[b]Vasilia![/b] "My father told me something once," said Aphrodite, spectacles on as he quietly tapped away on his archaic typewriter in the corner. "To move copy, add a dash of unrequited love." The Hermetician, rather bizarrely, reached out to pat Dolce's head in a there-there gesture. "There, there," he added in an uncharacteristic tone of voice. "It will all work out." His hand had a gentle coating of spotted grey and black fur. He quickly withdrew it and hid it back inside his robes. "These marriages," he said, "must be salvaged. Any combination of components, personnel, or life lessons that can be extracted from them will undoubtedly prove essential to our journey. Navigating the Tear will require as much divine support as possible, and if even one god is displeased with us then the task will truly be impossible." The Tear - you've heard stories. The great storming rift at the centre of the galaxy. A weapon of Molech? A curse from the gods? It is far, far away from anywhere you have traveled, but only the most distant stories of its nature have reached you here. It is, to say the least, not the sort of thing that people go in and out of. [b]Bella![/b] The Empress Nero, in her wisdom, had declared new codes of war. The primacy of surrender was key amongst them - rituals for how violence was to conclude. Overmatched like this, it is not to Big Bone Lick's credit that she keeps fighting - it is a prideful blindness that believes that even now she can pull victory from the jaws of defeat. You see Athena turn her face away in disgust right as you tear open the cockpit and that may as well be the end of things right there. As the metal comes away you see a gleaming serpent eye in the shadows and then - she lunges! Coiled like a snake, knife gripped in her hand, she flies at you with blade in hand - and jolts short. Amidst the crash and chaos she forgot to unbuckle her piloting harness and just as that blade is about to reach you the pirate queen jolts to a halt against her restraints. The only thing that touches you is her involuntarily expelled breath. Information flows into you as the serpent-servitor struggles with her harness. You can smell her fears - ghosts, primarily, the data drawn from the click of bone dice on her half-dozen bracelets, charms to Hades. You can taste her preferences in food from the stains on her shirt and hands - marrow stock soup, oily and garnished with spring onion. You can hear her sins from where Apollo has marked them - sloth chief amongst them, so proud of her creativity and skill that she would stab a man who told her she could do better. You can see the chemical formulae of the poison in her fangs and again on her fingernails, enough to let a gentle caress inflict hideous suffering. You can feel her past in the luster of her scales - no child of necessity this, she has the strength and suppleness of a woman who has never missed a spa day her life. She manages to find a trick amidst it all - pulling on the cord of her ejector seat. Her chair erupts from the wreckage of the Plover and sends her, spinning, half-way down the corridor. It buys her enough time to unbuckle herself, struggle to a vertical position, angle her knife correctly, and say a few words to dig her in even deeper to the war goddess' contempt. "This is fucked up. War is about stuff. My stuff was better, you didn't even [i]have[/i] any stuff. I should be winning! What the fuck!"