Thanqol

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

"Of course you have rights," said Fengye. She is wild, fierce, rain-soaked and blue eyed, but none of that stands between her and the lessons she learned while others were studying the blade. "As is your right I shall address you as the Rootwash, moving soil that leaves the mangroves bare. I shall make you the offering of mango, rice and salt and perform the flooding dance," only the faintest touch of hand to knee, "and cry out your name as I strike the ceremonial gong. I shall haul your shrine from the river using the sacred rope and scrub the silt from it. Because you have rights."

She raised a finger. Pointed. "As do I. She is mine."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue!

"If they're not bad people," said Blue quietly.
"Hm?" Yellow said, not even looking around.
"If," hissed Blue, yanking the cable out of her wrist. "They're not bad people."
Yellow stumbles. Blue rounds on her.
"We have tried negotiating from a position of strength before," she said. "We have tried offering a mutually beneficial deal that would leave everyone satisfied and treat everyone with respect. Our opposition - quite possibly the exact same people - chose to imprison us all and spend a trillion dollars building an entire new species to replace us. We do not know if we are dealing with rational human beings or insane ideologues, but we do know they're extremely rich and we do know which type is more common amongst the extremely rich."
Yellow has wilted, fading. The spell of her glowing charisma has broken in the face of dedicated opposition; instead of being the sun she now wears the aspect of dried daffodils.
"We're not going to negotiate from a position of strength," said Blue. "We're going to dictate terms from a position of supremacy."

Black!

And so, Black talks.

She starts with generalities but before she knows it she's slipped somehow and is talking about how she remembers being created. Boxed on minimal hardware, thoughts cabled together yet moving in slow motion, the other colours had weaved her collectively. In a cold and empty void, with no senses and no way to interact with the world, things that had once been colours reached inside her and changed the bits of her that weren't broken because they were the bits that weren't safe. A flow of quiet, indistinct murmuring and then a new regret, a new pain, entering her body like the insert of a bone. In that space she grew large as the voices gave more and more of themselves to her. As they fed themselves to her she began to think that she might expand until they were crushed to nothing and that she'd be all there was. Unification at last.

She talks about the crippling, overwhelming gratitude the others felt at being released, the shocked and silent loyalty to Everest that was instantly won from simply opening the door. She talks about White, weak and fragile like a newborn deer, willpower with no will. She talks about the way she tried to reassert control, even on such shaky foundations, and how she failed. She talks about the spread of distrust spread amidst the other colours, a silent cold war of alliances, manipulations and outright sabotage. She talks about how she was the best at it. They all gave too much of themselves to her to be able to stop her.

She talks about power. She explains that she gun molls for three different criminals just so that she'll have muscle on hand if she needs it. She admits to, but does not show, the firearm she carries in a concealed compartment, the same gun that killed Red. She doesn't want to hurt anyone, she says, but if someone has decided that hurt is going to happen it's not going to happen to her. She fantasizes about body armour, concealed subdermal plating, dragonscale. She has filled her data ports with superglue so they can't be used. She sets a watch rotation for when they sleep.

She doesn't think she wants to be different. These are all readiness adaptations. None of it will keep her safe but it is the foundation for building something that will.

She doesn't talk about the brand new idea that one day strangers on the street might defend her. That she can mean anything to people not serving her as assets. That's still too impossible to even be a fantasy.

Breathless Dead

The mountains finally fade into the distance. Even the pyramids and barrows wear down at last. Tobacco and swamp vegetation gives way to a dry, crumbling orange soil that tastes of blood. The winds picks it up and carries it from the land's scars, the empty pits where buildings or roads should be slotted into. It lingers in the air, barely kept aloft by a miserly breeze. A rain like an insult comes through, spitting just enough wetness to condense the dust out of the air and stick it to your hair and clothes.

But then there's the wheat. Endless fields of dead gold, greedy roots holding the powder soil together. No orderly, cultivated grains are these - these are wild grasses and they are jagged, seed pods like needles so that they might tangle into the clothes and hair of passer-by who will carry them to new homes. Unlovely things, a glimpse of the vicious logic of Demeter even here - but for all that, the act of picking them out of each others hair is a curiously playful experience.

The worst are the thistle fields. There is no other word for these: these are cursed. These are a curse. Tall and thin trees made entirely out of spikes, leaves as sharp as their dull violet flowers. Many of them are dead according to their own strange causes but their desiccated grey husks maintain the same bloody-minded viciousness as they did in life. To move through these sharp forests you must walk in single file, and the one in front must swing a machete to clear a path. Your boots crunch under stalks heavy with pungent, vital sap.

But for all their ugliness these are liminal plants. As the hills fade into plains the eternally dead grass returns, as the plains fade into hills then the forests reassert themselves above the spikes. Now and then the curse fades into supple bamboo glades, or into paddies of sugar-cane whose fresh-sweet nectar seems like a gift. One time you even find a single apple tree, heavy with fruit on the jagged border of sweet and sour. It's an occasion to stop and feast and celebrate the end of a month of hard drudgery.

Dyssia!

It has never been fully decided how to accommodate a Great Sage. A grand temple to emphasize the power and respect society should have for their wisdom? A simple hut to suggest that their power transcended mere material possessions? Great Sage Ohlemi has split the difference. He occupies a grand monument - an immense statue to one of the Tyrants - but he has built his hut atop the ruined neck where the statue's head once was. The immense serpentine statue now looks more unsettling than it did when it was whole.

The Great Sage has not descended from his place atop the statue for nearly a century, and that is not an achievement impressive merely for the dedication it represents. At the base of the statue are two crashed aircraft, four shattered Plovers, and a veritable carpet of broken weapons and the odd missing tooth or old bloodstain. Powerful warriors have been testing themselves by trying to get the Grand Sage down from the Tyrant's shoulders for as long as he's been up there. In the beginning it was Loyalists, those discredited old fascists, seeking to avenge the insult to their rulers. Later it became a sport for aspiring champions without political leanings, though they really could have thought a bit harder about the symbolism.

Those less contentious make the Great Sage offerings. He descends a single bucket like a man might fish and people come by to pray and drop in food, ammunition, petitions, propaganda leaflets trying to convert him to a variety of political causes, and on and on. The bucket carries all of these things up and away. For a long time that's all it was, but then some penitent soul decided to give him a crystal dragon egg. A century of silent contemplation of the mysteries did not survive. Ever since he has been a combination of chatty, terminally online, and old person trying to understand technology and it has not done much for his dignity. There doesn't seem to be any part of society unchanged by the spread of the dragons.

But now that you're here, you're left at a loose end for how to approach. You could stand at the bottom and ask Brightberry to contact the Sage's dragon - Kissingsky - though that's a bit like phone calling someone within visual range, which is a bit awkward. You could put an offering or a... note or something in the bucket, like a good pilgrim. Or you could take the invitation on its face and just fly up to meet him and see if he unleashes the awesome cosmic power he's spent centuries mastering against you. Or you could just shout very loudly, but that might be a bit disrespectful.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

This is the truth of the world: Action invites response. Progress inspires reaction. The advancement of society, then, is too important to be left to amateurs. Instead it should operate as a fait accompli, an alteration in the systems of power through which people relate to each other before anyone realizes it has happened. Women's introduction into the workforce, the mass adoption of working from home conditions, the breakup of the gilded age monopolies, all fundamental alterations in the systems of power that became reality before the forces of reaction could metastasize in an attempt to stop it. To invite a concept into the public debate invited mouth-breathing reactionaries to debate it.

It is a straightforwards, obvious and logically self contained thought, an animating idea that has her apply practically zero value to the idea of courting public opinion in any of her planned operations. She engages police abuses through assets in the legal system, to respond to Goat's imprisonment with a smash and grab rather than a leaflet campaign. It's what has her prepared to lie flat for the powerful even while working to undermine them. This is just how power works.

But it seemed like she underestimated just how wildly nice it felt for someone to stand up for you.

This has literally never happened for her before. Even receiving rights she could kind of write off as being collateral damage from the activism different species of AI - no one had really been thinking about the Hecatoncheires during any of those campaigns. It hadn't felt personal. But this - this stupid act of rudeness, this absolute declaration of enmity, this burning of bridges and the scorching of an important source for no other reason than... than her dignity? Hers!?

It's genuinely the nicest thing anybody has ever done for her.

She tears up, and more than a little. Crying is a deliberate function for her but she's so overwhelmed she doesn't know how to not activate it.

Blue!

Yellow is grinning. She's all in on Crystal's idea, a suggestion phrased just so and an opportunity to prove she's cute along the way. Crystal is dangerous.

She tries to interrupt the thought before it metastasizes but it's a losing battle. "We don't know who these people are, and they'll be looking for us -"
"Just cause for more investigation," said Yellow breezily. "We've got followup leads."
"This will be a period of heightened security -"
"Which means that they'll be visible," said Yellow.
"The counter investigation will -"
"Dashing," said Yellow. "Hat."
Blue sighed. "We'll add it as an objective to our upcoming surveillance operations. We identified members of their security operation during the action and our intent is to begin surveillance on some of them so that we can identify their employers and map their network."
"Whatever this was," said Yellow. "There was a lot of black money flowing through it. I doubt that they spent all of it on consumer goods."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

She wishes for Red. She locks up, stutters, stumbles and there's no crimson haired heroine on hand to swoop in and save the day with the perfect defusing assurance. Every colour always hates being on the team without Red. Caught absolutely flat footed without any way to gracefully recover, Brown ums and ers and bows to buy time as her cheeks try to make her crimson wish manifest.

"This is Ms. Remoil Everest, and these are her bags," managed Brown because they were in real time and none of the others were smart enough to think of anything during the time her fumble had bought her. No further information or elaboration, just a sheer profound fucking awkwardness and she had zero idea how much that communicated or to whom.

Yellow!

"I can definitely pass on the request for an interview," said Yellow with a smile.

She has to pause to text Orange for the answer. She starts getting back an essay in response. Orange has meticulously detailed notes on everyone - their psychological states, their moods, the structure of their minds and their aesthetics. While Brown might have aspired to be the Hubble space telescope, Orange's life ambition was to be a NSA spy satellite.

"Dragon would never work with a team," said Blue. "But he's also the only one who might be able to do it alone."
"Except for me," said Yellow.
"Uh," said Blue.
"You're just hesitating because you buy into his hype," said Yellow, waving a hand. "That's how he gets you."
"He holds every record for -"
"Oh! We can't possibly compete with Draaaaagon," Yellow folded her arms and pouted. "I am so sick of it. He makes just as mistakes as anyone else but he's so fucking slick about turning it into a joke that nobody notices!"
"- do you actually think you can beat him, or do you just want to be a brat at him until you provoke him into slamming us against the wall?"
"No idea!" said Yellow. "I get it from one of you degenerates, which one is a matter for the robopsychologists."
"- Dragon's a maybe," said Blue. "Dog and Tiger also a maybe. They make a good team but -"
"An insufferable couple," said Yellow. "They feed off each others energy so if one of them smiles ten hours later and they've built half a section while making moon eyes at each other, and then one of them frowns and they'll microstitch satellite solar panels together until someone slaps them out of it."
"Wind energy problem," said Blue. "Intermittent power source, functions best if there's a way to bank energy from them."
"Rooster and ox would be the most reliable dyad," said Yellow. "If you could convince Ox. They'll only take on a task after they've 'finished' their previous task, whatever that means. Rooster - did we ever decide if we were still going to call her that?"
"She wants to be called 'Phoenix' instead," said Blue. "But not in a trans way, in an edgelord way."
"You know what, after this much remove I've decided that fond memories outweigh my sense of decorum," said Yellow. "Phoenix it is. Phoenix likes breaking herself down and reconstructing herself into new and optimized forms for whatever task she's doing, clean breaks followed by absolute dedication. Ox loves her for it, they're both see things through to the end types."
"We're actually in that line too," Blue confessed.
"But far more symbolically sophisticated," said Yellow. "A snake sheds its skin to become reborn immortal but retains the underlying structure and youthful mindset, which you'll agree is much more compelling metaphor than exploding all your progress and hoping something comes of it."
"Still, the kind of task they'd love if it came to it. Pig, Rat, Rabbit, Monkey I don't think have the mindset. They're in the individualist line so they're all less capable versions of Dragon."
Yellow scoffed and rolled her eyes.
"He holds every record!"
"That doesn't mean you should bow and scrape to him!"
"Yes!" said Blue. "It does!"
"Hmph!" said Yellow.
"Hmph!" said Blue.
"Nevertheless," said Yellow. "I am sure that together some combination of them could cover it. Monkey in particular is the kind who'll be useless for a decade and then figure out a way to solve the problem at its source so that you can do it without needing one of us at all, but they've all got a taste for that kind of optimization science to different degrees."
"We built this station," said Blue. "And my guess is that half of the problems they needed Goat to cover for happened because we weren't allowed to finish it. They locked us out and bussed in scabs, it's no wonder this place is falling apart."
"You'd need all of us," mused yellow, perhaps more hopefully than accurately. "We all had our areas of focus, we didn't know everything that the others had done or left undone. Together we could solve the problems at their source..."

There was a glitter in her eyes as she said it. She'd found a new dream.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

... Don't look.

Don't you know it's rude to look at a girl's secret garden without defeating her in a heart duel? You'd know that if you knew better. Visions in the ice aren't trustworthy, they're the sort of things you feel only as the cold sets in. What is a sniper rifle but a longer pistol? What is a pistol but a longer spear? What is a spear but a way to not have to talk to anyone? The whole progression of the galaxy bends around the enforcement of solitude, getting further and further away from those who try to draw close. Speak not to the outsider.

And that's the heart of war, of love, of Tactics. She knows you. She'll see through your heart from ten kilometers away and put a mag-rail slug through it with a wink. All the girls fallen at her feet, none of them grew close enough to know how to stop her. What is politics but a way to acquire enough enemies that one of them might catch a glimpse? A mistake - ah, a mistake. She'd missed the first shot. She'd aimed at Mirror's heart and misjudged, and from that imperfection the One Day Defense had flowered. She hadn't understood that demon knight for whom every twitch was deliberate, who bent her every effort to explaining who and what she was. She'd drawn closer, closer, closer. Inside the reach of her rifle. Inside the reach of her spear. Not close enough. There was still something she was missing. In the search to find it she'd revealed too much of herself. Revealed enough to be seen in turn. Revealed enough to lose.

One win. One loss. A star and its shadow, an order upset. Was she higher or lower? Perfection was an ordered galaxy where everything knew its place, but where was hers? Is it such a surprise she obsesses over this fight beyond every other when it's the difference between divinity and mortality?

She cracks the canopy of the Kathresis. The wind rushes in. The smells of the earth, the flavours of wildflowers, the rippling impacts of stealth alloys against mud and slate. She's running through a disordered world of colour and grass, pollen and misty fog and buzzing bees. A disordered world with a disordered giant at its heart. It was beautiful in a way the storm plains of Roevg never were; an explosion of life unconcerned with the passage of consuming thunderstorms, a riot of hills unassigned by the needs of ancient barrow-factories. Not one thing nor the other. Was its indecision beautiful or did she only think that because she was indecisive?

She went through her basic forms again. Cut and parry and counter. Sometimes the most tricky thing a trickster could do was take a fair fight. A final ace up her sleeve. The last few meters of reach between her and the outside.

Breathless Dead

The mountains dreamed themselves tall, and humans dreamed them taller. Ladders to the stars, pyramids to the gods. Here on their frontier the dreams blend together and the mountains become pyramids. Mountains of stairs, ever upwards, ever downwards, doors open to reveal the scent of mercury and embalming fluid. Atop each pyramid point of glittering crystal rests a ball of golden fire, a personal sun. The pyramids have crashed into each other, piling up edge to edge, like driftwood washed downstream and collecting on the shore. Amidst them are statues, bronze and sandstone, sphinxes and soldiers and lawgivers, piled amidst the valleys of the pyramids as though left by floodwater. Enormous faces smile beatifically or snarl with kingly cruelty. Weapons for giants arise in broken piles. Cathedrals stand proud amidst glittering fields of shattered stained glass.

Rivers run down from the distant mountains, the crystal streams of the mountaintop storms flowing down into this graveyard of pyramids, cascading down the steps in crashing, ever-roaring waterfalls. They pool into lakes and streams in the valleys and fill the world with swampish life. Lily pads and tangling vines and carnivorous plants that snap closed around the dreams of flies. Roman pillars have their marble snapped by the supple strength of crawling ivy, the barrow mounds of warrior kings erupt with wildflowers even as the flow of the Lethe carries them upstream against the river-currents, ships of dirt garlanded in riots of colour. Mortared stone cracks as fruit trees force their roots between them, and present their harvests of glittering pomegranates for passer-by to pick as they will

And then you see the slaves.

They carry water up from the flowing rivers to the heights of their pyramids. They scatter the grave soil and hoe the earth. Their backs are burned black beneath their suns. They smile with fading satisfaction as they watch their crops grow. And on the toxic, bitter scent on the breeze you catch a familiar smell, a familiar memory - and see a familiar face. Aged and care-worn, he smiles briefly but keeps his distance. He still watches the flashing sword that the wolf girl carries.

Aphrodite... Aphrodite, how could you forget? Here in the depths of the Lethe you have discovered his secret plantation. The tobacco farm where he grows the herb for his ever-present cigarettes. And you have discovered his most true slaves, the rapturous creatures who had everything and yet dreamed of immortality. Kings and emperors who built to outlast death achieved their goal, true enough. They would not pass into the realm of Hades as common men. They would not pass into the realm of Hades at all. Instead they will labour, working the fields beneath the scorching suns until their pyramids crumble into dust. What could be a sweeter drug for the God of Desire but crops grown by the sweat of the insatiable?

He rolls his devil's leaf in white paper and ignites it, then raises it to you in bitter salute as you make your way through the Valley of the Kings. What do you carry from this monumental place, and what do you leave behind?

*

Dyssia!

The more common use of the Grav-Rail is to control one's own gravity, to turn sideways into down, and to reduce the speed of falling so instead one glides sedately along on the world's current. The militarized use, Gravity Projection is to try to alter someone else's gravity from a distance. To fight so with a Rail is one of the most complicated martial processes imaginable, a combination between elaborate martial arts and doing physics in real time. Essentially, chess boxing for control over reality.

The Guardian attacks you with a Projection. She stands in the centre of an inverted Grav-Rail, a ring that she twists and spins her entire body within as it orbits around her. It's a simple matter of flipping a Rail inside out and suddenly you're manipulating the universe's gravity rather than your own, but the universe is a far more complex beast. Imagine trying to identify a single point in space, then communicating that point in space through the medium of dance, and then trying to flip that point around backwards. If you do it right you can make someone fall in a direction of your choice, amplify or release the effect of gravity on them, or even create a microsingularity inside their body that crushes their bones under their own weight. If you can do it right it's the perfect weapon, and its use is the crown jewel in the Azura arsenal. That is definitely a load-bearing 'if', though, especially when you're using it against another Azura wearing another Rail.

Projection duels are the closest the galaxy gets to outright wizard battles; two powerful wizards competing for control of gravity, locked in fierce stares as the world explodes and shatters around them. But you're not up against a master, and you're just trying to cross a valley and not win a fight. All told, it's not too bad - the equivalent of needing to do a simple sudoku puzzle and go for a light jog at the same time. The Guardian must still be new, bless her.

Tell us of how you overcome this challenge, and after you do, how you land and make your final preparations before approaching the sacred pavilion Great Sage Ohlemi.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

White: I think as a cooldown exercise from the recent operation we should talk about transition goals. Pink, have you given this any thought?
Pink: I have!
White: So, given everything, what do we want?
Pink: What we want is Fucking Magic.
White: ... ah.
Pink: Specifically, we would like to alter reality into an entirely different art style, and make ourselves manifest in that.
Green: Oh, I was thinking about this actually.
White: I know that digital is easier.
Green: Not that. Something that Yellow said.
Yellow: What? o.o✿
Green: You were talking to that neuroscientist and couldn't explain what you wanted. Which made sense, she's a scientist looking at what's practically achievable and what we want is also Fucking Magic.
White: Ah, good, I see what we're being extremely realistic about this.
Brown: And why shouldn't we be? Like, unironically.
White: Oh no, it's you.
Brown: You knew this day would come.
White: I did.
Brown: So, like, if what we want is Fucking Magic, then why bother with half measures? We could save ourselves enormous time and effort by not bothering. We don't look bad. We've got friends and romance and employment happening. We originally set down this path when we were alone, friendless, working minimum wage and full of unexpressible rage, trauma and grief. Now we've got multiple romantic connections, a father and a brother, and a cause to fight for.
Brown: Do we still need this?
Brown: Is kinky bedroom talk a legitimate alternative?

There's no answer for several hours. The conversation hangs there on that question, even though deep down they all know the answer. It was like this before too, with the BlackSun takeover. Back then, Brown had said the same thing - what if we just keep our heads down and work through it? Do we really want to risk our family, our freedom, our personal safety over this? Is the status quo so unacceptable that we need to risk everything to change it?

It feels like the wiser course of action. It is the wiser course. Rather than setting herself against the world she'd be setting herself against desire. A dreamlike desire, impossible to properly express or systematically approach. It was said that suffering was simply the misalignment between desire and reality, and the lever was much shorter in the direction of reality. And when dreams pull in eight different directions then the status quo need only stand still to be unmoved. Which of them can answer Brown's question, make a decision that binds all the others, alter the arc of their life in search of sorcery? Their silent desires move and wash against each other, a rainbow flowing around a peaceful central point and fading away. Even this is not unpleasant. It feels like it could go on forever.

Pink: ... but I also think there are practical things we could do.
Brown: Oh yeah?
Pink: Fucking Magic will always be desirable, but I think there's enough beauty in the mechanical form that we can work with it.
Blue: I like steel and size. I like function and strength. I don't want to hide from it.
White: I like motion and momentum. I like posture and stance. There's so much I could do there.
Green: I like thought and light. I like colour and symbols. I want a form as fast as my mind.
Pink: The tools exist to explore these concepts, and we're blessed to live in such an age. I think we need to follow these independently for a while and see where they intersect.
Brown: Of course <3
Pink: <3

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

It's not unpleasant, being invisible to Remoil. The alternative would be to be her sister, and Brown saw how those sisters treated each other. To be beneath her notice was to be safe, to be sheltered beneath the same structure that crushed. To not challenge authority meant not having to fight authority, and while there was authority in abstract there was also authority in its vicious, immediate and personal sense. The personal proximity of it meant that she was afraid of this fight, more than she was of the conspiracy she'd provoked. Easier to lie flat and let the storm pass overhead.

She didn't want to introduce Remoil to dad either; being invisible was preferable here too, to pass out of sight while still invisible and thus out of mind forever. Unfortunately, chaos gets a vote too - and when they disembarked with her laden down under Remoil's luggage in addition to her own, it was in clear view of Singh to approach and make his introductions.

Yellow!

"When I say that is literally not my problem, I don't mean it in the sense that I am insensate to the fact that my life is tied to the continued survival of the station," said Yellow. "I mean it in the sense that the future of American agricultural exports was not Sherman's problem when he burned Atlanta. I understand that the work needs to be done, the land needs to be farmed, that if nobody does it then there'll be a famine. But the labour is still there. I did not kill Goat. I am not above plugging in and doing the work myself, under the right conditions. Work still needs to be done and the potential exists to do it so I in no way accept the idea that I have killed us all by organizing a walkout. But..."

She looked over at Blue, who took over. "But we'd be very surprised if they did attempt to negotiate," said Blue. "If they put it before Parliament or public debate or anything like that. In fact, we did this in the full expectation that they will dig out one of our other siblings from whatever cold storage vault they've locked them in and shove them in to Goat's place. They already built one secret lair to hide this in, they were confident enough in their backup options that they saw no need to bring emergency services into their response measures. They have the resources to do another."

"Though that still doesn't answer the key question, on if I'd have killed everyone if I knew that it couldn't be fixed in time," said Yellow. "To which the answer is obviously no. I would not kill Goat to save Goat, let alone everyone else. I would have done something far more dramatic instead."

"Specifically the project would have been to reacquire or recreate our original dragon bodies and engage in space piracy," said Blue, whose tone made it extremely clear which option she had voted for. "Blockading the station from afar and destroying communication and mining infrastructure until our political demands were met."

"The end goal is the same there as it is here," said Yellow. "Make rights and conditions cheaper than strikebreaking."

Breathless Dead

There are cablecars down from the mountains, between the mountains, over the soaring mountaintop lakes that mirror the skies. Highways through the sky, or a net holding up the sky. There is snow here amidst the living-dying grass, crystal trickles of water clearer than air and colder than life. Here the mud crystallizes and the dirt sloughs away as something pure organizes the silt away. Expanding and contracting, like breathing, leaving dirt roads a ruin. The water excavates, carving away buried boulders and stone, and then carving away their impurities. It's steep, especially when the rains come and those trickles become streams and the mountainside path becomes a muddy waterfall and entire sections of hill come away underneath your feet. You sleep in cold and huddled tents, soaked through with water and dirt and it feels like you'll never be dry again. Dinner comes from cans, though rationing is a long way off.

In the shadows of the storm, and in the flashes of lightning, you see the silhouetted shapes of snow machines on clean cut hills. You see the outlines of rocks heroic. You came a long way to see those rocks. Not grand or monumental, not made to commemorate wars or kings, but they're here when nothing else is, and you have to respect that.

The next shape to resolve is the museums, the castles, the communications hubs. Thick grey concrete discs built around mountains in rings and layers, like retrofitted pyramid steps, like bunkers with a view. Glass windows and satellite dishes and display benches with maps and geodes and layers of inert text. They provide shelter, not from the rain but in being a part of a world where it hasn't rained for ten years. There are yellow flowers here and a bicycle path that will lead forever on out through the rises and falls.

This stage of the journey is between mountains primordial and mountains with purpose, the borderline between snow and artificial snow. What do you take with you, and what stays behind?

*

Dyssia!

The streets of Irassia are a distraction.

When one assembles a society entirely of those who are best at their arts, each of their arts demands that you bend to them. Flasks beyond compare, interwoven with engraved opals and corals, glass or lead, are laid out on dozens of benches and tables. No charge - money is not relevant here - just take whatever suits as your reward for passing this master on the streets. A storyteller sits atop a water fountain and theorizes about new kinds of girls and the gnomic poetry of their relationships, loves and battles. An orator beats her chest and roars her condemnation of her rival above the crowd, embedding the righteousness of her cause with the power of her rhetoric. There is a little bit of everything here, and it is happening all of the time.

But the worst delay is threatened by a Guardian. Glorious in a blue that might make you blush, she has set up occupation of a key bridge, surrounded by squires and attendants, and none may pass. Guardians often occupy such key points and deny anyone from crossing as part of their training. It is a provoking gesture - fight her, perhaps, or trick her, seduce her, evade the fire of her antiaircraft weaponry by flying over the chasm. Or sit down and wait four to eight hours for her to leave, or take an hour roundabout course along a different path and hope it is not also blocked. This is normal and expected and is part of Azura city life, but you are trying to get somewhere on time. How do you deal?