"Given?" she laughs a little, despite herself. "You should know this, Tirzah. There's only one gift you gave me that I care about - and that's the chance to keep fighting. I left a much nicer home than this to become a hero, and for me, the stakes haven't changed at all."
It seems like nothing's changed. There are still those nails against her throat, marking the passage of every breath. There are still the bruises from a fight with Asterion and the exhaustion from a day of peril. There are still night-time confessions with Tirzah. There's still no guarantee there'll be a dawn tomorrow.
"But you know why I'll never stop. You are the expert, after all," she said. "You know I'll never stop until you're free."
THE GRAND ARMADA RESPONSE LEVEL: 3 Redana has disturbed the natural order by setting out to steal from a god. There is not yet additional response generated by the fight in the air.
Location Stats: Imperial. This place is home to the Soldiers of Empire Elysium Fields. This place is home to the Warriors of Ceron
Bad Weather The dark storm of Poseidon commences, and all within are in terrible peril. Bad weather is dangerous, and will need to be Overcome whenever it gets in the way. Bad weather always deals Soft Cuts.
Dark Secret This location gains another stat - the Elysium Fields.
Wild Animal When you reach this Response level, a Beast or Scourge threat will try to eat the next player who goes out into the open.
Redana!
The two old guards stand to look at the distant fires and pick up their weapons - like spears, but with strange loops of something like rope instead of points. Some sort of farming, animal handling tool and not a weapon of war, but there is still something just so about the way they hold them...
Ceronian Veterans No longer young and spry, but there isn't anything they haven't seen. Storm Trooper: Elite Troopers never deal damage to the fellowship. They automatically capture anyone they can surround and separate from the group. Formation Instinct: Anyone who keeps the Ceronian Veterans busy cannot get higher than the 7-9 result, and one of their commanders is summoned in the process.
You shiver. Warriors to overthrow an empire indeed.
"We're going to be busy," growled Sands. "Take the brainsquid." He unlocks a metal door near the gate while Leon tenses as if looking to catch someone trying to flee. Sands pulls the door open in a sudden gesture and an enormous bulk that had been pressed right up against the door falls and impacts on the ground in an amorphous mess and...
"Greetings, noble princess, in the name of the mother of storms!" burbled the octopus as the complicated mass of tentacles sorted themselves out. It's voice contained no hint of embarrassment at being caught evesdropping, and its orange and purple skin colours pulsed and shifted strangely. It was huge. "I am Godol, Assistant Secretary of Shame, Guilt and Self Awareness, I am charmed to meet you -" a tentacle tried idly to grasp your hand but the octopus seemed to pay it no mind. It pulled itself up, standing on the tips of its tentacles, taller than Bella and many times as bulky. "I of course will serve you in any way you demand! My function is to assist! And secretary!" It chortled at its own joke.
Vasilia!
Combat is not normally done in shuttles like this on the Imperial side. Normally there's a proper ship nearby that can just clear them away with a sweep of its ELF weaponry, or they're landing unopposed on a ship that's had its ELF weapons disabled. The idea of fighting in-atmosphere with them is completely alien to Imperial thought though it's the sort of thing that happens in resource scarce frontier territories all the time. You are by far the most experienced person here.
What you need to watch out for is the Imperial shuttles getting close. They're defaulting to what they know, which is to ram and board - and that's the sort of thing that's actually still very dangerous in this situation. But you start looking at this place as more than just a wonder, start looking at it as a battlefield and...
"There is life here," said Artemis, pointing. "And where there's life there is danger."
And you see it. Those deeps hold more life than the trees. Those shapes are not rocks, they're life. This place is filled with the strange and dangerous aspects of the Eater of Worlds, and you could provoke them into terrible response.
King Jas'o is focused entirely on the prize like a bloodhound. His ship hard burns directly towards the town on the hill-top, but it's not an attack position - he's flying proud and regal, looking to land and announce himself to the local ruler. And that stirs an idea...
"He doesn't have loyalty to his men," murmured Artemis, huntress' mind razor sharp alongside your own, focused on the weaknesses of your foe. "He thinks they've failed him and wants to switch them out for whatever local allies he can rally. Prevent him from winning over the locals and he'll have thrown away his army for nothing."
Bella!
The Codexia runs.
It's startling how fast she goes - she's not an olympic champion like you, but she's doing this in full armour. She's keeping pace and even gaining on the shuttle as it thrashes through the launch bay, Athena at her side like a storm cloud, winds flowing underneath every footfall. You're still getting your grip on the controls when you see her tearing along the catwalk at a dead sprint, leaping into the air with a battlecry, raised spear coming down to tear right through the transparent steel of the viewscreen...
There's a faint click, like the impact of marbles, and with a massive jolt the ship kicks forwards. The Codexia glances off the back and rolls all the way along the back to land in a heap on the hangar floor behind you. She's on her feet in seconds again and racing again but you're clear free into the black before she can gain enough speed. You're in the black, amidst the brutal spear-shapes of the Armada, on your way to the wrecks.
Ivory Smile, sitting next to the engine amidst a scattering of cards and a hastily written prayer strip stuck to the golden machinery, lets out a long, shaking exhale of relief.
Once again, she submerged herself in another's presence. It was so easy.
With Set she was the questioning Watson, the one who gently doesn't understand to help tease out brilliant ideas. With Marianne she was subject, kneeling before the inferno. With Asterion she was a wrecking ball of glass, breaking and broken all at once. And with Tirzah...
She doesn't know how to be. Doesn't know who to be. Please! Please, tell her! Tell her if she should kneel! Tell her if she should stand! Your whole society is based around the Great Chain and that divine promise that everyone will know their place - so tell her where hers is! Why torment her like this, her alone in all the world not knowing if she should kiss lips, hands, or feet. Damn you, Tirzah, please...
She melts, drawn out and in-between and so fragile, a mirror reflecting nothing and rendered into mere inert glass. She aches into that touch on her throat, as vulnerable as the moment she was first broken.
"Tell me how to save you," she whispers. What must she give? There must be something, there must be something of herself still to sacrifice.
"Your arguments were the bloated ego-filled pomposity of someone who axiomically assumed that given the span of eternity he'd someday learn to magic his way out of a rotting hemp sack," said Ailee Sundish. "And while in most cases I would agree that the mathematical concept of infinity does by nature suggest that anything is possible, the Hamptonshire Constant states that the kind of person who has a mid-life crisis at eighty five, realizes that they've done nothing with all the resources of Grand Jelt's greatest university at their fingertips, and so decides to walk directly into the chomping teeth of the nearest consortium of evil clowns, has such a lack of talent that they can cancel out even the positive effects of infinity."
She rolled her neck, getting to her feet and rather rudely rubbing the hand covered in Jackdaw's barf off on Hamptonshire's hideous armour. She's basically doing him a favour if it causes him to wash it.
"Anyway, congrats on finally learning what I figured out on day two at the university. Shame you stopped there, but hey, by coming down here and dressing like the contents of a sick bucket after a hotdog and mayonnaise eating contest you're still probably the smartest of all my former teachers. So, can I get some directions? I want to leave this place and I figure you're the kind of person to know where the door is even if it's just so you can wistfully stare at it and imagine how cool it'd be if you had the courage to go through it."
She wasn't quite this rude to her teachers when she was in school - she had to walk the intensely frustrating line of showing them the bare minimum amount of respect required to not get expelled, and in some cases that was still quite a lot of respect. It felt good to be honest at last.
One avalanche barely ends before the next begins. Marianne steps over her feeble insecurities like a queen, straight towards the harshest possible articulation of her gentle objection. Where Set speaks in visions and hope Marianne speaks in decree - the royal voice, the raised finger, the scepter that sends knights away on quests. Unanimous, Marianne? Perhaps as those who dwell within the sea unanimously consent to the operation of the tides by adapting their whole lives to those mighty flows. Do you think you do not frighten, Marianne, when you attempt to frighten? Canada has consumed the empty place behind the mirror, a void at her core that is filled with every gesture, every expression, every embrace. Once again she is swept up by those royal arms and brought to a place she did not expect...
And once again she is dumped unceremoniously to the ground as Marianne takes her leave.
And once again Set's words pile on top of her, burying her under an avalanche of data and questions before her knees have even stopped shaking.
"Fine! Things are fine!" she blurts. "It was - it was pretty fine. Everyone is fine. Except for all the people who I didn't save, which was one hundred percent of them - but apart from that it was fine. How are you?" She smiles to show that everything you're thinking about her is probably just a misunderstanding.
The two old soldiers exchanged a Deep Look, and then turned their attention to their marbles. Hades' sky-blue eyes glittered with every roll and curl of the marbles across the rough dirt surface. Click, click, click - and now there were three colours on the field - an invading, encircling red, a static, defensive black, and a single pearl of white in the centre of it all.
"Far be it from me to contradict royalty," said Sands, taking the role of red and breaking black's formation. "But the promise of a safe return is not something even a princess can offer, least of all to one marked by Athena." "After all, our princess doesn't seek simple adventure," said Leon, clacking a marble back into one of the chinks caused in the scattered armour. "She seeks war as we once did. She's practiced since she was a child to fight, and who could stop her? Violence is in the blood of Ceron." "A child of Hades," murmured Sands, pressing the attack, cutting a line through the formation of black and bisecting it. "Favoured of Athena. War and death. Does that sound like someone destined for safe returns and a life of peace?" "Her mother doesn't think so," said Leon, sacrificing the broken part of his formation to scatter several of red's threatening marbles, limiting the vectors red can attack from. "Her mother gave all of our lives in service to the Empire. Her mother rammed the Lupincas into the brow of the World Eater, and when we awoke in Elysium she had us forswear the Lady Athena." "We had done our duty, she said," said Sands, making a last doomed attack on the still-too-solid formation. "Athena and Empire can ask no more from us, we who slew the leviathan with our dying breaths." "She will not react kindly to Athena's attempt to snatch her daughter away to perish in the endless war of stars," said Leon, perfectly striking away the last few feints of red and ending the battle with the precious white sphere intact and immaculate.
Hades looks you in the eye - and as he does you can see Athena's frustrated hand pulling away from Sands' red - and a victorious Aphrodite smiling a scowl in black. It is Aphrodite who has been invoked by Queen Hatchan as her daughter's gaoler. It is Aphrodite who will work against you with all his viciousness if you try to rescue her.
(And by the same token... you might not be Athena's only piece on the board)
Alexa, Dolce, Vasilia!
The shuttle flies into the Leviathan's interior. The splendor of the crystal sun ignites the world; the impossible mangroves and cascading waterfalls alight for you as they did for Redana - but your vision is not as pure as hers. Imperial shuttlecraft are here too - huge and brutal, rectangular shapes that speak of uncompromising strength, defiant of concepts like wind resistance. They maneuver like shopping trolleys but bristle with solid projectile cannons that open fire even though they are out of effective range. Shells fall short, shattering trees and sending explosions and gouts of blinding, poisonous gases into the air.
The make and aesthetic of the Plousios shuttlecraft isn't Imperial - it's stranger, sleeker, older, a device that somehow speaks to the ocean as much as it does to the void. You can guess where Redana has gone but there is a lot of distance between you and there, especially if you want to delay King Jas'o's landers from settling there and deploying their phalanxes.
Bella!
It's only through your hand, so close to Mynx's jugular vein that you feel the dizzying pounding of her heart. She almost keeps it off her face entirely but when she tries to speak it's from a dry mouth and it comes out as an inarticulate squeak. When you pull her up she stumbles trying to keep her unfamiliar legs underneath her. It's not often you get to leave the shapeshifter totally speechless, totally defenseless, but you've done it here. Payback for the poisoning indeed.
"I don't know why -" she starts, and then stops, and swallows. Didn't even have the courage to finish that one this time around. She tries humming a few bars of the Admiral's theme song as you walk across the hangar bay to help focus her head a bit.
Then the Codexia almost cartwheels out, pointing her spear at you, perfect smile gleaming so white it's a bit like looking at an engine wash. Codexia make a... sound when they move, like a '!' sound, like an action hero in a cheap drama might make when appearing on a scene unexpectedly. "Halt!" she said, cupping her chin with an L-shaped hand to further emphasize the gleam of her smile. "Admiral!" she said. "Catgirl!" she continued. "Death priest!" Ivory Smile gave a nervous little wave from the background.
"Codexia," said Mynx, hand half straying up to touch her mouth.
"Admiral!" the Codexia repeated.
"Codexia...?" Mynx said a little more firmly.
"Thoth, Admiral!" said the Codexia.
"Codexia Thoth," said Mynx.
"Admiral Odoacer!" said Codexia Thoth.
"Go away," said Mynx.
"Okay!" said Codexia Thoth, saluting and stepping away.
Across the hall you can see Athena storming towards the Codexia with fury in her grey eyes - and then you see her stumble, trip, and fall to one knee as her legs entangle in red ribbons. She turns her spear upon them in a fury - and Aphrodite by your side mutters, "Go. Now."
Canada staggers blearily into the room, surrounded by the refractive, broken light of a half formed shield forming in response to the sudden danger that had grabbed her in the dark. It's a device formed of pure conceptual power - the shattered reality of her own darkening reflection, her purest self, but even this legendary barricade is no defense against the crashing tidal wave of words that slams into her and pins her against the wall as securely as any chain of the Annunaki. Set is talking.
If her mighty shield is no proof against the flood, then neither are her shining eyes a deadly enough weapon to cut through the onslaught. A gaze that could stun a charging salamander glances pointlessly off of Anathet's forehead as she goes through pages like an industrial scanner. Perhaps that melodic voice is trying to get a word in edgewise but that is a mistake - what 'um' or 'er' or 'excuse me' could disturb a world where djinn are dying, gods are falling, and the earth is saved through the publication of sufficiently accurate textbooks?
And then it stops, and Canada starts like she's just realized that this is a test and she should have been taking notes instead of mentally inventorying bruises. "Uh," she gapes for a second. "Gee-lll-gee - Gilgamesh? Like the dude with the gold? Didn't he live eight thousand years ago or something?" She trails off and goes a little bit red. Thanks for your contribution, Canada! Super insightful! While Anathet was studying the true nature of the ancient alien invasion that defines this planet's history, you were studying the blade.
"I mean, uh... I don't actually -" she coughed and reddened a bit more. "Can you explain how this helps us, um, practically? They didn't, you know, beat us by pretending to be gods so much as by... you know... beating us."
You were under the mistaken impression that Ailee had been hitting you before. You were wrong - now she hits you, an open-palmed slap across the face. "Jackdaw! What the hell do you think you're doing!?" she snaps, snatching the stick from the semiconscious fox's fingers. "E-NUN-CEE-ATE! Defend! For heavens' sakes, this is what you get for blowing off my adventurer training!"
Ailee's 'adventurer training' had involved her bursting into your room in the middle of the night, putting a pistol in your mouth as you were struggling to wake up, and screaming at you to perfectly enunciate a defensive abjuration. In fairness, she'd put herself through the same 'testing' - more than once she'd had a weirdly fluent conversation with you with a mouth full of literal marbles and she'd only accidentally swallowed and almost choked on a marble once.
Today was not a day for small mercies - mercy made for poorly trained wizards!
Jasper pouts. Cute!? She is glamorous! She is elegant! She is... she is tall! Tall people aren't cute! Besides, lines of that nature were independently written by two different songsmiths and capable of inducing swooning when deployed by far lesser spirits than her! A line such as that coming from her should have caused at least three of the onlookers in this restaurant to faint, at the very least!
"Hmph!" she hmph!s, but she can't even maintain her attempt at dignity for more than a second because Dulcinea is finally revealing what to do with the ramen and she's fascinated. Up she gets from her chair and orbits around the table, eyes wide, observing everything from as many angles as possible. And the writing! With a magical brush that didn't need to be dipped in ink! She observes every minute gesture of etiquette and pose, the posture, the stance, the control of the fluid that keeps it away from the notebook. She is going to get this right!
She sits again, folding into her chair like a flower retracting. She picks up the chopsticks, lowers her head, and performs an absolutely perfect mirrored slurp of ramen soup exactly as Dulcinea demonstrated. She keeps her off hand in the same place as Dulcinea's notebook and, sure enough, her control is so fine that not a single drop of broth touches it. She sits back, a droplet of soup on the edge of her mouth, and gives a haughty, proud look. Try laughing at her now, demon queen!
And then the taste hits her and she chokes, gasps, and coughs, eyes widening. "What!?" she said. "What is - it's like you fit a savannah into the ocean!" She can't even chastise herself for her lack of poetry in this moment because she's busy reaching into the bowl with her bare hands to pick up the mass of ramen and stare at it - it was uncomfortably warm by this world's standards, and it dripped down her fingers in an incoherent mass. "The water is contaminated with the essence of the forest," she said. "But that doesn't come across at all to my hands or my eyes. But when I -" she took an unglamourous chomp of the mass of noodles she was holding in her hand, "- taste it," she continues, mouth full, "it unravels! It's the most impure thing I've ever experienced!"
She blushes as she realizes, at last, just why the devil queen laughed at her. Oh, how naive she must have sounded just now - thinking that she could talk to a devil about temptation. What power could a pure heart have against a creature that ground all of the forests and seas together? She was really out of her depth. Blushing more intensely, she set down the mass of ramen that hadn't already escaped from her hand into the bowl and picked up her chopsticks again in imitation of Dulcinea.
"It-it's good," she said weakly, watching the devil's expression with a new humility. "The mouthfeel is like the oil of liquidized fire. The saltiness is reminiscent of mountains broken into crystal. Umami is, uh, no I don't. My first impression is that there is an unknown heat at my core that feels like a wood-root fire, consuming and transforming me. As you command - this is the egg? - I will obey."
"Oh, it's the opposite actually," mumbled Canada as she gently tried to tip-toe around all the kneeling people. It was really hard because this cell was not very large and they took up a lot of floor space and she really didn't want to step on anyone right now because that kind of thing left people with a complex. "It's actually righteousness that is beautiful. Uh. You know, spiritually," she had to push the two Salamanders gently aside and they fell into each other with sighs. "Unrighteous hearts pollute physical beauty and make it, you know, scary. Um."
This part was always so awkward.
"So, uh. You can attain this kind of beauty in yourself!" said Canada, trying to be inspirational. "You just need to bring your heart into alignment. So I'm going to leave you here to think about it, okay? Be kind to each other."
She waved uncomfortably as she locked the cell door.
Overlord Thraka
Izurich
Lurking Krog
Antlers
g1ngersnapped
Phoe
Balmas
The Fool
Tatterdemalion