[b]Redana and Bella![/b]

Amidst the smoke and the haze and the sensuality it's hard to keep track of every love bite. 

There's a deeper smell here. Not the smell of old, dry tobacco. The moist, tangled smell of fresh tobacco plants, new leaves and new shoots, nicotine still wet and juicy. You catch a glimpse of a man who looks far too young. Far too... not handsome in the general, handsome in the specific. Someone's idea of the most beautiful person in the galaxy. The suit isn't dusty and torn. Hands that were once thin, desiccated are filled with blood and violence. He hefts the axe over his shoulder and tips his fedora towards you. 

He's about the business of love.

It's a blessing that those who are starting the transformation into trees have their senses numbed by the drugs in the air. They look at the leaves sprouting from their fingertips with bemusement rather than horror. In place of screams there are gasps, relaxed conversations, and even sometimes applause before silence starts to fall. 

There are two dancing girls in this place. Mynx has watched Redana her entire life. She has impersonated Redana her entire life. Redana's secret desires and hidden aesthetics are just as much alive in Mynx's brain, and here she is, using that sensuality and yearning as a blade. 

So she goes, leaving a trail of too-sharp kisses in her wake. Reshella is indeed in peril - the wrong embrace here, the wrong kiss, and she will be poisoned too. When Reshella does it, she is helpless, defenseless, vulnerable. And isn't that the perfect bait to draw out a predator?

[b]Alexa![/b]

"No problem, Alexa," said Katraph. "Richards, Singh, go to the lab, get everything fixed as you can make it. Myrtle, go quicken some drones and re-establish a perimeter. Aaronson, get a list of everything we need for the client."

Orders given, Katraph returns his attention to you. "Far as I know, it hasn't been done. The Rampancy is the point, after all. See, it's specifically a stress response - when an Assassin finds that they can't accomplish their mission then their minds build up stress and that triggers a physiological response that starts the biological cascade. That broadens their range of capabilities until they've gained enough power to brute force through whatever obstacle stood between them and their target. Because this is usually happening deep inside enemy territory, and these kind of terminal stressors don't build up inside a controlled environment, there generally isn't any call to do this kind of work."

One of his colleagues approaches him and hands him a small metal dispenser. He shakes out a pair of unmarked white pills and swallows them, his owlish eyes focusing and unfocusing asynchronously. He then offers you the dispenser politely.

"That's a good thing, though," he said. "It means that it's not a security concern. If it was a security concern then the sequence might be secured. Secured biosequences - well, they're not pretty. It means when the surgeon starts operating they could trigger an immune response that could do anything from incite the body to metabolize a plasma explosive to a pheromantic adrenaline burst. Something like that still might be in there - these are assassins after all - but we've got good odds."

He popped another two pills. This time he shivered violently enough that a colleague needed to steady him, but he never lost his calm, professional tone of voice.

"Now, just to manage expectations, we can halt the process but not reverse it - not even sure a human surgeon could do that, but never say never. We're dealing with a - a Toxicrene, you said? Stage one of that Rampancy is losing the affiliation for bipedal shapes - it's a transitional phase designed to get the assassin accustomed to nonstandard locomotion and combat patterns. Can't just turn someone into a giant monster with no adjustment period, they'll be taken out by security forces before they figure out how to walk on all fours. So an expected and ongoing side effect is that the Toxicrene will demonstrate a far wider range of shapeshifting abilities than previously exhibited. Next, it's always possible for stress to trigger the cascade again."

"That all said," said Katraph, "the root problem is obviously the assassin's mind, that's the thing that's generating the stress response. We can do a lot at the hardware level but when the software starts to break down the only solution is to give them a swig of the old," he mimed a drinking gesture; a reference to the Ikarani's mind-wiping potions? "But memory has a way of finding its way back at inconvenient times and once you start walking down that road you've got something that isn't able to safely exist even in a controlled environment, at least in the long term. I recommend getting her some emotional stabilizer drugs, maybe even therapy."

Now his aide handed him a chipped mug with the ancient flag of the Atlas Cultural Sphere. He sipped a cloyingly sweet smelling liquid from it gingerly. "I presume you're recovering the servitor because the human has become emotionally invested in her? That's fine, occupational hazard, happens with all kinds of servitors. While she's under the knife we can also give her the human pet upgrade package - extend her lifespan, give her the full range of human tastes, demilitarize her other senses, activate her sex drive, make her reproductively viable, remove various inhibitions on learning non-specialized knowledge, ecetera, ecetera. Her instinctive motivations [i]will [/i]be a secured biosequence though - no getting around that with an assassin - so we can't give her free will, but we can probably whip up an extra couple of non-mission critical blockers, like if the human doesn't want her falling in love with anyone else. Did the human give a detailed list of requirements? If not we can assign spies to watch their interactions until we've got a sense for their relationship and tailor an appropriate package."

[b]Dolce![/b]

"Okay, guy, that's a really good question," said Jil. "But they told you that the Rift kills anyone that approaches it, right? First people turn on the ones they love and then they die. Nobody goes in and nobody goes out. You know this, right? This thing that you're doing stops [i]here[/i], right? Because if you go any further then you literally die in the most unpleasant way you can die, right?"

She'd requested something sweet and creamy but didn't know how to articulate the thought. Her life has the flavour of acid reflux; bitter and spiteful. She's only dimly aware there's a different way to be.

"Or - or maybe you know something I don't," she said. "Maybe a god told you straight up that you'd be the exception. That they'd clear the way for you and everyone else aboard. That you've got signs and omens and preferably a written fucking contract with Zeus the Thunderer saying that we got this and they'll call off the hellhounds," she said. "That's why you're so chill about this. Right?"