Thanqol

Breathless Dead

Bella and Dyssia!

Vesper smirked a little. Leaned forwards, elbows on the table. It was a genuinely affectionate movement - like she'd seen through both of you so totally it was like she was reading your internal narration, but she liked what she was reading enough not to skip to the end.

"It has to do with being old," she said. "Calendar old, not days-active old. Each time I activate I need to figure out the laws of the cosmos from scratch because they change, more often than people think. But once you've seen them change enough times, had enough points of comparison, you can kind of see how the Gods are moving the pieces. And from there it's not really so far to start changing universal law by yourself."

The Ikarani Temple. The ones who fly too close to the sun.

"Prometheus did, of course - but oh! Those old stories are so garbled. They say he gave man the gift of fire, but probably the better way to think of it is he birthed fire into the world. Fire, the consuming hunger, the desire that destroys. They say he stole fire from the gods, but why did the gods have it locked in a vault?" She whirled something silver in her fingers, click -

A silver lighter, made from torn and polished metal. She touched the gleaming little flame to a rolled up tube of paper. It burned like a cigarette.

"No wonder Zeus was pissed," she said. She glanced up at the roof, then around rapidly, then smiled. "Ahhhh, I timed that well, right when Aphrodite was distracted. I did not give myself good odds of getting that one out but ~worth it~!"

Somehow this was worse. Going quietly mad was one thing, dispensing hot gossip about the true nature of the Gods was the kind of thing that resulted in eternal punishment. You absolutely, positively have to shut her up.

Or, you know, let her roll the dice again and hope she gets lucky.

Ember and Dolce!

Two impossibly tightly wound springs snap.

Two cats have been having a staredown, and when a friendly dog blunders into the center of it, a peaceful situation becomes an instant furball of ultraviolence. The Drone crashes through the wall, gangly limbs, thorax shaped like a hoopskirt and an impassive feminine face made entirely out of bone. It is met with a hoof to the face from a spectacularly executed side-kick which parses immediately into an alternate leg roundhouse; the crack-crack! of the two impacts echoes down through the corridor. The Drone responds by shoulder-charging the unicorn, piledriving her into the wall - and Sanalessa barely jerks her head aside before a headbutt dents the thick metal where she had been a moment ago.

They'll be everywhere, all over the room, crashing into and destroying everything. In the chaos 20022 ducks his head and hoofs it.

Return to Thellamie

It wasn't... wasn't like that. The ritual was contingent on Heron's presence; the old bond needed to be severed at the same moment as the new one was forged. The realignment of the triad - two verses one - would have locked the heroine in a dark world encircling the abyss, the last bearer of a flickering flame rather than the proud guardian of a thriving world. In time that battle would have worn on her, scratching away at her will until she gave up. It had been obvious, in retrospect: the only weapon that could truly kill the heroine's endless determination was loneliness. That was why...

She needed a comeback. A narrative about how she'd teach the mathematicians antireality equations, corrupting them with knowledge of the void until the temple inverted and became the nexus of madness. The structure of it was all there, a dark promise about a new age of evil, the tools of civilization once again turning to its own ruin. But even as the thought arose it drifted away in her head. Her heart wasn't in it. Pointless threats and pointless speeches, another turn of the wheel, when instead...

"You will do all these things?" said Sayanastia. "That is a shock. I presumed you would do as you always do: sit obediently and wait for Heron to rescue you. Though perhaps, with her out of the picture and your attempt to crown a new champion ruined, you finally feel the need to take matters into your own hands?"

There was a flicker of something inside her. She'd lost... so many times. In the end the only thing she could do was accept her place. She was lesser than the heroine, and such was a dragon's pride that accepting that had taken so very long.

But she didn't yet know if she was lesser than Civelia. And that question raised a flicker of the old fire inside her.

[Spending the Unrescued String: Sayanastia wants Civelia to work towards challenging her directly, rather than hiding behind champions]

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Actia.

Assassin understood, of course, that in this day and age fox spirits were accepted as a normal, if troublesome, aspect of daily life. He could not quite go that far. Their ceaseless ambition to climb the ladder of tails neatly mirrored the nine layers of Hell and that affinity had gone a long way towards this very ritual, where the souls of the damned had been plucked forth from eternal torment in order to do battle once more.

Of course, that left Assassin with something of a dilemma. To condemn the Actia and the ritual that had summoned him would imply that he, too, was amongst the damned. He was, of course, open to the idea that he was a base sinner like all of mankind, and he had certainly signed his name in blood during the course of his duties to France, but he simply had no memory of the afterlife. If he had died, then the Lord had passed judgement upon him, and his soul had not been destroyed or - indeed - marked in any way that he could discern. The pleasures of the vine were still open to him, he still could enjoy the taste of fresh air, still found the sun on his face pleasing and the quill in his hand as responsive as it had been in his prime. He had, in short, been the recipient of a miracle; had arisen like Lazarus from the dead, and the Lord had felt no further sign necessary.

In short, he could imagine himself as a damned soul, amnesiac and raving in service to a deviless, or he could imagine himself restored to Creation as he was so that he might continue exactly as he was. It was a simple decision because the fallegant's lash had never held much appeal for him, but it did rather undermine his ability to consider his Master a simple wicked spirit to be undone as soon as the opportunity arose.

Now would have been a good moment. She was standing before the throne of her subordinate, who was gloating in a state of undress and excess. She'd been going on for a while now and Actia was standing idle, eyes masked from him by the heavy set of her square glasses. He respected the patience; he had experienced many such meetings with the King, and the greatest response to silk had always been the cloth.

"That is to say," said Cyanis, arranging herself to present both her bosom and posterior at the same time, "I'm calling the shots now."
Actia stirred, as if from a deep reverie. "You are?"
"Of course I am," said Cyanis. "I have the greatest servant, I've found your stash, I have the allegiance of Berserker already - and if you're lucky I'll even let you keep your tails."
"You will?" asked Actia.
"Why not?" said Cyanis, smirking. "When I control the Holy Grail, I'll just wish for my fourth tail. And then we'll be even."
For as inconclusive as his opinion on Actia was thus far, Assassin felt a sense of profound kinship with someone who could hear that line and not let even a flicker of it display on her face.
"All right," said Actia.
"All right?" pouted Cyanis. "That's all you've got to say? I outschemed you - I outfoxed you - and all you've got to say is 'all right'?" she was working herself up into an outrage. "No yelping? No curses and promises of revenge? No grovelling and begging for mercy and flattery??"
"No," said Actia.
Cyanis sat up, folding her arms. "Well, maybe I will take your tail after all. I certainly will if I don't hear some begging in the next few seconds."
Actia took off her glasses, picked out a handkerchief from her pocket, and took a moment to clean them. Assassin thought she looked oddly vulnerable in that moment, more girl than spirit. Then she put them back on and everything was steel again.
"Are you done?" she said coldly.
"Oh!" said Cyanis, putting her hands on her hips. "Well, if that's how you're going to be - Archer!"
There was no response. "Archer!?" Cyanis called again. She looked at the door nervously.
"Do you think that your wounded, recovering servant was safe from Assassin?" said Cyanis.
"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," Assassin murmured by reflex.
Actia looked at him witheringly. "Do you think I imagine you to be without initiative?" she said, which shut him up.
"Kat? Kat!?" Cyanis called, scrambling to the top of her throne and arching her back.
"Hello?" said Katherine Isabella Fluffybiscuits, walking out of the kitchen holding a bowl of cold rice and wearing a pig-themed bathrobe.
"Destroy this interloper!" screamed Cyanis.
Katherine looked at Actia and flinched. "Um. Hi Actia."
"Hello, Katherine," said Actia, not taking her eyes off Cyanis.
"Should I, um, destroy you - oh nevermind that's a stupid question I'm leaving now."
"Kat!" shrieked Cyanis.
"Cy, the only way I've figured out to stop Berserker from turning everything into castles is by feeding her, so I've kind of got to stay on top of that," said Katherine apologetically, inching out through the door. "Uh, let me know how your showdown with Actia goes."
"I - I -" Cyanis reeled. "I challenge you to a fox duel!"
"Assassin, get her off that chair," said Actia.

Assassin considered the situation, then went through a door. He came back a moment later holding a broom.

"NyO!" shrieked Cyanis as Assassin used it to shoo her off her throne. "Mean to me!!"
"This is the problem with three-tails," Actia said. "You got one tail by getting lucky, and a second tail by doubling down. But now you're swimming with the sharks and we can see through an empty bluff." She strode up to the steps, put her hand on the throne, and ripped the mana flowing into it out so violently that the stone cracked. Cyanis cowered.
"Get yourself together," said Actia. "I'm not going to punish you, I'm not a cop."
"Really?" Cyanis effused, relieved. "Because I've always said that you were the opposite of a cop, and your glasses are really striking, and black is such a lovely fur colour -"
Only Assassin noted the slight hesitation before Actia cut her off. It seemed even Actia was not immune to good girl. "Stop. I still have use for you. I have heard - concerning reports."

In the distance, thunder rumbled.

Breathless Dead

Bella!

"You know I've killed a lot of people?" asked Vesper. "It's actually kind of stupid when you think about it. When they designed me they were thinking that an ultra-genius assassin would kill people in the most subtle ways of all - some kind of butterfly effect where if I knock over the right glass of water then a toothpick ends up in the target's brainstem a few days later. A coincidence! But what they got instead was the kind of butterfly effect where I knock over the right glass of water and then a moon de-orbits a few days later."

Her room is a nightmare. When she first emerged from the Lethe she was writing on the walls in an attempt to get all the thoughts out of her head - she's done something much worse now. A simple black metal typewriter sits in the centre of the room, so smooth and heavy it's like it was made in a factory and not from panels ripped from the walls. The thing has a terrible gravity to it; it makes the room feel smaller, like moving through the blast radius of an Azura microsingularity.

"Maybe that's not the designers fault," said Vesper. "Maybe it's a target selection problem. Once they realized what I was capable of they started sending me on impossible missions, and it turns out there's been some inflation since Heracles' twelve. So once I started to remember -" she gives a normal giggle because, like the typewriter, there's no need to add anything extra to make it horrifying. "- I thought, well, what if I didn't exist? What if all the people I'd killed survived instead? What would the galaxy look like then? And so," she gestured vaguely at the machine, "I found out. There's an entire universe in there, one where I ate dirt on my first mission and billions of people lived when they would have died. But you know what's fucked?"

She slams her hands down on the typewriter. It jumps and dings, hammers smashing tracks on the paper.

"It's not any different!" she said. "Nothing's changed! There are different people in certain chairs but it's not the people making the decisions, it's the chairs! And this goes all the way up, all the way to the Gods themselves, ever since Demeter -!"

She shut her mouth. Then smiled. "Did nothing wrong," she said pleasantly.

"Anyway," she said, stepping away from the typewriter. It started clicking, the key turning like a wind up doll's. "How are you?"

Of everything she'd just said, that was the least with it she'd been. How are you. New information. She says it like a junkie trying to convince herself that her last shred of decency is worth more than the contents of your wallet.

Dyssia!

Hey, did she say there was a universe inside that typewriter?

Dionysus thinks you should touch it.

Ember!

You're doing fine. All you have to do is look pretty. You're really good at that, you know? You're so good, you're such a good girl, "you're doing great, a face that could launch a thousand ships, my kind of face. Guys like me have to look out for dames like you when you're doing something so fool as putting yourself in danger -"

Aphrodite takes off your gag, and puts a cigarette in your mouth. It's worse. "Don't think nothing of it," he said. "You're doing all of this to get back to your true love, Liquid Bronze?" he grinned with nicotine-stained gums. "Far be it from me to star cross such lovers." He undoes your chains, and with them, your choices. He wraps you in his suit jacket to preserve your modesty and bind you tighter than you had been. "Ahhh. Don't you love it, love? People used to think that it meant stunning, overwhelming, violent beauty, but that's not how I like to work. I like to sneak up on people and then get them when they're not expecting it. One day you're in control of your own destiny, making your own choices, and then -" Aphrodite carries you away from the Plousios, towards the Cancellation. Like a gentleman. "- love changes everything."

Dolce!

"I think we got off on the wrong foot," said 20022.

He's not who you were expecting. He's here with a fruit bowl - somehow the same kind of bland fruit bowl he bought earlier.

Sanalessa sits up slowly on the couch, black skull t-shirt hanging loose off her statuesque body. She has barely shifted but it felt like the chambering of a shotgun shell.

"There has been a bit of a learning curve here," said 20022, putting the fruit basket down vaguely. "Humanity was, after all... sentimental. They loved their cats and dogs and, yes, even their sheep long after the time for such things had passed, and they kept those animals alive through us. But they were also more fractious than the Skies and so there was a certain amount of, ah, duplication. That is to say, there hasn't been clear enough communication about your bio-preparedness to handle the rigors of the Service, and that is something I regret."

He smiled a professional little smile as he drew forth a document. "Not to worry. I've negotiated with the local Biomantic administration, and they've agreed to perform a correction. Of course, I do not wish you to have any unfinished business, so if you would, please go ahead and write down all of your own sentimentalities on this piece of paper and we'll see to it that everything is taken care of, as best as business allows."

Something in the corridor behind him shifted. Sanalessa is focused on it, terrible muscles bunching with the promise of resurrected violence.

But Artemis is sitting quietly by the door, reading her newspaper - and not acting. Not yet.

Return to Thellamie

Nobody notices her standing up. That in itself is a master-level skill. The first time she'd awoken after being annihilated by searing holy light she'd screamed and thrashed and carried on in such disarray that she'd barely had time to process what was happening before she was destroyed a second time. She'd developed the stagecraft of shrugging off her own utter obliteration, to the point where she could go from apocalyptic final battle with Heron in one moment, to stepping down out of a ritual circle and smoothly issuing commands to cultists without missing a beat. She'd been dimly proud of how cool she'd come across in that moment.

Her startracker spell informs her that the year hasn't changed. The moontracker lets her know that it is still in fact the present day. The infocyte she maintains for this eventuality warps into being and starts informing her of the political situation, technological innovations, current presumed status of the Hero - she shoos it away by blowing distractedly at it. She needs to fix her hair. Civelia keeps hers done up in extremely elaborate braids and whenever she stops paying attention her own starts knotting itself into comparable intricacy. It's a constant war to keep it loose hanging, but as with most things she still does, she does it because she refuses to give Civelia the satisfaction.

She's vaguely aware that at some point in the past this scene would have infuriated her. The way that broken things insisted on pulling themselves back together into new shapes, gaining scars and complexity each time. She would want to ram an unreality spike through the disruption and chaos, tear open the gaps until they were insurmountable, scatter this bubble of reality across the Outside in the hopes that the individual fragments would dissolve into nothing. Hoping that the web of light would not stitch them back together, and tie her wrists in the process. Maybe that was what drove her for so long. Hope. Hope that things wouldn't be as they were. It seemed like all she hoped for these days was for control of her own hair.

No, that wasn't true. She didn't hope for that. She knew that battle was as futile as the one to end reality. Her hair would never belong to her. What she was hoping for was to irritate Civelia by showing everyone what she looked like with her hair down - and that was an achievable goal. A faint smile flicks across her face, just for a moment.

She makes eye contact with Civelia, just as she shakes her hair loose. Time seems to slow as it cascades free down her back and shoulders, and she leans into the pose just a little. See? This is what you'd look like if you were freed from your duty. She gently runs her finger along her own chin, in a seductive mirror of Civelia's own pose. See? This is the impact you'd have if you let yourself relax a little. You, obsessed little goddess, wrapped up in your dignity - this is what you'd look like if you let yourself be a woman. How far do you have to go to avoid thinking about that?

[Entice: 10]

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Princess Jezera recognizes her mistake. When panicked, she took refuge in humanity. She gave up on the strength of her vision and withdrew to her most basic incarnation. This cost her control of her size, of her neck, and her arms. A lesson.

She rears back as Aeglesia charges, letting her sword fall from its awkward grip, instead taking refuge in her legs. One comes up in a kick and as it does, it changes - the snap-crack as the knees rotate, the sudden flash of iridescent turquoise scale, and the lengthened raptor leg extends out to grip Aeglesia's head in its talons. Then Jezera flips in mid-air, twisting Aeglesia off the ground and send her spinning in a flash of crimson armour and golden hair face first into the ground.

Jezera lands perched on her extended raptor leg, and with a pirouette shifts the other into an extended octopus tentacle. A bruised Aeglesia barely rolls out of the way as it slaps down on the ground where she was a second ago. She barely has time to regain her feet before she's bowled over again - Jezera's entire lower half has become that of a great tiger, and she pins the would-be Roman beneath her tauric form. The weight of her makes Jezera struggle and gasp, beating her fists against unyielding fur.

But she does not neglect her gifts.

The cut from the grudge-dagger is small - but that's all it needs. Jezera jerks, eyes darkening. Crimson-violet energy pulses out from the wound, exposing the twisted labyrinth of veins that comprises her. Perhaps she might have fought it, but she just learned the lesson that when panicked she should not take refuge in humanity. This cost her control of her mind, her heart, and her reason.

The bound tiger-taur begins to twist and change. Teeth sharpen, colours deepen and run cold, fur lengthens and stripes jag into razor lines. Then, two great bloody wings of exposed bone emerge from the tiger's shoulders, feathers forming out of crystal-frozen blood and then solidifying into a twisted red reality. With dark, determined eyes, Princess Jezera, griffontaur, stands and steps away from Aeglesia. She stars at Saber - the wordless speech of someone who agrees with what has to be done, and stands ready to do it.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Some would say the best part about having this conversation during a duel was that matters could close gracefully. In any other context Lancer might have sniped, argued, sought the last word, made some brash and impassioned speech where her emotions outran her theoretical framework and embarrassed herself in the process. As it was she simply slid face-down across the grass for over two hundred meters before coming to a gradual halt, trail of torn mud behind her, and then gradually curled into a ball and clutched her head. Don't be sad for her - it's better this way.

And besides, a moment later she is hidden away as the mighty lioness crashes to the ground.

Aeglesia's shield had held many advantages, and she'd been preparing for this fight above all others. Somehow it had transformed, twisting itself into a ribbon of steel and carbon fiber and forming a set of knots binding Princess Jezera's paws together, linked by a short chain to her neck. The divine lioness roared and clawed at the earth, covering Lancer in dirt, trying to scratch the bindings off before in a panic reverting to her human form.

Aeglesia gasped for relief in that moment. She'd won.

Jezera hadn't realized it yet but the binding had been illusory - the bondage equivalent of a finger trap, growing tighter in proportion to her opponent's strength, popular amongst dragons who were into that sort of thing. If the lioness had maintained her cool and committed to the strength of her monstrous self then she'd have been able to wriggle out of it before long. But she'd observed Jezera's reaction when put in a bad situation was to shapeshift - and that meant that the chain, grown strong on the stolen strength of her lioness form, was now unbreakable.

The Princess was dark skinned, blonde haired, wearing denim shorts and a white sleeveless shirt tied up into a knot. Her hands were tied to her neck by the crimson steel ribbon that had once been Aeglesia's shield - but she wasn't done yet. Holding her sword in an awkward grip close to her throat she charged without hesitation, and Aeglesia - third place regional swordfighting champion - suddenly found herself fighting desperately to hold her off. She didn't have her shield and so was desperately backpedalling, short gladius at a range disadvantage against the huge machete wielded by Jezara.

Return to Thellamie

Kalentia!

Kalentia did not throw up a barrier.(1)

(1)

"A barrier!?!"
"Calm down Kal, she didn't mean it -"
"Get the fuck out of my way Cair -"
"Shit - sorry, she gets like this -"
"I don't get like this, I am having a perfectly normal medical professional's reaction to being told I should put up a barrier -"
"Here it comes, I tried my best."
"Ever since Scaithworthy published her goddamn Survivability Cake treatise then every novice white mage who's come up has looked at the numbers on barriers vs healing and come to the same conclusion: That barriers are far more effective. It makes sense right? A gram of prevention is worth more than a kilogram of cure? I'll get good at barriers first and then maybe learn some healing basics on the off chance something gets through the barrier -

But then it's not just getting your barriers right, is it? What if you're slow on the draw and get tackled by a werewolf before you get your barrier up? Well, then you've got to improve your reflexes. It starts with getting strung out on coffee and before you know it you're learning performance enhancing time magic in order to shave microseconds off your barrier reflexes. And there are different kinds of barriers, right? Specialized against different damage types? So before long you've got a mage sight up every second, cutting through the privacy of the people around you, and you've probably got a bunch of barriers up 24/7 just in case, so nobody can get close to you physically, and you'd better believe emotionally as well. And then your innocent little barrier-curious novice has fallen down the stairs of Evil Wizardry, cultivating a paranoid surveillance apparatus to ensure that every threat is perfectly identified and met with the exact right amount of force, surrounded by a cloud of time paradoxes and privacy invasions while becoming so touch starved that they're one lonely morning away from kidnapping a princess for their impenetrable forcefield lair and guess who has to go dig them the fuck out of it ---"
"Kal, that was like, two times."
"In the six years since that fucking Cake Essay was published!"
"Alright, alright -"
"And where's Scaithworthy now? Has anybody seen her? Has she answered any questions about the barrier mindset? Or is she ensconced in her own impenetrable forcefield lair, slowly going insane like the rest of her cultists?"
"Look, man, I don't know, I just think you're overthinking this."
"There is nothing more romantic than holding a wounded knight in your arms, gently opening their armour, feeling her heart flutter beneath your hands, knowing you're the reason it still moves - and that lady wants to take it away from the world in the name of efficiency! I hope she catches a fucking cold."

Instead she followed her traditional technique: running after the Lunarian, hands alight with healing(2) magic, waiting for her to take a hit so she can dive in to immediately cure it. This was not a dignified process; the vibe here is 'late schoolgirl rushing through a bad neighbourhood', involving lots of shrieking and ducking.

(2)

Offensively, this doubles as a sleep spell. Almost everyone's got a few hours of sleep debt keeping them from optimal performance, and any opponents who get the bright idea of coming after her will get the nap-slap and wake up a few hours later feeling amazing.

Injimo!

Fantastic. Instead of 'legendary hero defeats mysterious assailant' she'd managed to hit the bar of 'bodyguard squad leader'. She should -

Hmmmmmmm. She swallowed the frustration audibly as she set her weapon at ease. Nothing to be gained by seething. She knew she was second best, and all this meant was nothing had changed. No sense crying over the status quo. She'd get back to trying to break it along with her punching bag later.

But damn. That skateboard was fast. She should get one.

Return to Thellamie

Tsane!

Books. She loved books. She was so glad that she read all those books. She couldn't imagine how confused people who didn't read books must be right now. She wished she could go and read some more books instead of doing what she was about to do -

- But not entirely. Because what she was about to do was reveal her brand new offensive spell that she'd refined for years but not gotten to use in anger yet. The conditions were perfect; the backdrop was open, there was no wind, minimal humidity, clear and present danger of unknown typology, a crowd of witnesses. She'd had time to do all the precasting and all of her markers had been fresh and she'd even managed to get a purple one with a glitter effect which, according to the theories of Beautification of Violence, should add a meaningful boost to her damage output. She stood up, raised her arm, the colours surged inside her -

And something leapt into the way. She had to do an emergency halt by drawing a line of black across her index finger, blocking the mana cascade. Damn it, not again!

Injimo!

The stakes of any situation were what you allowed them to be.

To someone else this would be a moment for uncertainty, defense, information gathering. Figuring out who the opponent was, what their agenda was, the reach of their weapon and their measure as a duelist. This would be a dialogue with her opponent, one which required her to be on the back foot until the chance to reverse presented itself. That's how Heron might have fought here.

But Injimo wasn't fighting the opponent in front of her.

She smashes the initial attack aside and that's the last of the respect she pays to her opponent. One hand tears her handmaiden's dress open - sorry Rurik - revealing her short sun-yellow strapless dress, traced through with curls of soft white wool. The white pattern looked like a network of fractures, matching with the tracery of fine white lines all along her exposed olive dark thighs, her knees and shins, her elbows and hands. Each scar was a mark of pride - a time when Heron had been forced to hurt her in order to stop her. A single line of blue hair, dyed amidst the black, falls down across her left eye. Her muscles emanate heat, the lines of sweat confessions that even in the midst of this festival she'd been doing pull-ups in secret. Not a moment to be wasted, every scrap of value to be extracted from every battle.

The offensive begins with a lioness' roar, overhead two-handed strikes with the spear while advancing. She fought like a workout, combinations in sets of eight, each technique feeling like it took everything out of her - everything but the next technique. She was already so far behind she could not afford to hold back even a little.

Anyone she lost to would be one more person standing between her and Heron. She could not fall further behind. Everybody back up, she wanted this.

[Fight! 8!
- Create an opportunity for Civelia
- Seize a superior position]

Breathless Dead

Primitives often have a hard time grasping divination-based warfare.

The ships of the great empires are, by traditional definitions, blind and deaf. They have no scanners, no computer-assisted modelling programs, no signal emitters or receivers, no ability to detect life signs or lack thereof. Nothing more than Biomantic eyeballs being placed against Ultramateriel telescopes. You can, in fact, hide from the warfleets of the Endless Azure Skies by painting your warships black and turning off all the lights.

But that's where divination comes in. Blind and deaf though the ships of the Skies and Shogunate might be, through communion with the Gods they are able to consistently place themselves into the same broom closets as their enemies. This is powerful sorcery, but brute force: on the one hand, the infinity of space is condensed into a single certainty, on the other, you are not provided with any detail of what you will find at the other end, only with the directions on how to get there and the certainty of a battle at its conclusion.

This has a curious effect when a fleet seeking engagement hunts a ship that seeks to escape. Against primitives the entire fleet might deploy in perfect order around its quarry, but against an enemy working its own acts of prophecy then the strands of fate become entangled. The prey's prophecy tells it that in the future if it goes to this point it will be engaged by the entire enemy fleet; the hunters prophecy then has to change to account for the fact that the prey knows they know, but then the prey's prophecy has to take into account that the hunters know they know they know, and so forth. Presuming the relevant war gods do not hold particular malice or love towards one side or another, this results in a stalemate that must be solved with a sort of bidding.

The aggressor fleet performs the divination, gets a null result from Mars, and determines that there cannot be an engagement on the terms it desires. So it splits off a task force, commits it to going to one of the possible battleground areas, and then it performs the ritual again. This process continues until the fleet has split up sufficiently that the balance of powers has become if not even then within the range of possibility; at that point the gods bring the comparably matched forces together for their fated clash.

So it is that there is no surprise for either side when the Plousios and the Cancellation of Florence Nightingale leave the Deep Void to arrive in the suburban Archer-12 system at the same time. The Archer Constellation is one of many star clusters that has been rearranged so that it forms a constellation visible from Capitas; according to the grand plan of the Endless Azure Skies this entire cluster is to be transformed into a militarized bulwark, a multi-system stellar fortress that can anchor multiple civilian sectors. That is many centuries in the future; right now, Archer-12 is a scattering of luxury mansions, and an archaeological site with a few scattered research bases across the system hard at work on important questions like 'did we destroy these planets/civilizations?' and 'why?'. A dull red sun burns low, unseeded by the stellar macrocytes that make the stars of the Endless Azure Skies burn blue and violet - the star is too small and weak, it needs to be upgraded by fusion with another star before it has the dignity and brightness to be worth seeding. Somewhere in the distant horizon the machinery will be underway to redirect the relevant stellar objects.

The Cancellation is twice the length of the Plousios, and modern: ships of this era are ridiculously large and over-designed, temples to cost blowouts and gold-plating, stuffed full of cutting edge systems and optimized for parade duty and saber rattling. An evolution on the traditional Warsphere design, behold: the Spike-Sphere. Shaped as though a grape had been stuck through the centre with a toothpick, the spike extending out evenly in both directions. The forward part of the spike is an energized blade, the theoretical answer to the ramming techniques that Imperial vessels use to such great effect against Azura warspheres in the Battle of the Trinary Stars. By rotating precisely, the theory goes, the Warsphere will be able to wield this massive blade like a sword, cutting apart enemy vessels as they approach. The aft part of the spike is a massive Imperial-style plasma engine, almost skeletally exposed and vulnerable but giving the Spike-Sphere Imperial acceleration in deep void.

To add vulnerability to vulnerability, this section is also covered in massive nacelles filled with plasma torpedoes. Historically such armories present points of critical vulnerability in Azura formations, requiring fleets to baby their vulnerable munitions trucks. The Spike-Sphere solves that particular issue by making the entire 'tail' disposable; a detonation chain reaction will destroy the entire Engine spike but inflict minimal damage on the central Warsphere itself. In fact, detaching the tail might be a deliberate decision by the Captain: breaking the spherical shape causes a massive reduction in the effectiveness of the Grav-Rail drive, limiting the Spike-Sphere's maneuverability. If the tail is detached or destroyed then the Spike-Sphere will gain a massive increase in agility to help it win its current engagement.

The final aspect in this equation is the massive carrier bays on the Spike-Sphere's central structure. Carrier operations have been out of fashion for a while, but Liquid Bronze is bringing them back. A massive, forward projected fighter screen works to prevent speculative attacks against the vulnerable tail and prevent flanking. Together this makes the Cancellation alone a hybrid of all the strengths of Imperial and Azura designs, a fleet unto itself, the herald of a new age for the Endless Azure Skies. As a fun little aside, it would be utterly defenseless against an enemy that had access to starship teleportation, as they would be able to detonate its expensive tail with impunity - but then, this generation of warships is not designed to fight primitives. It is the final answer to problems of the last war, as represented by the Plousios.

(One might wonder what the point of all of this is compared to the traditional Azura answer of 'just bring another Sphere filled with ammunition'. Well, to answer that question one must consider that Warspheres have been destroyed often enough to lose their intimidation factor; they are known quantities and tactics against them have been perfected. But this? Fear of this new face of war will propel the Endless Azure Skies into a new age.)

The Angelshark lurks in the shadow of the fourth planet; it is an ambush predator and will only be effective if it has the advantage of surprise. Two slipgates in the system provide a flow of civilian shipping to render this a functional, if not prosperous, outpost. Right now the Cancellation is holding its ground at a distance - a stall. The fighter screens are currently being flown by drones while the Summerkind eggs are quickened and initial rage spikes are quelled. Once drone pilots are swapped out for elite Summerkind then the Cancellation will be ready to engage; until then it will maintain its distance - something its Imperial Engine allows it to do even in deep void.