Thanqol

Fellowship: The Heart

"That," said Ailee airily, with all the haughty pride available to one splashing water in their eyes, "is classified."

Her finger taps one of those dyed fur-patterns on her shoulder - one of the ones shaped like a bright and terrible eye.

She tosses the canteen back to Coleman - totally whiffing the throw and sending half of it splashing onto the ground - and then pretending she didn't notice that she'd done that she walks past him and bangs loudly on the door to the kitchen. "Hey! Idiots! Hurry up! Or else I'll come in there and show you how it's done!"

Who the fuck had time for a meal that took more than two minutes to cook anyway?

Breathless Dead

Bella!

A roar from outside - audible even over the storm. Mynx's Ceronians are landing your shuttle outside. A risky and dangerous deed in this weather but they've managed it. What a relief - you have mere meters to walk before you're back on the ship, not miles through rain and mud and alien peril.

Mynx hears it too, and hesitates - her hand was reaching for a pocket as she sized up Vasilia with reptilian eyes, but then she freezes and mutters something under her breath. "Fine, yeah. Alexa, do as Bella says and shut this idiot up and maybe I'll arrange for you to come back with us. I'll be right back, make sure this is resolved by the time I'm back."

She flicks her head, shifting in an instant back into the form of the Admiral and ducks out the front door so that she can address her waiting soldiers.

Dolce!

"Oh, but there's not," sighed the Assistant Secretary, deflating into a gently-waving blob. "It no doubt seems so very marvelous to you but to me, there's just all that it used to be. I could go back up to my office but I'd be boiled from the heat of that reactor set up in the middle of it. I tried working for the Ceronians but they kept me in a cage and only spoke to me when they needed something done. This place is, I am sad to say, really the domain of Hades."

One of the tentacles had an idea - it sparked with life and wrapped around your head excitedly. It took a moment for the thought to run back up the neural system and you can watch in real time as each tendril explodes with excited waving. "Wait, of course! I should have seen it before - the crest on your jacket, you're a Starsong Privateer! Oh, let me come with you! Take me on your ship - a new bureaucracy to administer! A whole new set of terrible problems to experience! Oh, how my threat-assessment matrixes will change when I have to account for operating on that scale. Take me with you and I'll move the Eater of Worlds, I swear it!"

Breathless Dead

Alexa!

"Yeah!" said Mynx, standing behind Bella like a school bully's backup. She looks flushed and embarrassed at having been called out so directly, and folds her arms across her chest. "We know what we're doing and we don't need you butting in! You'll only cause problems for us, so just... find your own way back, okay!?"

Dolce!

"Oh, it was quite the experience," said the Assistant Secretary nostalgically. "I got to contemplate such marvelous things! Black holes, the will of the gods, planetary defense networks..." it sighed. "I even got to contemplate the Great Sundering and the possibilities of crossing it! It was such a unique position - there were not many things grand enough to threaten the Eater of Worlds, and I got to spend my days in contemplation of them and their dangers. Staring into the stars and wondering what other horrors Grandfather Poseidon had left there! Why, there might even be others like the Eater! We might be the smallest amongst them, or not understand the social rules and cues of their society and commit some sort of terrible faux pas."

Its eye was going dreamy as it remembered. "Such a grand adventure. There was so much to fear in the void of space, and I got to catalogue it all."

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

This was it.

She sealed away her tempestuous heart. Doubts and fears and loves all needed to be still for a little moment. This was the moment when the world might change, where she could undo all of her failures and have one more chance at saving the world.

She touched two fingers to her temple and then to her heart, drawing a mystic line of light between the two. She spread her fingers and pulled her hands apart, letting her hair fall backwards into a wave of raven disarray, and the line unfolded into a profoundly complex mystic circle. It spun as it stretched to the tips of her outstretched fingers, the heart-shape glyph centered above her own heart, igniting with pink and golden flames.

The roof shook, and then exploded, letting in a beam of brilliant noonday sunlight to strike her like a spotlight. It grew brighter and brighter as it touched her, the light burning away her robe, her veil, her menial civilian clothing. It soaked into her skin rendering her a silhouette of light amidst the lights and then overflowed, soaking out of her like honey and condensing into pink-gold crystals and metals. A gleaming gorget formed around her collar, engraved with solar rays. Arm-bands circled her wrists like cuffs and then lanced out a cage of quartz bars to guard to her elbows. A slash of indigo erupted from within her as her hands touched the top of the circle, cascading down her in consuming dark silk, barely not concealing feet that step into woven gold sandles.

She stands there for a moment, radiant amidst this darkened place. And then she snatches the mystic circle from the air. It doesn't just come in the form of light, it pulls the very reality from the air within the bounds of the circle, twisting and solidifying into a mirror in the midst of a barricade of light. Canada, the Light of Ra, stamps upon the ground sending a shockwave of sunlight from her that scorches away every shadow in the hangar.

And then she points with one outstretched finger. "False God Shamash," she declares, "I, Canada Taliv, challenge you to single combat."

So much for the stealthy approach.

[Taking foolhardy action to clear Insecure]

Breathless Dead

Redana!

"Oh, Princess... you may be wearing these rags, but that doesn't mean you can drool all over them," said Mynx, rolling her fingertips up and down Redana's burning-bright ear, ice cold against white heat. "I suppose that it was too much to hope that this place would have a gag worthy of royalty. Well, we will have to make do."

She leans in with a serrated smile, finger running up the place where your shirt used to be before coming around the back of your neck to tie Bella's handkerchief over your mouth. "It's such bad form to have to double-gag someone," Mynx lamented, "but I'm afraid it's the only way to protect your dignity. And besides, you're making so much noise through that gag already I think you're trying to get someone to burst in here and find you like this..."

She leaned in close. "You're going to have to get used to this, Princess. You're going to have to get used to me be being someone who -" SLAP! Mynx's hand hits you, open-palmed, across the face, "- hits you. You're going to have to get used to me being someone who -" SLAP! Again, against the thigh this time, "- being someone who disobeys you. You're going to have to get used to me being someone who -" she spits in your face, and it soaks down into the already dirty handkerchief, "- degrades you. I am going to be playing an extremely dangerous role in the presence of a singularly dangerous individual and the wrong," SLAP "squeak out of you will doom us all. Do you understand, Redana? We're going to have to play a game. We're going to pretend that I am strong, you are weak, and Bella can't get out of those ropes."

She flicked Bella's ear, and then petted it provocatively. "You see how good Bella is?" said Mynx, running her hand along Bella's tail as she circles all the way around. "She knows that she needs to be a good maid. She knows she needs to keep her eyes down. She knows she needs to keep what she's capable of a secret. She's going to let me do this -" Mynx tugged on Bella's tail sharply, "and worse because that's the price she has to pay to keep you safe. You're going to play this game, princess, because the alternative is playing it for real."

She stares into your eyes, deadly serious, cold as ice.

Bella!

You know Mynx a little better than Redana, and you know her signs of embarrassment and stress. Her scales are rippling in what you've come to recognize as her version of a blush, and while her hands are cool as ice cubes against your burning face and ears they're warmer than they normally are. She's as much talking herself up to this as she is beating it into Redana. In her heart she's shy and soft as butter. Being able to flirt and project confidence like this is something she's been consciously working on for years, and you can tell how nervous this role makes her.

You have a moment to reflect on this before a trapdoor slams open and a goddess emerges.

Alexa!

You've walked in on - something. The Princess! And Bella, the maidservant you met back at the Palace - what is she doing here!? And there's a blur of liquid motion you're already coming around to face when -

"Oh, it's you," said Mynx tucking her bioplasma-blue glowing hand inside her sleeve with an air of faint embarrassment and letting out a relieved sigh. "The statue, right? Stand down, the princess is fine, I'm her bodyguard."

You know Mynx. One time she shape-shifted into you and stood directly in front of you silently for six hours before pulling a goofy face. And more, you know what she's capable of - the Toxicrene Temple was one of Molech's favoured instruments, for what better war than one where you controlled the leaders of both sides? She has a lot of strange tricks up her sleeve but all of them are useless against your lack of metabolism, so she'd only be a tactical threat if she was supporting a Trochidae.

Dolce!

One of the problems of distributed intelligence is that it very easily lends itself to indecision - and so the Assistant Secretary slides back and forth at the end of the tunnel as its limbs all vote differently as to if they should stay or go. But you are soft and harmless-looking and so the octopus comes to the conclusion that it is in no immediate danger here, talking to you.

"Oh, very well," said the Assistant Secretary, one tentacle taking the initiative to pat you on the head and delight in the fluffiness. "Look. I'm out of a job, to be honest... what's the point of managing a dead leviathan's fear? Oh sure I'm still on the organizational chart and my office is one of the ones that didn't get shattered when the ship came through but that doesn't mean I deserve to be here. My position has been destroyed and now I need to grow a backbone," funny. "and decide what to do with myself. Do I take a voluntary redundancy and return to the spawning depths? Do I transfer into a new position? There are so many vacancies, how do I decide what I want? What if I don't like it there? What if I need to apply?" it groaned.

"Help me out, little sheep," lamented the bureaucapus. "What should I do with myself? Retire? Start a new job? Maybe even go into the private sector and join a cancer colony?"

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

Sometimes Canada feels like she's drowning in Marianne's presence - it's so easy to do. Follow the waves and undercurrents and riptides no matter how far away shore gets. But now she's under the surface and it's...

Fire and touch and tongue and lightning. Intensity and curiosity and intimacy. Her tongue touched the inside of her mouth and tasted her thoughts and she melted into that. Please. See me. The mask she could never take off was torn away and her knees shook in fear and her heart pounded in exaltation. She'd missed this. Please... she needed to be known because she didn't know herself. She needed to be vulnerable because being strong was so hard...

And then she was standing, blinking, lips glistening, hands trembling as judgement was passed.

She tried to speak but her tongue had not accepted the idea that it was free and untangled. She tried to fall to her knees but before she could she was supporting Marianne whose weight was on her shoulders and she couldn't drop her. She tried to blush and at least something went right.

And through it all she had the intense feeling she'd been found wanting. So much for confidence.

She started taking shaky steps forwards, the kind of stiff march that came when every footstep was an individual requiring dedicated care and attention. "You..." wantkissedsavedshattered "...disapprove." she managed, resisting the urge to touch her lips that still sparked like stars. "I'll work harder," she said because that was all she could think to do.

Fellowship: The Heart

"Philosophy is bullshit," said Ailee. "I'm interested in results. And I just want... urgh," she rubs her eyes, then swears as she realizes there was still sand on her fingers. She starts rubbing a lot more fiercely with the back of her hand. "I just want something to change. I just want..."

She sighs, but it settles into a smile. "I thought about it. You know, plan A, take my fucking shot at the king and see what's left standing at the end of it all. But an answer like that is both too slow and too short term."

She finished rubbing her eyes, one of them quite red and watery from the sand. The other... not much better. She gives a confident little smirk through it all. "So I'm down here instead. Going to solve the problem at the Heart."

Breathless Dead

Redana and Bella!

Mynx bites her finger to stifle the giggles. "You two are so cute like this! Oh, I should have done this much sooner. And maybe I should find a way to keep doing it even longer," she daringly puts her finger under Bella's chin to affectionately scratch. "After all, from that expression I might be in danger if I were to let you go! You know, I told Redana that she should train you better."

She reaches into one of Bella's pockets and takes her time rifling around until she comes out with a silk handkerchief. She uses it to dab up the saliva from the maid's mouth, and then steps around to provide the same service to Redana - with the same handkerchief.

"You know the Empress didn't trust me with this?" she said. "She didn't even trust Bella. You should have seen how hard Bella worked to get to be out here with you... but don't worry, okay? It's not just us two. I've got assassins from all five of the temples standing by. I'm teasing now, and later when I'm pretending to be the King I might have to be really mean... but you're safe, okay? I'm going to get you and Bella back home and things can go back to normal." She grinned widely. "And then you can punish me as much as you want! Oh, should I start giving you some ideas? There are all sorts of things I can show you now so you know how to really discipline me when the time comes~"

Alexa!

"Oh, so polite!" said the Assistant Secretary. There's so much to keep track of - so much movement and motion - that you almost don't notice when it starts squeezing out through the bars. Despite its bulk, the rubbery body of the octopus is capable of deforming even through this narrow space. It takes a while though, the cage isn't entirely useless. It continues its cheerful patter while it's so doing. "And yes! A system like the Eater of Worlds doesn't collapse just because one office building is destroyed. Admittedly after the decades some systems will have grown cancerous and need to be put down, and resource scarcity will have done for some non-critical functions, but there's life in these old bones just yet, ha ha!"

For all the cheer in that burbly voice, you manage to finally spot the eye of the brainsquid as its core bulk emerges on the other side of the prison. It's nervous. Darting around frantically in all directions. It's latching onto politeness because it's terrified of violence, and what it wants more than anything is confirmation of its own physical security. The tentacles continue to move erratically - octopi are distributed intelligences and every single one of its limbs has its own brain that only works vaguely in tandem with the others.

"Anyway, it's been ever so pleasant to meet you Alexa, but I really must be going -" and oh whoops, that's the rooftop vent clattering down besides you, and before you have time to blink the entire Assistant Secretary has lifted itself up and crammed itself into the air vent. "Please put your request in through the proper channels - Form 20185 I think you'll need - and I'll make sure it's processed. Ta ta -" and it's slithering away into the vents.

That's what you should be cautious of.

Vasilia and Dolce!

They're still moving, yes, still coherent - but they're so slow. You can escape from them in moments if you have to and that might be desirable because the objective is whooping away down through an air vent. Alexa isn't going to fit down that but one of you might - if you're prepared to climb into a cramped air vent currently occupied by a giant octopus. The rest of you might be best served going upstairs into the palace and trying to cut it off.

Fellowship: The Heart

"Try again," said Ailee, "but arguing against my actual position this time. I didn't say that there should be no laws or enforcement. Like you illustrated, having laws is in the interest of the community because otherwise it's just strongmen. But say the Duke d'Nauvair starts that civil war at last and overthrows the King of Grand Jelt. From what Lucien says that might already be happening. He'll have proved himself through politics and warfare an exceptional individual - or at the minimum the most competent of the closed circle of land owning magnates who have a voice in the political system. The laws by definition won't apply to him, what with him being the king and head of a massive army. And yet his reign would immediately be constrained by laws he had nothing to do with! Laws that weren't far-sighted checks and balances placed upon an incoming magnate by a visionary founder-figure, but shit like 'the clerical estate has a veto over legislation' and 'thou shalt not regulate intercolonial tariffs'."

She leans down through the railing, stretching out her hand - and the gleaming magical talons that extended from it - and ran them through the sand as it raced by. She withdrew a handful of silver sand and looked at it thoughtfully.

"I mean, what's the point of having that civil war in the first place if the new king is exactly identical to the last king? Why are the laws vested with any sort of moral authority if they can't even perform their basic function of stopping a usurper? When an individual so exceptional they can single-handedly overthrow society arises, why would anyone hold to old, failed laws and traditions as inherently moral? Why not totally remake society in that instance?"

She's watching the sand fade through her fingers.

She's worried.

She's not arguing this in the abstract. She's arguing this while she's thinking of her family at home, trapped in a nation on the verge of civil war.

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

There are other presences, but none as overpowering as Marianne. Canada can drown in that flow - the ferocity, the confidence, the musical and flowing speech and motion. She seems like genius made manifest. Each sentence she wants to replay in her head, first listening to the rhythm and grace of it, and then descending into the meaning. Each glance between the shadows and light, each act of transdimensional acrobatics she wishes she was filming. The eyes that flash out of that shining mask like thunderbolts see not only her but her futures as well - the ones she seeks, and the ones she will not attain.

She's stomping her feet a little. Letting the armour rattle. So direct and lumpen in comparison, a castle amidst a sunstorm, hoping the noise and regularity steadies the rhythm of her pounding heart.

"I-I didn't know I could do this," she said, and what an embarrassing coincidence that she stepped into this puddle of shade and shivered right as Marianne was talking about punishment. "I never had to before."

Some part of her wonders if she regrets the wishes of her youth. She'd dreamed of who she was now - the speed, the face, the curves. She'd wanted to be this - exalted that she was this. But there was something about the motion of that tail, the creak of those broken wings that made her struggle not to stare. How did they feel to touch? Would it be rude to touch them? Were they like hands or shoulders or... something else?

"Well - uh," she swallowed. "It's not that I'm twisting myself, Marianne," she said, raising her head and speaking clearly - and oh, in that moment she does not know how clearly she's speaking. How commanding. How bright! "My heart is set. I know the world I wish to create. As long as that remains unchanged all that's left is building it. Shield, spear, they're both tools and I will wield whichever one I must."

Replace every colon with a question mark and you will know the shape of her heart, though you would not know it from her voice alone. She still struggles with the lesson of the Cat.

[Canada is explaining how she thinks the world works, looking to shift your Superior down and Danger up. Accept her words or reject her influence.]