[b]Redana and Bella![/b]

"No, you don't need me," said Mynx. 

She flexes her arms experimentally. Ribbons tear. Fabric rips. Her arms swell with crimson muscle, claws and talons and black scales mixed in through the red. She looks at them with a quiet, almost awestruck fascination for a moment and it's only after the moment has passed that you realized that wasn't a bait to lure you in.

"You were the one who killed Sagakhan," said Mynx, shrugging her shoulders as her spine became bladed sharp. She's stepping forwards and backwards lightly, feigning lunges, testing your reflexes as though she doesn't know them by heart. "You were the one who rescued Redana. You were the one who found Redana in the first place. You survived on your own for months and then somehow got ahead of us in a ship that you built out of scrap and crashed into an Azura capital. You've killed every enemy in your path and won an army's loyalty. You don't [i]need [/i]anyone, Bella."

And then she comes forward - deceptively predictable. It's a fight you've had before a hundred times, but this time her arms her longer, her legs are faster, her tail is barbed. What should have been a feint catches you by the hair and yanks you backwards. She's atop you razor quick and this time your hands can't shift hers.

"I know you'd go through the Rift, because nothing can stop you," said Mynx. "And I know you'd survive Aphrodite's curse for the same reason. But while I was dying after you [i]literally [/i]broke my heart," she smiles playfully, showing the pale scars of newly regrown scales on her chest, "Hades took pity on me and told me everything. In particular he told me that the Rift was the River Lethe. The river of forgetfulness, the place where they harvest Beautiful's medicine from. The border of the land of the dead and gateway to the realm of the living. And we are and always have been the breathless dead, born and raised in the underworld amidst the shades and ruins."

Her eyes gleam with a frenzied light, her layers of lies and misdirections cracking below the surface with the weight of knowledge and feelings. She pushes down further, her razor teeth against your cheek and the familiar sensation gives no clue if it is to be poison or antidote this time. "So all I am doing," she said, voice hushed. "Is saving Redana the trouble. She hates goodbyes. It broke her heart, leaving you behind. It'd break her heart to leave all of these people she collected behind too. Once they figure it out they'll abandon her, or she'll abandon [i]them [/i]to save them the choice. So I'm just going to... make it so that there's no question. The poison will run its course in a few months and Redana will be surrounded again by all the people she loves."

She almost kisses you. Comes closer than she ever has before. She can never quite be the one to initiate. "So please. Let me keep her safe."


[b]Alexa![/b]

"Look, I don't mean to come across as unhelpful here," said the Biomancer. "But you're asking me to repurpose a piece of dedicated military hardware for civilian use. It is to the human's credit that she wants a peer, and that she sees something of value in the subject, but she's asking it of a cruise missile. The best I can realistically offer is to render the subject down and reconstitute a specialized clone, but that comes with unacceptable software loss."

"Besides," said the Biomancer, sipping again from his sickly sweet cup. "We don't deal in iron laws here, we deal in... warmth. Cold. Preferences. Comfort. Craving. The subject is already free in the sense that it can make choices - as spectacularly recently demonstrated by the other assassin's break with coded preferences. An example," he looked down at some papers he was holding. "This entity was patterned as a bodyguard. Adjustments were made to the self preservation instinct, protectiveness and to kin bond instincts well beyond anything that would be considered a human standard. The expected manifestation of those genetic adjustments is the development of a martyrdom complex, suicidal ideation and extremely violent aggression towards anyone who threatened her romantic partners. At the same time, adjustments to her internal expectations of strength and beauty were made so high that she would develop an inferiority complex so crippling she'd never imagine she actually had anything to offer the people she was attracted to. The result would be a creature that loves, deeply and protectively, while lacking any confidence that would allow her to make a move on her own, and would accept being passed over as normal. A silent guardian. Perfect."

"Say we were to somehow crack the sequence and alter those variables - that would cause all [i]kinds [/i]of mental instability. Thoughts that bought pleasure and comfort would instead be hollow. The subject would be filled with a new, entirely unfamiliar awareness of danger and the importance of self preservation. The loss of the inferiority complex would likewise result in a contentedness that would undermine productive habits of training and exercise. I fully expect that changing those biological variables to an unconstrained human default would result in her rendered into a paranoid, slothful, miserable wreck."

He set his cup down. "I gather you're new at this from your involuntary physical reactions. Odd that they'd be coded into a battle construct, but I gather you also had a social function. Please try to understand this point because it's very important and you don't have the biological context to understand it instinctively. Servitors are, by and large, happy. Performing their functions results in enormous pleasure and, with only a little social sculpting, they form self sustaining communities that strive with all their hearts towards their imprinted tasks in perpetuity. Work needs to be done and who better to do it than people who would choose, passionately, to perform it? Who would choose to perform it, self sustaining, down the generations with no intervention or interference? Humanity was able to retire the lash and do away with money because job satisfaction was imprinted at a genetic and species level. The only reason to interfere in these systems is to ease the transition on entities that humans are using for improper purpose."

[b]Dolce![/b]

There was a lot of information to process there. Jil hopped up onto the counter and sat, going through it all. There's an entire internal journey happening with her, and many times she opens her mouth to ask a question and then stops. Those aren't the questions she needs to ask.

Eventually, she finds the point she can't move past. She looks at you through the skull beads of her hat and says, "Okay, so this journey is insanely dangerous," she said. "And you have what sounds like true love. And you are stressing out and having a mental breakdown over what's coming next. So." She takes a deep breath.

"Obviously you're just doing all this for Vasilia. This is [i]her [/i]dream and you're just dragged along behind it because you can't figure out how to let her down. And the fact that you're currently stressing out so hard about all of this is because you're starting to feel the Rift put pressure on a bond that's already straining. And if you try to go into it [i]that's[/i] when you'll snap."

She stood up on the counter and drew her cutlass. "That settles it. I need to overthrow you and maroon the two of you on a desert planet for your own protection!"