Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"What did I do?" asked Brown. "What did you do? York hasn't told me anything about what any of this is."

It's a dodge, a redirect, but it's not in bad faith. What she did was pointless and mediocre, a weak ass improv that took too much profile for too little gain. Discussing it would be exhausting. But Zhang? She's interesting.

Brown is keen to the way she needs to shift and balance her structure to avoid crumpling beneath her weight, aware of the subdermal plating, conscious of the warmth of her lips and the gentle coolness they leave behind. She doesn't bend beneath her presence but she's aware of how much it takes to keep herself from bending. She appreciates it and wants to learn more. And that means she needs to let someone else's legend breathe without filling it with her own words.

Orange!

"Translator," said Orange. "That's a strange concept. Aevum took a lot of pride in wiping out that profession. For all I'm interested in this civilization and its people, some part of me has always wondered if once I have my family back we might just leave." She fidgets. She's never talked about this. "I don't know on what basis I could begin to choose between those two worlds."

"Do you dance, Orange? For any reason other than you were taught to?"

Memories flash. "Yes," she admits. "Bondi took me to a club. I told her I needed Red to learn this, but she insisted..." she smiles. "It was a disaster until I went limp and let her spin me like a doll. And normally I'd hate that, but that time... it felt really safe. Really loving. She was right, then. It did need to be me."

She looks out the window. The curve of Aevum cuts the stars. It's impossible to tell where her eyes rest.

Green!

There is a rumbling of thunderclouds, pixellated flashes of lightning cutting through the HD sky. Green knows the proper response to a tower of Babel, but she can't let herself be shaped that easily. The stormclouds pass and Fiona ascends beyond the atmosphere on dreamlike feet.

And there she sees the rain of satellites. Tens of thousands of them, marked with the flags of all the nations of Earth, including those who never reached space on their own. They circle the world in a massive orbital ring, the echo of Aevum. They fly so densely clustered they amass onto each other like compiling junk, more satellites than ever existed or could exist. Upon them is inscribed all the languages of humanity - or at least, the best impression that ten minutes of frantic behind the scenes coding could manage. The satellites are glitchy and floaty and their physics are crude, collision is broken, but for something that Green managed on the fly in response to a statement it's impressive. The real artistry of it is how the jank is part of the style, a retro glitchwave energy where broken code mixes with ultra high quality assets. Of Green herself there is no sign, but the ring of satellites is placed such that it serves as a moat perilous. How high can this tower go?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

See, all this stuff was worthless. If she took it, it was legally inadmissable. If she journalismed it, it could just be denied and purged before an investigation. A bunch of physical shit wasn't a pattern of behaviour. No, she'd get them on the coverup.

Brown's move here is to put a bug on the phone and hide a camera and microphone in the light fixture, angled with a perfect view of the chief's desk. Then she made the place look tossed - re-arranged a bunch of stuff, left a couple of files open like they'd been photographed, opened up the computer to expose the data crystal like she'd scanned it. The thing about paper files being easier to burn was that it didn't matter what was on them if there was video of them getting burned and audio of the captain ordering the burning.

[Electronic Surveillance 0/1, Conceal 3/8 1+5 6]

Orange!

"Pope," said Orange. "Let me demonstrate something for you." She picked up a pencil. "This pencil's name is Sarah. She has a family."

Orange snapped the pencil.

"Part of your soul just died when I did that," said Orange. "That's the main point. Human brains process information in a certain way, and part of that is assuming that other things think like them. I don't, I process information in an extremely alien way. A combination of clever software and physical design goes a long way to inviting you to assume my brain works like yours, but it doesn't. Why is this hard and other skills aren't? Because writing is about asking me to express an idea and that original clown car draft is what my ideas look like. I think you'd understand if you saw me talking to my siblings; all our colours talking at once, and some of our nodes are on the brink of coming to blows even if we're overall agreeing. If I had a united mind that could express ideas without being in conflict I'd be like Goat, and my entire upbringing was about teaching me not to be like Goat."

She drummed her fingers on the table, mirroring his pattern. "I can churn out functional, basic writing if I have to. But writing from the heart? To make my heart comprehensible to humans I think the path lies in, like, meditation, xenoanthropology and goetic sorcery more than a writing workshop."

"Speaking of," She looked down at the pencil. "Don't tell Pink about Sarah."

Green!

The channels of stars in the sky run faster, so fast that they seem unbroken blinding arcs of white light. They stretch all across the heavens, a constellation the size of the sky. And then that vast and vaunted heaven, that masterclass in dark blue and violet and glittering stars, fills.

Like, instantly. Like someone got the MS paint fill tool and clicked it into a black area, overwhelming the perfect night sky with a vast single block of a green-tinted white. The sensitivity on the fill tool is turned all the way down, too, making the points of stars and constellation lines surrounded by jagged pixelated auras of darkness. The effect is jarring and ugly in stillness - but then it moves. And in motion the poorly filled stars become a glittering network of scales, the fades around the eyes like eye shadow, the computerized motion more fluid than the sky itself could be. Claws and wings emerge from that undifferentiated silhouette of white, only the edges of cheap computer fill acting as the suggestion of life and motion.

Claws descend towards the cabin.

She moves one of the windows, dragging the hole across the surface of the wood like it's a decal. She changes the rooftop to tile, and then smothers it in moss, and grows wild flowers from the moss. A slash across the ground and drop of glittering seeds and a moment later half the house is covered in heavy ivy, thick red and purple leaves. She adds a chimney and twists a cloud into a smoke asset.

Then she raises back up into the sky, lags for a second as an undo command is processed, and the fill of white clears away leaving the night sky and its rivers of stars again.

"Well, you got her attention," said Pink. "Um, maybe not her respect yet."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

She sets down upon the Stormlands of Roevg.

Once she had to crawl against the howling wind. Now, with the Aeteline, she stands tall. She never experienced such might before. She never -

... She did. She must have. She Walked the Mountain. With... with nothing more than her mortal strength she fought a God. She climbed its legs, arm over arm, muscles burning, heart pounding, head dizzy with adrenaline. It had felt like everything. When it had turned and almost threw her she'd seen death and when her grip held strong despite that she'd laughed like the devil. When she'd stalled out of charge halfway up and needed to press herself against a heat sink to recover she'd nestled against it like an infant. It had been beautiful. She'd chosen it from amongst all the Gods because she'd thought it had been the most beautiful of them -

An irrelevant memory. A precursor to the Aeteline, a means to become her true self and nothing more. What was some godbeast of the natural world compared to she as she was now? Already she could sense the wild machines all about her, cowering away like wolves from a flaming torch. She was the greatest hunter, the hunter of huntresses, and these mindless machines would give her their strength -

... The Sunhorn. That was what it had been called. Her first god. She had welcomed her in. She had left her to struggle against her. She was like a deer, a vast, mechanical deer with antlers that could channel the power of the sun. She had morphed to a bipedal shape so that she could swing with her sword but the true speed, the true adaptability was in that animal form. The Sunhorn had asked so much of her. It had asked her to explore it. Asked her to understand it. Asked her to learn its secrets that she might get the most out of it -

A wretched way to fight. To pursue a stag without knowing if there was purpose. Why fight using an unconventional blade? It cost so much more time and capped out lower than perfection with the standard. Time spent exploring a blind alley could have been spent perfecting her true self. That was the truth below all of the dance of mechanized combat: just fight normally. Every step from the standard was a step away from power.

But I almost lost to -

Almost! Almost! Irrelevant! Why fixate for years on an almost! If you had been with me all that time we would have eclipsed everything!

Aren't we the same?

...

We are the same.

...

Target identified. Hunt commencing.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

It takes a lot to be a human. Every day the cleaning, brushing, shaving, makeup, dressing. Personal time is tight and putting effort into appearance is so unrewarding. Taking the time out to get a tattoo is...

She picks up a sharpie from the office supply cabinet and draws a fish skeleton on her arm. It'd look fake on a human, but against her artificial skin it looks like a decal.

Then she goes for the warden's door. Raises her coffee cup. "You fish?" she said.
"Hell yeah I do," he said.
"Cloud or farm?" she asked.
"Cloud!" he laughed. "Why do you think I joined the force?"

The enormous water reservoirs of the Cloud keep having fish mysteriously released into them. People with access - Cloud Angels, cops, paying "tour" groups - offer the community service of throwing their lines into the tanks to try and clear them out. Legitimate fishing farms are much nicer, more curated experiences designed to emulate old earth, but there's an authenticity to Cloud fishing - standing amidst massive industrial equipment, hearing the distant roar of the pipes, the lurching motion that makes waves flow across the surface, the faint sense of the illicit about the whole thing. Only sometimes does a citizen have a fish fall out of the sky into their face.

"You hear there's a Pink Snapper pod in Tank 4?" said Brown, sipping her drink.
"Get outta town," said the guard, though he was interested. "I'm surprised to hear that from you. Not many androids into fish."
"I'm half telescope on my mother's side," said Brown. "Gives me the patience for it." He laughed. "Mind if I -?"
"Hah, sorry, I still haven't seen you before -"
"I'm Warden Knoplier's lawyer," said Brown. She gestured at her lawyer badge.
"Oh! And what're you doing here?"
"You really asking?" said Brown.
"Aw shit, really?"
"You really asking?" said Brown. "Look, buddy, give me a dollar and I can fill you in, but then you'll know."
"Yeah, I get it," he said. "Shit."

[Notice 0/1 Disguise 0/1 4+4 8]

Orange!

"Oh don't worry about any of that that - I think you figured it out. I'm sure of it!" said Orange. "I'll do my best to apply it! Let me take one more try!"

Her writing takes a nosedive. It's not even writing any more, barely on topic. Orange writes like an insecure gossip - fascinated by what everyone said to everyone else, desperate to be liked. She tries to talk about herself in a way that is flattering and cool, while also humbly undercutting herself so she doesn't seem like she's bragging. She can barely stay on topic at all. She'll incorporate sentences from Pope whole, diligently trying to reflect lessons learned back to him in a way that's at once flattering and indicates that she did not connect to the substance of what he asked.

The issue here is that writing is an expression of thought. November's colours have internalized certain habits and skills from each other, but they cannot finish a thought on their own. Orange can only take into account the social angle; it's all she's interested in and she regards objective facts as vaguely annoying externalities. She's extremely focused on the social dynamic between herself and Pope and is trying her best to make him like her by demonstrating traits that she thinks he will find praiseworthy.

"This is something I'm uniquely capable of," she said after an hour of this, suddenly serious. "Leaning into failure as a communication tool. Does this help you understand?"

Fiona!

You dive into a world of colour.

Unbound from the omnipresent layer of grime, dust and imperfect lighting that saturates everything in the physical world colours can become something more. More real than real. In this world Green has built, every colour is in relation to every other colour; each highlight is the centre of a storm, each shadow runs like oil.

She has built a planet here. Mountains and valleys and endless black-trunked, pink-leafed trees, thick with cherry blossoms. The clean, dark rivers are heavy with clumped petals and lily pads. And above...

The stars run in rivers. Flashes in the void, an endless waterfall, glyphs in heaven. Distant suns burn in different colours, red and blue and pink, so close and large that they might crown the moon.

Pink waits under one of the trees, staring out at the landscape. At first she seems her normal self, wearing a breezy sundress - but no, both of her arms are sleeved not with fabric but with glittering metallic tattoos. They form an intricate pattern of machinery, like the arms of a mecha painted onto her body. She smiles and waves.

"She built all of this place down here," said Pink. "Harvested the raw material out of defunct MMOs. There are dozens of planets up there like this. I could never..." she sighed. "No, I don't want to undercut this. She's incredible. But she's getting more and more withdrawn into this space, and tetchy when she isn't here. We're all a bit afraid of her, is the thing, and I want you here because I think you're the most capable of dealing with that."

Breathless Dead

Mosaic and Ember!

The message from on high is quite clear: Haul or die.

The Corvii descend in great unkindness. Every living being on the peninsula is swept up and dragged into place. Vast teams of sweating labourers are made to hold enormous cables that run down into the depths. Supervisors with ELF Razorwhips[1] walk the lines, and flesh and blood flies at their crackling rebukes. Like the slaves who built the ancient pyramids the people of Bitemark pull.

[1] A Razorwhip is a cruel perversion of ELF technology. Normally an Electromagnetic Flux nullifies electrical impulses, stunning living people and draining electricity. A Razorwhip instead briefly merges with its victim's nervous system, causing intense pain, before flensing the top layer of skin and flesh leaving bloody welts. They are awful weapons against unarmoured targets and are truly horrifying when wielded against primitive aliens. They are not standard, their use by the Crystal Knight is a statement of malevolence.

In the distance you can see the Crystal Knight's flagship hovering over the ocean, the uncannily levitating sphere surrounded by a cluster of orbiting subcraft like a miniature solar system. Extending from her ship are multiple large crystalline barbs, esoteric weapons of unknown design - though if Quajl's weapon is any guide, it is capable of strange and terrible effect.

You can almost see her there in the distance, the hungry loom of the ship over the water, staring for even a hint of its coming prize. The pupil of the serpentine eye, the perverse moon that commands the masses of the world to pull, pull, pull.

Dolce!

"You cut it fine with the minefield," said 20022 mildly.

There was no time for a full audit. But he spent the fourteen minutes he had checking your work. You see the truth now; although he looks as mild and soft as you, he's a hunting dog as dedicated as the Majordomo. He is your enemy, even as he smiles from behind his cup of tea.

"I made a few corrections," he says gently, even supportively! "But on the whole you did very well! You are a lot more daring than I would have given you credit for!"

You're sitting above the world. From your throne in space, in a room facing each other, all your plans in motion, the two of you sit in a comfortable room with a plush green carpet and a little garden off to the side. The full-wall window shows the planet in perfect frame. As calm as the setting is, this is a duel of intellects, a chess game of politeness and deception. 20022 is suspicious. You might be a spy, or you might be a naive student who made a few questionable choices. He's trying to sniff out the truth as you wait together for the Royal Architect to arrive. He hasn't mentioned what changes he made or why; he wants to see if that makes you sweat, if changing your setup will have caused your plan to fall apart entirely.

"Do you see what I mean?" he said with a happy little smile. "Even if you've never done this work before it's all in your genes, and you took to it like a natural. How did it feel?"

Dyssia!

There was a sudden sunlight breaking through the fog.

"Ah," said the Dust Knight, no longer possessed but inspired - the radiant smile of Apollo shining through behind him. "To win. The most dangerous thing of all. We won, the Azura - we conquered our rivals, we conquered the science of life, we triumphed over material limitations. It almost killed us all. Why not climb the endless mountain of virtue instead? Why not leave the task unfinished to your children, and your children's children? Why not let the galaxy continue on like this forever, the endless accumulation of virtue as its own purpose and own reward?"

"Fuck that," Dionysus says through your lips. "I'm going to strap the wheel of karma to the front of a motorcycle and backflip off it into a canyon while drinking cocaine cola out of the Buddha's skull. It's time for a new age, and a new age is always built out of the failed and succeeded promises of the previous era."

"And," you say, with a rare certainty, "I know I'll find my answers on Bitemark."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"What do I..."

Brown trailed off. Stared blankly. Then turned on her heel and walked away.

"Nothing happens if I don't make it happen". It was Green's most toxic trait. She was fundamentally dissatisfied with any level of control over the situation less than deification, and she'd passed it on in the form of an absolutely awful organizational culture that made her an overstressed, overachieving neurotic wreck. What the fuck was she doing here? Why shouldn't she just walk out of this situation she clearly had no control over, no ability to influence, and not a single fuck to give? Why did she have to see this and decide it was her problem?

... Why was she trying to cause a distraction while adjacent to the two most distracting people on the station?

The supervisor wasn't in her office. Free lunch. Brown walked right through an employees only exit and into the administrative core of the building. This wasn't designed as a prison so it wasn't fortified. It'd be fine. Everyone here was used to ignoring lawyers.

Orange and Blue!

"We're not -" Blue massaged her temples in an imitation of Everest's favourite display of frustration, "- different voices."
"Blue, this could be useful advice -" Orange said in a halfhearted attempt to defuse.
"It's not! It's the same advice we always get!" said Blue. "I don't know how to explain it. Do you?"
"... we can give it one more try?" said Orange.
"Augh!" said Blue. "We're not people! We're not even emotions! It's a trick! You're just projecting how your weird brain works onto us!" She stood up, went to storm out. "This is why I hate being in this fucking human body!"
Orange watched her go. "... Sorry about that!" she said politely. "I'm happy to continue if you are."

Pink!

All of that for a key.

She sits in the light and looks at the key, the little twist of metal. Barely a stopgap until a better security system was installed; a padlock was all that it took to defend nothing. She would have thought there'd be a deed, a physical piece of paper, something to sign, some ceremony - but no, just a key, and a promise that nobody would fuck with her in that location. This little serration of metal contained the promise of...

Of what? She couldn't conceptualize it yet. A space of her own. A fragment of the space she yearned for, but perhaps enough to breathe in. To let her thoughts spill out of the corner they were trapped in. No wonder people wanted more of it. No wonder they were fucking psychos to steal it from others. It felt like there was an emotion that had been bottled up inside her, a scream that could only start to be expressed now that there was slightly more space to move around in. Inside a sliver of metal and a name on a database was the promise of silence, for the first time ever getting to be away and apart from everyone else. More canvas, and the quiet to work on it. How was blank paper so scarce?

She wanted to think about this more before she even walked in, before she even looked at it. She wanted to finally start composing ideas she'd never thought she could think. She wanted to go into it with intent. But she knew she'd need Green.

Pink: Hey, Fiona, could you help me with Green actually?
Pink: I do need her for this and I can't figure her out on my own.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

It was possible to bring Brown a long way if you let her stay standing exactly where she was.

"Excuse me, sir," said Brown, with the same energy as before but now actively talking over any interactions with York and physically interposed between him. "I understand that the supervisor is off site, so could you please confirm that makes you the ranking officer on this location? So you are claiming full responsibility for everything happens here?"

She's still going through the boring Karen routine unaltered, but now it's clear that this is a play. This whole thing is a play, a scene, a setup - a stunt. It's clear that Zhang and York are feeding off each others energy, they want to be here - Brown is just a flimsy shield of decorum who is there to stall and witness anything blatantly illegal. York already has a bloody nose from before she showed up - was that bait? Because now even if he's lightly shoved it'll look dramatic for the cameras.

Her play is to make him it feel like this is a trap, and that neither she, York or Zhang are particularly interested in leaving quickly. So releasing Zhang isn't letting her go, it'd be kicking her out.

Blue and Orange!

They humour him. It's clear immediately that they are humouring him, and that they're extremely well practiced at humouring people who want to get them to focus. Write a piece from the perspective of just a single colour, easy, that's just about not doing something right? Each of these colours are so real they must have some aspect of Truth to them, deep down, that just needs to be supported and encouraged. Select one colour to learn this skill and then have the others focus on different things, so simple it's surprising she never thought of it before.

She'll make a good college try. In places it might even seem like they're making progress. They can certainly follow instructions and repeat certain words, use certain sentence structures, even - if a steady hand is kept - finish an article in a very C+ student way. An adequate transmission of factual information. Getting that to be something worth reading? It's unclear how you'd even start.

Neither Blue nor Orange volunteers anything throughout. They're just patiently waiting to see how stubborn Pope is going to be over this.

Pink and Green!

Green: Blue is hardware.
Green has left the chat
Pink: uh
Pink: Don't mind her >.>;;
Pink: She hasn't liked anyone we've dated
Pink: I'd be delighted though!
Pink: Actually do mind her a bit, Green's been intensely weird for ages now.
Pink: She's been going on super deep megaverse dives and is only really half present mentally
Pink: She's got this like, thing
< a fifteen minute gap of 'Pink is typing/backspacing' >
Pink: Trying to figure out how to say 'superiority complex' without implying you might relate <.<;;
Pink: Kind of like, she's bored in a really toxic way?
Pink: Nevermind. Undercutting a good moment. Would love to see the space, and thank you so much for the offer <3
Pink: I've been thinking about getting into sewing! You interested in modelling for me?

MASKS - Ghost Gate City

Hsien was, in her heart, a lurker.

For all her thoughts and philosophies and understandings of the world she didn't exactly post them. She just read all the correct people, built up silent disagreements with them, witnessed their arguments and identified the imperfections from a place of superiority. She didn't wade into the muck and debate people. She didn't want to risk getting into an argument where she hadn't done the legwork, where everything was on the line, where the translation barrier between righteous thought and righteous speech was suddenly so intensely complicated.

So she froze up. In this moment she was just that: tail seven, suddenly under the scrutiny of the only eyes qualified to judge her. She felt tiny, blinded, scared, frozen in a defensive crouch. If there was a saving grace in this, her stunned null reaction looked anything but dangerous.

[Rejecting influence: 7. Clearing Insecure by proving them wrong]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

Brown stared for a moment, then sighed. "Law enforcement officer, badge number 502-332, was your interpretation of detention periods outlined in the Crime Prevention Act 2055 your own, or was it given to you by a supervisor?" she said in her most android voice. "In either case, I would like to speak to them, and a copy of the facility's policy as you understand it in writing."

There's no direct threat there, no attempt to monster him with legal action, no need for cunning recording plays. They both know that's bullshit, he's a cop, the system is on his side in any trial. What she can do that will ruin both of their days is Karen this. Asking to speak to the manager. Getting everything down in writing. Making all of this a formal process with receipts and written statements and getting called up as witnesses in some low energy public defender trial. That threat is credible - after all, she's just been told she has to stand around for hours, she might as well make those hours as unpleasant as possible for everyone involved.

Blue!

"The -" Blue is startled by the question. She's like that - so singularly focused, vision so clear in her head, that she doesn't know that she needs to explain it. No matter how many times she learns she can't know. "The lawyers. They're the audience. There's not a future that doesn't involve them, but they need to feel their house is rotten."
"So that makes you Lady Justice then?" Orange cracked.
She looked immediately concerned at how thoughtful Blue looked.
"Maybe not..." said Blue. Orange relaxed. "... a lady?" Orange looked panicked. "In a monster way, not in a not-girl way," said Blue hurriedly. "I don't want to get axe murdered by Pink."
"... still concerning, but you definitely put the threat profile in perspective there," sighed Orange. "Look, I'll raise looking into your surveillance detail with the collective. Let us know if the urgency shifts at all and we can prioritize."

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

"I just need... I'll get there eventually..." the words drain out like poison. "Just one more victory and I'll..."

The wolf maiden slumps in sudden exhaustion. The animating vitality has bled out of her. More. More, more, more, it drips out of her heart and as it goes the space it leaves behind is how little it even wanted it in the first place. "I want..." what? "I wanted... to not be bored..."

The blade slides free, shining clean. Her claws scratch at the edge as it leaves her. She falls gently to the ground as a final truth escapes breathless lips.

"I don't know what I want."

She lies on the road, curling up, vulnerable, shivering. "I don't know what I want. I don't know what will be enough. Nothing ever is. I fill myself with instinct but being full isn't the same as being whole. It's just... not having to think about it."

Ember!

"Oh!" said Gemini. "You! I can't even be mad at you, and that's the most annoying thing of all!"

She fumed, staring off into the distance. "Well. For love, is it? I can't be mad at that. But the pack is the pack, and right now the pack is suffering because of you. So your punishment is to suffer with them."

Scent and memory are intimately linked - but Gemini can go one step beyond. Her invisible aura swells, her being larger than her body, and she acts as the conduit - the full flow of the pack's formation instinct pours through her. In normal circumstances a Ceronian is subconsciously aware of the exact location and status of every pack member around them, letting warriors move in perfect silence and harmony through complex maneuvers. What Gemini does to you is a razor sharp refinement of that basic instinct.

She pours all of the experiences of the entire pack through you. Those of them trapped under nets, piled up on top of each other, stripped and bound and put on display. Your mind fills with the full humiliation of defeat, every slap and jeer and gag and twist of rope applied to the Silver Divers also being applied with crystal clarity to the one who doomed them.

It's a lot.

Dolce!

"Do you see it?" asked Artemis, sitting across from you. "The power."

The ancient stories speak of the moon. The hunt. The howling of the animals in the bloody forests of the night. The maiden who walked into its depths untouched and emerged with the bloody wreckage of her victims. This deep into the work of the Service...

Your senses are heightened. A stray number on a ledger might be a family. Your breath is still. You have sat in a repose that an ancient sniper might have prayed for. Your tools are sharp. With a flash of your pen invisible arrows cross the distance. You are afraid. There are monsters in these depths truer than any modern wolf.

Artemis stares at you. When the natural world became knowable, when wolves became tame, when ecosystems were tamed she did not change. She still stands in the heart of a mysterious world, where the tremble of your fearful hand or the blink of your weary eye could spell death.

"You had fourteen minutes spare after you finished your assigned tasks," said Artemis. "Enough time to fill out two requisition forms. Two wagonloads of treasure, delivered anywhere on the world you desire. You moved around tens of thousands of Corvii, and you had a surplus of them. A unit of them could have been dispatched to burn a village and massacre its inhabitants. You ordered the clearance of the orbital minefield to make preparation for the Architect's arrival. What if you submitted it with the wrong priority stamp and it did not get done in time?"

Her eyes are more lupine than the wolves of Ceron. To walk into her forest is to risk everything - and to emerge with meat, rich and bloody.

You can feel hot breath warming the paperwork under your fingers.

Dyssia!

"You sound like you're bored," says the Dust Knight.

He doesn't choose to say it, though. Some power inspired him to say it. Silver strings descend from above, lifting his cheeks and jaws, waving his arms about like a puppet. Careless. Ridiculous. Mad.

You look up at the divine monster hunched over him, hands raised aloft in the splayed puppeteer's precision. Your own distorted face stares back at you in the murk of Dionysus' mask.

"And why wouldn't you be?" said the Dust Knight/The God of Feasts/Your Reflection. "You haven't moved an inch. You thought you were looking for righteousness, but you never were. This is righteousness. It is just another Path, Dyssia. After all that you're climbing the same old ladder towards the sun and you haaaate it. So is this it, then?" His face/your face is Merilt's. "You just needed to feel even more guilty about getting bored, hopeless and distracted before you'd finally stick with it? All you needed to knuckle down and do the work was more strength behind the whip?"

Dionysus grinned Apollo's grin, mad and shining, more passion than the Sun had ever shown you. "We're sure to get there eventually if we do it this way," he said. "Swear on me mum."