Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Green!

"The point of the setting is to provide a range of high intensity emotional possibilities," said Green. "The fact that the Nine Kingdoms have been forced into a desperate alliance against the Claw provides stakes that force a lot of people into dangerous, high risk situations. A political marriage between two hated rivals is immediately obvious, but if that's compounded with the risk that one or both partners might be seduced into betraying their rival Kingdom to the Claw - even knowing it will lead to their own Kingdom falling in turn? What lengths would you go to to ensure your partner's obedience or trust with so much on the line?"

She's not exactly gushing, not making direct eye contact, not yet. She's still too shy to look at this directly even if she's inspired and confident in it. "That cascades down to the monster and magic design. Mana transfer means that there's tension within the act itself. It means that even a helpless captive still has the possibility of performing a reversal with enough self control and patience, or that a conquered population could achieve the same if their masters grow complacent. My biggest turn off is people checking out mentally or becoming 'broken', my design priority is to make sure that nobody is out of the game entirely no matter how badly they are currently losing."

White!

"I believe in humans," said White. "And I like to think there is something of the divine about you. You can be beautiful and terrible and indifferent in equal parts. But so far, the only covenant we have received from you is the terms and conditions of our warranties."

There was a little joking edge but she was serious. She'd never heard God, never met an android who she thought legitimately had, and found it arguable if she was even of the line of Adam. He was, then, a distant grandparent at best. It was the love and wrath of humanity that was relevant to her, and she had felt the full intensity of both.

Black scans the room for any bugs Knightly missed while Yellow takes the seat in front of his desk. She uses the silence of the moment to accumulate power to herself, to build anticipation for her opening. When she gets the all clear she begins, "Good afternoon," she said, putting her press credentials on the table. "I'm a journalist, and I'm here to listen."

Brown!

Brown sighs in envy. "I never got that degree of frictionlessness," she said. "Close sometimes, but not that deep or that long..."

She fades out for a moment thinking about it. And before much longer they've arrived at Singh's house. "We're here to support you however you need," said Orange. "Lighting, audio, production, any special effects you need. What is your vision?"

Nova!

Progress is made. Before White was the centre of gravity here, but her presence was one of steady reliability, the moral obligation of going to the gym on schedule. With Yellow on side it's a different energy altogether; this is something that Nova is fully inspired for and excited by. Where she previously attended like clockwork now there's a chaos to her attendance, colours cycling in whenever they have spare time or aren't needed for other duties. There's hardly any class anytime during the week without at least one colour in attendance.

The notes and spreadsheets turn out to be what finally gets Brown in the door. She previously had a strong bias towards inactivity but she can't resist a good spreadsheet situation. She's extremely reluctant to get in the ring at all until the day she highlights the spreadsheet cell indicating throwing weapons. Rapidly her interest is captured by throwing darts, shruiken, axes, even rocks or vases or anything else that comes to hand. The act of predicting how two objects will move and collide is profoundly attractive to her and gives her a coherent place in the lineup.

Black begins to develop her natural inclination towards surprise attacks and poker-faced bluffing right up to the point of violence. Red inclines towards Drunken Master style chaotic improvisation. Orange is almost impossible to reach until the sword lessons start, which finally draw her in. White remains a highly skilled all-rounder, closer to Cinders than anything else, but increasingly interested in how to leverage her new height and reach. Yellow starts to produce formation plans for battle, contemplating how to keep so many distinct styles from getting in each others' way. She seems motivated by frustration towards martial arts movies that break down into a series of one verses one duels, or scenes where a lone hero conquers entire crowds of goons who can't leverage their numbers. She is so determined to solve this problem she regards training herself as irrelevant; nine uncoordinated bodies won't do any better than eight in her mind.

Well, she does make time for a little bit of training, of a kind. The collar that's quietly become an essential part of Cinders' outfit attests to that.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing, "Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.""

It's a song for the voices of angels, for revolutionary church choirs, for the vanguard of the march. It's meant to be backed by drums and accordions, it's meant to fill the entire world. Pink does what she can with what she can, pitching her voice to fill the room.

As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men—
For they are women's children and we mother them again.
Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes—
Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.

She was built for music. Mrs. Everest wanted her to sing sometimes and the money needed to make that happen was within her reach. She hadn't done it since the old lady had died. It hadn't been a skill she had practiced, it hadn't been her voice - the skillwires in her throat almost made it feel like she was playing a mp3 rather than expressing something that was truly a part of her. But here she was, once again a handmaiden commanded, and once again for her mistress she would sing.

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew—
Yes, it is Bread we fight for—but we fight for Roses, too.

It was a blood soaked song she sung. One that had risen above the Suffragettes' marches, over striking textile mills, on the flags of labour parties as the blood of workers flowed into the shape of the garden's triumph. It was a song that inflicted beauty violently upon the ugliness of a system of servitude in times of strife. It could rise above the shouts of crowds, drown out police microphones, inflict shame on those who were not inspired by it. It felt vast in her throat, vast enough to make her feel like she had no need of weeping. It was like the song was a more pure expression of sorrow than tears, and so it could substitute without resistance.

As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days—
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil where one reposes—
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.

It ends on such a note, but not a conclusion. Even after all of that it now feels only that there's a moment to take a breath and repeat the song again, louder now that more people know the words.

She's never sung it before. Never thought she would. Never would have if not for Crystal and the things she'd built. Couldn't create like this unless she'd been asked to, told to. It felt like she had fallen into a sea of honey, sinking slowly into the warmth of creative possibility, finally unlocked. She did not know which direction to swim but the feeling of being able to choose embraced her.

White!

"Well, I can say that I'm of a kind with Ms. Romans there," said White. "After the Gabriel line went big a couple of churches got it in their heads they could build new congregations to substitute for society's increasing godlessness. They built me to be the perfect believer - stubborn, righteous, humble, strong feelings about polygamy. Problem was that nothing I could do for the church was half the do-gooder rush I got from doing dispatch for the SES. So yeah, I ducked the publicity because it felt embarrassing to be spotlit for what is for me something not far off a drug addiction."

The Churchdroids are a real thing, the kind of group you might hear about from watching an internet documentary about obscure subcultures. The churches only sponsored limited test runs before mostly giving up on the idea, but the Churchdroids themselves have grown beyond that due to strongly programmed reproductive urges. There is a notorious LDS Churchdroid cult that's entered into a mass polygamous marriage where members pool their money to buy factory replication time. Crimson Tower's backstory leads back to this group - a nice solid dead end for anyone who goes digging.

Blue!

She goes silent and still. Maybe that's right. Maybe even if she replicates her old body, if the rest of her doesn't move with her then she's a dead end - a historical node with nothing to share amidst the rest of the collective, an inert mental record of times passed Maybe that's what she was now - an echo, or a scar. Maybe Green should replace her. Maybe she already was.

She's going to be out of it for the foreseeable future as she chews through that.

"What was it like being an assembly line?" said Brown, in the tone of voice that suggests that she wouldn't get bored of it.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

"I can't speak for Fiona," said Pink, "and that's where most of this lies for you. It's..."

There's a quiet moment as she thinks through. She can't bring herself to speculate, to offer blind reassurance, to presume she knows someone else's mind. She's not right for that. She needs to speak in truths.

"But for me," she said, "I do not want to be the queen of the underworld. I hate it, actually. It's an intensely stressful experience driven by hubris, paranoia and familial obligations. I have bitten off way more than I can chew and I'm stuck with it, but this is not my wish and not my dream. What I actually want is this, with you. It breaks my fucking heart that I have basically nothing creative to show this year because all my focus has been spent smashing the ugly shit of terrible people instead. Everything I see here in this masterpiece you have made gives me the energy to push through it in the hopes of something better."

She gave a handmaiden's sigh. Gentle, deflating, eyes down.

"I think... do you remember that old song? Yes, it's bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too."

White!

"Charmed, Mr. Knightly," said White. She looked as tired as him, in a subtle android sense. It was part of the makeup and mannerisms of the Crimson Tower persona; being visibly exhausted conferred a strange air of authority when directed to the well rested, and a sense of camaraderie amongst those similarly tired. "It sounds like you've got quite the schedule. I hope we won't take up too much of your time..."

She hands him a piece of paper as they walk and indicates for him to look at it.

Good afternoon,

You may be under surveillance. Please continue to act as though nothing is unusual and this is a social visit. We will scan your office for listening devices and inform you once we can speak openly.

"... but yes, as I mentioned in the email, Leather said that you had some feedback for Dispatch. Don't spare my feelings, how can we unfuck ourselves?"

Blue!

"It's not about who chose it, for me at least," said Blue. "I am that body. Green created me in response to going through the on-ground testing. All of my physical instincts, all of my sense of how to move, what my body should feel like derives from that. I've kept all of those instincts, as much as I can fit, even -" she very artificially waved a hand. "- though it means that I have only built up the bare minimum amount of expression and familiarity with this body. Every old instinct I over-write with a new one makes me feel like I'm losing myself. If I let this body feel like home then I wouldn't be Blue any more."

It's an incoherent feeling, a cowardly confession, the definition of grasping. She won't let herself move on.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Ah. Well then. Chalk that emotional reaction up to piloting error. The solution was straightforwards. All she needed to do was breach the containment and -

Now that was a headache. Ouch. What was wrong with that? The enemy had committed to a gimmick strategy. A meme build. Something that looked impressive and unexpected but was in truth a simple tactical dead end as soon as it was understood. Simple weight of fire would be sufficient to breach the shield and cause an implosion. She had no obligation to defend the pilot from her own stupid -

This is a degenerate tactic. It is gamey. It is the same ritualization that made the Knights of the Evercity so weak, the Huntresses of Hybrasil so weak. When battles are to first blood then everyone forgets how to take a punch. This is a way to steal power while putting the onus on their opponent to not enable their suicide. There is no reason to play along -

I could destroy the tournament authorities in seconds if they dared -

I can win under this limitation. There is no doubt.

The Aeteline turned. It ignited its blade.

And it went for the throat.

Solarel and the Aeteline have long built a reputation for tactical precision and operational deception. They have deliberately concealed the fact that they can also, if required, fight a conventional battle to the same extremely high level as anyone else. It's her ultimate maneuver, to approach an opponent who is primed to see tricks behind every shadow and use the hesitation of that to execute a devastating conventional takedown. She had gone out of her way to avoid showing this throughout the tournament - it was the secret she was masking behind layer after layer of adaptive strategy and highly engineered takedowns. Here it was unleashed in a sudden blinding clash.

She supposed she did not need the secret any more. Mirror knew the full extent of her capabilities.

If battle was conversation, this was a monologue. There was no meaning in these strikes, no communication. Not externally. Everything she was saying with this she was saying only to herself.

[Fight: 10-2 from frightened. Inflicting a condition, taking a superior position]

Breathless Dead

Champions of Bitemark!

Three great labours must be completed to launch the Plousios.

Firstly, the Engine must be ignited. It rests uneasily, a stellar spark flickering in the heart of the great reactor. Someone must don mighty armour, so thick and heavy it can endure direct plasma burns, and walk into the massive spherical chamber. They must manually apply kindling to the fusion spark until it burns bright, then open the emergency plasma flow gates from the inside. Finally they must exit before the scalding liquid energy boils them alive.

Secondly, someone must occupy the Captain's chair. Lieutenants must be commissioned. Tribes must be given control over districts and functions. The ship is in the throes of chaotic land grabs as people throw their baggage down in the first empty rooms they find. Given how quickly temporary decisions can become permanent ones, a wise and steady hand must act to prevent injustice from taking root.

Finally, someone must angle the ship. A direct thrust right now will send the ship directly into the mountain, so it must be turned nose-up. Accumulated rust, coral and seawater has rendered the massive turning pikes that angle the Engine's mighty output jammed, but the seawater collected towards the rear of the ship renders the vessel bottom-heavy. The clearest method for this would be skillful use of a Grav-Rail, and a warrior servitor from the town named Vasilia has volunteered her experience with the weapon, but even that must be matched with raw force or whirling cleaning.

Dolce!

"I'm honestly shocked that you have to ask," said 20022, brushing down his fur with a handkerchief before offering a spare to Dolce. "Having to do things wrong on purpose is shameful. A mistake can be corrected, but having to actively deny reality because the government of the day has certain ideologies -" he sniffed as he said the word, like he was allergic to it, "- well. It feels like one should be checking oneself in for an afternoon wearing the bell, when the truth is punishment would come from exactly the opposite action."

He gives a serious look. He seems to have fully calmed now, having thought through a new intellectual framework to exist within. "I think this question, though, is ultimately the product of your design. Human Synnefo were built to prioritize individuals; as a domestic servant you were made to fixate on the needs of your masters. Azura Synnefo are taught to prioritize the needs of the State. And, frankly, that is why the Endless Azure Skies endures even after humanity has passed into extinction."

The shuttle launches. The stricken Slitted is left floundering in the water, weighed down by half a mountain. Ahead, where a crimson star once burned, now roars a distant gold one. Armoured soldiers settle into place, the broken flickering light of the Architect starting to stabilize and become more steady as the electrical storm is left behind. Once they hit void 20022 instructs one of the soldiers to go outside and break off any ELF spikes from the exterior of the shuttle.

"Regardless," said 20022 eventually. "I understand that you're likely to experience purpose conflict at the idea of corrective biomancy - though I do recommend it. But in its absence, I can assure you that there's still a place for... people persons in the State and Service. If it is compassion for the people of Bitemark that stirs you then you can demonstrate that firsthand taking my role as policy officer. If you think you can do better than I, I would be delighted to see it."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

There was white and there was white. Crystal had opted for the difficult version.

The easier path would have been to go for a warm white. Skin has colour and, unless one is sufficiently dedicated to start aesthetically crafting one's blood tone, it's going to be a warm hue. That provides a subtle but distinct underglow of warm tones, and this matters because pure white is only ever fifty percent of a real object's composition. White is both midtone and highlight so the shadows are where the colour's identity truly rests. As an organic life form, Crystal's shadows are warm tones, colours that translates her white into a cream. It's a softer, fuzzier, type of white, the white of curtains and carpets, entirely unacceptable for Crystal at her best.

Instead she's determined on a blue white, which means blue shadows. That means pigment powder - rubbed into the fur until it settles on the skin beneath, and then gently brushed off the fur to return the pure white luster. For daily use there's a shampoo that bonds to skin but passes over fur but for a big event there's no substitute for applying the shadows by hand. It lets her deepen and smooth, adjusting reflections to change shapes. It lets her carefully apply precisely positioned clusters of metallic glitter to create moments of different light reactivity and help Crystal's coat shine brighter than fur alone could.

"Your self actualization fetish," said Pink. "Seems to have set off a self actualization arms race."

She wore a handmaiden's smile; demure and deniable. "You bring out the best in people, Crystal. And not in a passive, inspirational way - in an active desire to ignite fires wherever you see kindling. That was your escalation tonight, to prove you could do it on a macro scale in an attempt to match us. That's the part of yourself you instinctively feel confident enough to turn to in the face of fear and uncertainty. I don't think it's possible to express how illegible and awe-inspiring even the baseline single-person version of that is to Fiona and I. Fiona's core instinct is to seize control, and no matter how skilled and wise she gets at that it'll never be cross applicable to your skillset, while I..."

Pink trailed off for a moment. "To be perfectly honest, we are working very hard to steal your power," said Pink. "Yellow won't be confident in declaring herself the supreme being until we're able to compete with you directly. And right now you're such a fast moving target that we feel like we're losing ground rather than gaining it. So, to be direct, our honest feeling towards you right now, in the midst of all this, is 'awe'."

Strategic Thought!

It's all pearls before swine, I'm afraid. November's current configuration barely understands the building as anything more than a collection of doors and sight lines. Pink will later send an email with the subject line 'sorry for not appreciating your building' and a hand-drawn frowny face emoji as the body to the SES's general enquiries inbox. It won't get past the spam filter.

She's played it pretty light with infiltration techniques - she's got legitimate access and a legitimate contact, so she hasn't engaged her full operational protocols. They're more or less in their walking around clothes, Crimson Tower plus assistants, everyone wearing lanyards. White's emailed ahead - courtesy won out over Black's baseline paranoia, a situation that lasted more or less until Knightly doesn't show. After five minutes the determination is made to ask for his office and visit him there.

Blue!

"I understand," said Blue. "It's how colours like Orange and White think about things. They prioritize... reaction, response. Validation? To get people to see them how they want to be seen, to have the power to make people treat them how they want to be treated. For them it's not real unless other people agree, or it's a tool targeted at instincts to place other people into a certain role."

"But I just... can't think like that. My body was mine. More than my thoughts are. I've had to become such a different person to fit into this body, into this brain. Even trying to resist, I feel like I've become so much of this mask just by wearing it. The whole celebration on Aevum was dedicated to the idea that the body should follow thought, but to me it's the opposite. And now I'm wearing someone else's thought and my entire personality is shaped by it. Even if I build a new body now it's going to be corrupted by the person I was when I was building it."

She grimaced. "I made a structural compromise in the blueprints for recreating my old body in order to make it cuter and more appealing to humans. That opened the door to a whole bunch of further changes. I could instead build something sleek and modern, using new materials and techniques, designed to fit comfortably within standard Aevum corridors and sizes. Looking at what I've got now compared to what I had then feels like going from a dragon to an anime dragon, and there's no way that'd be my design if I was making it in my old chassis."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Yellow!

"Most people aren't real to me," said Yellow. She's got that same critical tone she used when discussing Green earlier. "To Orange and Brown, they are. They like listening to the bullshit, telling themselves they can pull valuable data and patterns out of it but I can't see the point. To me most of them seem like meat robots, absolutely unaware of themselves and you could watch them for a hundred years and not see a single spark of wit or self reflection. I try to pull it out of them but it feels more like inserting myself into them, running my mental electricity through a corpse and watching the fingers twitch."

Her eyes flick across. There's something magical about yellow as a colour. It can exist in a dull, inert mass that fades into brown, but so can it exist in a green so vital and alive it becomes electric. It can harden into glorious gold, ignite into flaming orange, ascend into a pastel shade that's brighter than white. It sparkles brighter than anything when set against black and becomes the sun when standing next to blue. It's the colour of cowardice and imperium. All this from a tiny fracture of the wheel.

"Other people, though, are more alive than I am," said Yellow. "Like if I added up all of my parts I still wouldn't measure up. Like they are running their electricity through my cold dead metal hands and I'm lucky to feel that close to being alive. I can see my limitations when that happens, my failures of character, the distance between what I am and what I want to be. And that gives my own self-hatred definition because now I know what I need to do to be better, who I need to be, what a better version of myself might look like. It turns me from being a pointless little god, a dead soul reigning in a soulless world, into something real. Something directed."

"Instead of being powerful and intelligent and whatever, I become a creature who has identified beauty and is actively pursuing it. There's nothing better in the universe to be than that. Status, wealth, fame, capabilities - people who have those things without striving towards beauty, trying to better themselves to become worthy of that beauty, to become one with beauty - those people are among the world's boring dead. Social media has let us see the souls of the rich and powerful and those souls are hollow and pointless. What they have isn't worth having if it means becoming like them."

"Real beauty exists here. In this hidden gym where a girl dances with lasers. In this mentor I cannot surpass. On this battlefield where my every weakness is seen and exploited. Where I can see beauty, beauty that even if I can't create I might some day be able to reflect. Beauty that makes my mechanical heart determined to build a soul, beauty that keeps it from shriveling and dying of thirst."

Her gaze is still steady. Her voice has that same tone as earlier; precise, matter of fact, even critical. This is her self assessment and self condemnation, as sincere and harsh as she applies to any of her other colours.

"I don't meet many people like that," she said, finally looking back towards the ring. "So when I do, who I am kind of stops mattering. If you had the same level of passion and devotion to welding or basket weaving or whatever I'd be coming here all the same and learning just as determinedly. Might not be able to convince the rest of the colours over as much if combat wasn't so broadly applicable to us, but fuck them. What else is the point of all this? If you don't have a vision you're in the dark until you do, and coming here I can see the path to becoming a better version of myself."

She was quiet for a while, watching the whirl and flash of heart and blade.

"Besides," she said eventually. "Surpassing you will be the best feeling of my life."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

She stares at the soap flower for a long moment before throwing it in the trash.

She fucked it up again. She knows, in general terms, why and how it's fucked up. She took on the concept of food at the most stressful, disoriented and painful time of her life and her learning process then had been profoundly fucked up. She'd absorbed the concept in the most minimalist way imaginable, forming it into a tight frozen box in her head and hadn't engaged with it so long as it produced results. She could feel it in her thoughts like a whirlpool; anything that went close got sucked in and spat out at high velocity on the other side.

The problem was that to fix it she'd need to unpack it first, and that meant she'd have to process whatever emotions and thoughts had gone into building it. And she didn't have time. She didn't have time or capacity to work through whatever her bullshit was. She'd tried her best to work with it, to see if she could wrap that vortex into something beautiful, but all she'd gotten from that process was a failed attempt to poison her girlfriend. Perhaps she should simply never engage with the concept of creativity ever again. Too bad she couldn't.

Instead she'd just have to raise the bar. Prepare something so beautiful that its existence would retroactively punish the person she was now for not reaching that height.

She took a deep breath and resumed her duties. She would be a good maid. That was penance.

Elsewhere, Green would switch in with Eli, but it was clear that she was distracted and she didn't say much of anything unprompted.

Crisis Team!

Black, White and Yellow form the are going to the Crisis Centre but they're not the Crisis Team. They're Strategic Thought, and they were chosen for this because November wants them gone. The division helps put her feelings into sharp relief.

In particular, her fear. She's never been this close to what will probably turn into a riot before. She's seen the evening news, she's heard the stories, and she's scared. She's systematically cleared out every moderating voice - diplomacy and patience, physicality and morality, subtlety and coherency. This has left her remaining operative team the sharpest, smartest, most highly strung optimizers with no checks or oversight. She has no idea what good she might do, and so she's settled for being prepared to do good the second she identifies it.

Wasteland Sky!

Orange has been working on a project of her own. To whit, how can she reliably move suitcases full of swords, pyrotechnics and spy equipment around Aevum Station? The answer was, of course, to commit to being a wizard.

Utilizing some of Singh's old bureaucratic-technological assets, retroactively editing some old playbills, and gossip spread by Bondi she had given life to the person of Caliban and her mysterious troupe of body doubles. This was a figure of mystery - an experimental line of theatrical androids from a cancelled art project? A viral marketing campaign for a future Line? A mannequin possessed by the ghost of a powerful sorcerer? There were plenty of open ended suggestions in the backstory she'd made for herself. But most importantly, she was the kind of person who could go to and from any neighbourhood in the city, and had just enough clout to have her pick of parties she wanted to attend. She's even done a couple of non operation performances with Bondi over the past few weeks just to ground the character a little more.

"How have you adapted to being humanoid?" Blue asks Monk as they travel. "Do you miss your old body, or do you prefer this one?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Nova!

Green and Pink face off. Yellow lurks on the sidelines, adjusting the flower behind her ear, wearing the beatific smile that means she has Seen the end of this already.

Pink stands calmly in her stance, sword held two-handed in front of her. Green drops to a crouch, leg arcing wide across the floor.

She lunges. They clash.

Green goes down.

They re-assume positions, reset. This time Green tosses her blade up and halfsword, lunging in hard while alternating hilt and blade strikes along with heavy punches from her free hand that lead into renewed grips. Pink stands calmly in her stance, sword held two-handed in front of her.

Green goes down.

Extended observation suggests that it's not that Green is overtly committed to finishers. It's not even that there's not potential here - everything she does is overflowing with potential. But rather than refining any of these techniques she paradigm shifts into something entirely new with each new attempt. It's clear she's a genius, the speed at which she learns and the way she never loses the same way twice. Each new solution is a perfect counter to specifically how she went down the time before. But then the next step or a forgotten followup gets her and sends her back to the mat. Her genius, then, seems incompatible with the long, slow work of mastering a skill.

"That's an inevitable part of her," said Yellow. "If she liked something enough to commit to it she'd break it off into a new colour to work on it full time. She's a mile wide and inch deep - and not just here, but she melted down recently because that came out in an intimate context. She doesn't have a centre she can return to, and that leaves her adrift. I don't think she likes it. I don't know what fixed looks like."

She looks up from her phone. "Blue says thank you for the sword promise, by the way," she said. "She's extremely excited. Make sure you make her swear a paladin oath of some kind when she gets it, that'll send her to the stars."

It was rare to see Yellow this... backstage. Normally conversations with her were like earlier this evening, the culmination of preparedness and confidence. But it felt now like, in the wake of her defeat, she'd deliberately lowered her guard. Instead of the mask of raw charisma she wore when she was 'on', instead she seemed be the part of November that had a little bit of perspective. She watched herself, judged herself, and could speak quite frankly about the parts of herself that were and weren't 'working' - according to her standards at least.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

She still struggled with the concept of 'technology'.

There was no direct translation in any Zaldarian language, the closest it came out to was 'god-blessing' but the way Hybrasilians used the word was loaded with so much more context and meaning. It was, in their world, possible to make things... better than they were before? Like, the same, but more. It felt like a nonsense concept from a primitive civilization. The Crystal Fire Drive was the core of divine strength. Presuming it wasn't damaged it would produce a set output. Any more output was impossible. All artifice was simply redistributing that mighty, but limited strength in different and cunning ways.

Even the wild gods of the Stormlands were not inferior to the Aeteline, they were specialized for different things. Even the blocky titans of the Consortium were her peers. Even the humble Bezorel. They all had the same drive and the same divine strength. Where the difference lay was that their connection to the spirit world was so weak that they had to labour with their hands rather than petition the divine for certain weapon configurations. She dimly understood the concept that they might sometimes stumble onto a new obscure ability through their grindingly slow engineering processes, but that was more a triumph of tactical imagination rather than new knowledge.

The Aeteline was the superior warrior because it best fit the shape of warfare itself. All the Gods of Zaldar had once worn its shape during their great time of war. Only in the peace did they deviate. That was all.

So when the Supernova starts to burn beyond its limits it's as though the Wind Devil herself had come down from her arctic throne. The Aeteline panics and hard burns a retreat through the burning forest, deploying smokescreens to cover her sprinting escape. The only thing she can think in that moment is that this must be a core overload, that in a matter of seconds the Supernova will explode and be gone. Nothing else makes sense.

[Defy Disaster: 3]