Thanqol

The Red Furnace: First Contact

"Union wage, eight weeks paid vacation a year and great healthcare!" yelled back a wag from the irregular formation.

Some defensive and buff spells go up in response, arcane in nature, but the spellwork is definitely below Aotrs standards. There is some magic capability here but it's deeply atrophied. These strike you as second line, garrison or security forces in terms of training and discipline. Those weapons are a lot to worry about in terms of the sheer damage they'll inflict if they hit - but that's a very operative if. If there are serious hitters in this formation they're holding back. Despite this they're well trained enough not to clump up and are holding a skirmish formation with good attention paid to minimum safe distances.

"Ha! Oh, clever question. Whichever you prefer. And I know I got paid because I'm still sane. I'm a, how you say," she said another word, 'Ikarani', that made the translation skip; it came out somewhere between supercomputer/genius/doomed. "Leave me running too long and I'll go mad. Hence," she said, fingers touching her forehead, "my appreciation if you would help me make this kill."

She froze when you mentioned your antipathy towards honour, and then took a ginger step backwards. "Child of the Crimson God indeed," she murmured, voice sounding both impressed and appalled. "I mean, I heard stories but..." she clapped her hands together, and then tossed her head back to send the hood falling from her face. The revealed creature was a slender owlgirl, eyes wide and brilliant gold.

In a loud, clear voice she announced:

"I am Boldness of the Ikarani Temple, and I dedicate this sacred hunt targeting Archmagos Birstol to the Azure Goddess.
A violet dawn breaks,
redemption remains denied,
and the curse shall make itself known,
to our glory.
Three are the existences I might end, or one hundred if I am denied."

She turned to face you, Unlucky, eyes glittering and grinning widely. "But you can kill as many as you want! Show me what you got!"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue!

"Exactly so," said Blue. "In fact, I knew him quite well, though we never really spoke. I surveilled him for the better part of two months."

Blue smiled over the gently wafting steam of her tea. Exactly as the Mistress liked it. She looked more than a little like her in that moment.

"I've tossed his apartment. Been through his phone and his emails. I know about both his mistresses, his secret Delaware accounts, his connections with the Triads. I held the door open for him when he went to meet his contact in Thai National Intelligence. One time he came home unexpectedly[1] and I needed to spend the night lying under his bed so he didn't find me -" she laughed politely behind one hand. "Good thing I don't snore."

She set her tea down. Let the intrigue steep, the imaginations run wild.

"Of course, this was all illegal - but of course, I wasn't legally a person at the time. The Mistress was quite influential, as I'm sure you know, so she had her fingers in a lot of pies. Above all, she detested trusting sensitive matters to humans. She trusted us, she trusted her 2D girls, and she trusted her lizards. Evidently them most of all, given how the will worked out."

She smiles another mysterious smile, but this time she looked nothing like Everest.

[1]: It hadn't been unexpected at all, the others had just decided not to warn her, as a joke. Bitches, all of them.

Pink!

She's overwhelmed. She feels that. Sometimes she's not sure any of the others do. She felt it when they built a world. She felt it when they destroyed the Everest family. She looks up into the sky and sees Earth there, the glittering planet straight above them. This is thunder and lightning to her, concepts so powerful they need to be reduced to the shape of everydad to not terrify. Media is a god. Media is a wolf. Media is a thing that doesn't have ten billion screens and twenty billion eyes and a trillion tonnes of mass and momentum on the line. It's a story, a film, a singular event. Not a change in the material conditions of a civilization.

It's an emotion she wishes she could just fucking dissect with lasers and carve into the shape of a city block. She needs some sort of outlet for feelings like this. She'll go fucking mental otherwise. She doesn't have one - not for feelings this big.

Black!

There's an instinct to this. It's to take a broken part of the world and make it fit.

In Black's opinion, November's problem is that she doesn't understand this basic truth. She rationalizes it and processes it a million ways to Sunday but the truth is that there is a secret order to the universe. If you identify that order then you can start pushing things into it. The reward for succeeding is this: Shambala.

There are no thoughts in Black's head either in this moment. She's action and reaction, as pure as 3V is feeling. Every time 3V looks for approval, any time her sense of bliss wavers and nerves kick in, Black is there in her perception with an unblinking stare and the silent words "This is what I want. You are such a good girl."

She's fascinated, hypnotized by this, by her power in this. How far can her silence push 3V? How powerful is her mere presence? Is it enough to overcome every inhibition this ridiculous, beautiful girl might have? It feels like everything here is her doing; she is the scene, she is every hand and every fang, part director part god. Everything feels like it exists because of her and so it is all a part of her. She doesn't know how this works, how to stop, it feels dangerous and she's hyperaware for the cracks and every moment she doesn't spot one makes her all the more convinced this is correct.

White!

Amidst the complexity of White's personality stack there were certain things that had 'right of way'. Conversation had an unusually large number of interruption permissions. It could inventory and freeze certain ideas that threatened to consume all available attention if they threatened to interfere with conversational flow. Some of her cousins didn't have the same priority set, and so if you gave them an interesting idea in the middle of a conversation they'd go silent for potentially days while they worked through it.

So, to Fiona watching White for reactions, there was a moment there when she totally froze - surprised, overwhelmed - but then it cut out after a second and went hard in the other direction: active, aware, focused, social.

"That sounds ideal," purred White.

Beneath those gleaming irises, the backed up thought cabinet looks like this:
1: I am somebody's hero
2: Identification of the problem is inadequate as a solution

But it's the third thought in the list she has to give priority to.

"Just so you know, this is my first time," she said. She has to. Her fundamental drive is to identify and confess weakness and virginity is no exception. "With people who aren't me, I mean. Please guide me while also not making it obvious that you are doing so." She smiled, licked her finger, touched it to the base of Crystal's horn and ran it up to the tip. "So I guess the stories about unicorns are true, hmm?"

The Red Furnace: First Contact

Boldness laughed, bright and clear and beautiful. "Oh!" it - she? said. "So many questions! You'll leave the Crimson in no time at all at this rate. How to put it? The Furnace Knight's crime is," again the translation spell stumbles over an intensely complicated concept being boiled down into a single word. The best it manages is 'redemption'. "So, yes. All of those reasons. It's hard to explain."

The defense is centered around a set of bulbous light mechs. These are unarmed, slow-moving all terrain quadrupeds, quite unlike the gravity technology seen elsewhere. To a scan, they seem to be little more than mobile reactors, heavily armoured and given basic locomotion. Each mobile reactor is tended to by a squad of nine soldiers, each carrying a strange nozzled weapon like a flamethrower or a chemical spray, attached directly to the reactor by a thick cable/hose. If those guns need a reactor the size of a car to fire then they will inflict serious damage despite ostensibly being infantry weapons.

The aliens carrying them are a different branch from the ones seen before. These ones still wear yellow fabric, but rather than concealing their appearance behind baffling robes these ones seem intent on showing their bodies off. The diversity is wild; unrestrained biological and cybernetic modification allowing each individual to follow its own ideal of beauty. Aliens from a hundred species following a thousand individual aesthetics make this military formation look like what you might get if you built an army of interstellar bounty hunters.

"And isn't that interesting," Boldness mused, paying no heed whatsoever to all this. They weren't firing and she wasn't acting like they were about to. "You're an assassin who thinks like a politician, talks like a merchant, and asks questions like a philosopher. You also seem to have the authority to negotiate. I'd almost have guessed you were part of a mercenary warband, but you seem to think that we might pay you with diplomatic relations..." she snapped out of it. "Gratitude! I'm not sure, I get paid in amnesia. You, though? A wish is traditional, isn't it?"

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

It is unfortunate to be a demon against Zhaojun's Demon Binding Umbrella. As she opens the weapon's span the binding circle pattern snaps into focus, crushing down on the maid from all sides. Isn't it wonderful to be wanted? But she could not bind a creature of the Maid's rank and power for long, so she used it to batter and confuse, to throw her opponent off balance with the startling sight of the circle before entangling the crook at the base around a foot and sending her to the floor again...

#impossibly@ this is not her function. As enchanting a match this may be, she has a mistress/an agenda. Amidst all this chaos wouldn't it be wonderful for some disruptive, primordial order?

"You think I am the fairest?" said Zhaojun, swaying aside. "But you have not even seen my Mistress! With but a word and a thought and a bite I was captured, captured so sweetly that I am bound still. How can I fall to another with her eyes watching over me? How can I accept a mistress who has not proven her superiority? All of this stands as a gift to her; but would it not be enchanting if it might stand as a gift to you?"

[I Ship It: 9. Zhaojun gives the Maid a string on Victorious Vixen, the Maid may apply a string in return]

The Red Furnace: First Contact

There is a complete double take from the passing alien. And then there's more. You are drawing attention rapidly - something which does not seem to bother the assassin.

"Oh, clever answer!" said the assassin, performing that enthusiastic high-speed clap again. "Context games, interrogational reversal. Your society hasn't finished growing, then! Well, perhaps we can help with that - and I can skip a few steps in my own task. As children of the Crimson God you have yet to be," it says a strange word that doesn't translate at all. The closest the spell gets is 'devoured'. "So you can do things we can't. My name is Boldness, and I represent the Saoshyant, who has marked the Furnace Knight for death -"

Onlookers within earshot flinch, and then bolt. Suddenly the space around the two of you is abruptly empty and the facility more distantly seems to be falling into a panic.

"- and were you to murder him on our behalf his gratitude would be known across the Endless Azure Skies!"

In the distance an alarm klaxon begins to sound. Lines of heavily armed and armoured soldiers are forming up at distant checkpoints. Boldness, for its part, couldn't seem less bothered by all of this.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Spirits and ghosts swirl around her, the cosmic shockwaves of minds that learned to hide themselves in the spaces between atoms. Heaven is empty and the gods are all here.

She reaches out with crackling fingers and the world shapes itself to her need. Oxygen crackles and the air runs thin as it is dragged out of the air. Carbon disassembles into its component parts. The flames still licking at her scales run dry as their breath is stolen and concentrated into the point of her fingers. All this broken matter forms together into a flask made of blue ceramic, decorated with the white figure sketches of early 2000s webcomic artists. It uses a single boar tusk as a stopper, attached to the neck of the flask with a string, and when it is uncorked the pop is almost as satisfying as the grapelike smell from within.

Solarel tosses it to Nierka. Drink! she signs enthusiastically. You'll cramp otherwise!

And with that, and an enthusiastic thumbs up, she's gone.

She follows her own advice as she clambers down the side of the Sea Spike. Each time she has a spare moment a new flask forms in her hand - this one white tropical wood inlaid with rhinestones, this one a silken waterskin still bearing scars from lion's talons, this one reinforced plastic hard enough to endure a napalm strike... - and takes a single sip before letting it fall so that she can use both hands to leap to the next section. Each time the flask dissolves before it hits the ground and reforms in her waiting hand, shape and contents unique each time.

Zaldarians have between two and five power cores in their bodies. Fewer cores mean shorter discharge cycles, quick to fill and quick to empty. Twitchy girls. Five cores gives you the aspect of the bear; slow and deliberate and unstoppable when you get going. Solarel has three - one at the back of her neck, another above her tail and a third above her heart - and in the aftermath of a fight they ache.

She's not built like a human or catgirl, with their weird artificial seawater circulation. Her blood consists of a thick, golden lubrication/coolant nanofluid that forms into fatty deposits on breasts, thighs and most extensively in the tail. It's a multifunction compound - it can supercharge the nervous system, enhancing reactions and senses, it prevents muscle clusters from drying out and accumulating friction damage, it contains repair and modification naites. A Zaldarian with a big, magnificent tail is a Zaldarian ready for war. After running hot in a fight like that she's lost an inch from her tail she's gone down a cup size.

All this to say, Solarel isn't really thinking about the fight or the concept of victory or anything such right now. She's mostly just thinking she's insanely hungry and needs something more substantial than flaskposting to get her through the afternoon.

Breathless Dead

Redana!

"Hmmph! Hrmph!" Iskarot grumble-hisses when hugged, with an irritability only shown as false by the lack of claws. "Redana. Do you wonder why I never gave you a saffron robe? Why I'm not wearing mine now?" he gestured self-consciously at his face; the fur worn and tattered, the scars visible beneath. "Because the robe isn't a sign of rank. It's fashion, girl. Well, fashion and an attempt to make it more difficult for assassins to target us."

Even crippled, even missing his legs and sat down like a plush toy, there was a quiet dignity in his perpetual seething rage. His face made it clear of the presence of a biologically coded aggression, and his stillness made it clear that this war had been won a long time ago. "We're not united by uniforms, Redana. Not by rank or by blood. It is not knowledge that binds us together across a trillion kilometers of space. It is ideology. It is the journey. It is curiosity to see what is over each new horizon."

He looks at you, small and so very fierce.

"Were Hermes herself to take mortal form and command us to do differently, we would not. We know this because she did just that."

Alexa!

"We awaited this battle for two hundred and fifty years," Lacedo said. "Trained for it. Drilled for it. Wove it into our myths." She raised up one talon to a distant star through the window. "And we succeeded. We took the sky back. Before the eyes of Athena, before a galactic empress, we cast our ancestral foe down and redeemed our species. Our names will live forever."

She looks at you, an impossible emotion in her eyes and in her heart. "Do you think they will make more of us?"

Dolce!

"Gotta be a quadruped," said Ramses briskly. "A bipedal sheep would look like a cute boy in a wooly jumper on camera, not an intimidating war leader. A ram, though? That is fearsome! That puts the focus on your horns, makes it known you are a warlord to kill a king and maim a god! It makes your craving for E N D L E S S B A T T L E known through your visual design! That's just basic cinematography."

The script has you swearing a lot more than you remember ever doing, incidentally, and in more languages.

Bella!

Crabs proceed without fear. They attend you, Bella, in a trail of clicking pincers. Some of them carry single strawberries. Others little bowls of ice cream. Still more jewels or shiny buttons or fragments of tinfoil or other, prettier crabs. Around your feet they skitter just out from underfoot, holding up their tiny offerings. Poseidon's realm is a place of treasures, and the crabs offer them as though to distract from the dark, the warm, the wet. The infestation runs deep.

Then a larger one approaches, signal flags held in its pincers. It sweeps and gestures and all the smaller crabs back away to a meter's remove.

Another crab, painted gold and blue, approaches beneath the cover of the signal flag. It has a letter in its pincers which it offers, clattering. "Mighty Praetor of Tellus, the Assistant Secretary of Fear and Doubt understands that you are presently unemployed. It would like to offer you position as Consul, with all salaries and privileges associated therein."

The Red Furnace: First Contact

The alien flicked a glance around when Unlucky cast his spell. Its hand made a gesture inside its robe - but it relaxed when it identified that the only target was the scanner. It was hard to track its eyes underneath the robe - there was actually a black mesh veil over the face - but it didn't seem like it was fooled by anything.

In fact, considering it, there was never a point of vulnerability with it. It was always just far enough away to make a melee attack risky, and even when it seemed to be looking away it had an uncanny sense for hand motions. It shifted decisively any time Unlucky so much as pointed at it, and any time the hand with the coldbeam pistol so much as twitched the alien took a swift and unpredictable step in response. In addition, it always made sure at least one of its own hands was out of line of sight at all times. For all its feigned casualness it was taking no chances whatsoever.

"Great wizard?" it murmured. "That's what you associate with political power?" Its concealed hand made a gesture and you can sense the warding spell shimmer into place. "Oh, that's so cute! So, how many are you? How big is your fleet? Have you solved the Riddle of Life yet?"

The alien was taking no steps to either summon the attention of the others, but it also seemed to be taking no steps to conceal itself from them either. It was evidently completely confident in its disguise.

Breathless Dead

The Plousios is on its way to the Tunguska - home of the Necromanteion, the temple housing the Oracle of the Dead.

Epistia and Beljani!

Two have become one and it's wild.

The greatest advantage of the Warriors of Ceron is their legendary pack instinct. It holds them in formation when all else is chaos, it lets them communicate wordlessly on an instinctive level, and above all it makes them like each other. A Ceronian pack will walk through fire to collect the body of a fallen packmate and high five each other while their fur is still smouldering. Regardless of how the pampered assassin and the feral princess might have thought about this situation before, right now they are thick as thieves.

And as problematic as thieves. In this intoxicated newly-formed synchronization the suddenly inseparable pair have become an engine of anarchy. With the collapse of the Temple, Epistia has taken it upon herself to procure the luxuries that Beljani is accustomed to, and Beljani is doing her bit to get Epistia hooked on those same luxuries. Their revels are increasingly pursued by Dionysus, and with Beljani's ability to pull more people into her network, their party is rapidly careening out of control. An entire deck of the ship has joined the celebration and while a week of merrymaking is laudable after such a victory, we're nearing the end of the second and things only seem to be accelerating.

Jil and the Lanterns!

The ceremonies for the dead must be conducted. The halls of the Anemoi arise in chorus and drum, thunderously loud to be heard over the silence of the acoustics. The shrines of Artemis have been carefully transferred into temples on the ground and new cathedrals build in favour of Apollo, and so day follows night.

The ship is theirs now. They have banished the darkness and filled every corner with lanterns. In Apollo's name they pray and work and say their many thanks to their many fallen. As is the custom of the ship, once their earthly flesh is stripped away, their bones are taken and woven into the fabric of the ship. Unlike the Kaeri, these bones are not trophies. They are not to be made into thrones for their conquerors to sit in. Instead they are given dignity and purpose amidst their families, remade into weapons that might defend their daughters or cradles that might keep their sons safe. They are built into the macrocannons they spend their lives tending or the lanterns they spent their lives defending. A fearsome custom, but the Lanterns are a fearsome people.

Dignity and virtue, then, they have aplenty. What they do not have is leadership. All throughout the dark their leaders were temporary and improvised. No swifter target for a Kaeri blade than a charismatic authority figure. But a starship can only fly in one direction and the lack of unified authority has paralyzed the Lanterns in their victory.

In the face of victory's entropy, Jil sits in one of the new temples of healing and wonders if the days when they were a united people were but a dream.

Iskarot and the Order of Hermes!

It had taken a long time for Iskarot to feel his age.

His tripod legs had held such speed and power. With them he had been able to clamber up walls without thinking, skitter across the exterior of a reactor, move across a starship exterior at a gallop. His body had contained an arsenal of deadly weapons, esoteric designs collected from a century of travel and service. He'd felt young and vital these past few months. He'd taken a gamble, betrayed the Empire, seized promotion, and survived void warfare.

And now he had to rely on fingers that wouldn't even cease their trembling in the time it took to light the blunt.

Exasperated, he pulls back his hood. The light absorbent baffles and polyweaves fall away for the first time in public for over thirty five years. Beneath is a servitor with the the features of an aging racoon. A common enough breed in the void: a Ruster, those genetically engineered spaceship technicians and salvage experts. The secrets of heavy industry were written on their bones and they would turn worlds into factories if someone would but feed them while they worked.

He takes a deep, shaky inhale of the smoke and blows it out, staring out at the distant industry of the reactor room. Neither the smoke nor the industrial activity calm him as they once did.

Ramses and the Coherent!

They're doing fine! Thanks for asking.

They're a highly unionized unit with strong death benefits, and their control of the field at the end of the battle - plus the capture of the Anemoi - filled their pockets to bursting. They could honestly have taken worse in the battle so they're pretty upbeat, despite their losses, and many of them are moving ahead with advanced or latestage body modifications they had resigned themselves to waiting years for. They are also working on a special project that will make them famous as well as rich - a new movie, Prion Paula VS the Garden of Terror!: A barely edited re-enactment of the recent battle.

Ramses has changed back to being a girl. Out of necessity this time. She is, after all, the actor who plays Prion Paula.

Lacedo and the Alcedi!

The Alcedi were never made for peace. The defeat of the Kaeri sat right with them. The skies are theirs again. But the price was awful.

Their losses were the worst of any side of the battle. Their grudge against the Kaeri sent them into the heart of the fray against the most terrible of the enemy's forces. Both flocks were consumed in the conflagration. The survivors are dazed and shattered remnants, barely one tribe where there had been four. Many simply desert this shadow of glory, leaving to join the Hermetics or wander away on their own paths. The Alcedi were not made for unity. They were made for pride, made for victory and nothing holds them together now their victory has been achieved.

Lacedo is one of increasingly few attendees to the tribal gathering, promoted to the status of Elder despite her youth because of the depths of the losses in the leadership. Even so, it seems like the entire history and heritage of the Fleets might blow away in the wind.

The Assistant Secretary of Fear and Doubt!

A triumph was held for the Lord of the Eater of Worlds. He was borne through the halls of the Plousios by a chariot of seahorses, while a treeshark carried a coral wreath above his head and whispered to him that he was not a god and all glory was fleeting. At the end of the procession gladiatorial games were held between the surviving battlecrabs. The victor of these games was awarded a villa immediately adjacent to the command deck and a staff of twenty Kaeri prisoners to attend and clean it.

The Assistant Secretary then withdrew to the depths to plan his next campaign.

Mynx!

She was not amongst the slain. Where her body had fallen all that could be found was a single burning cigarette butt.

The Red Furnace: First Contact

No support seemed to be incoming. There were plenty of others within shouting distance but so far this disturbance had very carefully taken place outside of everyone's sight and hearing.

"Unlucky?" The alien tilted its head to the side. Then it snapped its fingers brightly. "Ah! Irony. Very amusing!" it clapped its gloves flutteringly together, sincerity weirdly ambiguous. "Well, if you're all about looking and searching, Unlucky, perhaps you might draw my attention to the Archmagos of the Order of Goltir? You see, all of this," it gestured vaguely, "is in place to keep me from killing him. I've been active for two weeks now and you would not believe the headache."

Up until now everything's been bright and bubbly. But when the creature said "It's making me contemplate extreme measures," there was an edge that would send a chill up the spine of even a lich. It's not a threat, per se, but oh goodness if it doesn't seem like a good idea to treat it as a very convincing one.

"Well, back to it then!" the creature said, all sunshine and light and waving. "Good luck!"