Thanqol

Princess-Champions of Hyperborea

Adila!

You crash down onto the roots, clinging Hornet tightly to your chest. Your ears are ringing, full of destruction and the not-sound of that terrible explosion, and there's for a moment nothing to see when you turn back and look at the sea, just inky shadows covering up the collapse, blotting out everything. No, wait, you do see something, as your eyes start to cut through even that magical night: the ink-black shells of the Garthim sliding into the water. If anyone else survived... they'll soon be in Oberon's hands. But you haven't been noticed.

Or at least you haven't yet. That'll change if Hornet starts crying, which she is threatening to do, sniffling and gasping with a hoarse throat, tucking her knees up to her chest and slowly rocking back and forth. "I didn't mean to do it," she whimpers.

Oh. Hornet.

@Tatterdemalion

It's jarring to think that Hornet came to the same conclusion she did. Adila was so used to thinking of Hornet as careless at best, to hear that... self-recrimination in her voice tilted her. She identified this as a failure. How many times had she been blamed for failures and accidents? Adila... knew a thing or two about what that was like.

+Shh, shh, it's okay,+ Adila thought, trying to keep the thoughts brief and hurried so they didn't reach out to the oily shapes of the Garthim. +We've got to go, it's okay,+ she wished she could focus. This wasn't the time to be in the open - whatever had shot them out of the sky was still out there, and taking the fight to the Garthim would just make her a target. She needed to back them up and lay and ambush to rescue the others, so she carried Princess Hornet across the roots, heart wrenching with each little sniffle.

Fellowship: The Heart

"They think I'm a what," Ailee politely requests clarification. "You want me to do what."

She takes the flask anyway, because now she knows where your flask is and she never misses an opportunity - but she takes a pretty dramatic slam from it instead of splashing it on herself. The tendrils of electric green energy around her become bladed, opening up with beautiful violet eyes like peacock feathers as the essence of Pride rises to the fore.

And then, voice raw and husky from the drink, she speaks in a tone that passes beyond conscious understanding. Her language embeds itself in the mind of the terrier and bar patrons alike and if they are not capable of understanding it drags their very consciousness up through as many spheres of enlightenment as necessary to ensure they can understand.

"I am not to be trifled with," she says in that terrible language. "Control yourselves."

[Talk Sense: 11; Holy Command ensures that everyone and everything understands me.]

Masks: Resurrection Roundabout

It is 20XX+3. It is the future.

@Sarahphim!

"Hands in the air! Do it now!"

You knew what you were getting into

In a way, you kind of have to respect the training and discipline of Dominus' troopers. Armed with only a handful of discount off-brand Impersonation Rigs they've spent over twenty four hours pretending to be wooden mannequins before revealing themselves all at once. Now they're a dozen hard-bitten soldiers with assault rifles aimed at you, wearing all of your rejected dresses/suits/etc. And frankly? None of them are pulling it off at all.

Dominus has planned this perfectly. You had backups just in case you needed to costume switch mid-ceremony if your first dress got damaged, but now your entire range is in danger at once - there's no way to fight all of these guys and girls without destroying your entire fashion range at once.

Errant!

"Reach for the sky,"

You knew what Sara was getting you into.

DeathGun69 has chosen a good time to make her approach - stepping out in her extremely edgy goth-leather bridesmaid gown, studded with metal, holding her totally badass signature death gun that's, like, got flame decals and stuff on it. Skull facepaint for that additional edge. She's waited until you've finished getting into your bridal dress, assessing - correctly - that you would be much less inclined to get into a firefight that put at risk this extremely expensive brand-new dress.

Besides her, SSJ2Rick and BloodHackerXxX have gagged and bound JuneBird who was helping you get into your dress. They're both wearing similarly edgy bridesmaid dresses, a look that SSJ2Rick is pulling off way better than the other two - he's actually got some vampire style to him, unlike the 'powerful magnet dragged through a hot topic bargain bin' vibe the other two have.

It's not a surprise to see them, though. You kind of knew exactly what was coming after the news report that these losers broke Comstar out of prison.

Brainstorm!

You had no idea what you were getting into.

On the left of you is an eight foot tall glowing lady with extreme drunk-mom energy who has introduced herself as 'Ourania' and has been hitting on you all night. On the right of you is @Tigerphim who is a literal massive bengal tiger who's had at least two attempts at eating you before being caught one handed by Ourania. Right now Ourania is reaching over you, giving you a face full of arms and elbows, as she pats the deeply purring tiger and - did she just ask the tiger if she wanted to come back to her place afterwards!? Ourania!!

These are the worst seats in the house. You need to get out of this.

Princess-Champions of Hyperborea

Part of Adila is, of course, screaming. Every interaction she's had with Hornet using technology has been a disaster, she has no sense of priority or scale, the responsible thing to do is to physically remove her from the engine room until there's a problem serious enough to roll the dice over...

But she doesn't do that. She just stands there holding the panel like a big dork. An awkward silence as she tries to find the thoughts. +Hey. Princess Hornet,+ she thought awkwardly. +So... um...+

She's got no idea where she's going with this. Hornet very clearly isn't being careless. She wasn't careless last time either, with the drill... or in the castle... or in the Bazaar. There's a grim motion to her work, no laughter, not even a smile.

When was the last time she saw her smile?

She hovers half in the doorway, holding that panel like it's a wall she doesn't know how to climb.

*

There's a terrible moment of vindication when everything explodes.

She moves like black lightning, all the uncertainty collapsing back into instinct. She crosses the engine deck faster than fire, snatching up Hornet without losing a second of momentum before crashing through the hull to the open air beyond. Her wings expand to catch the breeze but instead are filled with razor darkness and only then does Adila realize that Hornet isn't to blame for this.

She folds up, tumbles, dives, tries her best to power through the shadows. She's an obsidian comet with a trail of autumn fire fabric in her wake.

Fellowship: The Heart

Emerald fire coils and burns. Binding symbols ignite all along soft white fur. The lanterns gutter, the world grows darker, and twisting tendrils of energy from beyond surround her. An Emperor might not have the power in their finger that Ailee does then - see how she gestures with her entire body, slender frame ignited with the might of the Heart itself, a posture for directing armies to their deaths. Her enunciation is perfect - breath from the base of the diaphragm, neck straight and sharp, each movement of the jaw expertly rehearsed, the flash of teeth in between each syllable dangerous and intimate. She speaks with her entire body and soul and the cosmos hears her command.

"CURIOSITY," she declares with the authority of King Dragon, and points at Lucien.

The dog changes targets.

Masks: Resurrection Roundabout

POTENTIAL 2

"Locker," Sara says, intense. "I need to hear your Comstar. I have never needed anything more in my whole life." This is a lie, obviously, but what's a little hyperbole between friends? "Let me hear the Commy or I'm calling Angel again with directions for exactly how to come pick you up. I need this."

She's grinning, much like a tiger that's learned that it can get fish by padding up to fishermen and asking politely while flexing its claws casually, and commenting on how isn't it such a nice day with nobody getting mauled?

@Tatterdemalion

"Hey @Sarahphim!" said Locker, bouncing up on his heels in the bubbliest voice he had. "I was going to fight you but I didn't have any ideas for how to do it so I was hoping you'd suggest something! It should be something that shows off how amazing I am and make you into a puppet, and it should be kinda hot but not so hot that it distracts me enough for you to break free again. Oh! Maybe I should ask my audience! They'll tell me exactly what they want me to do! That's the move of a real puppeteer who is good at controlling other people!"

"Ok, maybe another crazy story would be good tonight. Did you hear how Victoria Messermitt bought a controlling interest in AEGIS a little while ago? Well anyway, she tried to use the company to strong arm me into hunting down my teammates like a psychopath. I refused, and she turned the entire complex into my enemy in a second. Imagine it, right? Hundreds of people, all highly trained professionals, suddenly trying to gun me down. Bullets flying everywhere, Maria from BlackSun coming at me with a sword the size of me. I have to fight my way through the TAG hangar, alone. I get chased by the god damn Turbo Knight armor and have to break away from it twice.. There are bullets flying everywhere, EMP weapons going off all over the place, everything that everyone can think of to stop or even kill me, all happening at once. I broke through it. The @SARAHPHIM stream at the high school in Neo Chaos Spire happened less than an hour later. And then right after that was the big fight at the starport. All of it, on the same day. I ate two cakes and managed half a cup of coffee and maybe an hour and a half of napping. That's all I had to run off of that entire time."

Errant sets the tablet down on her lap, screen side down. She shrugs.

"You can see the arms and legs. Everybody knows about those. A few more people know about the armor mesh that's been implanted under my skin because they've seen what it looks like when somebody blows through it on a camera. But I also had them remove my non-essential organs to clear space in my body cavity so I've got fewer soft targets when something does go through me. Most of my ribs are metal, and I've had to have my spine reinforced several times so it doesn't shatter when I do something stupid. And I've trained obsessively after every surgery so that my body has muscle memory of all of my fighting styles at each new level of capability, so that I don't have to waste skillwire space on combat programs. They're not fast enough. Besides which, novel programs like decryption, bomb disposal, cooking, and motorcycle repair are all much more useful.

And I'm not telling you all of this to scare you, by the way. It's just... when I signed on, I had no idea what it really meant. But I think that you should. This is kind of stuff the movie-level stories are made of. And I mean, you don't have to be exactly the same as me, but... do you understand me, Cinders? This is really important."

@Phoe

"I, uh..."

The confidence falls away. She looks down. Looks sad. Bites her lip. There's only one thought that could possibly be happening there - have I already failed? A real hero would accept without even thinking. If the stakes are that high, that... permanent then how could just hearing about them get me to flinch? There's a whole whirlwind of thoughts happening behind those eyes, all the more intense because she's on the spot and aware of every passing second.

It's a lot you've put on her. But so is what she's thinking about doing. It's only fair she gets to think about it before she commits.

"Do you mind if I think about it, for just a little while?" she said in a small voice. "I don't want to say something dumb."

Princess-Champions of Hyperborea

Something, somewhere, was wrong.

Late in the night of the Watch party they'd done Deductions - attempts to read as many personal details off strangers as possible in the style of hero detectives in novels. Brill had cleaned up, of course and he'd taken the time to dunk on Adila while doing so - "you've spent so long doing princess work you've forgotten how to pay attention to your surroundings". And then he'd picked her pocket. Bastard.

He'd been right, though. Everything in her brain had been too noisy lately - so many new places, so much heartache and heartbreak and heartrealization. In the Bazaar where things had been quiet it had felt like she'd had scope to expand her mind outwards until her thoughts could soak into the fabric of the city. Becoming so used to the rhythms and flows of the place that she could sniff trouble like a shark princess. She hadn't had a mind quiet enough to do that since...

Well, the when hardly mattered any more.

She was surprised that now of all times she was noticing the feeling. Here, on the Pear, when she should be coping with the complicated feelings that came with being a Captain or stressing about the final battle with Oberon and saving the world... instead all she had was this constant sense that something wasn't right. It was almost the same sense she had when Hornet visited the Bazaar - a warning that today was going to be an overtime day. Maybe there was some trick of Oberon's at work?

She prowled the ship. Around the engine deck. She knew she should be preparing, but...

Fellowship: The Heart

Looks extremely cool and good to me, Count! Also I adored your short fiction piece. More thoughts in a later cartoon.

Princess-Champions of Hyperborea

+It's...+ Adila tries to articulate a thought which almost seems simplistic once she has to give voice to it. +The mechanism by which the clocks read the future. It seems to me that they can do this because, if viewed from the correct angle, past and future are adjacent to each other. The clocks are circles inside circles and the hands move independently... The past is next to the future and they're always informing each other and they flow into each -+

The words broke off, and the next phrasing was filled with a strange clarity. +I think that time is better modeled by the processes of thought than the processes of a straight line.+

Masks: Resurrection Roundabout

POTENTIAL 2

Sara bows back. She might be a badass, but the most badass thing of all is choosing to share in her friends’ weird little rituals. And... tbh, Locker’s one of the best dance partners she’s got.

“Step one is establishing an alibi. You’re going to need a bot that can cover for you in chat, and also some sort of weird depression hobby. That way, you’ve got someone who can cover for you by spamming typos, and you’ve got an excuse for hiding in your apartment. Second, we start laying hints that you’re Vault, but sloppily, like someone’s trying to shunt suspicion off onto you. Then, just to make sure the lowest common denominator gets it, you’ll get saved by Dominus as Vault. And while that’s happening, I’ll start spamming the butts match, using photoshop and arrows and curves to PROVE YES PROVE that you and Vault are the same.”

She catches the look he gives her and nods solemnly. She was, in fact, controversial and ultimately canceled fic writer S4R4STORM17. Victor can never, ever find out.

@Tatterdemalion

"Sometimes even I forget how much work you put in to make this look easy," said Locker. "And yeah, alright. I think video game development makes sense as a weird depression hobby, especially if I'm making twisted little experimental games for Weird Youtube. Nobody wants to talk to game developers, the games can be bad and weird enough that nobody feels good about looking them up, and games take arbitrarily long periods of time to make -" he's working through the angles, following through. This is the opposite of where you started; you were the hero and he was the backup then. "Pity I won't get to fake my death, I've been mentally rehearsing my Comstar all through the fight."

"Oh come on, don't tell me you don't believe there's a legit Hyperborea dimension after all that @SARAHPHIM double nonsense! Phimmy alone should be worth an extra fifty credibility points on this! Especially because it was her stupid version of Satan I had to chase all the way over there! And then, get this, that asshole raised Devilhome out of the ground like twenty minutes after I showed up on scene and was still getting my bearings and had the nerve to call me a cartoon character! So I do this once-in-a-lifetime mission and I blow the whole stupid thing chasing a jerk around Devilhome which is basically just here but weirder and I'm still so mad about it! What a waste of a perfectly good emergency..."

She folds her arms across her chest, too deep into pouting to care about what this looks like anymore. Call her out on it, Cinders, she dares you.

@Phoe

Cinders picks up her next set of chopsticks. Rather than part them and try the precise scissor gesture she just jabs one like a spear, puncturing right through the sushi roll and denting the countertop below, and then adeptly transferring the results to her mouth. The assassin-chef in the background scowls at the terrible chopstick form.

"So I guess that's the reason I want to be a superhero then," said Cinders. "To find out how full of shit you are -"

She laughs and thinks better of trying to pat you on the shoulder. "I mean, like, there are other jobs that involve kung fu on the regular, but all the heroes I follow seem to have all these weird, magical stories that's wackier than anything you see in the movies. Just the idea of actually living it rather than just writing about it, you know?"

"Hey, mama. Remember how you always told me that when I grew up and married, I'd have a kid as wicked as I was?

"...No, Mami, I'm not married.

"Yes, you know I'd tell you if something like that... Mom! Mami, no--I--Yes, I know how to use a con--Mami please--"

Victor runs his hands through his hair wearily. "Look, we're not like that yet and that's not the point. Point is, point is, you know." Dammit. Damn it all. "He needs help, and I don't know how to give it."

@Balmas

"You were right to call me," there's the slam of a car door in the background of the call. "I've been worried sick. My boy makes the evening news and not a single phone call to let me know you're okay -" the engine starts and there's the ripping roll of tires. "- I'm coming right over. Look, Victor, it's okay if you're not ready. You're still a kid yourself. And you're lucky enough to have a family so lean on that, okay?"