that she is here at the gates to the Manor.

She has arrived before Injimo, having performed no particularly heroic feats along the way. She has with her Kalentia, who - good girl that she is - is determined to follow the Civil's instruction of infiltration and investigation. Tsane is barely interested in that part of things - she's here to do Dragon Science. She wants to take measurements, analyze elemental compositions, type affinities, weaknesses, take anatomy sketches, perform chemical sampling of scales and measure the crushing strength of jaws. Sayanastia is, for a variety of reasons[1], not a particularly useful subject. This place, this dragon, though... she can hardly wait!

[1] The full list of reasons:
- Weakened modern incarnation
- Fundamental hostility towards the idea of reality itself
- Ate my tape measure
- Vomited a nightmare gorilla on me

"Oh, well um, thank you," said Kalentia. She was always pretty weak with the Heron disguise, even when she could follow along with what was happening. "Do - do you want me to cook some eggs for you now?"
Tsane wasn't following either, but didn't interject. She had a long standing policy of always pairing up with Kalentia specifically because she was the only good cook amongst the Handmaidens, and that decision seemed to be turning out mission critical this time as well. It must be her lucky day!

Breathless Dead

There is nothing better than a massage from someone who does not give a shit about you.

Someone who cares will be gentle. Will be kind. Will be soft - or will be hard and deliciously cruel depending on their nature. But when there is a dialogue and self-expression and intimacy, the unique touches of a lover draw away from the possibility brutal, mechanical perfection. The Shogun could fix catgirls all day on an assembly line and every one of them would stagger away with knees too weak to walk and bliss too thick to speak through.

It's amazing.

A gift from the Gods.

Hermes, Nero, Imperator in her wisdom must have noticed the suffering of her people. And so she donned her healer's mantle and put this power in the hands of the Wolves. Your arms are wrenched and dislocated. A burning paw stomps on your neck so hard it feels like it might break. Your ears are yanked and pulled. Hairpin needles are drawn from the Shogun's hat and stabbed into the centres of pain that had become part of your personality. Art like this went from the galaxy when Hermes descended from Olympus, and its return, for all its agony, is the most transcendent of bliss.

"The Empress of the Galaxy," said the Shogun, "has descended to the Underworld. There She corrects the wicked shades of the dead, and teaches them again of glory. The Wolves of Ceron have been issued with this great mission: To seek the True Death. We fight and die and are reborn in the shadow of Nemesis, our flesh renewed as bird and beast, our souls and legacies returned in the cloning vats of Ceron. We live, we die, we live again. But one day the weight of our deaths and our kills will become so heavy that we will pierce Demeter's law and our souls will fall to the Underworld. When they do, we will find Tellus and summon it to Nemesis. All the uncountable shades of humanity will rise with it, and with them, our Empress. Until then, we live. We die. We live again."

At last she was done. She pitilessly stepped away.

"To reign in her stead, She has left Her shadow atop the Psycho Throne. She awaits you, Voyagers, upon the surface of Nemesis -" the Shogun gestured at the empty space in the centre of the Ring.

Space warps and distorts. The will of the God of Travel runs through a million glyphs and prayers. A divine hand reaches out to a distant star where a hidden pack howls at the moon. In the blink of the eye a pristine world is plucked from Heaven and served up to the Wolves for execution.

C-beams glitter in the dark. Orbital plates flatten mountain ranges with graviton pulses. Wolves pour from the skies - some in jets, some in pods, some simply leaping through the endless azure skies. Flickers of defensive systems come online, fortresses close their gates, military bases scramble to react. But, like an oryx separated from its herd, all it is now is meat.

"- so come with me now," said the Shogun, illuminated by the fires of Hell. "Come, but be warned. Whenever I step foot on the surface of Nemesis I am fair game. Any of my wolves might kill me freely and claim my title, and once that happens it can be months before my conqueror will be established enough to pick up where I left off. So, unless you'd like this to be a long trip, I suggest you keep me alive~"

The Namespace of the Rose

Archmagos Toros!

run shoot run shoot run run run shoot run
bliss
flow
perfect battle
eternal war
all the daemons of hell arrayed against her
run shoot run run shoot run run shoot
frictionless
fluid
perfect
run run run
like a war in dreams

The emotion flows and flows and flows, an endless cascade. Hours, days, months spent locked in this state of enchanted battle. Everyone knew the Archmagos to be an academic locked away in her tower, but all of her memories are of violence and war.

Motion.
Motion without motion
Secrets of perspective
Standing still and crossing distances
Here, there, everwhere
A dojo, clean and sparse
Flickering like a switch left right left right left right left
The Displacer Field. It was capable of so much more than anyone understood.
It was -

[Military Science] Listen up, soldier. There are only two ways this all fits together and neither of them are good.

Door comes in. Archmagos gets shot. Displacer field activates. Now - stay with me here - what if she teleported to a place where there was already a bolt-round? Not enough time and mass for the bolt-round to arm and so it finished penetrating and continued on to hit the window. So this means the assassin executed the Archmagos with a single shot to the head, and then fired a three round burst into her new location before she had even finished teleporting.

The Wolves of the Rout have made good shots before, but this is - well, you don't think you could do this. You're not sure your instructors could have done this. Frankly speaking it's some of the best marksmanship you've ever seen, bordering on the impossible. That's option one.

Option two is that the killer somehow knew exactly where the Archmagos was going to teleport to before she did, and was already firing at her destination before the killing round had hit her. And that downgrades the marksmanship to... merely very, very good. Don't love either of those, frankly.

The Namespace of the Rose

Ramona!

[Forensic Pathology] Good Evening, Madame Ramonia. It is delicious to have you here as my guest again this evening. Tonight we do not deal with the subtle flavours of poison, garrote or blade: prepare yourself for the heady, industrial flavours of a military murder.

One shot to the head killed the Archmagos. The detonation happened in her cerebral cortex and blew out the back of her skull. She passed away instantly, and without pain, Omnissiah be praised. If you do not mind I would like to collect all the fragments from the remains of her skull, though this may take some time [Spend: 1 Point to reconstruct the killing bolt round].

The torso, though, has two entry wounds. One exit wound.

No internal detonations.

A bolter is not a solid-slug weapon. It is more like a rapid-fire miniature rocket launcher; when a bolt shell penetrates its mass-reactive core detonates, creating a small internal explosion that causes crippling injuries. Two rounds have impacted on the Archmagos' armoured torso, the protean neometals of her cybernetic form, and deflected without exploding. The third one is missing...

But then there is the exit wound.

Bolters don't leave exit wounds, my darling. It is one of their signature traits. And yet there it is, clear as day, emerging from the Archmagos' rear left lung. A penetrating shot, not a detonation, as though shot with a bullet and not a bolt round. But bullets, I am given to understand, reliably leave entry wounds, of which there is no corresponding example. This is a mystery far outside my skillset, I am afraid.

[Notice] Look. In the broken glass. The light is wrong. That's a metal shard, not a glass fragment. That bolt round that exited through the Archmagos' back, it went on to strike the stained glass window behind her. It detonated, and shattered the glass, blowing it outwards. [Spend: 1 point] But it doesn't matter. What really matters is the door. Where it was kicked in, paint flecks. Green paint, centered around the impact site. Whoever kicked in that door was wearing green-painted armour. I will sample for you the exact shade and hue.

Virgid!

[Data Recovery]
10> LAMENT. LAMENT TO THE OMNISSIAH, FATHER AND MASTER OF ALL MACHINES
20> THE SACRED RITES OF DEACTIVATION WERE NOT PERFORMED.
30> INFORMATION STORED IN THE COGITATOR'S FORTUITUS MEMORY WAS LOST
40> TO MOURN THE LOSS OF SACRED KNOWLEDGE GOTO 10
50> NO ADEPT OF THE MECHANICUS WOULD HAVE ENGAGED IN SUCH BARBARIC REMOVAL OF SACRED MACHINES
60> [load: death-to-the-brute.hmn]

[Forensic Pathology] Good evening, Master Virgid. I have quite the meal for you this fine night.

You should eat her brain.

Not Ramona's. Ha ha ha, no. Not yet. You do recall that one of your implants is called the Omophagea? That is, the Marine's ability to learn the memories of the recently deceased by eating their brain matter. The brain in this instance is somewhat... scrambled, which may make the process complicated, but the Martians will understand. This is simply the organic version of Data Recovery, after all. Ms. Ramona may, however, be... more squeamish.

[Spend: 1 point of Forensic Pathology to get access to some of the Archmagos' memories]

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"Technology does indeed dull the mind," said the cats. "Why, back in my day..."

A cat is water with teeth. Eight of them together come as a river.

Clawing. Biting. Cuddling. Sleeping. Hissing. All the things that cats are and can be, through every gap and into every space, between every pair of legs and climbing every fabric surface. Fur as smooth and glossy as an otter's, leaving hairs as long and sticky as a web. Butts are placed in faces. Meows rise like a chorus. And the way they stand together...

It's like a magic eye trick. The eight cats are chaos, ceaseless movement, like looking at the rip and curl of individual waves. Look at them the right way, though, and you can see the ocean. A shape always in the center of that fluid movement; the outline of a person. That cat leaping up onto a fence post forms the outline of a face. That cat snatching at the butterfly gives the impression of a risen hand. A cat is water with teeth, and water shapes itself to the container it is placed in. In the center of all of this fur and pride and arrogance is a hole made out of kindness, patience, and wet meals reliably provided.

The jar is broken, but the water keeps its shape.

"Back in my day, if you wanted to find the gates of Hell, you usually had to die for it," said the catshape of Assassin. "Nowadays you can put a little portal to it directly in your pocket! Still, I like to think that my way has at least a little merit..."

The cats stopped, all looking at Katherine simultaneously, unblinking. "That is to say, hello. I am Richelieu, née Assassin. Please forgive the trouble I have caused you. I hope my master, Actia, is doing well? I could not find her, which I take to mean that she is in the field and does not wish to be disturbed."