Phoe

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Kat's spine is so stiff with fear that for a moment she can't even turn her head to see what just happened. Her tails are floofed at maximum, and her ears lay crushed so flat into her hair that she could be mistaken for an ordinary human girl sitting on a pair of bristly mint-green pillows.

It takes an embarrassingly long time for it to sink in that she's not in trouble. And not in danger, either. She clutches her chest with one hand and feels the hammering of her poor terrified heart. For a moment she'd really believed that, that, that...

Katherine blinks. Realization strikes like the grinding of a particularly ill kept clock.

"Oh nyo!" she exclaims as she rises to her shaky, shaky feet, "Oh nyo oh nyo oh nyo! Kitty put that down, it's bad for you! That's not a regular yummy bird, it's full of... uh, oils! And bad attitude! And terrible opinions! You're gonna get sick!"

But no sooner does she go running after it than does the cat decide to get serious about avoiding her. Or at the very least, serious about toying with her. Goodbye, jaunty swagger. Goodbye, piercing and arrogant yet somehow adorably endearing stare. Hello, adroit weaving through posts decorated with very fragile looking vases and lanterns. Hello, death defying leaps at the last second onto difficult to climb rocks. Hello, incredibly irritating move where you appear caught but then wriggle through the space between her legs and somehow in this exchange she's the one who caught claws?

Katherine dives, desperate. She eats dirt, desperater. She spits, not so desperate but still with fervor.

The gears grind on. The clock chimes the second revelation.

"B-B-Berserker!" she squeaks in horrified astonishment.

"You gotta help me, Ms. Berserker! I mean don't, don't hurt Kitty ok? But we need that bird! It's a clue! It's a really super important clue: we can't trace its oil bird magic back to the source of all this if it gets eaten! Plus it's gonna be reaaaaaaaaaaalllllll nasty if Kitty gets, like, possessed or something y'know? You ever tried arguin' with a, oof! Dang it!! Cat? Arguin' with a bird's one thing, but never never never get into it with a meowmeow! Just, just, trust, argh! No come back here, I neeeeeed thaaaaaaat~"

Breathless Dead

In spite of herself, Bella's mouth has turned completely dry. Her lips beg for moisture, and she scans the room for her glass and finds it frustratingly empty. Her surprised swallow catches in her throat. The air is filled with the smell of gasoline and shaved iron, with hot spices and tannin. It makes her nose itch, but she does not dare to scratch it.

She leans back, folding her arms across her chest in the face of this intruder. Though it is not the shock of her arrival or the threat of her legions that has stopped her heart like this.

"Y-you..." her voice cracks with longing.

The crowds are cleaner, sweat and swagger and metal, all of the pride and none of the misery underneath the tide of pheromones waiting so patiently for anyone to make a move that they can meet with aggression. Here is gathered perfection. Here lies the shadow that an immortal, perfect empire has wasted precious resources and many of its best ideas trying to biomantically engineer a solution that might at last run it through with light. But that shadow is not named Ceron. It is not even named Nemesis.

It is Tellus. Tellus as Nero dreamed it. The secret wish inside the heart of an Empress.

Bella's chest constricts around the point where she once felt the screams of that divine heart breaking. Tears stream gently from her grim red eye.

"I, I don't care about any of that," she says, and she cannot keep the reverence or longing out of her voice, "J-just... just tell me."

She reaches out and places her palm on top of the Shogun's.

"Do you see Her? Does She speak to you? Wh-when. Was the last time you?"

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Her eyes are wet.

For all that she is filled with a thing that someone might call strength, Katherine is unused to violence. That is, the suddenness of everything shocks her, and the shock is enough to spring a leak in her smile.

But she does smile. Her teeth sparkle in the firelight, and the shadows pull out the dimples in her sharp and delightfully foxy cheeks.

"It's really nice to meet you Pedro, I'm Kat. I've had so much fun today."

Her voice quivers when she speaks, but by the end of her sentence she has managed to put so much sparkle into her words that the period reads more like a heart emoji. Her hands let go of the brush and Berserker's hair: she's been at it so long that it has turned the kind of soft and lustrous that would make it a sin to carry on even a single stroke further.

But now that her hands are empty, she doesn't know what to do with them. She tries resting her chin in her palms but she can't find a comfortable place to put her elbows. She tries rubbing her eyes but she doesn't like how wet her face feels after, so she stops. She tries holding her arms behind her head to look cool and relaxed, but she's too self conscious to say goodbye like that.

So she ends up waving, instead. She is not messing this up.

"You're always welcome for tea, ok? Yue just found some super interesting pu-erh that I didn't think I would like? But it's surprisingly tasty, I bet you'd like it! Next time you're in the neighborhood come say hi, ok? I'll keep a cup ready for you! You've gotta, ok? It's a promise, ok?"

She flops back onto the grass, feeling the heat in the air all around her. She watches the glittering sparkles close by mix with the bursts of glittering lights that now dot the stars, and smiles wider than ever.

Return to Thellamie

"Oh," says Erika Fullbright through the hand clasped over her mouth, "Oh dear."

It is at the very least not necessary to feign surprise. It really had been her intention to adjust the card game only, and here she'd gone and somehow flipped the entire table over! What had done it? Did Miss Osorio Scarlett catch an implied double shell game when she saw the extent to which the cards had been read? Is this some sort of Aestivali rivalry thing?

She hastily dives for her sketchbook and starts scribbling a rough estimation of two fox women clashing in a little duel: one with a fan, the other with (please forgive her artistic license, she can't see right now) a sickle dagger. It's a rough thing, abstract, there's no time to make it better and Erika isn't the sort of person who cares all that much. What matters is the information it conveys.

"Hey, um," she glances up from her book where her pencil is currently dancing, over to the woman still on the near side of the table with her, "She sounds like she's losing over there. Your friend I mean. Shouldn't you, like, help her?"

It shouldn't be surprising that a sellsword would be quick to blows when accusations of foul play are in the air. What is very surprising is that Timtam wasn't prepared for this. Now it was a question of battle lines. How tenuous were the connections Timtam was counting on? Were these two fighters hired separately, or together? Was it significant that Osorio Scarlett had gone right for Timtam and not for the pillar of a woman across from her, or was that down to positioning or a nose for trouble? A lucky guess?

She makes a noise under her breath that's half giggle and half a colon followed by a three Tell her more, dear guests! Please please please, spill all your secrets while you're busy, if you do not much mind~!

Erika ducks and scrambles down from her seat and scooches along the wall as fast as she can, ostensibly to get away from the fighting. There is a very frightened look plastered across her face. How could this have happened? And what is she supposed to do about it? Fight? Oh dear me goodness no!

Although.... as she eyes the door to the stairway.... well, there are a bunch of very strong looking, erm, "nuns" downstairs who would no doubt be highly interested in breaking up a fight~~

A maid knight's duty is to honor, and to her mistress. But a detective's duty is to justice, so if you'll just let her, uh, oops don't bump into anybody now ok? Easy does it Erika.

Breathless Dead

No soft touch of hand on wool. No comfort sought in the tactile sensations of friendship. No pleasure or allure in the chiming of a bell or in sharing an old drink again. No comforting touch. No reassurances.

No.

"Why do this to yourself, Dolce? You didn't have your shit together on that side and you don't over here either. None of us do, it's all the same. What, like remembering every vivid detail of all the times I tried to plot your death is some great treat for me. Give me a break."

Bella sighs. She rolls over onto her stomach and rests her chin in the crook of her elbow so she can glare properly at her friend. Above her head, her tail flicks irritably back and forth. The signal for agitation: only the tired slack across the rest of her body keeps her from looking like she is ready to pounce.

"Everything I remember is a punishment. It got put back in my brain so I would have to keep living with myself instead of getting to run away into that stupid wall of meat that called herself Mosaic. There's no answers in it. I'm not lucky. I'm not fortunate to 'have Gaia to aim at', I was just desperate enough to see the Rift and think, 'yeah that's better than keeping like this'. It -- do you --"

She takes several deep sniffs of the air, and snarls. It's all the same. He still smells the same, that frustratingly incomplete scent and total lack of guile that renders him incapable of reading all the cues he needs to have in order to fit in where he belongs. Which is the problem. Which is the point.

A hand sinks into the wool. There is no comfort sought there, only substance.

"...Right. It's not fair of me. Is that the point you were making? I'm sorry. You and I have never had a juicy tell-all sort of relationship. So you're gonna have to take it with a grain of salt when I tell you that as far as I know you didn't have a wish that you could have said out loud before the crossing. So if you don't have one now, that's just more of the same to me. You're still broken, Dolce. That's why you left, because there wasn't anything for you back there."

She uses him as a lever to push herself back onto her feet. Her palm on his skull is enough to knock him over, but when she rises she pulls him back up with her. When she lets go she shakes her head, and watches him with the closest approximation to gentleness she can manage at the moment.

"I'm not... I'm not telling you to fuck off. I'm telling you to trust the idiot heart that whispered my name to a monster that wanted to drink your blood. I'm telling you to trust whatever voice inside you that made you think you had to thank me for what I did to Sanalessa. I'm not telling you a story. I'm telling you that when you realize who that knife is really for... you'll know what your wish was. What it's always been."

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"Mmmm, mmmm-- mhm?"

Kat is engaged in the act of sitting on a hill just a little ways above her Servant, taking a brush to Berserker's hair and making it glisten in the fading light while her eyes flutter closed, open, closed, and open again in short and happy little bursts. It is not that she has forgotten the urgency of this moment or of the job she'd wound up tasked with. It's just that, when the sun gives you scritchies, the only proper thing to do is take a second to enjoy them.

She looks over at Caster after a moment and offers him a little shrug.

"Well sure, right? I mean, what else is there to say at the end?"

Berserker stiffens when Kat's brush hits a knot toward her tips. Kat tenses, ready to spring into action, but everything quickly settles down again. The first kindling for the bonfire is being lit just now; as the massive pile of unwanted things begins to catch and be consumed by the flames, the clearing is bathed in a radiant orange glow that plays off of Kat's minty hair to give the impression of syrup on ice cream. Every now and again a burst of sparks crackles across the crowd as something tips and cracks, or someone new comes up from the outside edges of the gathering to add their own goodbyes to the pile.

Up above, the sky begins to fill with flowers, singing their song with the distant rumble of thunder. There is not a cloud in the sky: it is the most beautiful sight Katherine could hope for.

"Don't worry, it's not as scary as it sounds. 'Cause, like... after goodbye there's usually room somewhere for a new hello. Y'know? Besides, all this stuff still has a home, even now. There, see? Look! It's just not ours anymore, that's all.

"Not everything's gotta be."

Far away, a fox named Cyanis sneezes with the force of a typhoon.

Return to Thellamie

Eclair Espoir has never felt particularly short at any point in her life. The rest of Thellamie fits comfortably into two categories for her: shorter than she is, and so large as to not make scale worth contemplating. In either case there has never been a reason for the Maid-Knight to feel threatened by any situation or potential opponent.

That is to say that these would be new sensations for her, were she here. Or maybe there'd just be a fight right now, to simplify the vectors of possibility a little. Either way, Erika Fullbright feels entirely too small compared to the rest of this table. The huntress' muscles look as thick around as her head (she notes with equal parts fascination, trepidation, and excitement). The sellsword's wirey frame feels like it stretches all the way to the ceiling, and sitting calmly in between them even Timtam seems to be seated atop a mountain.

She swallows, once. These are the jaws of a trap. Between certainty of card draw and a total table-wide alignment toward a single goal there really only is one possible outcome. It's barely even enough to cheat because they can simply brute force her position into a losing one and accuse her of lying on the back end. The nature of the game is such that nothing short of a deck of cards up her sleeves would be enough to fight back, and that would only possibly spare her. She was not going to win any secrets that way, that's for sure.

She shifts nervously in her seat. The idea of just riding the massive loss all the way to Trouble Town floats back through the top of her brain, which makes her left ear flick in a way she finds annoying (it's such a tell! what kind of a loser has that for a poker face?) Her toes curl, and she shivers. In fear or in pleasure? She's not really sure.

And it doesn't really matter, does it? She's a private eye. And as long as a client's counting on her, she's got to do the best she can to crack the case. So when the deck is shuffled one last time, she leans forward and rests her elbow against the table. She squashes her cheek against her fist, and yawns as she watches the cards dealt around the table through half-lidded eyes.

She leans over a little to whisper to the huntress.

"Well this is a disappointment, isn't it? I've already played this game before. This exact game, I mean. Here, her cards," she gestures at the wraith across the table, "From left to right: Prince of Stars, Nine of Stones, Ten of Crowns, Princess of Crowns. Whereas I..."

She flashes her hand at the woman without having looked at it herself. It is, of course, all low value cards that would require her to bluff to get anywhere at all. There's no magic to what she's up to, this is simple marking and card counting. You simply shouldn't shuffle a deck in front of a detective if you don't want its secrets spilled out.

Is it a mistake to upend the table like this? Possibly. But the risk is so full of rewards she can't see past her big reveal.

She scribbles down a note with more hand information and flicks it across the table at the beautiful mercenary in her jewel encrusted veil, and shakes her head.

"And then you of course," she nods at Timtam, "Will declare you are playing the Princess of Knots. You like the yelp of indignation when I hear the name of such a high suit, because you know I'm not going to have any choice but to call you a liar. But when I do..."

She reaches across the table to reveal the Princesses of Knits, Crowns, and Stars all united against her Four of Stones. She shakes her head in sarcastic resignation.

"I mean, it's boring to play a game where we all know how everything goes the whole time, isn't it? We're not even going to make it to the cookie service before you've taken me for all I'm worth and then some. Er... there are cookies in this place, aren't there? I haven't made that up?"

She coughs.

"Well. Anyway! If it's all right with you, I'd like to suggest a few improvements we can make to spice things up a little. Let's have this one shuffle our deck again, and this one deal. You and I can take turns cutting the deck, if we like. And we'll all play single cards. Face down. Without looking. And the same rules and ante, of course. Let's play the odds and get a little messy, shall we? We could all stand to be a little more, mmmm, open with one another, shall we?"

She smiles a cat's smile, with her legs swinging mischievously under her seat. If she can turn the game from an unclimbable wall into a forest of pit traps for everyone to try and desperately scramble around, she will at least have a chance of trading shots, and that's to her advantage as the one with less to give. All that's left from there is to drive a wedge into the teamwork between the three of them, and then--

"Oh!" she chirps, "I guess I did still technically lose that last hand.

"Well then since you were curious, yes I can see your lips through those pretty little beads. If I'm watching closely enough. And it does matter to me that you're happy. So! Is it punishment time for me, or is it enough for you other lovely ladies to know that I'm secretly aligned with one other person here? I'd be careful what I share if I were you~"

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Katherine Isabella Fluffybiscuits is a two-tailed foxgirl, the lowest rung there is on the Foxgirl Ladder. It is unlikely that she would have ever reached that lofty height without help. It is equally likely she would never raise herself to a three-tail, unless another, better fox wanted to use her to punish Cyanis again somehow. It's something she's spent a lot of time worrying about, and a source of massive embarrassment. The worst thing about it was that, in her moments of honesty, she didn't really mind so much.

There were two magic spells wrapped around her heart, or curses as foxes understood the term. The first was named Good Girl, which got her in trouble a lot and stopped her from being able to grant any but the tiniest and softest of wishes. But the other, more insidious one was named Enough. It was the magic that kept her from taking the last slice of cake when she was full. It was the magic that held her back when somebody offered a reward: she could haggle her way up to a brand new jacuzzi, but did she really need to when Yue's bathtub was so nice already? If Good Girl made her agree to help out Cyanis in way too many of her plans, Enough sent her back home after instead of wondering what might be Next.

But she still had Foxgirl pride. So when something did come along that lit up all the neurons in her brain she always did her best to pounce on it and take it home. And it turned out there was at least one thing that made her as insatiable as was proper. But what was that thing?

It was love.

Not in the sense of romance, or even friendship. It was passion that Kat devoured, and whenever she saw someone lighting up with a new love she couldn't help but swoop in and try to bask in it herself. To date she had collected exactly 99 hobbies, and even though she quickly neglected most of them and wasn't even replacement level good at all but a scant few, she loved each of them dearly.

It was hard to say if a love for the promise of the ungiven future counted as a hobby, but it was a soft and tender flame she had never quite felt before and it caught hold in her heart. All of this is to say that when Caster finishes asking his question, Kat does not hesitate before she wraps him in a big, squeezey hug. She takes his hand in hers, and pushes it down on the reset button. And her own little bit of magic mixes in with his, so that the right buttons feel pleasantly warm when they're touched.

"Don't give up," she says with a little smile, "Come on, one more try. Then we should probably go find Berserker. I don't want her to miss the fireworks. Oh, or the fried tofu!!"

Somewhere there are magic words that could fix all of this. That could point out that the future Caster is so desperately clinging to is actually the past. Katherine Isabella Fluffybiscuits is not that fox. All she can offer is her own magic. That is, Good Girl.

And, of course, Enough.

Breathless Dead

It hadn't been the Eater of Worlds that made Bella's flesh crawl. Vast and terrifying as it was and terrible as it might have smelled, that creature had died before she'd ever laid eyes on it. It was Odoacer that scared her: the woman who had put a ship in the great beast's brain pan and then rode that achievement to a political stalemate with the most formidable woman in the universe.

Every plate at that dinner party had been arranged in the shape of a sword. Every selected dish was both opulent and at the same time brutal; gestures meant to offend and manipulate as sure as the seating arrangements had been designed to provoke conflict. She'd sat and watched with her heart in her mouth while so many of Nero's most loyal subjects were summarily executed and thrown into the depths of space to decorate the Armada's hunting grounds.

The only thing that had kept Bella alive was that her relative unimportance put her low enough on the hit list that she'd had the time to slip away from the party and disappear into the monster's jaws, which on balance felt less like suicide. That's what it took to stand up to Nero. She's not sure who if anybody she knows ever properly appreciated how horrifying a thought that really was.

Bella looks across the horizon one more time, and barks with laughter. Zeus could make her excuses, but the truth that Odoacer had shown her is that the King of the Gods was all too willing to be manipulated.

A shiver crawls up her spine. Bella leans back and flops onto her seat at last. She rolls her neck behind her shoulders and watches Dolce upside down. And she shakes with laughter once again.

"It is really fucking funny hearing you, of all people, talk about murdering someone. Guess everybody's got a line, huh? Artemis must like you a lot. After all, she trusted you with someone much more precious than me."

Her smile is languid and graceless, split somewhere halfway between drunk and bored. Only her eyes are sharp and burning, though this is nothing new between friends.

...What the fuck is she supposed to say here? He wants advice? A pat on the head? For someone to tell him how to not fuck everything up when the weight of his world is on his shoulders? She snorts.

"Does it hurt? Not knowing, not being able to do shit and wondering if that was meant to be your moment?"

Bella yawns, and slides down onto her back. With her arms folded behind her head, she stares up through the crystal ceiling and watches a bolt of lightning tracing through the endless blue skies.

"Join the club, I guess. I'm aimed at Gaia. I'm going to give my sisters real lives, so they can be more than knives and bombs. That's all I can tell you. Everything I pass up is just because I can't afford to blow up before I get there. That's why nothing here is worth shit. Call me callous, but I just don't care about saving the galaxy. And I wish everybody who did would just ask Hades to do it for them and quit haring off in ways that make my job harder. That's what I think."

Return to Thellamie

Erika notices (after far too long) that she is chewing on the tips of her hair. In her defense, it has no detectable flavor. The texture is oddly natural, and if her mind were otherwise engaged it would not be surprising at all to learn that it would feel natural enough not to call attention to itself. The good news is that her mind was engaged: she'd just collected a lot of very useful information, even enough to mark another line in her ledger and begin sketching an outline of Timtam's disguise, now that she knew it was a specifically relevant detail.

That cut the need off of... you could lose, you know. You could lose spectacularly. Don't you think? Wouldn't you rather? What does winning even get you? An answer or three? Respect? What good have those ever done anyone~? But losing, mmmmhmhmohohoho! They might blindfold you, peel you bare, but -- heeeee!! -- aren't you a detective? Be entertaining about it and you might be invited behind that veil? What secrets could you pry out of her tongue using yours instead of her stupid rules? Isn't this optimal, even? Won't there never be another chance like this? Isn't it worth the gamble, isn't it the only way to win? Don't you think that, when it gets right down to it, losing is just better than winning????

Erika notices her hair is in her mouth. Again. Hadn't she spit that out? Her cheeks flush as her elbow slips on the table and she almost plunges her face into the tea. She coughs twice, loudly, and hides her face behind her teacup.

"Mmm. Aha. Then. As the ante is paid in information here, am I correct in assuming there isn't much you can tell me about our fellow players? The game within the game would seem to be learning to read the tendencies of each member of the table the fastest. It would be, ah, crass. I would say. To have invited only a single new player?"