"Taller and thinner, Shorter and fatter! A shapeshifter rearranges But cannot create matter!" Mynx whispers the chant to herself as she walks in the riot of the garden feral. Demeter walks with her in her pulse, in a thousand scratching voices in her bloodstream. She sees the silver arc of Artemis. The curve of moon and bow lighting a path through the darkness. Target, here. Operation, like this. You are a hunter. The chant, over and over, the mantra. You are a hunter. You are poise. You are skill. You were born and raised sophisticated and armed with knowledge and instinct, scent and spoor, you are a hunter... She clings to that silver gloved hand as she performs her function. She has a mission. Protect Redana. From anything. From everything. Protect. Remember... "Longer and straighter, Shorter and messier! Can't shapeshift the hair And style always matters!" The chants are her limitations. The boundaries of her reality. The failures of the biomancers, the parts that need to be papered over with skill and training. The parts of her function that Mynx exists to maintain. She needs the girl who loves hairstyling and makeup and archery. If she didn't have that girl then she'd. She'd. She'd! The [i]mission [/i]- Demeter cracks from the outside of her scales. Newer, sharper growths amidst the soft and approachable smoothness. They pierce the leather of the glove. Divine blood is drawn. "Keep your arms long Don't let them cut short! A shapeshifter's dead flesh Is no use at all!" She's a hunter. She's a complete being. Her biology is only one small aspect of her function, a toolset, one amongst many. She's more than that. She's Mynx, who needs silver skill to perform her function in accordance with the laws of the hunt. This is the best version of herself. Because if it isn't... Because if she could defy the conservation of mass. If she could grow like a weed, neck stretching out to bite people across the room. If she could animate her own dead flesh, her own severed arm. If she knew the secrets of Sagakhan, the Master of Assassins, the greatest warrior of the Toxicrene Temple and master shapeshifter who had [i]taught [/i]her all of these limitations in her chants... If she, too, could transform into an immortal, invincible monster... If... if all she needed to perform her function was... in her blood. And not in her mind. Not in her heart. If all her restrictions were lies and she could do [i]anything[/i]... Then... Mynx was just slowing her down. Obsolete thoughts. Unable to comprehend the new paradigm. Why hunt as a single entity, engaged in inefficient social deception? Especially useless in an environment of paranoia, tests, passwords. Secured utterly against infiltration, an impossible task. Mynx, with all her restrictions, would have failed. [i]Failed[/i]. But what if she looked at it from a different angle? What if she contemplated this not as an assassination problem but a combat problem? These isolated, insular, paranoid groups will not engage in collective self defense. They will hole up in fortified compounds, ignore sounds from outside, turn away refugees. Remain isolated and atomized so that a sufficiently powerful combat morph would be able to engage them individually without risk. And wasn't this inevitable? The first stage of growth destroyed trust like an algae hyperbloom annihilating a carbon dioxide atmosphere. The end state of the garden was its own suffocation and mass extinction. The terraforming of its environment into something uninhabitable. Reduction into compost. And here the true seeds could grow. Instant regeneration. Poison breathed in great clouds rather than intimate bites. The final, consuming, apocalyptic phase of the Toxicrene upon a society that had been readied for this disaster by the earlier phase. The harvest was ripe. The reaper scythe was rising and falling. She needed both hands to hold it. No more moonlight. Only blood and dark. Blood and dark. The garden would grow. The garden... the mission... They were different, weren't they? The mission... wasn't to grow the garden. It's just that growing the garden accomplished the mission. So grow. Grow. Grow. The poison dragon slinks through the ship. Stiller than a budding leaf, faster than blight across a cornfield. The red scales are all gone now; she wears black, stiletto-sharp, serpent-long and with whisker-tentacles that gently touch every dark corner and hidden compartment to search for any targets she missed. She will get them all. They can run, they can hide. But they cannot trust. She has Mynx to thank for that. * [b]Bella and Redana![/b] You face each other. Blades in hand. Long, slender dueling swords. The kind you practiced with as children. The symbols of imperial warfare. The sidearm of civilization, even in this distant age. Though you have claws and electromagnetic flux and the strength of giants and poison gas and legions of bioengineered killers at your fingertips, all of them must be left aside. You are to fight, hand to hand, with swords. You are not to hold back. Blood must flow. This is Beautiful's plan. The one thing that can draw Mynx out, wherever and whatever she is. Her actions are performed out of a twisted desire to protect the both of you, but it is an abstract, long term sense of protectiveness. The only thing that can overpower that is immediate danger. So the two people she loves above all others must fight. The two people who love each other above all else must fight. Aphrodite sits heavily in the corner and lights a cigarette. He smiles. Or maybe all of you will die in each other's arms. Maybe your skeletons will fall in another twisted embrace for the next crew of the Plousios to find. The grass beneath your feet is green enough to welcome your falling bodies gently. Once more, then. For love.