[b]Alexa![/b]

The topic of the conversation between the Coherent shifts after a while, bringing a slightly cooler tone to a hot blooded celebration. The question has been raised about the first time they altered their bodies - what they wanted, what they thought they wanted, what they thought was okay to say that they wanted. Some of them are very quiet through this topic, but others are wise and distanced enough - or even simply drunk enough - to swap some stories.

Envy comes up - feeling drawn towards a task or social role designed for a specialized servitor clade. If you had been spliced as farmer and they had been spliced a pilot then there wasn't a path to the sky - at least, not one which didn't involve the genetic equivalent of cobbling together a rickety biplane in your garage from theoretical principles. Sometimes it was envy's cousin, hero worship - finding someone so inspirational that you wanted to follow in their path, even if it lead somewhere you were told you couldn't follow. Some of them expressed a deep itchiness, an uncomfort in their own skin that they didn't know how to express, and so they shed that skin regularly like a snake. Some of them had a dream of their completed self and have been diligently working towards that perfection step by step in a linear fashion. Some are curious, figuring they won't know what their ideal self is like until they try every possible configuration of shapes. Some of them had a simple problem, and they fixed it, and they were done.

There's a financial dynamic to this. The Magi of the Order are the experts at the augmentation and body modification that the Coherent desire, and so they hire the Coherent as soldiers and labourers in exchange. The conversation naturally flows onto grousing about pay, conditions, risk, and the damned magi. Everyone agrees that they should have gotten danger pay when the [i]Yakanov[/i] went down, and that the priests were probably holding out on them with their 'all of our equipment is back on the cursed space station' excuse. But while they're grumbling, this is the good natured grumbling of workers who are basically content. This is more mythologizing than anything, the foundation laid to lead into tall tales of how everyone totally saw a Coherent warrior with an eyepatch blast through a horde of bonsai zombies with two lightning pistols granted by Zeus herself.

[b]Vasilia![/b]

"You are small and irrelevant and from the smell of things you have somehow managed to burn rice," said Iskarot. "I do not understand. The process is straightforwards. Boil water. Add rice. Add broccoli. Season with monosodium glutamate. And yet you are able to achieve such a spectacular failure and not be genetically driven to ritualistically flay the fur from your back as penance for your crimes against biomatter. That blithe acceptance of mediocrity is truly remarkable."

A pause, as a spoonful of coleslaw vanishes into the depths of that blackened robe. Is he clewing? Is he dumping it directly into a vat of acid? Impossible to say.

"I must clarify that although this sounds like criticism, it is not. I know far fewer beings able to accept mediocrity than beings driven to achieve transcendent perfection."

[b]XIII![/b]

Philosophers sometimes make the case that the universe is one and all places are bound to the same natural laws. Travelers from the Order of Hermes sometimes quip that Zeus' laws are constant no matter where you go in the galaxy. The Endless Azure Skies stand in defiance of such simple-minded universalism, and it demonstrates this truth above all with flight. 

Flight in the realms of Tellus is a thing of fire and force. Muscles and engines burn away gravity for as long as they have fuel to sustain them and they pay for their defiance with sweat and smoke. To fly as the Imperials fly is to exercise power. Sometimes Imperial flight might even be graceful, but what is grace but power controlled? But to call the flight of the Azura graceful would be like calling the orbits of planets graceful - you could perhaps imagine how the concept might apply to such a spectacle, but the scale and concepts are so wildly different from any traditional understanding of grace that an entirely different vocabulary will need to be developed to understand it.

The Azura ships you watch don't move like birds or jets or anything else you might imagine. They are spheres, gleaming and reflective, rolling through the skies like marbles across ever-tilting glass. Many of them drag other spheres in their wake, orbiting them around them like moons around a comet. Sometimes they can turn on a dime, two hundred and seventy degrees of rotation in a split second at speeds that would make even a gene-reinforced combat pilot swoon. Sometimes they seem caught in some invisible lull, pulling themselves through a turn at the sluggish speed of a tea trolley snarled in that horrible tangled rug Nero kept in the Red Room. There's a logic there, a pattern, but it's no more visible to your true eye than the thermals that a bird might use. Even the Auspex is sluggish and curious here. It has been a long time since it has observed these ships and its memory stirs slowly. Eventually you can feel yourself leaning into the curves, developing a strange sort of instinct and expectation for the patterns they're taking even if you can't articulate the why of it. It has to do with their height... or perhaps their relation to other ships, or those strange flying buildings. The closer they are to each other the more control they have.

You watch them fly for many hours. Long enough that when the dark dagger-shape of the [i]Anemoi[/i] cuts through the surreal symphony of Azura spheres, burning and raging on its way to a docking tower, it feels as alien as you do.