[b]Redana and Bella![/b]

"Oh hey," said Mynx, blearily. Aren't her scales pretty like this, with that liquid mirror shine? Rubies in red water. "Your claws grew back. That's wonderful, Bella," she said, smiling. "I'm so happy for you."

Her left arm is a ruin. She takes it off like she's plucking a flower. Hefts it. Then tosses it forwards.

In mid air it becomes a snake - red and black and biting. 

As it flies Mynx has drawn a pistol one-handed. With the calm of a brain drowning in combat drugs she walks backwards while aiming and firing. Princess Epistia gets a solid projectile round directly in the ear, blowing out her eardrum and sending her to the floor. One of Beljani's Alcedi puppets comes forwards - Mynx puts a Thunderbolt round through her chest as she runs, catches her as she falls and bites her on the back of the neck as she gently lowers her to the ground. Already roots are spreading. The crystal dragon roars at her and projects its glittering lights towards her like a spotlight, like a laser, piercing the cloud of toxic smoke. She spits acid clean across the room - nearly twenty feet - and the dragon screeches and recoils backwards, scratching the substance off with its claws. Her ELF crackles and scorches a massive electrical arc up to the ceiling, blowing out the dim light of the single chandelier, sending a rain of molten candle wax pouring down to the ground below.

"I hope you come across the Rift with us, Bella," Mynx's voice came through the dark and the toxic chaos. "I... want to see what we might be like, if we were reborn into a life without all of this."

And then she's gone.

[Mark Damage, Bella.]

[b]Alexa![/b]

"Well - yes, of course," said the Biomancer, surprised. "Of course there are a lot of failed designs out there. Some failures are embarrassing or cruel, even, I'm as horrified as you to see them. Believe me," and he sounded genuine here, like this was actually hurting him. "I'm as sickened as you to see the Coherent. Designs so poorly thought through that the subjects experience crippling dysmorphia? That they need to resort to extreme, drastic, invasive surgery in order to feel happy? It's hideous! There can be no worse rejection of the Art than your subjects literally ripping your designs out of their bodies."

"But I assure you, I [i]promise [/i]you," and there was a strange, pleading tone to his voice. "We are not those backstreet sawbones who bring disrepute on our noble profession. [i]Our [/i]work was the Kaeri and they are a triumph. Look at this," he frantically rummaged around in his papers. "The Bloodfeather program. Our answer to the problem you describe. You see, the cornerstone of our branch's design is genetic/hereditary mental illness - the research was begun for the Assassin programme, but by adapting it we were able to broaden it to an entire true-breeding warrior servitor species. See, when a Kaeri is experiencing the failure states you describe - lack of task satisfaction, too much empathy for the syncretic helot species, desire for self expression or any other traits incompatible with the Kaeri warrior culture - then mental illness is sure to develop, as you have observed. Our method causes that mental illness to reliably trend towards aggressive psychosis. Dormant glands are activated producing growth hormones, overclocked adrenal production, and a heightened sense of territorial stress consistent with always being on the brink of starvation - while also hypercharging the maternal nesting instincts. By this method we transform a failure into a [i]leader[/i]. The Bloodfeather breaks with the warrior culture backdrop but does so in a consistent way, arising as a larger and stronger exemplar who is even more driven to seek battle out than a standard unit. It is also a self regulating system - in a controlled environment, surplus Bloodfeathers can be stored as shock troops, but in an uncontrolled environment surplus leaders will simply murder each other in struggles for dominance."

The Biomancer has by this point started laying out endless sheets covered with graphs, curves, scatterplots and other twisted glyphs upon the table, still looking up at you with wide and fearful eyes. "Look. See. We have successfully kept the Kaeri in operation in both controlled and uncontrolled environments, with isolated branches on dozens of ships and planets, for over two hundred years without the creation of [i]any [/i]uncontrolled failure castes. Like I said before, Biomancy does not deal in iron laws. Exceptions, mutations, failures and castoffs are inevitable with every species. The difference between a failed servitor species, like the Alcedi, and a successful one, like the Kaeri, is down to how it handles those special cases."

Through all of this it never quite escapes your notice that [i]he [/i]is also a Kaeri.

"This is all to say," he said, a little out of breath, "that we aren't banging rocks together over here. We're professionals, working on a galaxy class warrior species, while doing supplemental engineering on Assassins who are state of the art designs. So you say, save your friend - of course we'll do that! We'll give her the best treatment in the galaxy, short of a true human Genetor. If you want me to set all of her hormones and chemicals to human default I'll make it happen, you want me to make her grow skin instead of scales, no problem, you want me to clone her seven thousand times and tie them together in a hivemind, I can do that. I will do that. I'll do literally anything you want, it's no trouble. What I'm telling you, though, is if we go messing around with her motivations and brain chemistry, which were set up to psychologically encourage and reward certain useful mental illnesses, she'll either literally shapeshift into a plasma bomb as a security measure or become deeply mentally unstable and dangerous. And we'll roll those dice if you tell us to! Just so you understand the risks!"

[b]Dolce![/b]

The spoon leaves a trail of sticky, sugary sauce on the side of Jil's razor sharp cutlass.

She lifts it up alongside her head, the mirrored blade reflecting her face.

"If this isn't the best thing I've ever tasted in my life you're going to walk the space plank [i]immediately[/i]," she threatens.

I'm sure you could take the fact that she literally starts crying a few moments later as a compliment. If it is, though, it's a sad one. All the fierceness and determination just cracks for a moment and you're not dealing with a mutinous death princess but a girl who didn't know things could taste this good.

"What the [i]fuck[/i]," she chokes, hiding her eyes behind the beads of her mian. "I'm - sorry. Sorry, I didn't mean to -"