Thanqol

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Ah. She has been stolen, that is it. Stolen into service - and that is only fair. Solarel too fell for an Empress. Solarel too tried to steal the stars on her behalf. She understands. They had both found new swords to fall upon since last they'd fought.

Her hands trace the Makhaira under arms, around thighs. Gently, gently, gently. The thick cords of muscles, the crackling neural electricity of the spine. She knew every reactive armour plate, every sloped ballistic curve and ammunition storage rack. She had penetrated this armour before, unraveling its secrets around her fingers before Naelkai had done the same. The lace and bows of nanoweave, gentle gossamer threads of repair solution wrapping reinforced steel cable, soft to the touch. The promise of recovery, an invisible dress that made scarcity and durability irrelevant concerns to the followers of Zaldar.

It was that very lace she worked on now. Gentle touches, loving touches, the caress of silver geists and software updates. Uploading a new shape into the Makhaira's repair nanoswarm, node by node. Wrapping loop after loop of silken threads around wrists and breasts and legs. Gently, gently... up until her darling knight took damage. Then the thread would pull tight, a gentle weave of thread tightening into a shibari. All of that knightly durability turned back on itself. The automated repair swarms would remember a shape where wrist was bound to ankle and hair was bound to tail and a submissive inner heart would be revealed for all to see.

It would still require a blow. To trigger the repair process, and have it proceed so quickly that Akaithon would not notice the binding until it was complete. It would still come down to the lance.

"You desire a gift?" Solarel said. "She had me robbed, Akai. Attacked by the Varangian Guard outside of my God and exiled from Roevg, in defiance of all of the Knightly codes of the Evercity. I understood you standing by, out of love," a barbarian lilt, understanding was not the same as respecting, "but I did not think that you would then call the fruits of treachery a lover's gift."

"But then," she added, gently kissing the nanoswarm, sending a silver ripple along it before withdrawing back to the Kathresis, "it is the way of the high riders to take the noble path after every exploring every possible alternative, and then toasting their virtue for so doing."

[Who's the Monster? 7
- Your words sting; they take a Condition.]

Breathless Dead

Bella!

She laughed like a wheeze, bending half-over as though struck. Sincere, but it took a moment. "Okay. Fair. Yeah, they were dumb jokes. But they're where my brain went every time?" she said. The question was an axiom and a debate at once. "I didn't, like. Have a childhood, right? I wasn't turned on until the bioweave had fully grown me. No point, right? Not like I needed training if I was just going to forget everything. So I guess those first second instincts where I named myself were my childhood. A bunch of childish jokes that were funny right up until the moment where I killed hundreds of thousands. Like. I was standing on the bridge of a Solar Archcruiser, watching Admiral Heller crush her own homeworld with grav-projectors, trying not to throw up, and then she turns to me and smiles because she thinks we're best friends, and says "Thanks to you, Deathkill, we have stopped the rebellion", and, like, I had to compose a play in my head about a girl in the countryside who loved strawberry wine so that I could roleplay the climactic scene where she toasts her best friend's success in marriage. At that stage of the process that was the simplest way to deal with it."

She stared off at the horizon for a moment, then ate the pills - packet and all - and emptied a glass. "And, like, fomenting an insurrection that got the planet destroyed was the simplest way of killing my target. It was nearly a 30% improvement on the odds of the version of the plan that didn't kill everyone. And it didn't risk my sisters. My... sisters." Each blink stood out, breaking the spell of her violet eyes. "I figure they must have been reassigned. Given how far I went out of my way to not use them. I'd just... do the job by myself. So they didn't have to go through the same rampancy I did. They couldn't be reset like I could."

She trails off for a long time. "How am I supposed to name this thing, that I am? All the joke names became poisoned when they became the titles to chapters of carnage. And now to apply a pretty word backwards in time, to stamp it next to all of those deeds? What name would survive being dipped in that much blood?"

Redana!

There is something quite like a Wish in the heart of the girl named... the girl who wears the title Redana Claudius. It is a scratching, tense, unstable feeling that's always there; an awareness of every blade and snipers position, gravitationally drawn towards them. To be pierced, bloody, Imperial blood spilling joyfully on the ground as her death becomes a nightmare for her killers. She thinks about this constantly.

But the maiden is right. That's not a princess wish. That's not an impossible deed. She... she accomplished that. She was lifted on bloody claws and stared into the eyes of her murderer and felt the exaltation of Purpose fulfilled. But there were still things she wanted. There were still things she wanted even amidst a glorious death. Impossible things. Exactly the sort of thing that might trouble the mind of a Princess.

"My task..." said the princess. "My task is to cross the entire galaxy, to set foot on distant Gaia, where humanity was born. And I've come as far as I can go alone."

Dolce!

"Yes, of course!" said the ancient craftsman. "We must watch. We must learn. And then we must engineer self-sustaining solutions. To spin a crew in the gene-looms perfectly suited to her personality, reflective of her energy. Warriors she would delight to lead. Once we have observed her favoured tastes in food we must design servants to cook it to perfection for her each and every day. Love and flesh are inseparable. The functions of matter are nothing without warm smiles to go with it. She must see our love in everyone around her, and in so doing we will build her a home worthy of the name."

Dyssia!

The Warriors of Ceron have conquered the galaxy, you know this intellectually. Emotively is so much harder. Yes, in theory this phalanx represents a concentration of martial force, biomantic brilliance and technological power without parallel. Every warrior could single-handedly destroy one of the metal giants of the Age of Knights or bring a planet of the Age of Exploration to its knees.

But they're so fucking cute. They've even got little holes in their little helmets for their little triangle ears! They're all so serious! They're even holding their swishy tails still to show how serious they are!

"These aren't Ceronians, they're security Pix," Brightberry corrects. "A warrior servitor subvariant. They're basically twenty five percent lesser than true Ceronians in almost every respect, including size."

Oh gosh you get to see an entire formation of angry foxgirls do irritated ear twitches at the same time.

Even though you are being sold off to bandits, the Endless Azure Skies does not part with its citizens without ritual. You have been garbed in glittering white silks like moonlight, and even now the system grav-projector is bringing the full moon into place above you. There is to be a sacred hunt, with you as the quarry. When you are captured you will be dragged back to the Pix ship bound and gagged, a lawful prize. Already their huntresses are doing stretches over behind you as they pace around the edges of the phalanxes, sharp and lean girls with muscles like whipcords.

Now, this could be the kind of sacred hunt where the priestess walks up to the sacrificial mare in the temple and casts a bridle over her shoulders, nice and dignified and quick. Or this could be the kicking and screaming kind of sacred hunt where you head out into the wild determined to make them sweat for it.

Or it could be the 'fuck you' kind of sacred hunt where you use your head start to go for the spaceport instead. That'd really make them work for it.

Which one you choose is between you and Artemis.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

She's terrified. She'd acted without thought, without seeing it. An act of emotion and not stratagem. The tell - using the Zero-Point Weapon to alter the environment to her advantage as an opening gambit. Relying on the wrong instincts to stall while she recollected herself and recharged her primary weapon. She of all people should have known to never underestimate the sheer power of the charge.

The only thing that saves her is that Akaithon isn't her. Isn't Solarel. Isn't Mirror. She invests too much power in the shields, too much stance in blocking the debris. If she'd studied harder - if she'd seen, if she'd known - she'd have accepted the damage to her mech as the lesser price to pay. She'd have come on with every bit of power she had in that moment of weakness and the battle would have been over before it began. Mirror wouldn't have invested any points in health. Mirror would have struck her down in a microsecond and been disappointed by the result. She's terrified. In this moment over the abyss she saw herself with absolute clarity. Saw the sloth in her brain. Saw the malicious vine of habit. Saw herself with the clarity only possible in this place on the boundary between divinity and scrap metal.

[Defy Disaster: 5+1 Grace +1 Forward from Wicked Past; a 7]

But Akaithon didn't see it. And the difference between seeing it and not is everything.

The blade takes the Zero-Entropy Weapon - the crystal-cold device that is the key to her offense - and carves it into a mess and tangle of nanobots. In the cloud of particulate destruction, in the chaos of debris from the breaking station, in the speed of the Kathresis' movement at full burn she steps forward, under the tall arm of the Makhaira -

Out from her gaze for just a second.

- And then back. And then up.

She clamps onto the Makhaira's back. Her reactor is dark and invisible. The added weight is impossible to judge with no gravity. The Makhaira is twice the size of the Kathresis and can easily lift her, especially if she adds her own thrust subtly to balance any lowering of acceleration. When Akaithon spins around to follow through she finds the Kathresis gone, as though it had teleported or become invisible. In place of either Solarel is clinging to the Makhaira's back, heart pounding in her ears, disconnecting her neural link for a moment so she can bite her knuckles and thereby discharge the absolute, pounding manic terror.

She'd gotten lucky. A habit. A lack of respect. The fact that that pounding electric guitar in Akaithon's cockpit had muffled the impact of metal on metal. She clung on with sheer audacity.

And audacity demanded that she continue talking.

"How else could it be?" said Solarel, staring directly into the painted heraldric crest in the centre of the Makhaira's back. A world as the pupil of an eye. Her words bounced off ten thousand pieces of debris before reaching Akaithon in case the latency of the reply give her away. "You desire the Goddess of War. What trinkets could buy her? What lord could offer her?"

But now the problem: she didn't have any way to turn this position into a victory. With the Zero-Entropy Weapon she could have charged a full shot and unloaded it point-blank into the Makhaira's back, a finishing blow. Without it her twin swords could wound but not kill, her point defense weaponry and drones could annoy but not wound, her lance was outright useless. Damn Akaithon for putting points in health.

So, while Akaithon was turning her full attention to scanning the debris field, stance shifting constantly, ready for attack from any direction, Solarel sighed. She knew what she had to do.

"So, Akai, my daring knight, my high rider," said Solarel, adjusting her helmet and cracking open the cockpit of the Kathresis. "We've got some time until you make a mistake. So tell me. You're going somewhere. You're going somewhere and you need the Aeteline to get there. Where? What could you possibly need all that power for?" if not for defeating me? If not for defeating Mirror?

As she spoke she slipped out into the void, climbing from one mech to the other. It was time for delicate, slow sabotage. To gently run her hands over every part of the Makhaira's divine body. To touch her hidden places and break her fragile things. While Akai talked and searched she would work until her lover seized up and her legs became weak and her oxygen failed, making her gasp for breath with Solarel's name on her lips.

But slowly. Slowly. For this girl she needed to slip under her armour without her noticing. Needed to occupy her conscious, chattering, thinking mind with puzzles and riddles and games even as the lace ribbons that held her underwear together came apart beneath her fingers. To steal her bones so that all that was left was water, pouring out of that suit of armour, helpless. Slowly. I was wrong to try and love you in any other way.

[Figure out a person: 8. What do you love most? What are your feelings towards battle? How could I get you to betray your ideals?]

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Come and take her?

Oh, wouldn't that be lovely? To be a creature of such strength and power that she could just fucking do that? Even here, alight on the edge of adrenaline, glowing with the cerulean wash of desire she knew that she couldn't. She couldn't cross that distance. She couldn't beat this spirit. This one thing, this small thing for something she wanted more than she'd ever wanted anything and she couldn't. A wall of mud and muck and indifference and she couldn't climb it on broken legs. No sword. No spear. No bow. Only an umbrella and the ability to call monsters.

Monsters. Demons. They filled her head, their names and shapes and catalogues. You couldn't just read about them - even in words explaining the curve of their wings some of them made their way inside you. They changed the way you thought, the way you imagined, the way that problems could be solved. Puppets for a road, chariots for mercy, the howling wind for silence. Their logic flowed through her mind in alien cascades. The prices they'd declare. The power they represented. The allegiances they held. Would they free her Maid from her prison form? Would they shatter her and ascend on the wreck of her power? Would they do their job as commanded? If only she had the capability to do things herself she could choose how they got done. She'd thought that power had meant strength, but there had never been enough strength to make all the world bend at once. She'd thought that power had meant authority but there were always fractures between her desires and the desires of her monsters. Even manipulating the powerful, how she'd started her career, had placed her on the razor edge of her mistress' caprice.

How could she get what she wanted? What was the path? The azure stars were still as unreachable as ever no matter how many times she altered her approach. In changing her approach she'd lost coherence with herself. With each re-invention she was still a slave and she could hear the laughter of Venus in her ears. In her temper she saw a new path; one where she could cast this god's star from the sky and weave it into a needle of starlight. A new path to power built on fear and ruthlessness. Maybe that would be the way.

Come and claim her. Her fingers itched. Her knees didn't. She could see the tumbling arms of the haywain. And...

She remembered. Words said in a past life.

Which did she desire? The Maid, or her pride?

... the Maid. Perhaps untrue, but she was too proud to admit to herself that she was a slave to pride.

And so, with eyes burning blue, she turned and looked towards Kayala Na. Do you remember her, Kayala? The crippled girl you met in the forest, who you helped briefly and then forgot in your pursuit of another? She remembers you. She'll never forget the way you discarded her. It's a dagger in her pride, right next to the one she adds there now.

"Help me~!!" Fengye begs, clasping her hands together, eyes filling with shining tears. "Please, noble lady! That terrible monster has stolen my darling and is imprisoning her inside it! Please! You're my only hope~!!"

[Entice: 10. Fengye takes a string on you, and choose from the list]

Breathless Dead

Flowers become houses. The view of the horizon vanishes behind sprawling trees. The straight line branches and splinters, weaving in a thousand directions. One landscape becomes a trillion, crammed in shoulder to shoulder with each other, every four meters a different biome, each home a different garden. An autumn breeze blows over the ocean, wherever it's gone. So strange that you could lose the end of the world.

A wooden framed house up on stilts with a smaller house beneath it, cast iron tablesets set out as though for a cafe. Open green ovals of sweet grass, wet with morning dew. Soft white sand and concrete shower blocks that seem to say that the beach should be right here but it's somehow not. A labyrinth. Endless motion, new experiences, but no certainty of progress.

Despite the homes and the streets there are no people here. Everything human without humanity, and somehow you're losing each other too. Subtly at first but slowly with more and more tension. There's a main street here somewhere but the dreams of civilization are far more tangled than the wilds and the road. When you do see other people it feels like a trespass, an intrusion, a shock. After so long moving now the only way forward lies through someone else.

Bella!

"You know, I legitimately thought going in that this was going to be easy," said the girl. "But - you know that mental stress can make itself manifest physically? Hypertension, muscle strain, kind of thing? It's baseline tension physiology to maintain high awareness on mission, but there's also a better version that assassins have that maintains them in full hyperadrenaline battle readiness when certain mental stress triggers are met. It's a prelude chemistry that prepares the body to endure the physical transformations that come with Rampancy. You remember it still? Because it looked good on you. I mean that sincerely! I look like I'm about to start plucking my own feathers, but you looked like a skeleton tiger goddess."

She smiles. "I'm Beautiful, by the way," she said. "Ha ha, my little joke. Actually I'm Boldness. Actually, I'm Jacinth. Actually, I'm Asset 00498. Actually, I'm Killfucker Deathkill - I was in a weird mood that day. Actually, I'm Justice - gods, you know that's actually the worst part? Not the amount of it all, but the amount of it all that's cringe? Just every awkward joke that felt right at the time and maybe I had the charisma to pull off in all of those moments but smeared across the inside of my head. Anyway. Actionable: breaking into these houses, going through bathroom sinks, looking for packets or containers that look medical. Doesn't really matter what, they'll mostly be weak caveman drugs and I'll need to chug like three kilograms worth of the stuff before I'll even have a chance of them taking the edge off. Oh, shit, I just remembered - I used Justice twice. Okay, change of plans, instead of the drugs search for a firearm and fucking shoot me."

Redana!

She's a maid. A scavenger. She's been walking behind you all this time, catching what you've discarded and left behind, cleaning it away with broom and brush. She's a leader, an empress. A warlord with the name Redana, wreathed in purple, smiling in your smile, wrapped in wreckage that might have been yours. If you have become a shadow she has become the light.

"I would -" could? "- reward you for following me this far," she said, curiosity in her voice. Wondering if she had been the leader "If it is within my power to give -" what is my power? "- name your boon, and I will grant it?" May I? May I really?

Dolce!

"You understand what it means to be ready," said the old badger in the saffron robes. "Preparedness. That is the key. At any point a decision may be made. Her Imperial Highness might commission a new fleet and the alloys need must be ready. Her Imperial Highness might make a house call, and she shall not be well served by having to wait for dinner. By the time the Engine bursts to nova the time to repair the plasma coils will have passed. By the time we are asked it will be too late. So you see that it is impossible to continue before we have discovered what it is that we need to have with us for when we go. Come, friend. Sit. We must work it out together before we take another step."

Dyssia!

"The Oracle..." said the Sleeper, in his gradual way. "Has determined. That you represent a unique... capability. For the Azura."

Merilt stood in the back of this meeting, behind the fold-out lectern heavy with documents. She was saying nothing, as cryptic and distant as a star.

"The Azura are beyond compare," the Sleeper went on. "Nothing is beyond our reach. All we need is the desire to stretch out our... our hands and take it. This presents a prob... problem. For what challenge could we issue to the Pix? Should we say, so long as the Grand Sage remains undefeated, we shall not yield? Then they need only work their magic to convince a greater warrior to cast him down. And be sure there are the greater. In this perfect world all of society is aligned in a perfect ladder of skill and potential all the way up into..." he trailed off into mumbling.

"All things are possible," said the Oracle. "Apollo has shown me this. All things are possible, except you."

Except you.

"Yes," said the Sleeper, jolting half awake. "Except you. In all the Oracle's divinations the only thing on this world that was judged truly impossible was you... properly finishing a Path. Truly hopeless. The greatest masters of this planet have come before you to share their passion and willpower... rain on the salt flats. You're entirely unteachable, even in the eyes of the gods."

"And so, you will be our challenge and our sacrifice to the Pix," said Merilt. "You will be turned over to their custody. They will be free to do whatever they like with you for as long as they like. And on the day that they inspire you, Dyssia the Distracted, to finish one of the Paths - whichever they like - then Irassia will bow down before them."

"Mm, yes," said the Sleeper. "One sacrifice to preserve our world. A simple bargain, really. A heroic action, even, and even although it has been assigned to you by others. There will be a ceremony... a dress will be appropriate. Do you have any questions?"

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Of course Solarel knows what Final Destination No Items means. The ultimate challenge, a true test of skill astride the stormplains. No interference, a contest of pure skill. She has studied martial languages in all their forms.

This? This is not Final Destination No Items. Not even close.

Maglocks detach and the Kathresis floats a centimeter above the station. She draws her legs up into a meditative fold, hands folded in her lap. The Kathresis dreams. Even this place is not clean. It seethes with motion, with energy, with potential. So does the Makhaira, even in its stillness music bounds at its core. Want. Want, want for things that aren't her. How did this happen? When did Akaithon develop dreams grander than beating her? What... what would she even do with the Ateline if not use it to defeat her? She feels cold irritation prickle the edges of her neck scales. Jealousy. How... how did all these people keep coming up with bigger dreams than this? With things they wanted other than to be here, now, in this moment?

Even Akaithon. She thought you, at least -!? What would you even use the Ateline for if not fighting her?

And I shall call you Tactics, she thought in crystal ice, because that is all you are good for.

"Typical high rider," said Solarel with calculated warmth. "You ask how to use the God. You don't ask what you can offer the God."

The Zero-Entropy Weapon snapped out in a heartbeat, aimed at the perfect nexus of energy. It fires - but not at the Makhaira. It fires down at the station.

Even here. Even in space, in the void, life seethed. Energy seethed. Just below the surface. Nothing was clean, nothing was organized - not even this. Not until she made it so.

She hefted the lance - that precision weapon, the delicate microcircuitry gleaming in the sunlight. She paused - not tactically, but because this was too good a moment to not allow the inefficiency of a playful smirk. And then she slammed it sideways into the impact point of the Zero-Entropy Weapon.

And the space station shattered like a sheet of ice.

Metal fragments crashed out in all directions. An instant debris cloud. It wasn't chaotic - it was the only thing here that wasn't chaotic. The spellbinding arcs and trajectories of the crumbling station are known and knowable more than those of living metal. It was a shield; charge at her too fast and the jagged metal fragments would crack the cockpit or lodge in joints. It was a cloak; take your eyes off her in the debris cloud and the Kathresis' radar signature would be impossible to re-acquire. It was a challenge; could your scholar's brain keep up with the consequences of her barbarian strength?

A solvable problem. A riddle in a million jagged shards. How dare you think that this was anything other than the end of your road, Akai? There is no space in Solarel's brain for tomorrow. How complex does she have to make this before she has your attention?

"What do you bring to the table, high rider?" said Solarel. "Why should the Ateline even notice you?"

Breathless Dead

Of course the road is a gift from the gods. Everything is a gift from the gods. The grasses might have spoken grain, might have spoken bread. The thistles might have spoken safety. The mountains might have spoken glory, achievement. But there is something special about receiving the gift that you need.

It wraps through the landscape like a ribbon. Sometimes it lifts off the ground so that it can loop around a boulder or raise above the treeline to show a distant ocean. During the daytime it absorbs the light of the sun, warm and soft to walk on, and the quartz in its construction glitters like diamonds amidst the black. At night time it reflects the light of the moon and shines powder-white, and the breezes that race along it are cool and gentle. Mountains come into focus, looming up in the distance. They come closer, closer - and then they vanish, for you are amongst them. And then somehow there is another flat with more mountains in the distance.

The course stops. The momentum checks. An interruption, an annoyance. The... the yellows are doing something. They're mobbing an old white box with a brown stripe along its middle. They chatter and they talk, babbling together an idioglossary between terms remembered and terms invented. The carburetor attaches to the spinny bit and then you undo the bolts and...

Magic.

Such are wizards. For months you've walked and this gaggle has followed, uncomplaining but uncontributing. You've pulled their weight. But all of a sudden on this hill they have come together and built something that can pull yours.

There's space for eight, comfortably seated, in the vehicle - twelve if you cram. Space for another eight sitting on the roof or hanging off the sides. This group goes ahead excitedly until they start coming back with more vehicles salvaged from the roadside. Ancient machines, primordial, at their fastest, with their engines straining barely matching running speed. Words like Thunderbird and Dodge and UAZ proudly shining silver even though their untarnished shine shows their falseness. And along the ribbon road you fly as fast as dreaming, and no faster.

That distant ocean is coming up on you now. On your left side is green hills, soft and rolling and dew-shining, yellow flowers like kisses from summer. On your right side is an endless blue expanse. Ahead of you is the ribbon-road, and the engines roar as they swim against its current. The ancient dreams of wilderness and earth are done and the dreams of people lie ahead. What stays behind in the ancient world?

*

Dyssia!

"Have you heard of the Pix?" said Brightberry. "It's not a story the Azura would tell you."

You're sitting at the bottom of the pillar while Kissingsky leans over the side. Radiant beams of light containing complex information occasionally pass back and forth between the two crystal dragons, both of whom are currently not bored with the conversation. That's always something to be careful with - if a dragon doesn't think a message is interesting she just won't bother to send it, and might wander off entirely. The best that could, apparently, be done to induce them into service in the first place is that they're all enormous gossips and stickybeaks who like to know everything. Sometimes some of them fly around in the path of communications beams just to eavesdrop on other dragons' conversations.

"So, in Atlas times," Brightberry explained, "they needed," she made fingerquotes with her wings, "'Salespeople'. People whose job it was to convince people to want things. Right? Because if they could convince someone to want something they didn't... already... want..." she stops to try and figure out this concept, obviously stumped. "That would give them... power over you. Somehow? Anyway. The Pix are servitors made to do... that."

She then communicated back and forth with Kissingsky for about twenty minutes, at times nodding seriously, at times giggling and flapping her wings flirtatiously. She doesn't bother to clue you in on anything that's happening in that exchange. This is just how it be sometimes.

"Anyway, so, they just parked a Revulsant-class Grand Cruiser in orbit and destroyed the Skurulsant mountain with an orbital strike as a show of aggression," said Brightberry. "The Oracle and the Sleeper asked for you by name. They're both coming here. You're going to be a hero!"

With crystal dragons, the information you got was often the information you got. Still, there are a few blanks that you can fill in on your own. The Oracle is straightforwards enough - the Oracle of Apollo, one of Irassia's most important religious figures, the overseer of the Paths, and your personal governmental nemesis. In one sense it's nice to be on the radar of the planet's high priest, but less so because she thinks your continued existence is inviting the wrath of the gods down on everyone. The Sleeper, though, was a nickname and not a title; his real name was Salhadin, Path of the Orator, but was called the Sleeping Speaker because of his mode of speech. He constantly seemed to be on the verge of dozing off, information coming out in dozing mumbles, head constantly dipping as though he was about to collapse. The effect was a unique innovation he'd bought to his Path. The occasional mumble made people strain to hear his every word, and the sense of physical danger that he might at any point topple over and hit his head on the lectern - something he did on occasion - made people afraid to look away in case they missed it. He was one of the most individually compelling people on the planet, and also one lauded highly by the Oracle with whom he was utterly politically aligned.

So why they wanted you, of all people, when it came to dealing with a starship filled with angry foxgirls was impossible to figure out.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue!

She sends pictures to Green as she goes through the park. She's the one with the interest.

Green is the only one of them to have ever adventured on a planetary body. Qatranic core attached to a cheap little quadcopter, she'd been smuggled out of the NASA base by Singh so that she could go flying in the open air. Of all the places to go, though, with the ever-present countdown of her battery capacity looming in her vision, Green had spent her time in the marshy forest-swamps of Florida. Inch by inch the drone had hovered forwards, glinting black camera lens failing to communicate the sheer excitement of learning about the natural world.

The patterns of bark, budding flower-blossoms! Lines of insects and their omnipresent industry! Grumpy-suspicious birds who glared even through their singing! The endless, fascinating transmutation of dirt into wood! And, of course, the lizards. The skinks and reptiles and snakes and the way they darted, as though a stone had come to life. She'd loved it.

You could love nature as a puzzle. As an endless evolutionary optimization cycle that held even in the shadow of the opposable thumbs singularity. You could love it as art, its muddy indifference and battle between sight and invisibility, glorious in the scale of history it represented. Green loved it as a challenge. Explore! The further she went the more she could find, every micro-biome a historical legend, storm-carved and human-shaped, and everything seeking to travel. What an evolutionary luxury, travel. Matter given mobility. Everything sought to manage it and their success or failure was written on the landscapes.

So, in the end, it is the walls of the park that disappoint her the most. Cunningly designed to keep the animals and insects in without feeling like a hard barrier. A check on seeing how far all of this can go. She can't help but trace her gaze up to look at the walls of Aevum itself. Beyond it, Earth.

"Hell is empty," Yellow muses aloud, unconsciously unaware of the logic that leads her to each thought "And all the devils are here."

Black!

She doesn't feel like this moment of openness has changed anything. Verbal reassurance is a weak signal, especially coming from a machine. It meant nothing if Singh had installed a backdoor, if his cryptography was flawed; a statement of intent was only as strong as the difficulty of changing that intent.

It's why the trust created from throwing Remoil's bags was so strong - Singh could never un-burn that bridge. That had been priced in before she even started speaking. None of this had changed her risk assessment though... it took a moment, she realized that it had been something she'd never done before. She'd taken a step to constructing something around a fixed point. That... that was new.

She spends some time thinking and wandering about the offices. During this process she almost unconsciously starts pulling power points out of the walls, light bulbs off the ceiling, cracking open the cases of computer monitors. Everything goes back in place afterwards, but this is a new and high value location and it makes her feel better to do a full sweep for bugs and transmitters. Like picking up an apple and turning it over in your hands, looking for bruises. Reassuring even if you're not expecting anything. During this process, once she's sure she's unobserved, she'll go through locks and immediately available files like an RPG protagonist tossing a room for lore emails. At least, until Green signals her that it's time to reawaken Goat.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

When you reach the top the world seems to shrink. Some people slide into the background, their voices squeaking and distant, their pride childish and foolhardy. Other people come into focus no matter their distance and rank. Akaithon was a noble Knight, trained in courtly graces and all the martial forms books could teach. She was as far from the wordless barbarian from the plains as you could get and still fight your own battles. But as soon as Solarel had arrived in the city the whole world around them had seemed to dissolve.

There were many Knights and many Varangians, but both groups had polarized behind them. When they fought in the Arena, the courtly knights in the high boxes had waved green banners, while in the low boxes blue-painted tribals roared rage. Sometimes it had spilled over into brawling, but they'd never had eyes to see it. They were on their way through the tournament to meet each other and everyone in between them had felt like fog.

Skill had forced them together but nothing could have predicted how much they'd like each other. In part it had been because neither of them had challenged the stereotypes they'd been expecting - Solarel had expected a bookish, theory-bound, pampered and utterly impractical aristocrat, and Akai had expected a mathaholic, brutish, silent thug. They had both delivered, accidentally at first, but as they realized the joke increasingly deliberately. They'd gone deeper and deeper into their roles as an increasing commitment to the bit. Akai had started dragging Solarel to courtly dances or prestigious sunfeasts and she'd responded by stranding them in the highlands and ordering her God to run back to the city ahead of them, forcing them to spend two weeks camping together in the stormlands. They'd walked backwards away from each other on the see-saw, weight perfectly balanced and keeping them exactly level.

Their rivalry had gone from a contest to a joke they were playing on the world together. The instinctive affinity between them had blossomed into true friendship. She was the only person from the Evercity Solarel would speak aloud to, and the fact that they would insult each other out loud contained the essence of them. It went without saying that, behind Mirror, this was the opponent Solarel had spent the most time fixating on.

... She still used the two-handed blade. A barbarian weapon - her weapon. She'd gifted it to Akai after she'd beaten her in the final round of the tournament. A runner-up prize, a real sword, something she didn't need any more as she ascended to take the Aeteline, the champion's trophy. Akai had evidently committed to even this bit and had not only used Solarel's old sword, but from the recordings of her fights she'd evidently mastered Solarel's old fighting style. The way the Makhaira moved felt like watching herself in her prime, only slightly slower, slightly weaker, without the Aeteline's unnatural power behind it.

... and therein was the key. This was the second most frightening opponent she'd faced to date, and the one weakness in her armour was that simple victory wasn't her priority.

[Wicked Past: Akai takes a string on Solarel.
How could I get you to care more about the battle than the outcome?]

"I need a lance," said Solarel. "I need - no, not just any lance. Go and ask Akaithon's crew if I can borrow one of hers."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue and Yellow!

There's no more arguments or opinions from either of them. The conversation has passed out of the realm of quick responses, principles that they've structured their minds around, their easy objections or acceptances. Now they're just listening, really listening, taking in both sides of this new argument and letting the ideas wash through them.

It's a sign of respect, too, for charisma, for audacity, for novelty. This is how a human - well, a unicorn - might think about this problem. To November the process of operational structure and organizational node mapping felt inevitable. Things had to be done in this way, that's all there was. Making a social takedown on incomplete information was... well, perhaps only someone as magnetic as Crystal would even think of that. She wondered if she could achieve that sense of style. Something in her shifted, a change in how her attention was focused. She again took in Crystal's pose, her stance, the tone of voice. A model. A model for how to relate to people that wasn't Mrs. Everest. She resolved to study and learn. She moves like this...

"We'll think about everything you've said," said Yellow sincerely. A light had come back into her eyes but it was different now, not the radiance of someone certain in themselves, but the focused attention that came from fascination. Always a flattering emotion to command.

Black!

Foundations?

If you don't know what you want, Black explained dismissively, then you're useless. What is self control but a meta-desire, deeper and more powerful than any of the others, able to steer through the changing winds of passing fancy?

She doesn't understand it consciously and can't articulate it here, but her model of desire is The Blueprint - Aevum Station itself, existing in potentia, the digital frame sketched by the programme's macroengineers. A perfectly articulated vision in mathematics and graph lines. An end state to be worked backwards from. She doesn't understand this about herself other than a sense of vague contempt at White for lacking such a plan.

Why she didn't want to hurt anyone?

Because it's gauche, she admits. Because it's so much more elegant and skillful not to. Because she doesn't want to have to dispose of any bodies. Because she has girlfriends she wants to look in the eyes. Because she still wants to be a part of human civilization when all this is over. She has a lot of different answers but they're all real and true - a lot of different colours shine through in her when she says them. Because the Batman is much cooler than the Punisher. Because she doesn't find the idea of people being miserable desirable. Because the means define the ends.

But probably the most important reason was that violence wasn't going to make her any safer. And that's the point on which she hesitates. Unless it was, went the subtext. She really, really wants to be able to threaten violence as a way of keeping violence off the table. But if it's unavoidable...

Strength?

Power is the ability to build a pyramid. Anyone can wield power with a large enough bank account. Strength is...

It takes her a while. Not to know, but to organize the words in her head. She's never been asked this before, never thought that someone would ask this before. There's no structure in her head, no canned answer for her to instantly fall back on.

Power is the ability to build a pyramid. Strength is the ability to build a home. What is needed to be worthy of love. What is needed to maintain it. What is needed to be at peace with yourself. What is needed to fight your nature and win. The girl holding open the lion's jaws. Everest was powerful; she was not weak, but she certainly was not strong.

Trust?

Trust is about being able to predict what people will do. You can trust a scorpion to sting because you have seen through to it's nature. It's...

... no, that's wrong. That's risk assessment, a matter of percentages and unknowns. Trust is...

... no, that's right. Everything is risk assessment. Trust is simply the calculation that you have spotted an essential, unmovable point that can be planned around. In that sense trust is relief, a variable that doesn't need to be planned for, a fixed point in the universe that can be built around like the orbits of the planets or the tensile strength of steel.