Thanqol

The Red Furnace: First Contact

[Friction roll: 1]

The negotiations go very well. The Azura negotiator is receptive and an in principle agreement is swiftly reached. It's in the details that she gets you.

Negotiation and commercial technique is a technological branch all of its own. The Aotrs are dealing with a dedicated commercial and underworld trader, genetically engineered for this task from inception. Her understanding of finance, cost, and best alternatives is unbelievably sharp and she has access to more market information than the Aotrs. The way the deal works out at the end is still satisfactory, still a positive thing for the Aotrs and not something worth breaking, but she found a way to take every bit of surplus value right up to that line.

Her primary area of interest was data - geographic and political, all the way down to level of individual relationships between heads of state and the mineral composition of planetary moons. She walks away with details of faction leaders, planetary governments, voting systems and compositions, the minute details of treaties and more besides. Each time these things seemed like small things to give up in exchange for shiploads of rare materials but it's only in retrospect that it seems like she never had any interest in physical goods. She broadly doesn't push on the details of Aotrs worlds or military secrets but still wound up with at least everything that could be considered publicly available.

But in the end, the core principles are unchanged; an attack on the Strayvians, and an attack on one of her rivals, the strikes to be launched simultaneously. She will magically bind herself to the fact that the strike will happen, but the timeframe is not entirely up to her faction. It needs to go up the chain to a regional Imperial Court, and that is a process that would be assisted by a high ranking ceremonial Aotrs delegation.

*

[Friction roll: 6]

The Azura, committed to a rigidly planned assault, had not reacted swiftly to the changing circumstance that left the air unconstested. Their own ships were still on the ground and the Craters were able to destroy them before they could launch.

The Azura commit to their assault. Their plan was already to close in enough to render direct firepower weapons unwieldy, but their plan had hinged on overwhelming the Aotrs position with superior numbers and now they lacked that. The retreat decision comes too slowly and the order comes too late, so when the disengagement finally happens it's with the shredded remnants of the Azura force. It's a clear and decisive victory for the Aotrs, and between the disruption of the Tides and the failed Azura attack, there is plenty of time to recover damaged and disabled war droids from the battlefield and secure a complete inventory of the facility through the Gates.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Green!

She loved the way he laughed. His eyes were upturned creases amidst a face of lines. Human faces were always going somewhere; steady progressions towards a final form, and his road had been one of smiles and laughter so deep that they ran into his skin like scars. She'd wished she'd scared him. She'd was glad that she hadn't.

Around her the rest of her colours were breathing out massive sighs of relief. A trembling Blue leaned heavily against Pink who patted her shoulder. Brown started packing up the surgical tools that had been laid out on the kitchen bench. Improvised involuntary brain surgery on a cybernetic microexplosive, given by a girl trained by Doctor Youtube, had not been anyone's ideal way to spend an evening.

"Okay," said Blue. "I'm done. I'm going to take a bath." Green couldn't blame her; they hadn't had a proper bath since they'd left Everest's employment. Red, Pink and Brown were all fracturing away as well, to clean, explore, or whatever else took their fancy. She was glad for that too; there was nothing quite as awkward as maintaining her undivided attention on a single topic. The protocol of speaking, the lack of any sort of subconscious inner dialogue - it was a rigid way to think. Even five out of nine was a sign of deadly seriousness for her.

"Scenario four," said White aloud. "Disarming compliance. Orange, you may proceed."

Green wanted to reach out. She'd never been in a human body near her father before. She knew him as a giant, large enough to lift her in the palm of one hand. Strong enough to throw her in the air so that she could engage quadcoptor rotors and loop higher. She knew him as a face in a screen, filling the camera lens, and as the builder of worlds, the gateway to new realities. She'd wanted to trust him. She'd argued for it, an emotional appeal. Wanting so badly to live in the world where it was true.

"Good evening. My name is Orange, though we have previously communicated we have not met directly," Orange was saying. "To answer your question: Perhaps. We are investigating a clandestine organization, one proven to be willing and able to kill in order to keep its secrets. We are privy to those secrets, one of which is that you are connected to them. The threat to us is already existential but your involvement moves it beyond that. In order to communicate from a place of trust we require leverage of similar scope. Are you willing to provide this freely?"

Orange watched Singh. White watched Orange. Black stood out of line of sight, AR headset cutting down her reality into a monofocus point. Yellow sat cross-legged serenely on the counter in her sundress, delicately packing away surgical tools. Green was taking everything out of her pockets and putting them back in again; checking her inventory, one of her first nervous habits. Please. Please.

*

3V!

To play a game like this is a method of deep communication. To become a multitude and then express your will on your opponent. To adapt to crises, to search for strength, to make a thousand tiny decisions all in service to a vision. To wage war is to reveal your true heart.

Red's deployment is bold to the point of foolishness. An inch of movement she does not take is an inch of movement wasted. Harvest Knights gallop across the vampiric plains, seizing on an opportunity to crash into Prester John's baggage train and scatter the harem. The maneuver renders them surrounded and out of the battle, a poor trade, but one that leaves Prester's magic weakened and his command disrupted. Into the chaos more chaos is drawn. Sentinels decamp from an objective to make a killing charge. It's aggression, aggression, aggression, the clash of armies at the expense of scenario play, a furious desire to get close. So close that the rhythm becomes hers. So fast that all your decisions are reactions to hers, shaped by hers. Even if she's not winning the chaos that she creates, that she thrives in, intoxicates her. You can't play your game. You can't use your plan. She'll sacrifice so much to have those things be true and...

Then suddenly she folds her hands behind her head and walks away from the table and you're up against Blue instead. She looks at the table, the ruinous mess that Red left behind. She thinks. She thinks hard. And then she makes a few sharp choices. Two careful retreats onto objectives, one capture run against a linchpin Whipmistress, and the rest further committed. And that transition is the most difficult thing to recover from of all because *now* she's playing the measured, strategic game of objective control and points scoring. Now she's patient. Now she's restrained. She's just doing so from such an incredibly weird initial gamestate where she's telegraphed so much aggression movement instinctively stays cautious because of the everpresent threat of Red tagging back in.

She's not going to win. She's smart, but she's still new to the game and nowhere near the level of literal professional gamer 3V. But this is what she expresses with her play: The desire to manage chaos. The desire to render the game scrappy and reactive, to ruin every plan and brawl with barely functional scraps. Opportunity. Disaster. It's not just Red who likes this, November as a whole is profoundly drawn to unstable and shifting situations.

Breathless Dead

Mynx

Possibilities contract. She is shaped. Violence shapes her. Infinite possibility condenses; she could be anything, but she needs to be something that can survive this. This being Bella. This being Redana. This being... difficult.

She dispenses with luxuries. Size is dangerous; too much space to cover, too many blind angles. Hardened carapace is insufficient shield; she replaces it with flexible, frictionless scales. There is no space for wings, magnificent though they be. Additional senses can be reincorporated. So many toxins need to be discarded, not useful on this timeframe...

Like water, she changes to fit the container she is placed within. She becomes the shape of something that can survive this battle. There is only one shape for her here and it is not the army-destroying shape of the dragon. Instead it is... an echo. Not a girl, but not entirely a beast either. To survive this she needs intelligence. She needs tools. And so she decides against Aphrodite and shuts out her raging heart.

She arms herself with a shield made out of crystallized blood, a crimson snowflake that twists and tangles claws and swords, tangling and pulling tight. It is a wonderful tool, a netting weave and it's... it's contaminated. She feels it clearly. She's drawing on her own spilled blood to maintain it but there's something else mixed in here. There's another front to this battle. A scent. Something she's missing.

She can't afford to rely on instinct. So she shapes herself further. Becomes a little more like a person, because that's what she needs to do to survive. It's what she'd need to solve this. To kill this threat too.

*

Oratus Adepts were trained in public speaking. They were trained to bellow commands over the roar of the ocean; to address courts of law and violent mobs. To wield a cutting insult that would turn an Azura court against a target or how to give an impressive speech through the speaking tubes of a warship undergoing high energy maneuvers.

They were also trained to curl up inside ventilation ducts and hyperventilate.

Beljani was doing just that. Her heart was pounding and her breath was shallow and rapid, just enough to wet the air with the tracery of her viral infection. It worked best if she was scared. She'd never had problems with that. Definitely not now.

Bella and Redana, roll to Keep Mynx Busy.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

The eye is the blade. The compliment is the strike.

It had surprised Solarel to learn that the knights of the Evercity took the words of the Sage to mean that compliments should be cutting, incisive, mocking. Out in the wilds, with divine peril around every corner, it meant something very different.

She dropped from the rooftop. Spirit armaments glowed around her hands. One fist of silver and the other of gold; if the right one didn't get you the left one would.

She passed through the nanobot drone - it was barely substantial - and yet her hands gripped. From the centre of the swirling mass she pulled the geist down with her momentum, that tangle of startled code. Just as she was about to slam it into the floor she twisted in mid air, getting her feet under her with the grace of someone who had spent far too many hours staring at videos of sleepy Hybrasilians falling off things. She impacts on the balls of her feet, the shock of energy running up through her body, and as the glow of heat washed out around her she pushed the geist against the wall and slammed her open palm into place immediately besides it. Kabe... don!!

"Hey," said Solarel, looming and terrifying and glorious. "You're doing an amazing job. You're meant for so much more than this. What's your name?"

How, then, does one survive in a networked landscape? When even the least creature might be protected by unknowable spirits and gods? When the balance of force and knowledge was infinitely against the mortal? One has to give the machine what it cannot give itself. Love. Meaning. Attention. No mortal can defeat an angry god, but Solarel might yet seduce Kathresis.

[Entice: 9]

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Fengye looks at the N'yari lying across her thighs. A creature of desire. She could see it so clearly she didn't even need the mask.

She set her hand firmly against the girl's cheek, up to her ears, behind those fluffy triangles, and scratched.

"She was bothering me," said Fengye, for if she had made a lord of hell into a mewling slave what had she to fear from a catgirl? It was a tenuous bluff, built on nothing. But if it worked...? What if it worked? "Complaining. Ordering. Thieving. After all the trouble I went through for her - but it's my fault. I only ever showed her my gentle side," she leaned forwards, not fully aware of the curl of authority in her voice. A demon binder's practiced tone of absolute command. "I'd like you and your sisters to show her my harsh side. Demonstrate to her what awaits bad girls."

[Entice: 8]

Breathless Dead

"This is the only question that matters.

The words are written on veins. They are scorched into nerves. As everything else burns away only one question - one agonized, ongoing, constant question remains. A question whose answer is built upon galaxies of skulls. A question so important that another galaxy would be cheerfully consigned into the charnel pit if it resulted in even one micrometer of improvement.

The question, of course, is the riddle of speed.

Two legs. Four legs. Curved musculature. Fat reserves. Sweat glands. Pressurized water pumps. High intensity jaw clamps. Hands. Wings. Paws. Claws. Bioplasma reaction. Null-friction slime. Six legs. THE PERFECTION OF THE CRAB. Fins. Sprinting. Endurance running. Rolling. Falling.

Go fast. Go fast. Find out a way to go faster. This is the question that matters. This is the only question that matters. Fail to solve the riddle and you will die. Your loved ones will die. Your children will die. Your species will die. And everything you have, everything you are, will be rendered down into matter and remade in the form swifter beings."

"This is the only question that matters.

And isn't it just, baby doll? The scent of blood is in the air. You're running, and there's a lot of math and a lot of science behind that running. They boiled down those galaxies of skulls into a test tube and then grew you in it. No mommy. No mommy two. No one and nothing to distract you from the love that could save an Empire. You've got one job, honey, and one question to answer.

The question is, of course, the riddle of hate.

Because you've got a choice now, darling. You love, sure, we know that. You love so much that you want to die for it. But what if, and just hear me out, you could love so much that other people died for it instead? What if the everything you wanted didn't mean the everything you were never gonna get, what if it just meant... everything? What if instead of figuring out how to struggle back from the abyss of insanity that was built into your bone marrow, you expressed your love in the way that makes sense for what you are now?

Because, just putting it out there, you're going to lose them anyway. I'm a right bastard, what with this Rift of mine. Basically sentenced the lot of you to obliteration before your trip even began. So what's the harm in working it out with them properly? They're already killing each other, you won't even be the third wheel you usually are. Maybe before the end Sempai will give you the coveted Notice and you'll have a hell of a story to talk over down in the Underworld."

She steps forth from the hungry void onto hungry grass. A chimeric dragon, an apocalypse in obsidian. The harvest matron, glorious in flowers and tigerskin, and the old romantic, concentrating all light and colour in the world into the burning tip of a cigarette. It's a trial of the gods, and heaven help the tribunal.

The Red Furnace: First Contact

"Oh, but you don't understand!" said the Regional Subdirector. "This planet is but a rock pool before the vast, endless ocean of the Tides. We span the stars, fight the Azura on a thousand different worlds, and our victory is inevitable. But to destroy your kind, as we will have to one day, we will be forced to equip ourselves with anti-materiel weaponry. This means that we can't destroy your civilization without destroying your artifacts and cities; this means that any materiel that passes in to your civilization cannot be repurposed and so represents a net cultural loss for the galaxy after it has been drowned. So you see how unreasonable your position is? Don't you realize that, if you persist on this path, you will lose something far more important than your lives: your legacy?"

The Regional Subdirector extended its tentacles in a sign of earnest pleading. "Please. Take a moment to consider the big picture. Consider the future generations who will witness you in our museums. All we want is for you to give up this undead foolishness and resurrect into biological bodies which can, at a future date, be exterminated cleanly with poison gas and neutron flaying. Be reasonable about this."

[Friction roll: 6; Aotrs advantage]

The rebuke of the Aotrs scouts is immediate and decisive.

The elimination of the Subdirector is done without casualties - and indeed, the Battlecrab reaction to its death is to retreat rather than attempt to engage. Moreover, the retreat seems to have prompted a reorganization of the Tidal garrisons in the region, which is resulting in a temporary degradation of their anti-ship envelope in the region. The airspace is suddenly much less contested, opening the possibility of Gating in another dropship.

*

But even as the possibility is raised the flickering communications and sensor blackout of an oncoming Azura assault begins. They are coming in airborne, moving extremely fast and low. So fast and so low, in fact, that some of them impact trees or rock formations at high speed and crash spectacularly into the ground, but damn if it doesn't make them hard to accurately target, especially with their sensor-jamming effects.

The force is primarily dismounted airborne infantry, backed by a cluster of close range plasma-vent warspheres. The plan at this stage is to engage on all fronts at close range and pursue any retreating forces savagely to prevent them from falling back into prepared secondary positions. The Knights hold back this time, chastised from their earlier injury, and wait to commit to exploit a breakthrough wherever one occurs. It's an ugly plan. Casualties will be huge. But given that this is a frontal assault against an entrenched and prepared enemy in daylight, while on a time limit, the tactics are hardly objectionable.

*

"Oh, please don't tell anyone about me," said Boldness, rubbing her head as though pained. "Lot of reasons, but chief amongst them is that I represent the central government and everything gets insanely complicated if people out here on the periphery know that the core is watching. It shouldn't be too complicated though; just understand that there is a lot of ritual to Azura politics and it gets more intense the higher you get. The more absurd their demands the more seriously they're listening to you. They politically cannot acknowledge foreigners as equals, so if they are actually interacting with you as equals they need to balance that out with extremely intense fiction. If you hear anything that makes you balk, politely stall them rather than outright rejecting. They won't budge, but they won't break contact entirely either so you can find a different angle."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

The deadliest sword was, of course, the eye. To see something was to have power over it. The huntresses of Hybrasil understood only half of this. Time and again in the depths of space they had come for her; time and again she'd defeated them. Some blamed the strength of the Ateline. Some of them blamed her supernatural skill. None of them, not even Mirror, had realized that the greatest danger was eye contact.

Hybrasilians had beautiful eyes. Adaptive. Expressive. No matter how casual they feigned, the shift from slit to circle foretold the pounce. No matter how swift the strike she was always moving just in time. No matter if they refused her communications channels she'd angle her sensors to pierce metal skin so she could always keep the girl beneath the armour in her sights. So that she'd always be able to watch their eyes. And so their swords became hers.

She hadn't been stumped until she'd fought Mirror. Mirror was... she was cryptic, unknowable, mysterious but not out of any attempt to be. She'd accepted the communications channel. She'd spoken to her throughout the battle. She'd used the full range of body language, of flirtatious smiles and cutting remarks and emotional range. But none of it came through before she said it. Before she decided to do it. Her Goddess had been the same; no instincts to trick, no wiggle of the tail to herald a pounce, no habits to target. Her mind was disconnected from her body and the two only corresponded by email. It wasn't even that she was faster; if anything, her reactions were slower than other Hybrasilians. But the rhythm was wrong. Solarel missed beats in complex attack sequences just because she couldn't predict what was next and found herself on the defensive. It was the difference of her entire advantage.

Compared to that, the mathematical logic of the spirit was a far simpler problem. She could not read emotions in a camera lens but she could piece together what a lifetime of seeing the world as a house might be. This spirit was, after all, simply a house - to break a thing in the house does not deny that room to the house, it just flags that area for repairs. She was dealing with a maker and a steward, to whom loss of vision was an irritant and not a devastating strategic danger. And it was her own nature that would blind her more deeply than any loss of cameras. Solarel could see it in her eyes.

And so, the stratagem. She has looped her trail of destruction in an elegant knot across floors and layers. She has broken every camera in her path. And now she awaits, cold-blooded and empty of heat, pressed against the ceiling. Not for the Kathresis, no - for the repair drone. Any moment one would be dispatched to this location to repair the broken camera, hoping to fix the net where she had torn it and thereby trap her again. It was the drone that was her target. It was the drone's skin that would get her close enough to strike her true target. One did not hunt a perasaur without a windbanner as bait, and one did not go before a God without an offering.

Breathless Dead

"Taller and thinner,
Shorter and fatter!
A shapeshifter rearranges
But cannot create matter!"

Mynx whispers the chant to herself as she walks in the riot of the garden feral. Demeter walks with her in her pulse, in a thousand scratching voices in her bloodstream.

She sees the silver arc of Artemis. The curve of moon and bow lighting a path through the darkness. Target, here. Operation, like this. You are a hunter. The chant, over and over, the mantra. You are a hunter. You are poise. You are skill. You were born and raised sophisticated and armed with knowledge and instinct, scent and spoor, you are a hunter...

She clings to that silver gloved hand as she performs her function. She has a mission. Protect Redana. From anything. From everything. Protect. Remember...

"Longer and straighter,
Shorter and messier!
Can't shapeshift the hair
And style always matters!"

The chants are her limitations. The boundaries of her reality. The failures of the biomancers, the parts that need to be papered over with skill and training. The parts of her function that Mynx exists to maintain. She needs the girl who loves hairstyling and makeup and archery. If she didn't have that girl then she'd. She'd. She'd! The mission -

Demeter cracks from the outside of her scales. Newer, sharper growths amidst the soft and approachable smoothness. They pierce the leather of the glove. Divine blood is drawn.

"Keep your arms long
Don't let them cut short!
A shapeshifter's dead flesh
Is no use at all!"

She's a hunter. She's a complete being. Her biology is only one small aspect of her function, a toolset, one amongst many. She's more than that. She's Mynx, who needs silver skill to perform her function in accordance with the laws of the hunt. This is the best version of herself. Because if it isn't...

Because if she could defy the conservation of mass. If she could grow like a weed, neck stretching out to bite people across the room. If she could animate her own dead flesh, her own severed arm. If she knew the secrets of Sagakhan, the Master of Assassins, the greatest warrior of the Toxicrene Temple and master shapeshifter who had taught her all of these limitations in her chants... If she, too, could transform into an immortal, invincible monster...

If... if all she needed to perform her function was... in her blood. And not in her mind. Not in her heart. If all her restrictions were lies and she could do anything...

Then... Mynx was just slowing her down.

Obsolete thoughts. Unable to comprehend the new paradigm. Why hunt as a single entity, engaged in inefficient social deception? Especially useless in an environment of paranoia, tests, passwords. Secured utterly against infiltration, an impossible task. Mynx, with all her restrictions, would have failed. Failed. But what if she looked at it from a different angle? What if she contemplated this not as an assassination problem but a combat problem? These isolated, insular, paranoid groups will not engage in collective self defense. They will hole up in fortified compounds, ignore sounds from outside, turn away refugees. Remain isolated and atomized so that a sufficiently powerful combat morph would be able to engage them individually without risk. And wasn't this inevitable? The first stage of growth destroyed trust like an algae hyperbloom annihilating a carbon dioxide atmosphere. The end state of the garden was its own suffocation and mass extinction. The terraforming of its environment into something uninhabitable. Reduction into compost. And here the true seeds could grow. Instant regeneration. Poison breathed in great clouds rather than intimate bites. The final, consuming, apocalyptic phase of the Toxicrene upon a society that had been readied for this disaster by the earlier phase.

The harvest was ripe. The reaper scythe was rising and falling. She needed both hands to hold it. No more moonlight. Only blood and dark. Blood and dark. The garden would grow. The garden... the mission...

They were different, weren't they? The mission... wasn't to grow the garden. It's just that growing the garden accomplished the mission. So grow. Grow. Grow.

The poison dragon slinks through the ship. Stiller than a budding leaf, faster than blight across a cornfield. The red scales are all gone now; she wears black, stiletto-sharp, serpent-long and with whisker-tentacles that gently touch every dark corner and hidden compartment to search for any targets she missed.

She will get them all. They can run, they can hide. But they cannot trust. She has Mynx to thank for that.

*

Bella and Redana!

You face each other. Blades in hand.

Long, slender dueling swords. The kind you practiced with as children. The symbols of imperial warfare. The sidearm of civilization, even in this distant age. Though you have claws and electromagnetic flux and the strength of giants and poison gas and legions of bioengineered killers at your fingertips, all of them must be left aside. You are to fight, hand to hand, with swords.

You are not to hold back. Blood must flow.

This is Beautiful's plan. The one thing that can draw Mynx out, wherever and whatever she is. Her actions are performed out of a twisted desire to protect the both of you, but it is an abstract, long term sense of protectiveness. The only thing that can overpower that is immediate danger. So the two people she loves above all others must fight. The two people who love each other above all else must fight.

Aphrodite sits heavily in the corner and lights a cigarette. He smiles.

Or maybe all of you will die in each other's arms. Maybe your skeletons will fall in another twisted embrace for the next crew of the Plousios to find. The grass beneath your feet is green enough to welcome your falling bodies gently.

Once more, then. For love.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Fengye's background is in the subtle manipulation of powerful heirs of the Dominion. Of gently eliding signatures into place and rearranging the logistics of legions so that they'd be ready to go when a hotheaded young heir suddenly decided to declare war on a target of convenience. To ensure that the essence of government flowed freely and harmoniously. She is furthermore motivated by vengeance upon a girl who has just called her a cutie and threatened to collar her.

She also finds, as most thinking girls of the Flower Kingdom do, the N'yari incredibly hot.

So it is that her entire life, training, and background has built up to this moment where she feigns shrinking behind the Maid's leg and saying in a fearful voice: "You will fight them off for me, won't you?"

Perhaps the only thing better than subjugating the demon warlord herself will be watching a group of buff catgirls do it.

[Entice: 8. Spending the string to tempt the Maid to engage in futile battle]