Thanqol

Breathless Dead

Bella!

"Aw - yeah, sure, alright," said Vesper. She laughed. "Huh! Wow, that was way easier than I thought. It turns out you can just not do stuff -"

Ropes suddenly pulled themselves tight around her, bending her feet forwards and her neck back. Suspended by her wrists she ascended, hanging from the ceiling in elegant display, completely unsurprised by the suddenness of her bondage.

"But - you know, I kind of saw that coming?" said Vesper, tone having not changed a bit. "I just kept thinking about Mynx, and that sword and I thought - what if you come at me like that? What if you make some sort of heartfelt appeal to me and it works? Well, obviously that would be a pretty big point of failure in my plan, so I kind of set things up in advance to take me out of the picture if I got compromised. So, uh..."

The unicorn stepped out of the shadows. Her armoured bone-plate glittered like silver and every surface was filled with thousands of words. Vesper's instructions - not a name, but a spiralling, mad if-then, choose-your-own-adventure novel carrying instructions for what to do in every scenario she had been able to predict. The unicorn's right arm had erupted into a gleaming, round silver shield, and her right had solidified into a reinforced metal hoof. She moved like a Knight - deliberate but capable of sudden devastating charges.

Ember and Dolce!

"He's not fulfilling the mission," growled Taurus quietly.
"Oh, hush," murmured Gemini, elbowing her. "He's having a wonderful time. Look at how into this he's getting!"
"We're performing a military operation here. You should move things along."
"Darling, I am not a puppeteer," said Gemini. "I'm more like a stiff drink. I can take away inhibitions and give a certain push, but I can't roll boulders uphill. It turns out that this just happens to be where the peaks and valleys in his mind are."
"Mm. I suppose... the pack is enjoying this too."
"Of course they are. This is as much about Ember as Vasilia, and look what a delightful little helper she is. She's hardly as beautiful as when she's making someone else beautiful."
"Mm... we should..."
"Give her a reward after this, for being such a good girl? Of course we should. I'd suggest rewarding the boy as well, but I imagine his wife will have that covered. Besides, I'm sure little Ember deserves a chance to perform for her own wife before we are done here."

Dyssia!

No Satyr could resist such a pure hearted appeal. You're taken to the goods.

They hid it well; the plans show that this is meant to be the center of a plasma exchange manifold. Through visionary genius the Order of Hermes was able to shrink the size of the manifold from the size of an apartment building to the size of a house, but rather than reporting the success of their labour they kept the excess space for the construction of a secret still. Rows and rows of glassworks, an exotic vineyard, fermentation barrels and a storage cellar. Every inch of space was precious and so the pathways were narrow and tangled, requiring frequent ducking and sometimes jumping to make progress.

And yeah, it's cool here. Nontrivially cool; keeping this place at a steady temperature is condemning the entire rest of the ship to the worst-case heatwave. But, as the Satyr suggests, 'If we all crack and drink one of those kegs now, there'll be enough space for Dyssia to join us!' which seems to go over fairly well as a suggestion.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"Honestly, a feeble attempt," said Lancer. "Perhaps one day my Rome might have conquered the East as well."
"Hnnrgghhh..." rasped Rider, heart pierced by Lancer's spear. She was whispering something, words almost audible above...
"Ha!" laughed Lancer. "Do you take me for a simpleton? Whispering something enigmatic to get me to lean in close and enter the range of your fangs?" She swung her spear in an arc, smashing Rider hard into the ground, fracturing the stone. "No, Rider. I know how to kill a snake."
"You... do," she admitted. "But I know... that nobody in this new world would have resisted leaning in close."
"Truly?" said Lancer. "Well, doesn't that speak poorly of this world?"
Rider laughed, but there was a mocking air to it. Julia's brow darkened.
"You think otherwise?" she said. "More fool you! What we witness here is simply another dark age. The centralized state of yesteryear has collapsed, and in its place has arisen a world of petty warlords, monarchists and the barbaric rule of the strong. Progress has stopped, civilization has regressed, and the people shiver beneath monuments they no longer possess the ability to build. I fought to prevent a world like this, fought for an eternal Rome which could direct the productive forces of humanity towards a truly magnificent end!" She raised her fist to the sky, blotting out the stars. "The Gods themselves would watch our works with awe!"
"Which... works would those be?" rasped Rider.
Julia snorted and flicked her hand imperiously over her shoulder. "Anything we set our mind to. Once we have the capability, all things would become possible."
"Sounds like heaven," said Rider laconically. "I can't wait to see it."
"My heaven," said Lancer, "is not for the likes of you."
And she drew forth her spear and struck off Rider's head.

*

Beneath the earth, ancient machinery boils to life.

It begins with the lights, blue and cold, sterile in a place that has long lost its sterility. The lights burn harshly against the leaves of the subterranean rainforest - first, burning their leaves back, and then choking as the leaves grow back tenfold. In the distance massive gears begin to turn, old machines begin to rumble, and dispatch begins routing service droids down the endless sprawling corridors of the Burrower civilization. Each task is observed and paid for, the invisible seams of money creaking and groaning to life as long-dead corporations trade in the night. Not one of them will resurrect their civilization for free.

But there is enough new power moving through the system to make them think that they will all get paid.

Return to Thellamie

Tsane!

Rootwalkers - she sleeps. The whole point of being a monster researcher was in drawing proximity to power, and these guys weren't it. But Rootwalkers directly empowered by the Rot Star? Now that's Real Shit.

A Rootwalker is just a template, one which can be upgraded in a dizzying number of ways by magical manipulation of the plants growing on its back. Poison explosion fruits obviously, but also shield bubbles that protect nearby zombies, acceleration spores that send them into frenzies or repair their damage. And worse, they were then layered into precise ranks and formations by their superiors, forming interlocking puzzles of boons and curses and effects. Disassembling an organized, empowered Rootwalker formation was somewhere between jenga and sudoku and Tactical Terrors: A Guide To The Fourth Age had been filled with hundreds of illustrations of example formations and the proper sequence of attacks that would cause them to unravel. Little Tsane had spent many long afternoons standing pensively in the yard, looking at formations of plush toys wearing various roses, daffodils, posies and tulips to denote their various types as she pondered the order in which to kick them over.

Fairly often, Grandpa Rurik had been made to stand in these formations wearing little flower-crowns Tsane had made. Sometimes he tried to ham it up, change the puzzles or offer suggestions, but she'd usually just glared at him and told him that the rules said he had to wait his turn.

She'd never got him to settle as a kid. For a man who stayed inside and made dresses all day he sure did hate standing in one place. At the time she'd considered it a frustrating distraction from the real game, but now she was here again, getting to play her childhood game for real - and once again grandpa was messing it up by not standing where he was told.

She could see what he was trying to do. He wasn't stupid. If all of these zombies were weakened, and all of those ones were wet, then the entire formation would come apart in a moment with a single blow from Heron. Failing Heron, maybe Injimo could manage it - but that was the hardest of maybes. She didn't know much about what it took to deadlift anvils or whatever it was that Injimo did all day to get that figure, but she did know that Injimo fucked up often when she was put on the spot. And here Rurik was not even asking her, betting everything on either Heron coming back and nailing a one in a million shot, or hoping that We Have Heron At Home could avoid choking when put on the stand. WHERE AS. SHE HAD. FIREBALLS. FOR DAYS.

"Fuck it. Fuck this," said Tsane, rolling up her sleeves to reveal the glowing magical glyphs drawn on her arm. "I am over it. It's long past time."

And she started blasting. Complete psycho mode, just prime and fire, blowing through bottles of spell-ink. Sometimes precise where she could afford to be, but otherwise if Rurik had messed with the clusters too much she just burned the whole puzzle indiscriminately. She was capable of it. Maybe if she showed it off more then people would start planning the damn battle around what she could do!

Breathless Dead

Bella!

The depths of the Plousios have an aspect best described as gnomic functionality. Lines are straight and clean, with deep stone trenches for fast-flowing rivers, adjoining small fields of grass that long ago learned how high they were allowed to grow. Then come strange white concrete walls, sometimes with red stripes or arrows - some waist high, some vanishing into the ceiling. There is the occasional tree like a centrepiece, glyphic as its fractal leaves fall in an eternal autumn. Sometimes pipes break these channels, cutting across between cubes according to some arcane design, and sometimes strange machinery can be heard to rumble behind those walls. Bundles of cables sometimes web across skate-parks of half-pipes and triangular shapes before easing back into water channels again. All of this brutalist gardening has a purpose, but that purpose might have been to play off the anxieties and cravings of a long-extinct servitor species - or as a calculated appeal to the gods, or as a frustrated shipbuilder failing to keep the complex mechanisms organized in an elegant way. Only Vesper knows.

"I'm still stuck on the bloody skeletons," said Vesper, sitting atop a high wall surrounded by light crystals. "I can see how to breach the gates of the Underworld, that part is way easier than you'd think - not that what we did was easy, but there are points where people have been filing at the door hinges already, if you get what I mean? No, what I'm struggling with is - did you know I won the skeleton war? There was this armada of these weird primitives who were, I shit you not, spooky halloween bone people, like, no muscle or connective tissue, just walking around like woooooOAOoooAOaoooo. It was so fucking weird. Anyway I killed them all, but what does that mean? If I let them out of the Underworld will they return as spooky skeleton people, or will they appear as they were pre-skeletoned? Will other people come out as skeletons? I'm basically having to simulate entire civilizational developments to see where and when we get to skeletontown before I can even begin to think through the implications."

She shook her fist, almost hitting the burning sun that hovered dangerously close to her head. "Bet you wish you hadn't been such cagey bastards now, don't you!?"

Dolce and Ember!

"You know, I have faced mutinies before," said Vasilia, sitting upon her lounge-throne. She's set up in the cargo hold, atop a mountain of treasures - bales of fabrics, bars of quadranix, pallets of hypernitrates. "But I cannot recall one as high effort as this."

She took a deliberate sip of her margarita and leaned forwards. "... So, despite my better judgement, I'm going to see how this plays out. What, precisely, have you prepared for me?"

Dyssia!

It's a rush. It's a ru-u-uuush. Oh, wow, are you still slithering straight? You haven't been this tipsy since... wait, the wine is still in the bottle? Like, not even a sip? Then why are you?

"Oh yeah, that'd be the bleeeeeeeeeed," said the Satyr, letting the word come out to the wheeze of his accordion. "Hermetic wine should be stored at 30 degrees or lower. Get it too agitated and the bottle won't contain it." He pushed his face against the bottle in your hand and took an enormous, full-bodied sniff.

"So my buddy, my buddy Iskarhaman - and you're a buddy too, never forget that, I'll never forget what you're doing for us here - my buddy yellowface back there needs to bring down the temperature. Around the still! Because if we don't jack it down a notch then all of this," he tapped his horns against the glass bottle - tok tok! "is going to evaporate right through the glass - up in smoke! And then nobody is getting smashed," accusatory: "You really should have thought about this before you did the whole star thing."

Oh hey, this is getting better and better. You just keep on going about kicking people out of their precious patches of relief and you'll be in good with the Hermetics secret wine stores and a Satyr. You can feel good times roll off this guy's back at about the same rate as he's shedding hair.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Was there a hero inside of her?

She couldn't feel it. When she looked inside herself what she could feel was the distance to the next castle. She could sense the stores and provisions laid up inside, the status of the walls, the number of horses, the taxation to be extracted. She could feel the farmlands overseen by her fortresses, the movements of her tax collectors, just as clearly as she could feel the command PLEASE DON'T TAKE MRS. RUTLIDGES CROPS BERSERKER SHE NEEDS THOSE where it was seared onto her soul. And, if she looked deeper, she could feel - hear - hatred.

The hatred of generations bought under the yoke. Of kingdoms dissolved, crowns melted down, languages eroded, curses in the form of ten thousand folk songs damning her and her inheritors. Each time she struggled to find the goodness in her heart, something she could believe in, the cacophony began to rise. Her enemies had made their opposition known in verse and there was no argument with them. She tried to draw on the memory of her holy sword and all she heard was the sawing of fiddle-bows cutting away at her mind. Her kingdom had been a mistake. Its survival a curse. If she was the origin of it then all the more share of curses for her.

She grasped her helmet so tightly the metal bent. She fell to the ground and pressed her head against the ground. She felt the hatred flow like a river and the shape of Berserker held her mind open to take it all in. She had thought her banner proud; now she felt the dread of everyone who had seen it. She had thought her chivalry respected; now she felt the wrath that had risen up behind her daughter. She clawed at the stone with her fingertips and found only that it tore the shape of a new wall. She tried to break it with her fists, with her teeth, with her skull but it only grew stronger. There was no mercy. No mercy for her. She...

No mercy for her.

Berserker strained against the rush of the music, finding the flicker of calm amidst the torrent. "What." she rasped out loud, following the shape of the peace. She did not know what the words were, only that if she strayed from their shape agony awaited. "Is." Each sound was felt out, unfamiliar, piece by piece. "The." This too felt like a memory of a sword, but...? "Treasure." She coughed, feeling razor sharpness on her tongue. "Of." The sharpness blossomed, and then blossomed into fire. "A." She pressed on, fingers sinking deeper and deeper into the iron of her face mask. "Castle?"

With a final roar she ripped it from her eyes.

"A. Princess." said Berserker, and these words came easily, and as sweet as the rain.

No one cursed princesses. Every folk story made allowances for them, and their hearts. They repaid the world for that with kindness.

Berserker sheltered behind the sword-shaped clarity of that revelation. Not enough for more words than this, but enough for her to draw her sword and drop to one knee before her Master - her Princess. In her shadow then even a wicked knight could become a hero.

Return to Thellamie

Sayanastia!

Damn it. She was happy.

Her entrance had been perfect. Her opponent had been respectful. She had not found herself immediately overmatched, destroyed in moments by an interlocking sequence of relics, handmaiden curses and secret techniques. The fight was proceeding downright languidly compared to her battles with Heron, and she dispersed into that time like salt in water.

Take the first clash as an example - thoughts running in the long, languid seconds between pounces. Teeth, she had long ago learned, were ineffective as primary armaments against anything but the most overmatched opponents. And yet The End Dragon had come for her baring hers, looking to grapple, bite, and break. The correct response would have been to hate her to death, pouring so much raw contempt into her glare that the lesser being instantly ceased existing. The first time she'd fought the Hero of Ages that had been the only attack she had utilized; every few seconds obliterating one of the hero's companions. The only thing that had saved the worlds was the sheer number of friends Heron had bought to the battle. She had not left with any.

It was a simple thing to do, even now. Less than a technique, less than a spell, all it would take was a flicker of the feeling and then this whole situation would be over. The light of the Stars would go out, and the Dark Dragon would be alone.

But oh how delicious it is to, instead, hit her opponent in the jaw with her tail. To flow backwards, tail wrapping around that jarringly-shut muzzle, pulling tight and then flicking her opponent away like a gnat to smash dramatically into the side of the great tree. A technique she had once suffered from the Saffron Dragon, another of Heron's companions from a later age. An arrogant duelist who had thought that the techniques she had spent developing for single combat made her Sayanastia's peer. Look now, Saffron! I performed your vaunted technique without practice or preparation, to better effect than you ever managed! An elegant move, flawless from conception to execution, one to crush and humiliate The End Dragon. A small victory, one to revel in.

And one that took her one subtle step further away from the hatred that would end the fight.

Her next technique was elegant too - a whisper of cutting void that undid the force of The End Dragon's wings, sending her opponent plunging into stone and rock. It was something she had picked up from how her void toads caused miniature shockwaves to knock flies from the air, and wasn't it such a clever use of the mechanics of air pressure and entropy? And then it is time to use one of Heron's tricks - obliterating a conceptual distance set, meaning that when she raked her talons through the air cracking grooves shattered the exposed bones of The End Dragon. It was beautifully done. So beautifully done she let herself preen, and select yet another of her accumulated techniques to reveal, rather than use the move that everyone knew she had and meant nothing more than that she was still the Dark Dragon.

Her opponent's light screamed that she was lesser than she was. But look! She didn't know how to do this before! Or this! Look at all the beautiful things she knows, the wisdom and power that age has granted her. And after I have shown you all of these techniques, then perhaps I will show you that I am also still the Dark Dragon on top of all of that, and obliterate your humiliated wreckage so that you never trouble me again.

But... perhaps I don't even need to do that. Perhaps the humiliation is enough, and you will eventually learn that there is no benefit to rising against me. Perhaps when you fall, I will let you regain your strength. You can test mine as many times as necessary because I go to war knowing that, at the end of this diversion, I am still the Dark Dragon. And I can undo you simply by hating you. It would only take a second. I just need to... stop being happy first.

[Fight: 6]

Breathless Dead

Bella!

Artemis looks out of the window. Outside, in the distance, there is the Muster.

A strange thing happens to a civilization when it stops thinking in terms of resources and starts thinking in terms of galactic mass. Juicing black holes for their hydrogen atoms creates the conditions where eventually the galaxy might run out of black holes, and without a cluster of supermassive gravity wells in the centre then the galaxy will eventually destabilize and begin to drift apart, suns flung off into endless night. A problem aeons away, but any response will take aeons to complete. And so, the Muster - a backstop for the stability of the Skies, an expeditionary invasion armada with the objective of traveling to foreign galaxies in order to steal the supermassive black holes at their cores.

The main mechanism is a comprehensive network of acceleration gates, vast galactic catapults designed to hurl warspheres across the cosmic black to neighbouring galaxies. These gates consist of networks of thousands of rings, each one proving space warping microsingularies in their centres to accelerate the launching warsphere to the speed of light. At the final stage of this process a quantum encoder - a vast and brutal machine of spiralling energy - folds the ship into the sign of Zeus, crushing the light-ship until it becomes a thunderbolt. With a crack of thunder - and there is thunder here, in the proto-atomosphere of the spreading Skies - the ship is blasted across the rift between galaxies as though thrown from the arm of Zeus herself.

Every hour a new ship is loaded into the quantum encoder. Every hour a new thunderbolt flashes between galaxies. None of these ships are expected to ever return, no knowledge of their success or failure will ever be known, until thousands of years later the beating heart of the foreign galaxy begins to move towards this one.

Ten more encoders are under construction.

"I never said you were a failure," said Artemis. "In fact, I went out of my way to establish that you were not a disappointment. Heracles had twelve labours, and when he had accomplished six it did not make the next six any less impossible, nor did overcoming the impossible six times make him wiser than Odysseus. It simply meant he had overcome the impossible six times. And now, as with you, there is another impossible task at hand."

She closed her eyes and folded her hands in her lap. "But once the twelve were done, there were no more. This I can promise you, too. And for now, you must descend into the underworld of this ship; the secret depths where the bones of crews past lie slain by each others' love. Your sister works there."

Ember and Dolce!

"It's straightforwards," said Gemini, as she patted your heads and wrapped you in flowers. "You need to approach Vasilia and show her what remarkable talents you have developed. And then..." she sprinkles some golden dust into the flowers, where it sparkles and glitters. "... give her your flowers. Tell her about the smell. Make sure she breathes deep. It's very important she appreciates them as much as she appreciates you."

"I appreciate you doing this, Gemini," said Taurus. "You didn't have to..."
"Oh, hush~," said Gemini. "It's all for the good, isn't it? You'll learn secret combat techniques, these two will exhibit all of their many skills and talents, Bella will finally be able to take a rest, and Vesper will ascend as the promised messiah and resurrect everyone who has ever died! Literally everyone wins!"
"She'll -" Taurus blinked.
"What?" said Gemini, fluttering her lashes. A golden symbol glowed on the back of her neck - a paragraph of instructions, written on her body the same way that names had been written on Bella's, back when she'd become XIII.
"... Nothing." said Taurus. "Come on, then. For the universal good, you must satisfy your catgirl wives."

Dyssia!

The Hermetic stares at you blankly for an extended period of time.

Then he suddenly lunges a hand towards his coat, a reflex so fast it feels like he's about to pull a gun. Instead he pulls a bottle - a large, heavy and rounded industrial piece of glassware, solid enough to crack a skull, with a long neck that would make a great handle if it was used as a club. The glass is yellow tinged, wrapped with a handmade cloth label with the words BATCH 145 written in blocky sharpie, and the fluid inside has the viscosity of molten chocolate.

He offers it to you. It is clear this is a bribe.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

A threat beneath the earth. Berserker was ready for that.

Castles came down to states of readiness. Neglected, they'd be stolen away, brick by brick. Disassembled by the locals who saw a mountain of pre-cut stone instead of a noble fortification, until there was nothing but a flattened hilltop in their place. But invested, there was no end to the amount of preparation that could be done. Towers could be built higher. Stockpiles could be laid deeper. And siegeworks too could be constructed well in advance.

An attacking army would naturally try to burrow beneath a castle's walls, sapping the foundation as the earth itself betrayed it. There was nothing that prevented a castle's defenders from doing the same. Miles of defensive tunnels could be built below a castle, a human ant warren, and when the enemy sappers dug close then countersappers could dig through and slaughter them. It took only an awareness of the threat to start the counter-miners moving, the dark industry of her fortress turned to removing the underground as a valid front for attack.

And that settled things, as far as she was concerned. The threat had been identified and responded to. More time had been purchased, and that time could be spent improving and fortifying the castle further. The enemy would still need to attack here eventually and so there was no need to go out and meet them. She expressed as much to Saber by putting her hand on Katherine's shoulder possessively (she had to reach up to do so) and snarling. They weren't going anywhere.

Return to Thellamie

Sayanastia!

It is easy to become the axis on which the world turns. Too easy. Perhaps that was her sin.

All she does is present herself. No more than that. As much as her pride insists that that alone is all she is doing, the world reacts the way she knows it will. She needs draw no sword and give no speech and everything falls into its order, the order it is used to, arrayed against her, the Archenemy. Arrayed against...

She huffs what she resentfully knows to be a laugh. She thought she could get away with breath, thought that she could transmute it into an engine of destruction. Sure enough her breath out came with a flick of entropic void, vaporizing the left half of a loungechair. But the world long ago adjusted to the rhythm of her breath. The world long ago adjusted to the consistency of her opposition. The world long ago moved on from her rises and falls. The world instead turned its attention to novelty remixes like The End Dragon.

She can smell her, even from here. The stench of rotting wood, insects and compromise. Willing to settle for a filthy bog, swarming with microbactrial life and buzzing cicadias, as the only approximation of true void and true peace her feeble echo of a mind can conjure. Obsessed with her hatred of heroes and the backwards-approximations of them that were her knights. Hatred had been a trap so obvious that even she, Sayanastia, for all her blunders had never fallen in to. She'd raged and corrupted and ambushed and possessed and cursed and transformed, but she'd never hated Heron or Civelia. To do that would have been to take them into her heart, undoing the purity of her purpose, taking her eyes from the goal of universal nonexistence and lowering it to a pathetic tripartite romantic comedy. She could at least take solace that her decline had been one of tragic gravitas and...

Fuck. It was just fucking elegance again, wasn't it? Every time she thought about her downfall it came back to this absurd obsession with being elegant.

"Yana...?" said Cair cautiously. She did not react but for the elegant flick of a tail. "Nice of you to join us...?"
"The End Dragon is here," said Sayanastia. "A pretender and, worse, a failure."
"Oh. So, hypothetically if the Architect-Knight were to have gotten her hammer from the Stacks, it wouldn't have been a minor and isolated incident...?"
"What care I for she, chained to her rhymes by ropes of hair?" sneered Sayanastia. "A shadow of a shadow. No, I shall address my wayward puppet, and you shall clear my way."

Injimo!

"Looks like you were wrong," said Injimo with a smile. "Looks like my backup is here after all."

The enormous, looming shape of the Dark Dragon Sayanastia raises up behind Injimo, endless in her majesty.

And then it baps her on the back of her head with a wing. "And so shall you."
"Ow," said Injimo. "But also, rude?? I'm fighting a -"
"You are losing to a drunk who correctly guessed that Heron's arrival is not immanent," said Sayanastia. "Do not embarrass yourself further."
"But -" another wing-clip to the back of the head got the message across. "Ow! Okay! I'm going."
For a moment, Eclair Espoir was left face to face with the undivided attention of the Dark Dragon, the terror of the ancient world, the breaker of the first sun, the ruin of castles, she whose waking scream bought forth the terrors that would haunt the world for ten thousand years.

"I appreciated the parry with the teacup," she said, before leaving heralded by darkness.

Breathless Dead

Bella!

"You're right," said Artemis. "You are not the best piece I have. In fact, you're actually horribly obsolete. Three hundred years out of date. Sanalessa, another Diodekoi, is on this same ship and she is your superior in every way. Not least that she actually trains, while you've been coasting since the Olympics and you're horribly out of shape. Unfortunate, because Vesper will have her fight you, and she'll kick your entire ass and probably set me back a century."

"But," sighed Artemis. "She's useless to me. Even you're probably useless to me, to be honest. I am not being kept from my target because none of my huntresses are capable of bench pressing enough iron. Zeus took first crack at the problem, after all. All the galaxy couldn't apply more violence. No, what I need isn't bigger, faster, stronger what I need is..."

She trailed off for a moment, letting an idea roll about on the tip of her tongue. "Mistletoe," she said eventually. "What I need is mistletoe."

Ember and Dolce!

"Good"

The pheromone slips inside your heads and burns to the core. Good. Things are good. You are good. All of this is so, so good. Ember feels arms wrap around her shoulders as Gemini nuzzles against her cheek. It isn't clear that the reward centres of your brains, already so overloaded by the weight of the situation, needed this additional kick from an Oratus Adept but it does mean there's no space to go from here.

"Did you forget about us, little pets?" said Taurus, stretching languidly as she came into the room. "How silly of you. I've let you play around for too long, but it's time for you to remember that you have to earn your treats."
She reached into her bag and scattered a handful of collars across the floor. Each of them had a name ready and engraved. "Please, put on your collars, all of you. You can help each other if you finish early. Then we're going to do some practice - I cannot be having fights breaking out when you perform for Mistress Vasilia."

Dyssia!

A metal stencil comes out of those robes and presses against the wall. With a puff of yellow smoke, it imprints a hazard warning sign on the metal:

AREA IDENTIFIED AS RESPONSIBLE FOR INEFFICIENT HEAT BLEED
AREA WILL BE SEALED OFF AND USED FOR PLASMA CONDENSATION STORAGE
VACATE AREA IMMEDIATELY

Then that blank hood turns to stare at you and a metal finger taps the sign loudly and pointedly.