Thanqol

Breathless Dead

Redana!

"Two questions," said Beautiful. Then she punched a hand clean through a loose panel in the ship's wall next to her, pulled out a solid projectile pistol concealed within, and fired it at your feet.

(The last time she'd been active, she'd instructed a priestess to conceal a weapon near her chamber, marked with a glyph of her own design. Her mind had decoded the glyph as instructions on the basic operation and effects of a SP pistol.

Under normal circumstances, Sagakhan or Mynx would have checked for exactly this.)

There is a flash and a bang, an overwhelming, awful explosion into every sense at once. While you're coughing and spluttering, vision hazy and deafened, you get a kick in the forehead that sends you careening backwards.

"One," said Beautiful, "what's a Tellus? Is it important? Normally people chant all that stuff at me while I'm waking up, there's meant to be this huge ritual and everything which is basically a couple hundred people reading different encyclopedia chapters at me all at once, so I'm kind of running on DNA right now."

She snap-reloads the pistol and aims it at you in a perfect firing position. Taking a SP round to the forehead never killed anyone but holy shit does it suck.

"Two," she said, voice ice cold. "Who is Bella? Why do I remember that name?"

Alexa!

Lacedo cannot speak. She is silent. She is still.

It took three hundred years to develop that thought. It took a minute to speak it. Who knows how long it will take for it to unpack in the Alcedi's mind?

But for now there's nothing but the thought. Every so often she makes a breath like she's going to speak, to argue or to agree or say anything, but each time the scale of the thinking she hasn't done yet tapers it off into silence. By tomorrow she still won't be ready. Maybe when a week passes, or two...

But she does stop trying to rally the Alcedi. And without her leadership in this moment the Fleets and all their glory pass into history.

Dolce!

"Oh, uh, Zeus' tits, little guy," said Ramses. "Listen, have you ever met an Order of Hermes Magos? We live and work on their ships most of the time. One of them literally built a corridor of ever burning flame just to reduce the rate we knocked on his door asking for cybersurgery. So we mostly take care of ourselves until the orders come down from above. So, like, the way I figure it, if I waste your time with unimportant stuff you'll get mad at us and cut us off entirely."

She coughed. "I actually was hoping these designs would build up some favour, but it seems like they're having the opposite effect so... uh, I should go?"

Bella!

"The crabs are like animals," came a voice as smooth and strong as a riptide. A beautiful merman steps out of a tidal pool, fish tail seamlessly parting and shifting into two human legs. His face has the cruel beauty of an elf, a shock of deep violet hair woven with kelp, onyx and amethyst. He smiles and gestures and a pair of crabs come forward to wrap a spectacular robe of cream and red silk around his shoulders, patterned with elaborate whorls and waves. He doesn't bother to do it up.

He turns to a massive battlecrab that approaches him. He smiles affectionately, letting his hand run across the front of its shell, affectionately scratching the eyestalks. It clacks its claws in what might be happiness. "It is not a perfect metaphor. Really, the crabs are more like our hands. They can think, but they cannot want. They can act but they cannot know. They are part of us, and yet separate. We must treat them with kindness as we must treat ourselves with kindness."

He turns back to face you and then smoothly bows. He shows respect without any understanding of courtly manners, instead showing genuflection while watching your eyes through the water's reflection for the twitch that indicates he has given the proper amount. "When humanity sought to leave distant Earth, it was the Lord Poseidon's will that the ocean would not be left behind. So he drank it all and spat it out in the shape of a man, and they lay together until they conceived twelve children. Those children, the Tides, were as the hecatonchires once were - the hundred handed children of Gaia. But one mind could not control all those many hands, so the Tides split themselves like starfish. Some parts of them grew into swords, some grew into hearts. Some are creatures for appreciating all the finest things the galaxy has to offer, some are to deliver the cups to their lips, but all are the same creature. But as the Tides grew larger and more complex, their aspects became more specialized. It is only here, in the aftermath of the trauma of death, reduced to barely ten thousand nodes and less than a hundred minds, do we again call upon the most ancient names of power. It is only now that it is worth creating more... generalist incarnations."

He smiled, and at last looked up and made eye contact. His eyes were orange; pink and yellow and salmon and...

"I am Eyes of Coral," said the merman. "One of several who claim that title in this region. To claim a Name is to claim a throne, and one must defeat and subordinate the pretenders before one can come into the fullness of its power. Right now we are entrapped in a hell of our own creation; we are of the lineage of a trauma incarnation. Too scared to leave the defensive crouch, too angry to let the knife slip from our hands, too broken to trust. Do not think Fear and Doubt a cruel or poor leader; he is the ghost of a starship through our brain pan. With him we are craven and obedient, without him... who knows how we might lash out?"

Eyes of Coral looked warily up at the crab. It had no fear in its eyes as it clacked its claws.

"As to what we are capable of, within a timeframe practical to you, we could build an entire million-soul battleship from scratch," he said. "Or take one apart. As to what we want? To be healthy and whole, to reckon with our trauma and learn to grow again. This eternal inquisition of the self is no way to live."

The Red Furnace: First Contact

The moment the Furnace Knight was alone with Lord Death Despoil he plunged the blade of the Law of Kings into the stone and took his hand off it as though it were scalding hot. In its place he drew a smaller, far less magical, backup sword - but even this he held at a low angle.

"Not much," he admitted. "Even less because this was an ambush. It has been a long time since I fought the living dead and your mental resilience was a surprise. The Crimson Goddess tests me."

The Furnace Knight drew slightly closer; a position that indicated he wasn't counting on his room-crossing reality-warping lunges any more. He was wary, but his stance still deeply favoured offense over defense. He knew that unarmed did not mean defenseless, especially for a spellcaster.

"I will accept your surrender," he said, producing a set of metallic cuffs from his belt and sliding them across the floor.

An energy crackles in the air between your eyes.

You know that he is bluffing.

You can practically feel the odds shifting around you, the tilt of the skein of probability. If his power comes from affronts to honour this puts the Knight at a low ebb. You have committed no crime here, he has no evidence of wicked deeds with which to strike you down. You feel like you could almost fight him now, with your bare hands, spells and chilling aura. Be sure: that would not be an easy fight by any measure. Winning outright is likely out of reach. But the idea of injuring him badly enough to make an escape seems suddenly possible.

He will get his surge when you do... but if he is impaired he might not be able to make it a killing blow. The alternative, of course, is to accept captivity and await a rescue.

You can see the same calculation happening in his mind. His fingers held the sword like a western gunslinger, waiting for the moment to draw.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

There's an inconvenience with sign language. It requires a certain distance - the sage Zaldar used it to enforce a certain distance. When someone has stepped inside her guard, inside the swing of her arms then their physical presence interrupts the words she's trying to say. How can a gesture be seen when the eye is too close? How can attention be commanded in a silence that leaves her beating heart revealed?

She dressed up for the occasion. A cream white X of a dress, leaving violet scaled hips visible, a necklace of pink roses collaring her neck and running down her sleeves like a waterfall to collect and pool along the cuffs. She's drybrushed her scales to match, a hot pink delicately powdered along the edges, a mixture of yellow and purple creating a deep burgundy colour that she ran into the recesses. Purple is such an ambiguous colour; it can be a magnificent expression of red or colder than black. Her dress shows that she's thriving, alive, almost princess-pure - but she didn't choose it because she thought it would look good. She chose it because of Mirror.

And it's to Mirror her thoughts go again now that she's distracted, taken away by the tapping and pressure and the implied mathematical rhythm of Crescent's touch. Her mind always goes to Mirror in moments like this. She would be dressing in something dark, wouldn't she? Something subtle, something dangerous. She'd thought at first that she might go to crystal blue coldness, to white lace and delicate strings - but not at a party like this. Not flushed with victory. She'd come predatory, redder than blood, blacker than space. A suit, maybe - or a dress sleek and elegant, enough mobility to raise a leg to the point where it could wrap around her opponent's neck...

Once she'd started thinking of that dress she hadn't had a choice in her own outfit. She needed something that would look good alongside it; something feminine, something vulnerable. Something lace and frills and impractical, something sweet and flowery and easy to stain. Easy to tear and mark with claws. There had been just as many hours searching endless online catalogues, listening to the advice of the ever-chattering ancestors as they suggested TC brands, and spirits to bargain with, and even just learning to sew. She'd even tried that, but the work was taught to her by hands used to weaving thick cloth that could keep out the arrat winds. She'd wound up with something cheap from a TC store and it wasn't right, but maybe that would just make Mirror look better when she destroyed it?

She tries to say all this, hands working when they have space, have time, have observation - or don't. But it's a feeling more complicated than the language Zaldar lets her speak in. It's an audience who isn't listening. It's a narrator who doesn't understand herself. Why is she like this, warrior of the wilderness, drunk on mathematics and the music of a catgirl's claws? Dressed in pink and white and vulnerability? She wants to win, yes, definitely, to confirm that she still has that capability - to show that she can know and predict and anticipate Mirror's actions before she made them. But it was Mirror's fault that the only way to show that was to dress like this - if she'd shown clad in darkness and power then she'd be doing the same thing but worse, if she'd shown clad in fur and godscale then she'd be rigid and inflexible, this was the only way. Can't you see?

She's lost track of where she is or where she's going, hand-speech slurred with the decisive emphasis of a drunk trying to communicate a revelation or conviction too deep for half a brain.

[Marking XP]

Breathless Dead

Redana!

A blink of violet eyes. Then she gets up - suddenly, awkwardly, bizarrely, like someone learning how to move one muscle group at a time. She rolls her head and her deep, amethyst eyes. Her head spins three hundred and sixty degrees around on her neck and you'd forgotten that the Ikarani are based off Kaeri genetics so it's frankly the worst surprise.

As spooky as this is, it's also somehow hot as hell. She's fucking Beautiful, after all.

Then, as her control over her body starts to settle, shivering up through her shoulders, down to her elbows, discharging in her fingers with a set of rapid fire finger snaps, she speaks. "No ritual," she said. "No target. No incantations of targeting and awakening. You," she points a rapid-fire snapping finger set at you, "must be a threat. A criminal, looking to defile a sleeping bride of Artemis."

She winks at you. "Well, you've got good taste," she said.

A silver energy runs through her. She reaches and flexes, wiry strength visible animating her slender body. She falls back into a simple combat posture right leg back, primed for kicking. "So, I could murder you so bloody that even I'd remember it," she said, "or I could transform you into a deergirl and hunt you all over the -" she sniffed the air. "Bunker? Spaceship? Really large industrial plant? - Cuter ending, that way. How cute you feeling, cutie?"

Alexa!

"It doesn't feel hollow, though," said Lacedo quietly. "It feels good. It feels better than sex. Even now I'm shivering with joy just thinking about it. You described all of that like you wanted it to sound bad but," she shifted uncomfortably, "all it did was make me want to pin you down and fuck your brains out."

She looks at you, a strange burning, haunted look in her eyes. "You know that humans don't get that feeling? They get to make the decision about who rises and who falls, but even then it's not really their decision. It's ours. We earn the win and they have to acknowledge it. When you think about it, they're the real slaves. What are they even living for? What is the meaning of human life?"

Dolce!

Ramses looked at you like she was resisting the urge to lean across the table and pat your head. "Listen, Captain," she said gingerly. "The crew was never going to come to you with their troubles. You could be the friendliest sheep in the stars but you're in the senior executive branch and they're grunts. You might as well be the Imperial Princess. Worse, actually, because the Princess works as an Initiate and they know how they relate to that."

Bella!

The Tides of Poseidon are often billed as unknowable horrors from beyond the stars. Unreasoning monsters that serve as the armed wing of the earthquakes they accompany. The punishment issued by Poseidon for those who have grown safe and complacent. The peril they represent is existential. If Odoacer had not defeated the Eater of Worlds - which was by every history lesson a precarious and narrow thing - then Tellus would have been broken and humanity ended.

But the Empire's leadership has long known that these are not gibbering monsters of myth and film. They have their own societies that exist in strange reflections of the societies they are sent to destroy. These can be subverted with assassination, suborned through gifts and broken with politics - and they will engage in the same in exchange. Far from being bloodthirsty beasts, perhaps the single most consistent driver of conflict with the Tides is that their relationship with Poseidon is so strong that they know exactly where and when to strike in order to take advantage of the chaos sown by the Rainbow Lord, and are ruthless about exploiting disaster for their own ends.

The end result of this is that the process isn't nearly as alien as it seems from a distance.

The chief problem, as you can swiftly identify, is that the Assistant Secretary of Fear and Doubt is well suited for his role. He has a military mind, and a paranoid one. He has directed all of his available resources to the production and maintenance of a battlecrab legion while also avoiding promoting any subordinates more than he strictly has to. He actually has the younger cadre of bureaucrats locked in an all-against-all struggle and minor armed conflict in an attempt to draw insight into which of them are the most capable, but he continuously dithers over actually promoting them, usually well after the point where the young officer in question has been killed by a rival.

The result, then, is a militarized society that can only support a comparatively small military due to its weak economy, and an ambitious officer corps only kept in check by its internal conflict. And this is actually the most interesting Imperial test you've faced so far, because what you are seeing here is actually ideal. The Tides, so long as the Assistant Secretary is in charge, are weak, divided and pliant. They are categorically incapable of posing any threat to you, Redana or the ship in this state. They will be a single mediocre battlecrab legion and nothing more.

You could fix these problems almost trivially - promote capable young brainsquid, devote resources towards economic and industrial growth, undo the paranoid security state. But that will start the ball rolling on them becoming a serious power player aboard the Plousios. The example of Odoacer as a powerful military commander is all the example you need to know what the consequences of that might be.

In the opera theatre, Nero's carmine fan sweeps under your neck - then under Redana's. "The riddle of Empire!" she said with a showwoman's glittering smile. "For the nation to be strong, the Empress must be weak. For the Empress to be strong the nation must be weak! So she must walk between the Scylla of a coup and the Charybdis of invasion!"

You might want to take some time to think it over.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

"Destruction of the Mistress' foe by way of falling to her death is considered to be unacceptably high variance," said Zhaojun. She holds Giriel's hand with one hand - and her other hand holds a firewand. A firewand is a thick-barrelled pistol that acts as a short range flamethrower; a fine trickle of the golden dust that serves as its ammunition trickles down onto Giriel's forehead. "Mistress!" she called to the Vixen, below the ring of battle, "Confirm instructions?"

She is the perfect servant. So considerate. Not letting this opportunity escape her mistress. If the Vixen hears her and replies promptly and clearly, she will take the shot. If she is wielded as a weapon she will kill.

But if she is not? Then she will wait, like a good servant. If that gives Giriel the chance to escape, well, then - it is not the sword's fault if it is not swung.

[The Mask: Secretly performing a loving act reduces Feelings to 0]

The Red Furnace: First Contact

The keen tactical mind of Lord Death Despoil shows him that the problem of the Furnace Knight is less impossible than it seems. Perversely, that makes it even more dangerous than it looks.

If he was simply a creature of Big Numbers that would be a far more manageable problem. The Aotrs has dealt with warriors with more power than common sense before and it's simply a matter of locating an even larger hammer. But, despite the initial shock of the Furnace Knight's charge, that's not how he's actually fighting. Instead he is fighting in a profoundly intelligent and deliberate way - just in a way that uses an utterly different toolkit than the Aotrs have access to.

Consider the opening sequence when Foul Skream and Shatterscatter attack him in a perfect flanking maneuver. If it were anyone with thoughts slower than Death Despoil watching the Furnace Knight's counterattack would have seemed just a ludicrous disregard of basic combat reality, but it's not that. He placed himself there to get flanked deliberately - and as the perfectly co-ordinated assault comes in from two directions, the Furnace Knight grows stronger. In fact, the more people are directly engaged with him the more powerful he gets, a fact which he exploits ruthlessly to overwhelm the core of the high command in moments without taking more than superficial damage. When Bowblast begins casting spells at him from a distance the Furnace Knight's gravitational singularities explode in power, extending his reach to allow him to maintain full assaults on three enemies simultaneously with no loss of efficacy.

That is just enough to save Lord Death Despoil from making a critical mistake - waving off Foul Skream and Blowblast right at the moment they had prepared their perfect rear-shot Coldbeam attack following his teleport step. The Lichemaster had seen his own extinction flash before his eyeglows in that moment: the Furnace Knight had been relying on riding the power surge he'd get from being engaged by two additional foes to put his blade right into the Lichemaster's skull from across the entire room. As it was he missed by millimeters.

That had been a Smite too. It might have been the closest Lord Death Despoil had come to extinction in a long time.

There is another moment of stillness, the Furnace Knight shifting between serpentine stances, blade seemingly in every direction at once. When the Furnace Knight smiles, this time he does not look like a boy at all. He looks ancient. The bearer of terrible experience, a cold-blooded warrior who knows every trick in his arsenal and how to drive them to maximum effect. One who committed to the frontal assault as a deliberate tactical choice. One whose ruthlessness runs just as deep as Lord Death Despoil's. Slitted eyes stare unblinking.

He's waiting for something. And Lord Death Despoil is wise enough to guess what it is: He is waiting for the retreat.

If this warrior gains power when outnumbered, then it follows that he may obtain a similar surge when his enemies attempt to flee from him. The Aotrs might make a virtue of their disregard for honour but the Furnace Knight's enforcement of it is weaponized. It's a trap as ugly as anything the Aotrs might have planned: stay and fight against a wave of invincible warriors until you are ground down, or flee and face the Furnace Knight at his most powerful on the way out.

Bowblast's assessment was correct, but for one thing: The Furnace Knight was not deceiving himself in the least.

*

"Oh, this is actually really bad," Boldness said dreamily, body synthesizing opiates to dull the pain she must be in. "I wondered why he came here. It turns out it was to draw him out. He's found a worthy enemy and he'll be able to use that to command public support..."

She'll live, it looks like, though barely. The shock of that impact would have killed a lot of creatures, and the fall would have finished her off if Lord Death Despoil didn't catch her. As she staggers alongside you a collection of broken, burned out protective charms fall from hidden pockets like blood-drops. She leans heavily on Unlucky as the two of them get through to the portal.

Unlucky doesn't realize it, but he'd just walked straight through the Furnace Knight's death zone and got away clean. Turns out the heroic rescue of a stranger got you a pass from whatever power bound the Furnace Knight.

*

Stab immediately came under fire from a volley of the acid projectiles of the wolf warriors. The acid was expected. What was not expected was the disorientation. Arguably the disorientation was the primary effect.

The grenades fired by the wolf warriors were absolutely, ludicrously vicious extension of the flash-bang concept. They detonate multiple times and on multiple spectrums, physical and magical, overwhelming all sensory input. At the same time they created burning acidic clouds. The ideal of this weapon was clear: to break formations and deny cover, forcing targets to flee into the open.

Once in the open they were targeted by the unit's officer, in the middle of a defensive shieldwall formation. He had a long bolt-action rifle that fired high powered specialized ammunition - a combination of lightning bolt and disintegration effects. In military parlance, the acid shock bursts were a maneuver element that cleared the way for a powerful squad level fire asset.

The Red Furnace: First Contact

The Furnace Knight raised his blade, in prayer, in salute. "The fire burns still," he says simply, quietly.

Not much of a monologue but enough to get him shot in the mouth by Deather. The Furnace Knight smiles as the coldbeam clears, lips blue and microcuts visible around his mouth. For a moment it seems like he could not be happier.

*

The star Salib rumbles. At this moment it lets loose a colossal gout of violet plasma, a solar flare that changes light itself all across the system.

*

It's incomprehensible, the way the Furnace Knight moves.

There will be time enough to examine it later, to contemplate the gravitic singularities that his divine spellcasting generates. His technique creates concentrations of gravity so powerful they bend light and time both. Around them he wraps, stretching to a hundred times his length, seeming to fill the entire room as an endless oroboros, a snake whose jaws unhinge to eat the world.

The effect collapses and he is amidst the liches, in the centre of their formation.

The sword is everywhere. The blows are crashing down again and again as he pivots from stance to stance, offense to offense, crash and sweep and spell all coming together so fast and unstoppable it feels like being on the wrong end of a turn based RPG. His sword flawlessly passes between all four hands and any hand not swinging it is either casting or countering a spell. Micro-gravitic singularities erupt around him like flowers, dragging opponents into his blows or shoving their aim aside. The Law of Kings - the blade's name is carved upon it - blazes with divine fire, a rainbow of blue.

(Above there is the crack of thunder - Unlucky glances up to see Boldness in the railings high above, having aimed a strange wooden rifle down at something in the chaos below and fired a shot that wafts like ozone. She's turning her aim towards the Furnace Knight when, offhandedly, he hurls a metal sphere at her that hits her shoulder at such speed it shatters her arm and sends her falling to the ground below)

And then come his allies. These are not champions with the expertise of the Aotrs High Command, these are not a host of legendary paladins - these are berserkers. A host of the wolf-warriors, each wearing blindfolds glowing with runes of blue, stripped to the waist, charging furiously with fang and talon and monstrous strength. The shock of their charge is impossible to stop: they wear divine wards that defer all consequences they are to suffer until after the battle is done, at which point they will drop dead. They surge into the opening created by the Furnace Knight and, heedless for their own safety, seek to overwhelm the High Command.

And as the battle breaks out behind him, the Furnace Knight has a few precious moments alone with Lord Death Despoil. He smiles still through bloody lips. Painted eyes sparkle with a boyish kind of joy. It's infectious, maddeningly infectious, an enormously powerful psychic compulsion to leave aside spell and strategy and fight this impossible monster hand to hand with a sword.

Scales coil beneath him, tensing like a spring. He is ready if you do not.

The Red Furnace: First Contact

This is the ideal of a mismatch. These soldiers may be heavily armed but they are not prepared to stand up to spellcasting like this. They manage one disciplined barrage, one ragged one - and then they break. Within moments the survivors are in flight. Boldness gives you a wild thumbs up and races after them, leaping up onto interior buildings and racing along through the upper gallery, using the chaos to get a better look at where the points of organization are. She has a strange weapon in her hand and is aiming it down amidst the anarchy below. Her target is sure to be flushed out at this rate...

But just as things are going your way, you feel a new spell take hold - and your hands are too full with battle casting to do anything about it...

[Friction: 2]

It is a terrifying feeling, being on the wrong end of a Prophecy spell.

The timeline burns bright and inverts as knowledge is ripped from present to past. Everything rearranges around it. Chaos becomes organized. Initiative reverses. Perfect stealth is rendered irrelevant; that spell told them exactly where you were going to be and when you were going to be there. It is eminently, wonderfully well constructed - even a glimpse of the business end of the spellwork tells you that this spell is one of the keys of the arsenal of the Endless Azure Skies.

And into the field, amidst the wreckage of the retreating warriors, comes a champion.

He is a serpent, as large as an ogre, with four mighty arms and scales a richer blue than the sky. Armour heavy with divine calligraphy rattles and clanks with the trophy skulls of a primordial time. A sword like a sharpened pool table rests over one shoulder and eyes that burn with the heat of sacred fury radiate outwards. His aura is powerful enough to cause your scanner to explode from the weight of it. With a glance he stills all panic in the room. With a glare he lets it be known that he has taken your measure. With contempt, he unbinds the spell powering the acidic cloud.

This warrior is to a paladin as Lord Death Despoil is to a wizard.

He hefts his blade and - one handed, points it across the room at you.

"I am the Furnace Knight, champion of the Endless Azure Skies," the words burn with the might of a divine curse. You can feel the weight of it smashing in against you - compelling you to step forwards, aim your pistol, engage this creature in futile single combat, all thoughts of retreat and cunning forgotten. You might resist still - your divine ward was well chosen - but it weakens quickly in the heat of the Knight's presence. "I stand uncursed in the light of the Azure Goddess. I have your scent now, Child of Crimson, and neither you nor your kind shall escape me."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Ah, the city of the gods!

There are certain concepts that simply have not had the time to soak into Solarel's consciousness, and one of which is the concept of civilization. Her life is one of wilderness, of giants, of the void. It is a mythic place of gods and spirits and war. The tribe, the warband, close kin are the true family, the only ones who you might speak aloud to. Conversations built over shared experience in the aftermath of gods and battle, love unrestrained as deserving of comrades against the world.

And now this! A shining place of lights and colour and fabric and miracle! She compares it to the palace of the Empress of Zaldar. She was blinded then and she is blinded now. Already in her hand she's holding a Daral Box - a little holographic container containing a stupendously complex, and mostly pointless, mathematical problem. To a Zaldarian it's an intoxicant akin to alcohol - a certain amount of her cybernetic mind has shut off in order to contemplate it, resulting in an enchanting feeling of being productive, being useful. Buzzed from Daral it's easy to appreciate yourself, to justify treating yourself to further luxuries, to lie in the sun and contemplate as warmth creeps in at the perfect pace for discharge.

She's looking for Mirror. The second the Bezorel had landed she'd already been downloading the recording of her fight. She was holding that display in her left hand, the Daral in the right, mind blissfully buzzing as she contemplates equation and appreciates the flick and slash of machine tails. Part of her kicks herself - Mirror had drawn the fight out to test even more functions, while she had ended it as fast as possible with a trick that wouldn't work a second time. She could already feel the crack of the God-Smiting Whip against her armoured plating, her focusing mirrors shattering from a distance, her speed insufficient to keep up...

And then she was on her butt.

She'd been punched unexpectedly, both of her drugs dropped and scattered on the floor. Flat footed and dazzled she'd lost her footing and gone straight down onto the ground, breathing in through a lungful of fire. She looked up at her opponent, then started snapping her fingers in memory.

You, she signed, getting her bearings a little. Oh! I know you! she let her eyes trace down her body - with interruptions - before settling on her calves. How's the leg?

You don't forget a shot like that. Five kilometers through an asteroid field, timed just so to catch her opponent's god in the leg as it accelerated to max speed. She'd spun out of control and smashed through half a dozen asteroids before coming to a halt. Fully synchronized, a hit like that carried a phantom hurt that took months to shake off.

Her intention in asking was genuinely empathic. She hoped that it had healed right! But since she was communicating through sign language and smiling and making biiiiiiig eye-contact it might have inadvertently come across as mocking.

[Wicked Past: This catgirl is someone I defeated and humiliated during the war. She takes a string on me, and I ask her what are your feelings towards me?. I mark XP from Talons of the Past and we can each define a vulnerability we know about the other.]

Breathless Dead

Redana!

"I know exactly what you should do," said Iskarot, a serene being, filled with wisdom. "First you must find your rival, this assassin you have spoken so much about. Then you must challenge her to a fight. Use these." The Hermetic champion placed a set of brass knuckles on the table. "My father gave these to me, and now I give them to you. Make me proud, apprentice."

He nodded at you, a paternal tear of affection in his eye.

Alexa!

"That was what it was for," said Lacedo. "All the history. All the practice. All the training. All the centuries of dreaming. It was for glory. So that our lineage would rise and we would become the new right arm of mankind. A thousand warrior breeds have vanished into history seeking a victory like this. The alternative is dissolution and extinction and an end to the Alcedi forever. Just another skull on the throne of Ceron."

She hasn't said why. She doesn't truly know. This rivalry was woven into her bones, the same as with every other warrior servitor species.

Dolce!

"Uh, yeah, little guy," said Ramses. "Look, the army was, what, fifty thousand strong? Like maybe three hundred could actually see you. Riders went up and down the line and repeated your speech to them. Scared men and women, people with pre-battle nerves. So maybe they jazzed it up a little, made it sound like you were a big strong demigod ram of war who would lead them to glorious victory, and that's what the soldiers imagined. That's who they fought and died for. If I put in their movie that the Captain looked like a militarized plush toy - no offense, I think it's a great look - then they'd call me a liar. And they'd be right."

Bella!

"Because I am in so far over my head," said a voice as the Assistant Secretary of Fear and Doubt materialized. He wears a golden helmet decked with amethysts, a curling helix staff, a ceremonial orb containing rainbow light. He was there all along, pressed up against a wall, skin camouflaged to blend in with the wall and gilt adornments blending in with the treasure junk that washes up inside Poseidon's realm. A single eye fixes on you as tentacles nervously clutch at the staff.

"I mean, I was only ever the acting Assistant Secretary!" cried the squid. "My substantive position is as a Administrative Positional Spawning Six! That's not even on the management cognition track! but then a spaceship ploughed through my supervisor's office and then I was kidnapped by wolves and nobody ever relieved me of the position! And now I've got ten thousand battlecrabs under arms and another ten thousand on the way and they just hailed me as dictator! I'm following the Tidal Field Manual Policy as best I can but now entire specialist cohorts are hatching and a subsidiary administrative caste is coming into being and they're asking for documentation and I don't know what to tell them!"

"And..." he slumped a little, clutching his staff. "And the mice said that you were the best captain they ever had. That you changed their lives and freed them from tyranny. And so I was wondering if you could maybe help me, too."