Thanqol

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Tsane!

"I do not," said Tsane airily, swishing around the teapot "negotiate with the help. No, I'm going to speak directly with the dragon one way or another, and the only question for you is what condition the house is going to be in when I do."

"I'm sorry," said Kalentia. "She gets like this - um, Tsane?"
"Mm," said Tsane, holding up one finger. She's drinking the schnapps out of the teapot's spout directly. "What?"
"Do you think we could -"
"They've given us an ultimatum, Kal," said Tsane. "Following on from an ambush. Following on from having one of their knights kickflip a skateboard off my head when I was about to single-handedly defeat Aria Thendragon. They are the aggressors here and I won't hesitate for a second to burn this entire house down."
"Oh -"
"As far as I'm concerned, I've displayed a saintly level of self restraint already."
"Okay -"
"Have some schnapps," said Tsane, offering the teapot.
"Um, thank you. Uh, before we burn your house down, do you mind telling us about why Eclair attacked Civelia?"

The Namespace of the Rose

[Art History]
Lion green
Wolf blue
Fangs, jaws
Loyal two
Forest black
Burning sky
Fool's glory
Eye's eye

In the days of the Great Crusade, when the Dark Angels and Space Wolves were both Legions, there was a terrible argument between Lion'el Johnson and Leman Russ that escalated to a duel to the death. Lion'el, Primarch of the Dark Angels, won the fight - but at the last moment turned aside his blade and spared the life of Leman Russ. A glorious battle, one of the first sagas that every Space Wolf learns - and the beginning of a ten thousand year tradition that whenever the Angels and the Wolves meet again then a formal duel should be conducted between their champions to recreate the great battle of their Primarchs.

Eunicornus knows this too. They do not waste a single word. As you reach the bottom of the stairs, they stand. Robed in ashen white, helmet bearing magnificent wings, golden pauldrons glittering with displays of ancient battles. Get closer, give me a good look, and I will unravel the secrets engraved into their armour [1-point spend].

Ramonia!

You don't get any of that. You just see a transhuman killer in full plate draw a sword the size of your entire body and start coming down the stairs towards you with what is clearly murderous intent. Whatever else you have become in your life, your ancient monkey brain is letting you know that this is the largest, scariest monkey you have ever seen and it means to inflict harm. You're up for a Stability check - you won't embarrass yourself on a failure, but you might miss some things that you otherwise would have picked up on.

Breathless Dead

You have been here before, in a dream.

Not the dream of Tellus. That was a world of steel and ferrocrete, of crimson carpets and crimson banners and the awesome power of a united humanity crammed into a single ball. Once humanity's empire had spread as far and wide as the Endless Azure Skies before being crushed into a single point, all of its joys and cruelties stacked cheek to jowl until they all blended together. You would remember the dream of Tellus, but this dream slips through your fingers. Where have you seen it before...?

The room is small, built for no more than twenty seated. The floor is wood, poorly laid - each step creaks, and walking is almost musical, no matter how softly your feet fall. The walls are paper, beautifully painted, but not fully blocking out the fire and noise of the war outside. Three quarters across the room there is an open channel, filled with ever-burning fires, forming a veil to separate you from the Empress. It is not there for her protection - it is there for yours, for the Empress that sits upon the Throne of Regret is a ghost.

Her hair is long and lank, rotting through its elaborate bindings. Her fingers are withered into claws. Her eyes are sunken into a beautiful face, shining with the metal pins where it has been stitched together. Her robe is the palest white. The morticians of Ceron have done the best they could, but this is still the face of death - the twisted projection of a soul trapped in the Underworld.

Above you sits the Dead God.

"Re... da... na..." the words come from breathless lips. "I knew this burden was not too heavy for you."

Dolce!

"Hm, hm, hm~" Artemis hums with every step across the floor. She brings out the music of it; the nightingale melody of footsteps. She twirls on one toe, then steps down hard. There is joy here, in the sounds footsteps make in this haunted place. Even you, trained for stealthy service, cannot avoid the music of these floorboards - but you knew before you entered that the mistress of this house has no fear of assassins.

Then this is not a weapon in a game of murder. This is a toy. A thing of happiness, amidst the fire and darkness. As you step across the floor something of that mysterious dream comes into your head: the memories of the Starsong, and what it means to turn battle into music.

A precariously permitted toy. Were a single one of those great urns of coals to be kicked over this entire building and its paper walls would go up in a conflagration. Indeed, it feels like this entire place is intended to be flammable. Easy to destroy. An impulse that exists in tension with this beat of playful indulgence, so...

"It'll be easier for her to leave one day, if there's nothing here to return to," said Artemis. "It'll be easier to ensure that there is nothing to return to if the smallest spark might burn it all."

Dyssia!

You know the glyph-crest of Dekal Lawgiver, Knight of the Publica. One of the Publica's legendary warriors, liberator of a dozen worlds and author of some of the most insightful legal codes in the Order's library. A renowned champion of the Grav-Rail and eternal enemy of the Endless Azure Skies, she has not been seen for a hundred years after resolving to launch a strike on Capitas itself. Of all the places her legend might have taken her, serving in the Imperial Court was always more likely than dead and unremembered.

She is unchained. Proud. Strong. But she has given all of her Publica's red for the ghostly white of her corpse empress.

"You look as tired of this as I am," she said in a voice like tarnished copper. "Come, sit with me, young Knight. Tell me of the worlds outside this eternal war. Remind me that there is peace out there, somewhere."

The Namespace of the Rose

Not all technology is mechanical.

The Adeptus Mechanicus are most renowned for their engines - cogitators, plasma turbines, cybernetics - but all forgotten human technology falls within the remit of the Quest for Knowledge. In order to upgrade Skitarii troops, better cogitation implants or more flexible limbs are worthwhile, but so is study into the ancient and forgotten martial arts of bygone eras. While the deep nuances may be lost, enough remains of the trappings to form a foundation.

Inside the massive metal Cube 05 is the dojo of ZBD_ZEN. It is the far future's best guess as to how to recreate an ancient Zen garden, contaminated by a certain Willy-Wonka influence - bioengineered miniature trees, open ferrocrete battlegrounds, waterfalls of liquid fertilizer channeling from one part of the industrial-chemical complex to another. Everywhere are combat servitors, airbrushed entirely black, heads replaced with large cone shapes. This is also the home to the Electro-Priests, sorcerers of lightning who obey the Omnissiah in His aspect of the Motive Force.

Everywhere you can hear them intone the sacred chant: [Techna-linguia] Ka (force) Meh (riding) Ha (peace). The last two tones are repeated over and over, distorting and intensifying, until finally spectacular electrical discharges roar across the open field, blasting apart the combat dummies in fountains of sparks.

This is where the Dark Angel Eunicornius is said to practice her craft, apprenticed to the great Magos. You can see the two of them in the distance, meditating atop a tall pagoda that overlooks the entire dojo. It also looks like a frankly uncomfortable number of stairs to get up there.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"Who else?" said Assassin. "The ones left to guard the tomb were the dragons."

Super Magical Idol-Class Dragon Servant, Elizabeth Bathory!

You have been guarding this stupid tomb for like a hundred years and you are doing GREAT at it. Your hair is SO silky smooth and pinker than Pink Dye #8. Your fingernails are razor sharp and pinker than Pink Dye #5. You maintain the kind of performance schedule suitable for a dragon: That is, every waking moment is spent bringing the demons of the underworld to their knees, tears pouring from their eyes and blood pouring from their ears. And whenever you're in between shows, you take a little nap and let that stupid jerk Oroboros handle things for a bit. Oroboring more like.

Two dragons is overkill. You've always said! You've told her at length that she can take a hike because one average dragon is frankly overkill for this kind of work, underworld of demons be damned. It does help being able to take long naps or time out to compose new songs without compromising perimeter defense, but even so it's embarrassing for the both of you. But mostly her. And mostly because of her dumb hair and her cutesy-wutesy tail-biting and her failure to acknowledge how much better she'd look on her knees softly biting your tail - oh! That jerk! You hate her so much! Also she sleeps through all of your performances which is totally unacceptable.

That is to say: you've got a lot of pent up frustrations. And for all the "danger" these demons of the underworld allegedly pose, fewer and fewer of them even make the attempt to come near you. So when you feel the oncoming storm of what can only be a Lancer-class servant coming towards you (honestly what kind of failure would get summoned as a Lancer, the worst class?) it's time to put on a performance so sharp that'll drive your pinker-than-Pink-Dye-#6 heel through her stupid heart. And maybe you'll crank it so loud that even Uwuboring wakes up and pays attention.

Alright, Liz! Show us what you've got~~~!

Return to Thellamie

Tsane! does the smirk. That little wizard smirk that they do when they're about to draw two units of oceanic mana from nearby nautical features.

The worst thing about wizards is that sometimes they are, in fact, smarter[1] than you.

[1] 'Smarter', of course, is a smokescreen that wizards like to use as shorthand for expressing better than. Nobody needs to be 'smart' to hide a card up their sleeve. What they do need is enough bloody-minded devotion to practicing a trick over and over and over until they get it right, along with the kind of personality that makes them read relevant books and a swan's impulse to shoving as much hard work out of line of sight as possible.

Tsane spent a great many hours analyzing the waters of Vespergift - and the cleaning soaps that Eclair Espoir had used to purify them. And it had mattered exactly how she had performed this act, and so Tsane had spared no effort in searching. She paid visits to four dozen homes and seven different businesses, taking meticulous analysis of their inventories and missing supplies. She had performed a chrono-analysis ritual to unpick the magic of her dress and broom. She had sacrificed a black rooster at midnight so that she might commune with the ghost of the man who's fat she had rendered down to lye. She considered herself quite clever and undeniably correct, and she was about to demonstrate why that mattered.

The pink fire in her lantern erupted, the glass rattling as it tried to hold in the explosion of aetheric heat and light.

"Entropic Principle:" she declared, "Unfamiliar Kitchen!"

And things got messy.

The skateboard grooves all shifted and bent; rehearsed tricks to link onto them instead sent maids wiping out against walls. The wooden floorboards splattered and sucked in feet like mud. The windows all flew open to let arctic winter winds in, despite the continued presence of the heating. All of the furniture shifted, nothing was where it was meant to be, nothing was where it made sense for it to be - for anyone except Tsane. This was now her room, and everything was set out exactly according to her preferences. So what if she kept her pots and pans in what you'd expect to be the silverware drawer? If she used her under-sink cabinet for the storage of cups rather than cleaning supplies, how could you - a mere houseguest - say she was wrong?

And if she decided to sit down in her big comfortable chair and use you as a footstool, well - every house had different purposes for their maids, didn't they?

"What is this awful leaf juice?" she said, making a face and flicking the contents of the tea contemptuously onto the floor. "Make yourselves useful and find me some peach schnapps."

[Defy Disaster: 12]

Breathless Dead

"War is funny, isn't it?" said the Shogun. The light around her was so red it turned even her black leathers shades of crimson. "It is such a disproportionate response to the desires that ignited it. A question of who pays taxes to whom turns into a conflagration that consumes a generation. A yearning to be seen as beautiful and worthy devours an entire planet." She climbs up out of her trench and stretches widely, greeting the burning suns overhead. "No matter how Lord Mars tries to instruct and warn, Desire cannot help itself but dig down to this place where Desire itself is ridiculous."

It is not a dance for her. She does not express anything, does not seek to communicate with how she walks across no-man's land. Turning her head to avoid a cannon round that leaves a whirling arc through her hair is another breath, leaping atop a ruined Knight to not be trampled by a cavalry charge is nothing more than stepping on a stone to cross a river, shooting down a jet fighter from an AA emplacement and leaving before a retaliatory missile reduces it to ash is no more than a pause at a traffic light.

"See how quickly things stop mattering?" she asks. "What does it matter who reigns on Capitas? What does it matter what humiliations the weak must suffer at the hands of the strong? Of all the ways a peace can rot and fester, of all the societies that may be better than the one you are in, of all the wealth and glory you might personally gain from the war - which of them makes you take cover when the shells rain? Which do you think of when the horses charge? Is it love in your heart when you fix the bayonet, or is it instead -"

She grinned. "Nothing? People don't like to think it's nothing. Cut down far enough and it's nothing, nothing, nothing. You are not dead when you live without Desire, you are not stupid when you live without thought. It almost feels like enlightenment. Don't you think that this is more real than what is out there?"

Music, through the fire and crash. Yellow light, dull against the red. Banners held high, the hexagon eye of Jupiter's storm marching through this burning world. The Imperial Caravansary walks about the Nemesis world's equator, lanterns swaying against the storm.

"When Nero came to us all those centuries ago, the Shogun had one condition for our allegiance," said the Shogun. "And that was that she always fight alongside us. She thought her wars would be brief and her peace would be glorious, so she made the deal easily. Gods do tend to underestimate us mortals that way. We have been working on her ever since - showing her that the toxic peace she is building is stagnant and senseless, without meaning or reality. After centuries aboard Nemesis I think that she is coming around to our way of thinking."

The din of battle quiets as you approach the vast carriage-complex, the mobile palace of Imperator Nero, Hermes Manifest. Marble buildings roll ceaselessly atop churning wheels. Wooden temples and interlocking shingle-rooftops wander endlessly on. Half-tracks and jetbikes howl around the edges of this strange, ethereal sight. The din of battle quiets -

- but does not entirely cease.

The Namespace of the Rose

[History] The Astra Militarum cohort Angelis-CC were known to paint bullets blue, believing that the colour was sacred to their dualistic interpretation of the God-Emperor. Under their belief system, the two heads of the Imperial Aquilia represented two independent brains and entities, sometimes acting alone and sometimes acting as one. Their regiment was renowned for brutality, wielding improvised human-scale boltguns and handmade rounds. The cohort perished to a man three hundred years ago during the Skullzar Crusade, and Angelis was subjected to Exterminatus due to an Ork infestation one hundred years ago.

... Sorry. I don't think that is particularly relevant. Is it?

[Occult Studies] None of your business.
[Criminology] Maybe there is a ritual significance? Even if the specifics are forbidden knowledge, sometimes cultists express themselves with unified paint schemes.
[Art History] Then why is the door paint green? Because now that I'm looking at it in more detail, I can confirm this is exactly the correct shade of green paint for a member of the Dark Angels Chapter. The blue isn't a codex compliant hue though.
[Human Terrain] And there is a Dark Angel in the Factory Cathedral. So much of this could only have been done by an Astartes, but...
[Bullshit Detector] But on the essential point, you're right. This feels... wrong. Wrong and stupid. Like someone fucked up a frame job. I think there are two stories here: What was meant to happen, and what actually did.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

In unison, the cats blinked. Then they all stared at each other with undisguised hostility, regretting their moment of uncharacteristic vulnerability.

"Forgive me," said Assassin. "I am accustomed to keeping my secrets and playing my games. I am somewhat unprepared for dealing with an honest soul - no doubt you understand. So firstly, my confession: My objective here is an unfortunately small vanity. You see, in my life there was a beautiful language called French, the language of love and nobility, spoken in all the courts of the world. Eventually the centers of power shifted to foreign courts. Language evolved and mutated. And with it went knowledge of how to pronounce my name. Over the course of aeons some truly abominable permutations have come into being, and my wish upon the Grail was for a small correction to restore my language to its exalted place."

It is strange to see a collection of cats laugh. The motion is a flurry of scrambling and pouncing and diving, a whirl of mirth. "Petty, yes? But all of the Servants here came for wishes as ridiculous as this - desires to be remembered on different terms. Only Caster - and I through eavesdropping and preparedness - knew the truth of the Vault."

The cats, exhausted by this outburst of play, settled themselves into perches of rest, the outline of a comfortable chair in half a dozen snoozing tails and fluffy loafs. "In the dying days of the Burrower empire, after the death of the nine suns and the exodus of the settlers, God sent a falling star to the Earth. It was a diseased thing, thick with alien life that viciously grew in the form of a terrible forest atop the desert wasteland. For many weeks the Nineshard Princess fought the jungle to a standstill as her companion descended into the underworld to find the last remaining Lord of Hell. Through song and love, she touched the Demon Queen's frozen heart and earned her aid.

"The Demon Queen used the power of the Sunshards to release nine powerful ghosts from her artificial Hell, what she called the Penitence Loop. The Loop was a ghastly device, a machine that harvested the energies of souls within it rising and falling in a simulated environment, a - what is the modern term? A 'Do Not Create The Torment Nexus' situation, only this one inspired by Eastern religious texts. The Karma Turbine.

"Together they defeated the fallen star and sealed it in the Demon Queen's deepest palace, bound by the Loop and overseen by two Servants set aside for the purpose. To watch over the Star and the Loop, the Queen bound the Demon of Righteousness, Adam, whose personal morality would never allow him to falter in his diligent oversight of his charges. A perfect, self-reinforcing bubble. But then, when you and your friends cast your spell and contact with the outside world was forced upon him, he was entirely free to flatter and corrupt vulnerable souls. The wish is bait. It is achievable with the controlled detonation of the Penitence Loop and its phenomenal accumulated mana supply, and is therefore an honest offer - but the side effect will be the release of the Star to resume its wicked work.

"I sought to kill Saber via Rider early because I knew she would be a particularly deadly blade in his hands - though neither he nor I foresaw her transformation into Avenger. Lancer was a second choice for weapon, and one far less threatening than Saber would have been. I would have been just as vulnerable to his manipulation had I not the forethought to send letters to myself during my last incarnation.

"As to where Adam stands now, with Caster's aid he has begun the process of overclocking the Penitence Loop - accelerating it with mana harvested from defeated Servants so that it will begin to overload and break down. The power of the Star is leaking - you saw it in the underground jungle - and Lancer is absorbing that strength. Sooner or later the seal will crack and the fallen Star - along with all the souls trapped inside the Loop - will erupt onto the surface. It will be a calamity. Caster, in despair, imagined this to be a good thing.

"Perhaps Lancer too might listen to reason," he finished. "But the issue is that I cannot think of a way to talk to her without her killing me before I finish speaking. She is terribly powerful as she is now, and has Adam by her side to explain away or intercept any letters I might try to send her. But nor can we delay too long, lest Lancer's might blossom such that she can fight the two guardian Servants outside of the Demon Queen's mansion directly. I can, of course, carry a letter to Saber - wounded as she is, I believe her to be safely beneath Adam's notice."

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.