A hundred tiny treasures skitter about her feet. Bella wades further into the dark and the wet, never once stopping to look at them. She still remembers how it felt the last time someone came to her in grandeur, bearing gifts to win her favor. She remembers this same smell of fear, the only scent that anyone would debase themselves in before offering a creature like her tribute. The only motivation that could be trusted. She still remembers how that ended. And those were far prettier baubles, then. Much more queenly gifts.
She steps around each one of them without breaking her stride. Her teeth grind more with each clacking pincer reaching up for her attention.
But she stops, to read the letter. She pauses to read it again. She stands there with her tail slashing through the humid air, and takes the extra time to tear the note in half no fewer than four times. The pieces turn lumpen in the water, nothing more than ugly clumps of uglier promises. She walks past these, too.
"...Tell me why."
Her eyes are gleaming in the dark. Her claws are glistening in the damp. But her head is tilted, in curiosity.
"I have never betrayed the Empire. Not for the Princess, and not for Mother." (the word spills like hot ashes from her mouth. she uses it anyway) "What the fuck makes you so special that you think I'd do it now? Tell me why. Why'd you offer? What's your game? Tell me. And if I don't like your answer, I'll pull your guts out and use them to mop this ship dry. Redana and her band of dipshits seem very lax on their cleaning standards. I am not."
She offers a mocking curtsey to the darkness. The wet. To the crabs in all their sizes, and the voice that thought speaking to her through them was wise. She grins with a feral longing to be unleashed.
"I was originally designed to be a maid, you know. You are nothing new."
Of course she'd seen Eurydice. Of course she knew the story. Of course she did. Hades doesn't give back what's his, isn't that the lesson? Coming back from the dead should be impossible. Or at the very least, dramatic. A journey across the entire galaxy to bring back the lost, an impossible task as the price. Destined for failure and tragedy, always. And if not, if not, if someone really was stupid enough to cross into the land of the dead and beg for a single soul back, and if they were earnest and gullible enough to abide by all the rules and somehow actually made it happen? It'd be the kind of sensation that would get written down in history books and performed for holos across a lifetime's worth of lifetimes.
She never would have guessed that miracles could be so boring. There had been darkness. Blackness, really. A void with no thoughts and no feelings, no light and no sound, nothing to touch and nobody to notice in the first place. To call it the sensation of floating would be wrong and stupid. There hadn't been anything at all; just a patch of total nothing slapped over what could have been a minute or a year without any extra effort. And then from that endless nothing, she realized that her legs hurt.
That's how Bella figured out she wasn't dead. Whether she was meant for eternal punishment or reward, it'd feel different than just her legs falling asleep. And if she's not dead, she might as well breathe. The air tastes of rust and dryness. Clean, but only in the unpleasant sterile sort of way that meant someone had been desperately trying to scrub this place not very long ago. Well then. If she knows where she is, might as well open her eyes.
The Plousios is not the grand, crumbling temple of death Bella had imagined through her straining eyes the last time she was here. But there's no other place that this could be. It might've been a grand ship, once. Pride of an entire armada or... whatever else Humans might have once used star ships for, back in whichever fantasy time it must have originally been built in. The ceilings in this room are high enough to make a palace, and yet somehow claustrophobic. The colors are bright, compared to the Anemoi. But unloved. Everything here looks either pitted or greasy: Zeus' rainbow by way of an oil spill.
Bella huffs. She was meant to be a dead woman. Or if not dead, then a prisoner forever. But when she sits up, nothing catches on her wrists at all. No lashes or bindings or cuffs. Not even weights, except... no, there is something pinning her legs in place. She looks down to see a tangle of messy golden hair flopped across the covers over her knees. And the Imperial Princess sleeping beneath it.
Bella whips her head around first this way and then that, eyes darting around for signs of other people in the room. Some sort of trap. But there's nobody here except Dany, with her exhausted face made innocent again by the spell of sleep cast upon her, and the ridiculous squish of her cheek where she'd slipped on top of Bella's kneecap probably an hour or more before. Dumbass.
But here. Here still. Holding onto her, carrying her up into the skies, kissing her for luck until all the monsters had disappeared, and now... Here. Bella's fingers press into each other for long minutes, worrying at her knuckles or brushing against her lips or doing anything at all other than sitting still, or touching the one thing on this whole stupid ship that they really want to. She watches the princess' rhythmic breathing with a hunger in her eyes that can't be hidden anymore. After so many years, maybe not ever again. But in any case right now, there's no one to hide it from. So she sits. And she watches. And Redana sleeps.
She doesn't realize she's doing it, at first. There's so much to focus on that her own hands don't really matter for shit, do they? After the endless boredom of the Yakanov she's forgotten how to stop herself from filling quiet moments with little games, little chores, little projects. Just to do something. But the feeling of Redana's hair in her fingers is so soft that it pulls all of her attention to what she's doing, and once it's there how could she ever focus on anything else?
On Tellus, she wore special gloves to hide her mutilated fingers from the Princess. Over and over and over again, Dany had asked about them. And over and over and over again, Bella had answered that they were tools to help fight tangles. She wore a lot of tools over her fingers, come to think. Scrapers to smooth away oil from the skin before a wrestling match. Small blades for clipping split ends. Absorbent cloth to wipe away water and grime so that her princess would always look her best. It was stupid, every time. None of it was a match for the power of her hands.
Over, down, around, and through. The memory of a shared childhood guides Bella's fingers through one of the most complicated braids in her repertoire. The one she tied for Dany every time something bad or scary happened to the two of them. When Her Majesty had harsh words for her daughter, this was the braid she wove to make the Princess strong. When a test loomed over her, this was the look that would let her throw herself at the examination like a warrior. Hundreds of times, she's pulled these locks into this shape. She could do it with her eyes closed. Only she won't, because that would mean not seeing the girl who ran away. Maybe she'd mistake her for someone else, given the impossibility of it all.
Her fingers run out of work to do. With it comes an unpleasant tightness in Bella's chest. Her stomach feels filled with lead. But the great loops of hair are tied into the fine, tight plaits of the prettiest fishtail braid Bella knows how to tie. Even with her dirty clothes and the smudges and burns all over her face, Redana looks regal again. Every bit the princess she's supposed to be. Bella's teeth clench. Her fists wind tight enough to rip out clumps of hair, if she hadn't caught herself in the nick of time. Every breath in this place tastes staler than the one before it.
It's the bed. She's been here too long, however much time it's actually been. That's what it is. But she waits, even still. She watches for Redana's eyes to open, thinks about what she might say. Maybe she could open with a smile. Her intestines writhe like serpents inside of her. Her body pulls taut and rigid from her neck down to her toes. Bella flicks her fingers through the empty air, watching what claws she still has slicing through the air.
Fucking dumbasses. She snarls and slips her legs out from under Redana. She watches the most beautiful face in the world slump against the dingy sheets. Like finding pirate treasure tucked inside a napkin. She rolls her eyes and lifts Dany off the chair she's been stubbornly plastered to, and lies her in the bed. Your turn to rest, idiot.
Dany's lips open as she's moved. She mumbles something, and Bella freezes. For luck, she said. For luck. For a thousand different times she'd let a little debt build up, and now, and now, and now...
Breath swallowing breath. The heat of two pairs of lips, wet and begging for a tongue to brush them. The feeling of bodies that want only to press so tight together that they absorb each other. Two becoming one. Bella hesitates, a whisker away from the kiss she's dreamed of since the first time she saw those lips smiling at her. Her body turns to ice.
She turns, and runs instead. If only there was somewhere left to go.
*********
Bella's legs are soaked up to her shins. She's not even found the deepest part of the pool yet. Crabs snip at her priestess robes (the only outfit that belongs to her on the entire ship) as she passes by. Cold and clammy and uninviting. Everything is death and salt. Everything is misery and doubt and fear. Everything is tentacles, paranoia, and whispers.
For some reason it feels like home.
"...All this time they've been running from me in this? Fuck me, the Empress could cut me in half for failing her and it'd be less than I deserve. This. Seriously, this?! What the fuck have you been doing, Dany? Do you not have a single dipshit in your entire misfit brigade who knows how to clean up? Gods."
A wet tearing sound echoes through the sloshing water and empty halls. Bella lifts the battlecrab that had dared to claw the back of her skirt open up out of the water and squeezes until she feels the carapace start to splinter in her grip.
"Try it again! Just fucking try! Next one of you gargling little shits even thinks about it, I'm gonna turn this whole damn ship into a pot and boil the lot of you! Test me. Try it again. I dare you."
Had it been any other opponent, the sharpness of her words could only do so much to cover the awkward way she pulls her legs together, or the bushing of her tail. Gods, what an awful place. Gods, but isn't it exactly what she deserves.
...Gods, why does it remind her so much of Tellus?
The head of the Gods-Smiting Whip pivots to point its cameras at its own shattered arm. If lifts that arm up and pulls its fingers into a fist one by one, testing how many of the individual servos and signal transmitters remained functional through the damage. One... on and a half fingers' worth. Her tails detach from either side of the arm, shuddering as they hover from the tremendous amount of power that just routed through them. They almost seem droopy as they glide back to their neutral positions behind the main body.
"...I see."
Mirror pivots the trident in her mech's good arm and, pivoting on a dime, lobs it high into the air. A moment later her ambush-tails come rocketing back to her, and she snatches one out of the sky without turning to check her position. All of her focus is on Valentina de Alcard and the Lonely Star.
"Compensating for lost power and combat capabilities. Get it right this time."
She takes the tail and rams it through the hole in Nine-Tails' arm, which sends bits of armor plating crumbling to the ground below. There's a nauseating screech in the air as she rips open several more connectors to make room for this bizarre addition, until after one horrifying moment she finally sees the hand shut down completely and go limp. A twist of the arm, a sharp thrust toward the ground: with a rush of blue light, the lodged tail fires an unfocused burst of light from both ends of its rifle-like structure. The light show flickers and extends into the shape of a massive kite. With a new shower of sparks it transforms, now a solid thing of raw light and power. No longer an arm, but a shield.
Utter disaster. She rockets forward with her arm extended out in front of her, twisting at odd angles as she flies to stay out of the direct path of that deadly barrel as it winds back up for what would surely be the victory shot from this range. Utter, utter disaster. This shield functionality was what she originally meant to test in the first place, it's why she baited the shot. She simply hadn't considered the possibility that she wouldn't finish the configuration sequence in time. She planned for a full power burst, she wanted it... she'd caught her mouth on the barbs of her own pole.
Sequence one: shield slam. No more room for error. She entered this fight as a scientist, fought like a scientist, and then very nearly died like one. A prideful opponent. She'd expected patience, an opportunistic mindset. The sort of guileless cleverness you found in someone skilled enough to solve puzzles by slicing them in half, but then let that make them forget how to do it the more useful way. Somehow the reality of the woman in front of her was even cuter than that. Well, know what's good balm for an injured pride? A demonstration of the skill that gave her the space to conduct tests like this in the first place.
"Enemy targeting array: offline. Initiating close combat sequence, type three."
What follows is a demonstration. What follows is a dance. What follows is a lesson in what happens when you fight someone who has studied the properties of neural mesh much more diligently than you have. The Gods-Smiting Whip slides smoothly through the river and pops up underneath the Lonely Star. It kicks both feet into the riverbed and whips its shield-hand up into the face plate of the enemy mecha, and then lifts with its back to force the Lonely Star up into the air.
A flurry of punches and kicks. She pauses, poses, as if smiling, and in that precise moment her trident comes hurtling back down from the heavens. She catches it perfectly. Now her shield batters the colossal length of that deadly rifle first this way and that, and every time the momentum of the strike carries her off step she lights a thruster and spins around to slash with her beam weapon. She takes one arm, then the next. A leg. The chest, the stomach, the chest again. And again. And again.
Every strike looks brutal to the cameras, there is no doubt. And the damage she causes is readily apparent. Her whirlwind cuts the Lonely Star's fighting capability in half without so much as needing a napkin to confirm the math on. But these strikes are calculated much more precisely than that. Where Nine-Tails strikes, it does so with an eye for how Valentina's mesh suit in her own control rig will respond to the shocks. Hard enough to trigger a sensory mute, but careful not to let any one strike numb her completely.
This is a form of dance that Mirror has tested extensively. A thousand hours of training to create this one specific skill, shown only to worthy opponents with superior talents of their own. Valentina's world is transformed into a song of teasing fang bites and flicking swords. Slicing off her armor, piece by piece. Exposing her. Admiring her. And in the spaces where she's bared, the shield touches her and sends waves of energy rippling through the Lonely Star that her suit will interpret similarly to fingers on her skin. Touching. Caressing. Squeezing. Pinching.
It's over. The only question is how dignified her opponent is in defeat. The Gods-Smiting Whip pins the Lonely Star in among the rocks of the riverbed, pressing its lithe frame against the torso of the TC mecha, slowly sliiiiiiding along it with a shower of sparks and a scraping of paint. Her shield arm is planted deep into the earth, and her weapon arm is bend impossibly behind her, pointing that trident straight at the cockpit. Half threat, but half invitation.
"Well fought, Little Warrior," Mirror purrs over the public comms, "Would you like your reward now, or later?"
Floating behind her, seven tail modules spread out in undulating patterns. They ripple in what might be amusement or might be pride. The tip of each pivots toward the Lonely Star, and gleams with the promise of untold pleasure. The kind that only comes from submission.
[Fight w/ Daring: 9. Mirror flirts and takes a string, and seizes superior position]
What happened? She must have closed her eyes without realizing it. There had been a moment, she was sure of it, when she was flying. Held. Kissing. Falling. Hunger and terror and desperate passion pulled her down into the depths of a pair of lips that had haunted her dreams since she was a teenager, and then... what happened? She had meant to take in the whole scene herself. She was supposed to drink in every fraction of every second and burn it into her memory so that however long she had left to live, this at least would stay with her.
But there had still been work to do. The great beast who had once been the Master of Assassins was still roaring in her ears the entire time. An invincible opponent. An immortal opponent. But all she could remember is the sensation of falling, and now... it's as if the hydra never existed. The storm that marked the excellence of her preparation and her prayers, gone but for an arc of soft light in a prism of colors as if to mourn its passing. The battlefield that proved her dominance and terror is gone as well. Something happened. She can't remember closing her eyes. But one instant turned into the next and the entire world had transformed with it.
All that's left is... a garden. Not the kind that Sagakhan was so proud of, the wilting land of death and terror that she tended so obsessively for so long. This was a proper garden, like... no. Not like Redana's little paradise in the Tellurian palace at all. For the first time in her life, Bella's memories fall short of the reality around her. The colors here are more vibrant and beautiful than anything the Imperial miracles could conjure back home. The petals flutter more softly and more perfectly, turning the swirls of the gentle zephyr into a physical thing she can watch with her eyes, a dance of pinks and whites and yellows. The smell is sweet. So bewitching and wonderful that it makes her mouth water, and not even the passing bounty of Demeter on the Yakanov can rise to match it.
If... if there could only be a butterfly or two, this would be paradise. She might ask for music, too, piped softly into the air to help her Princess focus on her reading. She'd sing herself, but she. She can't. Remember any songs just now. The desire flutters out of her as nothing more than nonsense humming, and the magic of the gods is that to her softly twitching ears it sounds melodious and sweet. Somehow she's captured every lullaby and masterpiece she's ever known inside this ridiculous crooning.
Bella falls silent a moment later. It hurts. Singing hurts. Breathing hurts. But, the way it hurts is unlike anything she's ever known. This must be what Beautiful felt like when she was jabbed through with that needle carrying the Lethe. The hot stab and the burning feeling of something sticky and pervasive, like sap, and then... peace. The inevitability of it all is soothing, somehow. She sighs. She doesn't want her body to shut down like this. She doesn't want her body to stop feeling anything. Not when the sensations were finally the thing she had been dreaming about for her entire life.
She drags her arm up as high as it will go. Her fingers clumsily paw at Redana's face. Even in this perfect garden, she can't help but smear that perfect face with blood. Typical. But she can't bring herself to care. The feeling of her skin is soft and warm. If she wrapped her hand in Her Imperial Majesty's finest silks it wouldn't compare half so well to the wonder of this stupid girl's skin. Finally, she finds her grip. She squeezes, harder than she means to, to hold on. Her touch is so light it might not be noticeable at all. Bella laughs: a shaky, breathy, weak noise. Her grin is lopsided and exhausted.
"I... finally... caught you. Princess. Now you... can't..."
Ha. What a joke. All the weight of Bella's body slumps forward unsupported by any meager power she might have left inside her. Only Redana keeps her from dropping into the garden and sinking beneath the flowers like the rest of the dead and dying. Already, she can't even feel the sensation of being held. Being supported. All that's left is that calm inevitability. But that's ok. That's... ok. It's enough to see it with her eyes. It's enough to know it happened. Even if only once, before the end.
This is what she deserves. So many of the bodies here were names on her list. Murder was forbidden. No higher law existed in the Empire. Her secret purpose was no excuse, not now after she'd discarded her own flesh and denied her own transformation into Artemis. She had brought only death and misery with her on this journey, and the list of names stretched so far beyond the ones they'd asked of her. Lanterns, Kaeri, Magos and Coherents both. King Jas'o and the frenzied queen of Ceron. That pirate woman. She can't even remember the name.
Ivory Smile. Mynx. Oh, Mynx. If you were... if you could... no. It's too late. Her eyes are already falling shut, no matter how hard she wills them open again. Her head feels so heavy. The last memory of Sagakhan, her mother, swims through Bella's veins. Dragging her down, and down, and down again, until surely even Redana won't be able to hold her up anymore. After so much wishing for it, now it is finally time to die. Or perhaps some miracle will come to save her? She would shrug, if only she could. It doesn't matter. If she takes one more breath or one million, it doesn't matter. She will be a corpse or she will be a prisoner, and she'll deserve it either way. So much pain. So much misery.
And for what? In the end, she hadn't managed a single damn thing. That was the thing that really made her want to laugh, if she could just manage it right now. After all her effort and frantic scrambling, after every plan and scheme and choice, after each close call and bloody toll... she'd only wound up in the same place she would've anyway.
Something most people don't understand about puzzles is that they are actually weapons. The ultimate weapons, in fact. The faster you solve them the harder they hit, especially in warfare. Technically speaking this arena-level play fighting wasn't that, but the principle applied in equal measure to kittens testing the sharpness of their precious little teeth on each other's ears as it did to holding back a Zaldarian battle line. Information was power. Data was a sword and a shield. If you understood the nature of your opponent's strike, then...
"Evasive maneuvers, shifting power to left leg rear thrusters. Flip and flop, run and drop, as they say."
The first strike was irrelevant. The second was largely immaterial as well. The Gods-Smiting Whip bent at an impossible angle: one leg dangling in the air as if broken while the other drags the main back down toward the canopy in the direction of the river bed. The blast from the Lonely Star is enormous, more than powerful enough to puncture Mirror's frame clean through if it landed a direct hit. But Valentina's aim was perfect, which is to say incomplete. She led her shot to compensate for humanoid reflexes, humanoid movement capabilities. When Nine-Tails moved like a machine it converted a kill shot into so much superheated air.
"Excellent! Very well done, Milady!"
That was the proper way to speak to human nobility, right? The Consortium's society was enormously complex and consisted of a frankly nonsensical crisscross of ladders with ascending and descending hierarchy that seemed immune to common sense adjustments for familiarity and physical closeness. They each had social roles (defined as birth traits? Bizzare.) and defaulted to the assumption that everyone they met would automatically treat with them with according levels of respect or disrespect depending on myriad cues they simply refused to signal. It was even possible, though unlikely, that Valentina de Alcard was not qualified 'nobility' at all, in which case Mirror was committing a major taboo just now. But then, to what purpose was the designation if the visitors to a planet weren't afforded the distinction?
Well, that would be a puzzle for the Kiss and Cry, she supposed. In the meantime she made a spiraling dive for the tree cover, twisting out of the way of a second shot that was only slightly less accurate than it needed to be. Oh, beautiful calibration! She'd figured out the nature of the movement in just one demonstration! Mirror couldn't have asked for a more fun playmate to open her time in the arena with. It was only a shame they were operating on such different layers of the same puzzle together.
"Target lock acquired. Synchronization levels holding. Stabilizing. Destruction rains from the heavens."
The Gods-Smiting Whip takes the river, landing in a three point stance on its right knee as it plunges the beam trident into the rocky riverbed with a rush of boiling water and the soft shuddering of earth accepting a temporary scar. Just as it crashes, tails one and two unleash a barrage of energy bursts from their original position in the canopy above.
The first clips the side of the Lonely Star's giant weapon barrel. The second passes a whisker's breath away from its face plate. The next twenty two are total chaos. Rocks split clean in half as gleaming coal-like embers and dirt sprays in every which direction as shock after shock after shock of energy churns it up and spits it in the air like a great beast crawled out from mythology itself. The air turns to muddy steam that's quickly whipped into a whirlwind by the pattern of extreme heating and cooling happening to the poor air all over. But this level of assault is only sustainable for a few brief moments. The tails slink quietly down toward the ground, out of sight. The wind dissipates.
And the Lonely Star is completely untouched. Not a single shot fired from the entire barrage did more than mar its paint job a teeny little playful bit here and there, like cutting little scraps of clothing from a duelist to show your admiration in a much more ancient sort of ritual. Instead, Mirror has carved patterns into the ground on every side of her opponent. She's painted the Lonely Star into a box and dotted the entire thing with stylized heart symbols. As if that was the entire point of the exercise.
Nine-Tails rises to its full height, as two more tails float off of its back and seem to lock onto the mech's left forearm. It lifts its trident to the skies.
"I want to commend you for your choice of positioning. You claimed your territory with the precision I would expect from a huntress, I can't pay you any higher compliment than that. All the same, I'm sorry. I need a favor from you, cutie! See, my Nine Drive System is missing a lot of combat data. Data I need to finish it, understand? Of course you understand, good girl! So if you wouldn't mind..."
Mirror smashes her trident against Nine-Tails' forearm with an explosion of multicolored sparks. She settles into a deep stance and braces for impact, raising the arm like a shield in front of her.
Since the day she'd had the Auspex implanted, it had always shown her where to go. Omn had called it the Golden Path - a series of pulses of light that flitted across her vision even when she shut her eyes, always leading her across the fastest, most efficient path from one place to another. The more attention she paid it, the more details unfolded across her vision. She could will it into faint, ignorable specks or make it open a pattern so specific it told her exactly where, when, and how to place her feet to unerringly bring her victory. Or if nothing else, opportunity.
Bella is focusing now. One. Two. Three steps, and that's all there is. Just three steps. She turns her head, looking above and to every side. She frantically spins around, still holding Redana's wrist, but the terrible hydra is all she finds waiting behind her. Three steps, into the middle of this strange, awful hole. And then nothing. She feels ice fall into the pit of her stomach. No, but of course. There's no longer victory to be had. Her opponent is an immortal monster. Her mother. So this is where the eye of Hermes was leading her this entire time. Her mouth turns drier than the desert this planet used to be, and all her tongue can taste on the air is ash.
She'd been running from death since almost the moment she was born. Starvation and torture at the hands of the Kennel Master, or the hideous fate that waited for her inside the dark confines of the box. The humid, fetid bogs and jungles festering inside the Eater of Worlds. The dark and claustrophobic openness of the lonely floating grave called the Yakanov. In the end she fled from every single one. No god terrified her more than Hades, whose priest she was forced to murder. Whose priest she failed to save. Even now, with death a certainty ahead of and behind her, a cowardly servitor finds no hero's nobility quickening in her veins. Her heart pounds frantically against her fate. Too little, too late. The lord of the dead stands there waiting. A shovel over his shoulder. And three steps left to her for the rest of her life.
Two. She's long since run out of bile to cough up. Venom eats away her strength and replaces it with the sensation of ten thousand needle teeth clamping down around her insides with powerful jaws to guide them. Skin and organs split, and blood leaks internally. She can feel it pooling in her arm. Come on, is this really how she's gonna go out? She chokes back a scream, but it dribbles out as a whimper. No closure. No happy ending. Just the conclusion of her misery; the proof that she was first and only a wicked monster. No matter how hard she tried to be anything else. Too many sins to count, Bella. Pay up. You did save your coins to pay for the ferry, right? Or was even Tartarus too good for her, compared with eternity trapped inside the close and crushing dark?
One. This is it. The time she has to say goodbye. To say I... to tell Redana the words etched across her heart. To burden her princess with one last thing before the end. Or perhaps, one last chance to redeem herself. The Auspex is the eye of Hermes. The path must be telling her to stand her ground here. In falling, she could save Redana's life. That wouldn't... be so bad. Maybe then, at least, the gods would forgive her for this life she lived so impiously. If only she'd learned how to pray. She glances around one more time. No steps. No Apollo with his insufferable eternal smile. No Artemis in her crisp moonlight suits. No Hera to squeeze strength into her shoulders. Just a cigarette, where Aphrodite used to be. And Hades, all alone.
Bella squeezes Redana's wrist as tightly as she can. It's time you idiot, let her go! The ember of that cigarette butt burns as hot as any star. She twists her fingers deep into the skin, trying to claw herself free only--
Only she'd given up her claws. XIII's claws. And nobody trusted Bella with her talons anymore. Her heartbeat stumbles. Bella feels herself fall as if from a great height, tumbling over and over again into herself without her feet ever leaving the ground. Why? Why, why, why? Why had they taken her claws from her? What did she do to deserve mutilation like this? What did that little girl do wrong to deserve so much pain? Sagakhan had told her it was all to grow her perfected body, but that was already rotting into the sands. So. Then. What if?
Was it... for this?
"Redana, what the fuck are you dooIInG?!"
Bella's feet leave the ground. Her arm is pinned between hers and Redana's bodies, and the only thing she can think to do with the other is throw it tight around the Princess' shoulder and cling. No more steps. There are no more steps for her to take. No more steps, and nothing to do, except be held. And then be kissed.
She feels the warmth of Redana's lips as they press indelicately against hers. Her tongue tastes blood, and for once Bella has no desire to spit it out. She feels no nausea, even as her mouth finds the corner of Redana's that's been split almost entirely open and she's forced to contemplate the texture of a wound on her palate. She holds her eyes open, so she sees Redana's close. It's a private moment that belongs only to her. Their tongues dance, and the expression that paints Redana's face is... relief. Fire roars hot to replace the ice inside her stomach. Hades recedes farther, and farther, and farther away as two children of Tellus take to the sky as if on wings.
Bella is still watching her princess when she opens her eyes again. 'For luck', she says. Moron! Idiot! Stupid dipshit royal dumbass!! Heat colors Bella's cheeks as a fresh surge of pain crawls up through her chest. She snarls as she watches the ground pass below. She clings to Redana to try and hide a coughing fit.
"You still read," she sputters, "Too many fucking stories."
"Cat in the jungle. Ah. Jokes. Do I watch playback on mute? Mm, no. Can't resist. Besides, it's more instructive in the event of a loss."
Stub-clawed fingers glide over a series of switches and dials, clicking the row on the top-left of the main panel into the proper positions with a chorus of extremely satisfying clunks. The smooth palm and spotted fur of the hand glow in the harsh cockpit lighting, rippling with motion as they grasp a large lever and tug it forcefully into a neutral position.
Her spare hand takes a moment to pluck at the skintight jumpsuit clinging to her body like it's trying to merge with her. She shifts the fabric a bit so it pinches her tummy a little less, but her muscles tug it right back the second she shifts. She shrugs. The material's amazing at keeping sweat off her skin so she can't really mind it too much, as hot as it gets in here. Her leg stomps down on a foot pedal as two liquid eyes flit over information displayed across a dozen different screens and pop ups.
And in the jungle, Nine-Tails takes a single cautious step. The lithe frame of the mecha tightens its grip around the trident in its hands, while its eight free floating "tail" units hover quietly behind it, with only the occasional pink spark from the energy matrix that keeps them linked with the main machine.
"Systems check, all green. Input delay measuring at seven milliseconds; within expected parameters. Beginning first live combat test... now."
Mirror's face scrunches into a light frown. It tended to do that when she was happy, and in particular when she was happy about being presented with a challenge. In a less cramped environment she might also stretch her spine and stand up on her tiptoes, but inside the confines of her mecha all she can do is hunch forward in her chair to grip the joysticks tighter. The great secret of the Gods-Slaying Whip: it had no neural link of any kind. Consequently, that made her one of only a tiny handful of people in the known galaxy who might be able to pilot it at all.
But this was not the time for self congratulation. The value of the systems hadn't proven themselves yet, except on paper. Over a year's worth of obsessive thought, sleepless nights, and long arguments with her family, and so far all she had to show for it was what she referred to as a Pattern Puzzle. Each layer of the riddle unfolded to reveal a new dependency in the pattern, such that you couldn't simply brute force a bunch of colors together on a cube and call it good. Every piece needed to be arranged just so in order to get the shape of the puzzle on the next level to reveal itself, and even a correct seeming solution could only show her parts of what was underneath it. She wouldn't know if she'd done it properly until she got down to the core and received her reward. It reminded her of the way AI logic was woven out of such dense tangles of visual information that spoke to artistry almost as much as systems mastery, and how without any given piece of seemingly pointless data the entire thing would become so much inert sludge. Hence, the name. Satisfying.
"Layer one: disadvantage."
For as much as the... preliminary matches still had commentary teams, right? They didn't save that for the later, more important rounds? That would be a disappointment to learn. Regardless, while any hypothetical commentary team would doubtless be wasting infinite air calling this her home territory, the truth was that it (to use a popular human expression) 'hardcore sucked'. The true power of her Nine-Tails was in its adaptability, but that required space she didn't have in all this dense foliage for her tails to move about freely. Additionally, since her rig used camera feeds instead of pushing sensory information directly into her head, any sort of information dense battleground would naturally take her longer to process than a sufficiently talented opponent using a more traditional control scheme. The difference would be measured in fractions of a second, if that, but smaller windows had cost her more.
"Moreover, can only make assumptions. Moreover, minimal confirmation of enemy combat tactics. Moreover, determining position amounts to determining weapon capabilities."
Mirror nodded to herself. These would be good logs to have for later. She should install an audio recorder later if she found the time. But in the meantime, the shape of the Pattern was still becoming known to her. If the Lonely Star was a... what was the word again? In her native tongue it would be a [Far Seer] but with a human opponent it felt important to think in human terminology. A sharp shooter, perhaps? Regardless. If it primarily operated on the principles of long range, high precision marksmanship, then Valentina would respond to a threat-level response with a full power kill shot, ideally from the edge of her viable range. But if that tiny frame were focused more exclusively on maneuverability, she'd already be using the tree cover to slip in closer.
In either case the solution was to close distance and establish her Zone overtop of the Lonely Star's, but without knowing the exact size and shape of her enemy's Zone it would be impossible to properly manifest control. If she prepared for the wrong angle of attack then her own lightly armored unit would fall before it got a chance to gather any useful data. Unacceptable risk.
"Information wars cut both ways," she clicked her tongue while musing, "Must remember that."
This was the hidden layer of the challenge: victory was irrelevant in the face of learning. As far as the tournament was concerned, the only important thing was to qualify out of the preliminary matches and enter the main rounds where she'd actually be able to do everything she needed. A perfect record beforehand was excessive. If others mocked her for dropping an early fight... well, they mocked her plenty as is. Irrelevant. Of vastly greater importance was disguising the full capabilities of Nine-Tails. The less others understood the functionality of her tails, the greater her advantage would be when it mattered. As such, she'd already calculated she could only afford to use one third of her full capability in qualifications.
"Establishes a baseline response anyway. Important work."
In any case, it was a question of understanding enemies, understanding spaces. Understanding the biome reached a distant third. Based on publicly available information, it could reasonably be assumed that if Mirror took the river safely, she would win without question. At least, no one reasonable would question it. The answer to the riddle, then, was to establish reason and position at the same time.
...She's spent this long standing still in reasonably exposed space without being attacked. That's an answer in and of itself, really. But even still, one could never finish a puzzle using only negative information. Two tails shouldn't make for too big a strain on her concentration, right?
"Nine Drive System is active. Initiating full burn. Come and get me, if you dare."
The Gods-Smiting Whip shares no tactile data with Mirror as it first crouches low into the wet ground and then leaps high into the air on a burst of thruster fire, but that only makes the G-forces feel more potent as they force her back into her chair. It brings a knee up without her needing to, it twists it's back and arcs into a high flip as it clears the trees and hangs in the open air for three glorious seconds. Six tails follow as if on strings. Two more, hidden and waiting at the edge of the canopy. Mirror jerks her joysticks hard and her mech twists in the air, flourishing its trident with menace and purpose. Six buttons in sequence, and her hidden tails lock together like the barrel of an oversize rifle.
Her heartbeat quickens. This is what it truly feels like to fly.
She'd spent her entire life crafting that armor, and not even realized it. Every worry made it grow harder and more invincible, every doubt sharpened its claws. Fear wrapped it in thorns so it could keep her safe, and envy made it larger so that she could become a titan. It was supposed to make her perfect. In actual fact a god; finally making good on the promise she made in the darkness of the Yakanov. It was supposed to swallow her, the ultimate monster that every other monster had to run from. It was supposed to crush her into oblivion, until the name Bella vanished from lips across the universe, and even XIII would vanish into the ocean called Artemis.
It was perfect. She was perfect. Mere minutes away from accession. Tearing herself free was an act of insanity, one that had cost her the power of the gods and the paltry reserves stored inside her own body at the same time. Even now, her lungs burn as if the wet forest air was thick with SP smoke. Even now her legs tremble from the effort of supporting her body. Her spine longs to curl forward and never straighten again, not for all the pride in the universe. Her mutilated fingers tremble uncontrollably: naked lances of fire that scream at the barest kiss of air. The water pouring down is unbearable.
And yet.
Bella launches herself at Sagakhan, and it feels like she's grown wings. She soars over the sand, now covered with sodden leaves, and her feet barely touch the ground. One, two, three monstrous heads lash out at her as she comes. From above, and from either side. She reaches into the air, not knowing what to expect, and snatches at the sky with her bare hand. She disappears in a blink, reappearing at the top of the canopy of fresh trees, and. Oh. She's grown wings after all.
She plunges with the seeming of a spear hurtled from heaven. Sagakhan's heads pivot on a pin and snap at her with a series of furious hisses, but none of the fangs sink into her flesh. There's a burst of light, a flash of color she can't afford to notice right now, and unlimited attacks somehow turn into straight on thrusts and snaps that she can counter directly. Bella's whole body burns, but it burns with a rush of elation and a surge of golden power that feels lighter and happier than any sensation she can remember. Even with her sharpest claws removed, even without talons to replace them, the ones she's still got left are sharp and strong enough to carve deep wounds in Sagakhan's armored scales and spill her toxic blood in great hissing splashes that wilt foliage to nothing wherever it falls.
Bella rises and falls. She cuts circles around her opponent and flashes from corner to corner with a speed, precision, and sense of easy grace she couldn't have hoped to match as XIII. She is the true manifestation of the storm. She is the tool you send to fight the rainforest. She is the spear, the sword, the hammer, raining blows from above and below at the same time. She can be a weapon because she does not need to be a shield. Without the fear, she's lighter. Without the doubt she's stronger. Sharper, more precise, calmer. Free.
Her name is Bella. Named for her beauty. The Imperial Maid. A Praetor, chosen by no less than Empress Nero herself. She hops lightly out of the way of snapping heads, crushing tail blows, and claws larger than her entire head. She catches one deathblow between her hands, sinking half to her knees before she finally manages to throw it to the side. Suddenly all she can think about is Prion Paula. What a stupid thing to think about, when she's dancing on the edge of death with a monster beyond her power to kill? But she smirks, in spite of herself. Even laughs, in a brief sort of snort. And that feels... nice. Fuck it, then. Chan-barra-chan.
Ah, she's light. She's so light. What did she ever need that armor for?
Two heads roar in her face and snatch at her with deadly sharp teeth. Her saliva singes the fur on Bella's arms just from being this close. They bite down, and there's no time or space for clever dodging this time. Her shield is occupied elsewhere. All she can do is twist her body so the teeth can't get anything vital. She sacrifices a shoulder and her opposite elbow to keep her body safe. Her skin crawls and burns with the sensation of hot beads being endlessly pushed into it and rolled around by some giant, malicious thumb. She does not scream. She grits her teeth and wrenches her limbs free, and as she wheels around her foot crushes into one of Sagakhan's jaws. She takes the head in both her hands and wrenches it with all of her might, smashing it into the other one over. And over. And over again.
Until the scales split. Until the teeth shatter against each other. Until the bones grow soft and twin necks slump with the listlessness that hers long to, even now in the middle of her golden song. She stumbles back, and twists her neck to touch her lips to her injured shoulder. Suck, and spit. She wipes her lips clean and repeats the process on her arm. There, you stupid bitch. If cutting heads won't work, she'll crush them instead.
The smirk falls off her face immediately. The rest of Sagakhan's heads rises up and contemplate their fallen companions. The great Master of Assassins roars her displeasure, and crunches down on her own neck. The hydra lashes furiously, biting and tearing again and again and again until her useless, broken heads lie severed on the ground, skin and scale and muscle already dissolving down to misshapen bone. All around her is a graveyard made of herself. She gnaws it with a monster's zeal. New heads grow to replace the ones she ate herself. And she grows larger to accommodate them. Her teeth grow sharper. Spines rise and shiver along her back and at the tip of her tail.
But she does not grin. She does not laugh or taunt or condescend. She hisses and smashes her new club of a tail through several giant trees in a single catastrophic motion. And somehow, that's the cruelest thing of all.
"You called me your daughter," says Bella with enough venom to rot a hydra skull, "In front of Zeus almighty, you called me your child."
Her hands ball into fists. She rises as straight and tall as her body can manage, and stomps her foot into the ground.
"You disgust me, you worthless piece of shit. How dare you? How dare you! After everything you stole from me, how dare you say that and throw it all away?!
"Kill me if you can, I don't give a fuck. I'll come back, see if I don't. If it takes me three hundred years I'll find you. And I'll drag you with me. I will. Never forgive you."
Her shoulder burns. Her arm burns.. Bella squeezes her fingers again to keep from pulling her arms taught against herself. She snarls so she doesn't scream. Her eyes betray her, and wander away from the fight for the first time. Of course they land on Redana. Now her body burns with shame, too.
Sorry, Dany. This is gonna be a pretty short reunion. Whatever, it's not like she had much a future left anyway, after everything that's happened.
Her heart beats wildly against the thought. She punches her chest and hisses. Shut up, you.
Mira of the Fisher Clan, Whose Star Name is Whispered Promise Mira Fishers || Whispered Promise Mirror
The One-Day Defender Up-and-coming fashion designer Mayze Szerpaws, see her work in La Plataforma The Trickster
DARING +2 GRACE 0 HEART -1 WIT +2 SPIRIT 0
FEELINGS 3 (0-4)
Start at 1 and increase your Feelings by 1 each time you gain a String, someone gains a String on you, or you mark a Condition. You may also choose to increase your feelings any time you find yourself gasping or swooning over someone. Strings assigned during character creation don’t increase your Feelings. When you open up to someone whose regard matters to you, reduce your Feelings by 2. When you secretly perform a loving act for someone, reduce your Feelings by 1. If your Feelings track reaches 4, you can’t hold it in anymore. Tear off the mask and scream what you’ve been holding in, do what you’ve been afraid to do, and damn the consequences. You can give anyone present a String on you to gain a String on them. Stop when the consequences catch up to you, for good or ill. Afterwards, reduce your Feelings to 0 and clear a Condition. It feels good to get it out, at least in the moment.
EW, FEELINGS When someone offers you Emotional Support and you refuse to open up, increase your Feelings by 1 and choose 1 from the listed options for that move as if they rolled a 7-9. If they rolled a 10+, they know they got through to you; they gain the benefits of the 10+ result as if you had opened up.
THE MASK When you seek to persuade an NPC of a lie about yourself, roll +Wit: 10+: Choose 2 7-9: Choose 1 # They believe a big lie # The lie you have chosen is unexpectedly perfect, creating a new opportunity #They give you the benefit of the doubt and remain convinced even if there is some evidence of your lie Additionally, whenever a PC Figures You Out, you can give false answers. You must increase your Feelings by 1 at the end of any scene where you do this.
CENTER OF THE WEB When someone approaches you to get something from you or threaten you, choose 1: # Gain a String on them and they lose a String on you # Ask them a question from the Figure Out a Person move # +1 ongoing against them for the scene
DEVIOUS SCHEME When others go along with your cunning plan, roll +Wit: 10+: Choose 2 7-9: Choose 1 # Produce just the right object # Describe an unexpected weakness in an obstacle # Appear right behind someone in a crucial moment
A BEAUTIFUL LIE When you become Smitten with someone, say why, give them a String, and answer this question: “What secret do you have that you think would make them reject you if they knew?”
I SEE THROUGH YOU When you Figure Out a Person during physical conflict, you may additionally ask one of these questions, even on a 6-: # Who do you want me to be? # What are you most afraid of right now?
CONDITIONS
STRINGS 3 on Valentina de Alcard 1 on Solarel 1 on Crescent 1 on Smokeless Jade Fires
XP [X] [X] [X] [] []
Mirror is a member of the water-loving Fisher clan, and has spent a large part of her life bouncing around various science stations at the fringes of Hybrasil space.
Like the rest of her race, she is a feline humanoid with fur covering the majority of her body, except for her palms and the soles of her feet. Her fur is reminiscent of a snow leopard, a thick coat of cool white dotted all over with complicated black spotted patterns. Her face is unusually sharp and angled for a member of her family (who favor rounder overall head shapes), giving her something of a gaunt appearance that permanently makes her look like she's scowling. Her ears are large, wide, flat, and decorated with dozens of colorful piercings in an assortment of shaped and polished stones, none of which are particularly rare or valuable. The tip of her right ear is missing a large chunk from an old accident or childhood fight. Do not ask her which.
Her eyes are a vibrant aquamarine, and she's had them treated several times with [Falling Star Serum] to give them a permanently flowing, liquid quality. The hair atop her head is even whiter than her fur, and she's carefully grown it out for over a decade. She lets it hang in thick sheets down to her butt most of the time, but enjoys tying feathers into it to add color. While piloting, she also wears a headband to keep it out of her face. Her jet black claw-nails are kept cut short and filed down to blunt nubs.
Mirror's body is athletic and muscled as befits a typical pilot and guardian in her society, but there's a softness and a sort of fragility to the way she moves that along with her graceful and unsubtle curves that has given her a wildly effective side career as a model. Depending on the pose she strikes and the angle she's viewed from she can seem imposing, harder than crystal and stronger than the branch of a dwelling tree, or she can look vulnerable and meek, or playfully silly, or sultry and manipulative, or anything else the shoot or situation requires. As a model she'll wear anything and everything a job needs, but her own fashion tastes favor tight, legless skinsuits, heavy diving belts and metal clips, and necklaces made from the discarded teeth of various ocean predators, and her own designs go out of their way to cut out extra fabric to bare more of her fur patterns and as many parts of her body as she thinks is tasteful, which varies with the day.
She is considerably taller than the average height of her species, towering over her family by a full three and a half centimeters. This still makes her positively tiny by galactic standards.
Her mecha, the Gods-Smiting Whip || Nine-Tails {The Beast Who Gathers Power} or {The Hidden Reeds Where We Meet To Hunt}, is a speed-focused current gen model with a lithe frame and control nodes built into its head to resemble serval ears. A black power conduit runs down its spine to end in a tail, a common aesthetic conceit among Hybrasilian mecha.
Nine-Tails' armor plating is segmented around the joints to assure maximum mobility along all points of articulation. It is painted in deep earthen browns and shining onyx blacks along the head and chest pieces, with a creamy offwhite coloration across the limbs. It is equipped with a beam trident and, more unusually, eight free floating ornaments roughly the same size and shape as a standard issue beam rifle. It is the topic of intense debate among people who have seen her fight how the hell it is she actually controls them, but she does so with otherworldly deftness. Each of the eight ornaments {Sacred Tails} can be fired or swung independently, or combined to form new weapon configurations.
Log 1: Freedom. At last.
Log 2: Feels about the same. Fish is better prepared. Not overcooked. I really don't mind either way.
Log 3: This isn't working. Current model is operating at suboptimal parameters. I can't match her like this.
Log 4: Frustrating.
Log 5: I can't stay here. Need new perspectives. Different approach. Different tech? I will travel.
Log 27: Human fashions are fascinating. Unnecessarily prudish. I can fix them.
Log 52: Mother, Father, Second Mother. Sister and Brothers. I will make you proud. I swear it on the stars, for you to hear some other day. I love you all.
There was. A name. There was a name. There was a name on her lips, on the day that she was born. She was screaming it as she was waking up. Or had she been falling asleep? She can't remember. A skull splitting pain pierces her brain like a drill. She can't remember. She can't! Remember!
...They wrote the name on her forehead so that she would remember. It was the most important name on her list of thousands. In desperation she reaches for her head, claws scrabbling across the blood smear where it ought to be, but all that's there are white hot lances of pain. The name. The name! Where is it? What is it?! Give it to her! But it's gone. It's gone. There should be a name and it's gone. And all that's left is pain. All that's left is longing. All that's left is --
flustered bewilderment and trembling hands when it was time to wash the same gym clothes she'd cleaned a hundred times before. The stillness of a movie theater that she could not in all her life imagine deserving to inhabit, emptied just for her and the girl without a name. The fluttering of violet-black butterfly wings in a garden too beautiful to pay attention to history lessons in. A bouquet of rose-scented perfume. The pounding of her heart as she snuck under the covers of the nameless girl's bed for the first time. The look of betrayal and hurt on her face when she finally got the medicine she needed forced down her throat. The tears in her eyes before she shut that closet door. The screaming match. The graceless but somehow perfect smile of a girl as her head shone like an angel's. She opened the Box and set her free and her smile was brighter than the sun's just before she fell and --
Bella opens her eyes for the first time in a lifetime. Not looking up from a pit or trapped inside the body of an assassin, but here in the middle of a blood-soaked battlefield and a strange desert planet she'd never known before. The face in front of her isn't smiling this time. Her eyes are older, and mismatched green and blue where they ought to be simple little oceans unto themselves. She's more beautiful than pretty, more tragic than heroic, and not half so wise as she ought to be for all of her adventures. But she has a name, something Bella could never forget even if you tortured her and whittled her down into nothing but a barely beating heart.
"REDANA!"
She screams and struggles against her body. Her hands around her Princesses' throat. Redana doesn't say anything in response; she can't with her windpipe rolling under Bella's thumbs. Her claws bite into the skin and she can only scream the name, again and again and again, and wrench backwards with all her might only to crawl further and further forward to a thing she can't take back. Redana, Redana, Redana! She'd been screaming it with all her strength back then. Redana, Redana, Redana! Calling for the only person who could save her.
And she came. After everything she'd said, she came. After everything she'd done, she came. All the lives she took, all her imperfections laid bare, the monster revealed where the Princess had only wanted a silly little pet, but even still she came. That. Idiot!
Bella squeezes her eyes shut tight again, and screams. It's a horrible thing to listen to, tortured and quivering and very, deeply human. Her body convulses with the pain of a thousand hot knives flaying her skin. Slipping under sinew and ripping, tearing. Popping. Her ears shudder and clamp shut to drown out the chorus of wet tearing noises and pitiful moans, but how can she drown it out when it all belongs to her? Her body longs to collapse. Her brain screams at her to sink back into her skin, just stop before she kills herself. She pulls harder.
The Diodekoi armor unfurls at her back like a flower. Folds of spikes and chitin unfurl in layer after layer, revealing the now black-stained muscle fibers still quivering and fighting to hold her in place. She wrenches with every spare speck of might left inside her body, and with one final explosion of pain, XIII and Bella part ways forever.
Her skin feels frozen in the cold rain. Her fur feels sticky and clumped, like her hair, soaked through with blood in every weave of its clumsy braid. About her body what had been pristine white robes have turned translucent pink that sticks to her skin and does nothing to protect her like her skin... no. Like the armor had. She lifts a foot and kicks the Diodekoi away from Redana's body, but the jerkiness and unfamiliarity of the motion makes her slip, and all she does is make it collapse on top of her.
"...Whatever. You. Obviously need it more than I do. Idiot."
She doesn't smile. Doesn't cry. Bella simply looks down at her hands. At the claws on her hands that seem less sharp and deadly than the ones she'd had just minutes ago, and all the less for the mutilated stubs her index and middle fingers ended in once again. She didn't even have any talons to cover them with, her only jewelry was the worthless gold bracelets about her wrists and arms, and the circlet squeezing against her forehead. She lifts her arms to put it straight, at the very least.
Her ear twitches. Her back arches. Bella pivots on her bare feet and she lashes it with both her useless hands to turn aside the thunderbolt that is Sagakhan's tail. She can't keep the wince off her face. Her wrist feels numb. But even so, she snarls and hunches low to the ground, as if about to pounce.
"You can't have her," Bella says, and her voice is soft and strong and finally hers again, "Redana's mine."
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