[b]Lucien![/b]

You dance effortlessly through the chaos. The angel throws itself against the hexagonal projections of a Bee chorus with a shriek of rusting metal, and as you waltz on by, your feet avoid the singed, charred remains of Bees who gave their all for the hive, more falling with every slam of the angel's wings against those shining blue shields. Working under some alien matrix, the Bees part around you like the waves about a ship's bow.

Look up. You can [i]see[/i] it. The Bees are the fingers, the manipulators, of something vast and many-angled. Call it the Anti-Heart. Cold clean lines and infinite geometries, hexagon upon hexagon, each limb becoming ten million buzzing blue stone-furred warriors. This is a beachhead. This is a war. But this is all wrong; this hive has been cut off from the host, locked away in a twist of dimensions, this cosmic drainpit, this mistake of a bolthole. The Bees fight for survival, for the structural integrity of their Queen (how she shines!), and if they had their way, the entire station would be clean and completely reorganized. There is an Order to how things should be, and the work of you messy little apes is wrong. Not as wrong as the Heart, but still wrong. The Bees would organize your bones from smallest to largest and make a tasteful mosaic with your organs if they became aroused to fury.

You emerge in the communing chamber, finding Ailee there, and her soul burns dragonflare all around her. No, not her soul; the soul of something vast and terrible, passing through the prismstone of her soul to seep into the station. The horrid metal flower growing from the floor begins to buckle and pop under the weight of that [i]heat[/i]. For a second, you are seen by something huge and vast and burning and red, red, red, red as carnations, red as rubies, red as blood. Then it blinks and continues into the station.

And all the speakers begin to scream.

***

[b]Jackdaw![/b]

The people who made this place were very, very clever, and very, very arrogant. This place is a trap they made out of train station in order to catch bad luck and disaster and accident, just so that their railways would never run into problems. Were they the kobolds? Maybe. No. This place isn't made for people like Coleman, except in the small size of the staff doors. They were people who snapped their fingers, and the kobolds obeyed. But now they're gone, and the kobolds are still here. Maybe the trains ate them. Or maybe when disaster came hurtling down for them, in some other world or some other time, they came to the stations and pounded their fists on the carriage doors, and innumerable glimmering eyes looked from within as the kobolds implacably fed the boiler and chose freedom, the coldest and sweetest.

You want to use it; you don't want to break this. It would destroy the Vermissian Line, for this abscess to be lanced without care and forethought. For all of this backed-up filth of fortune to flood the tracks, and drip out into the Heart, and for the old systems of the stations to begin to feel age catch up to them. This is a wicked knot in reality, and it's not yours to heal. That's someone else's story.

No, you need to escape, and the way to make sure that it goes without a hitch is-- well, you've really got two options here. One is arranging things so that your escape is bad luck [i]for someone else[/i]. An absolute disaster. As long as your escape is fortunate, it will be crushed. No, you have to be causing someone to fall to their knees and scream at an uncaring heaven for it to work.

But the other?

You just need to... localize misfortune. Make a problem so big and so explosive that Sasha hurtling onto the tracks doesn't have any leftover misfortune clinging to her. Again, an absolute disaster. Like, say, making the station unable to sustain itself indefinitely. Breaking it. Whoops, we're back to breaking it. But something on that level, if you managed to pull it off at the same time as you escaped, it could work. It really could work.

(Or you could stabilize and disinfect the rails long enough for you to get out, but you'd need time, the help of, like, an entire [i]colony[/i] of Bees, and also the Station would be trying to kill you messily the whole while. Make yourself a little tunnel of good fortune, aligned perfectly and just so, and hurtle through it at top speed. But where would you even get that many Bees?)

And then all the speakers begin to scream.

***

[b]Coleman![/b]

You feel it first as a [i]Presence[/i]. Burning. Sasha shivers and groans, her boiler letting out a frightened and high-pitched whine.

And then all the speakers begin to scream.

It passes over you and dives down into the rails, and drags them up with it. Steel twists and shrieks as it is molded by will alone, and fire kindles deep within. The back half of this part of the station, the part you arrived in, crumples up like paper; that presence demands that the world give it what it requires, and brooks no arguments.

When it lifts its massive horned head (easily three times the size of Sasha) and roars its deafening yawp, mice begin pouring out from every nook and cranny, dressed in black armor and red robes and carrying golden arms. The shadow of its wings stretches from wall to wall. It gestures with a forelimb and the floor begins to shear and tear, yielding under the force of that terrible will.

King Dragon means to dig down to the heart of the Station and add it to his [i]collection[/i]. How can you outrun him? He is already here.

And also there are mice advancing on you and they look [i]grabby[/i]. More treasures for the Hoard. An immature Train will look just [i]fine[/i] stuffed and put on display in the King's Hoard.

***

[b]Ailee![/b]

It's not actually King Dragon. This is just one of his infinite talons being poked through into the Station. But you are a livewire conduit, probably because one of his idiot Grand Squeakers happened to be here, and in the seven breaths before you manage to clamp down on that transferal and close off the mystic circuit, your Patron has extended some of his power through you and poured it into the station.

And that's when the Station begins to scream in fear and pain as something just as [i]big[/i] and [i]vicious[/i] as it begins fighting it for control. Really should have made a deal with you the first time. It's its own fault, when you think about it. But while [i]you[/i] are safe, if any of your friends get his attention (and, really, getting attention is their best attribute) they might just get incinerated. Spicily.