Thanqol

Breathless Dead

Redana!

At no point did you pull that switch. Being ready to was a clever move - the action of an engineer, the kind of thing that would have gotten you a precious nod of acknowledgement from Iskarot. But there was no reason for you to pull it, no crash and detonation and shattered glass and wave of toxic fumes.

And yet when you look at your hand holding the lever it's in the downmost position anyway. The door blares as it opens, as the howling wind blasts into the cabin and every unattended object is hurled about. It takes all your strength to hold tight to where you are, even as the boarding ramp lowers to provide you with a view of a massive eye painted like a butterfly's wing in yellow and purple and black.

At no point did you let go of your handhold and yet the next thing you know your fingers have just scrabbled onto the edge of the drop ramp as you almost went hurling into the void. It will take all you have to hold your grip and not look at the shape of whatever it is is looking at you with that illustrated eye.

Roll to Overcome if you wish to keep your grip.

Vasilia!

You don't remember shutting the door to the cockpit, but you did - you even wrenched the handle off so you couldn't easily open it again. You're not clear why that was the course of action you took rather than going to rescue Redana, and Dolce is looking at you with evident confusion. There's no time for that, though, because the machine on the window is banging for your attention and once it has it it touches three fingers to its shoulder in what looks more like the charades code for four words than anything.

It holds a finger for the first word, then it points at its chest with two thumbs, and then expands the gesture around - us, we? Two fingers, second word. It... strikes a pose straight out of a children's film series, Princess Deadlift, doing the flex combined with two-finger point that she does when it's time to get serious. Determination? Conviction? Willpower? Three fingers, and then it places one palm flat upwards, and uses the other two to mime a ballet dancer with its fingers, dancing about and performing kicks.

We... are very serious about dancing? We will dance?

Fascinating probably but while this has been happening you've been without visuals on the exterior for the better part of a minute and you could fly into a mountain at any second. This is a serious problem and playing charades with an insane robot doesn't seem likely to help. If you want to straight up fly blind through this then you'll need to Overcome.

Alexa!

This is not how war should be.

Athena is there besides you, spear drawn, shield raised, but there is no advice from her, no muttered tactical assessment, not even commentary on your own stance. Her eyes are darting about looking for a threat as the shuttle turns to madness. Vasilia just slammed the door to the cockpit shut and locked it and Redana almost got blown out of the door that she must have mistakenly opened and there is an enormous eye staring at you through that loading dock.

"Sylica pattern assault carrier," Athena breathes suddenly, more shocked than you've ever heard her - but as she says it so you see it. The visual effect of the eye is incredibly disorienting but once you change your perception to focus on the hard lines and shape of the frontal ram you can see that it's not the mad eye of some god but a spectacular illustration painted onto the front of a combat shuttle. You know the Sylicas, Molech made a billion of them, huge and ungainly aircraft designed for lunatic mid-air boarding actions. You spent a lot of time aboard those in the olden days.

It's up to you where you put your focus - but if you assist either of the others they can roll with Hope. You might also want to do something about Princess Epistia who is lining up a javelin toss directly at the centre of the eye and you're pretty sure you see Ares telling her to do it. You're fairly certain that means that toss is not going to de-escalate this situation.

Bella!

Captain Lorventi clicked her beak and depowered her halberd. The cut about patience landed - glancing around you can see that Lorventi was the only one of her kind who seemed emotional and flustered in this moment. "Of course. Praetor." she said stiffly, trying to feign professionalism.

Strange. She's so obviously a highly strung mess out here in field when she was so restrained and focused on the ship. Is she actually new to this? Is there something about this situation that is triggering some phobia or trauma? Is it actually Mynx in disguise? Whatever it is, it doesn't seem to matter - she's coherent enough to perform her function.

"Praetor," blurts the machine, rising to its feet in a motion far too graceful for something that spoke like an invalid. "The Laughing God has told us of your coming. You are to dance the role of the Emperor. And so we will honour you and obey you in all things." It - she? - fell back to one knee in another fluid motion, one hand to her breast, the other extended out behind her. Still a bow, but the bow of a theatre performer this time - an act, as well as an act of respect.

"And we salute you!" blasted the crowd of machines in unison, so suddenly it made Lorventi jump and ignite her halberd again. They all raised their fists to the side of their heads, or whatever passed for it. The sound of these voices made a machine symphony that was somehow beautiful.

"We who dance the dance of death!" cried the speaker-machine, voice starting to flow, somehow finding music to it. Or do you have that backwards? Was its speech halting because it was trying to speak instead of sing?

"We who dance salute you!" cried the machines again.

"We who have died ten thousand times will die for you ten thousand more!" sang the leader.

"We who died salute you!" came the choir's refrain.

"All is ready!" sang the leader. "The Usurper comes! The Betrayer comes! The Hounds come! They come riding the lightning, racing against time itself!"

"We who have become death salute you!" roared the choir.

The leader bowed to you again, as fluidly and quickly as mercury. A zephyr gesture and a snap of her fingers and her choir - who had subtly positioned themselves through the performance - lift and haul slabs of stone away. As they do they revealed a hidden staircase, concealed underneath the otherwise identical marble of the rooftop. It was furnished for an Emperor, with carpet of soft blue velvet, and lead downwards into the heart of the palace.

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Robena and Apricot are in this moment a single creature, bonded by the perfect harmony that unites the most legendary of riders. Together they stare in wistful, forlorn longing at the festival - at the dancers, at the bar, but most yearningly at the little store that sells honey-dipped apples. It is the kind of stare that does indeed merit some ridiculously overwritten commentary about tears, eyelashes and the contemplation of injustice.

But they have a duty. And so the sweet-toothed duo give a synchronized sigh before Robena mutters some sound of acknowledgement and leads her horse away to re-unite with Constance.

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

"It wasn't you who killed me," Canada murmurs.

She can't shake the words out of her head, Marianne's or her response. It makes sense, doesn't it? She's dead, dead, dead. Her heart doesn't have anything left in it but pain, and so receiving pain is the natural state of being. When she stands she's still so straight and tall despite the bruises and cuts all along her back that would have rendered a normal person a wreck. She just doesn't feel it any more, like a fish doesn't feel the water.

All that courage. All that conviction when she stood up to face Shamash. It didn't seem like courage now. Just the absence of fear. The inability to feel it. That's not what's making her shake.

Why had she said it? It had been so simple when everyone had hated her. Now how was she supposed to redeem herself, when even her sacrifice would leave someone sad?

When Étoile pulls her forwards she almost falls. She almost lets herself acknowledge all the pain, the unexpressed and entombed enormity of it. She catches herself halfway, closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. She had to carry the weight of the world, how was she supposed to carry herself at the same time?

She follows.

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Mm. Yomdaelar.

You see, the Nightingale of Pest - a name I have nobly declined to comment on - has decided that she needs a Heroine. A Beowulf, an Odysseus, a Gilgamesh; a figure of legend who will ensure she is remembered through the ages. Accordingly, she would never say anything to make me look even the slightest bit bad. Intentionally. Her, er. Her prose involves a great deal of lingering on the diamond tears, as hot and salty as Poseidon's kisses that spring unbidden from amidst eyelashes as long and dark as Ethiopian scimitars as I contemplate injustice or pine for my lady love or suffer through the temptations of midnight-veiled seductresses who seek to pull me astray from the path of nobility and so on. If one finds terminally lavender prose comedic then one will have much to laugh at.

We have travelled together for some time. An involuntary arrangement on my end. I managed to give her the slip in Paris, but I have no doubt she is less than a week behind me. Her Paramofuff is almost as enamoured with Apricot as Yomdaelar is with the money my tales of adventure will make her, and she is a horse as swift as the breeze.

Breathless Dead

Redana Et All

BANG

Something hits the window of the shuttle.

Something is clinging to the window of the shuttle.

It's a machine - a combat robot with huge batlike wings that have wrapped all the way around the viewport to block out all vision of where you're going. It's holding a massive two-handed cannon and is pressing it right up against the glass, a shot that'll penetrate into the shuttle's depths and create an enormous detonation of suffocating toxic gas.

And it's wearing something on its face that is a mashup between clown makeup and digital camouflage, a manic grin with irregularly overlapping teeth. It's waving at you, fingers coiled around the trigger of its gun.

Bella!

Behold, Imperium.

The galaxy is ruled, and there is only one ruler. She has in her wisdom allowed the population the freedom to organize for themselves the best way to serve her and administer her justice. But free will, like life itself, is a gift that at any time she can revoke.

The constructs halt. Most of them drop to their knees and touch their foreheads - or what passes for them - directly to the ground. Some of them no longer have enough flexibility or motor function in their legs to kneel - these ones simply tip themselves over, slamming face-first into the ground in crashing heaps of scrap. From others, there come the sounds of loud popping sounds and small fires break out across their bodies. One rips free a tank-tread leg so that it can slam down lower to the earth.

One keeps staggering forwards, a demented mass of machinery far too gone to even resemble the holy form of humanity. Inside there are bangs and pops as the power of Imperium searches for a sanity that is no longer there. With a small explosion its arm falls away to reveal an interior blazing with fire, and after taking two more unsteady steps it collapses into a heap of molten slag at your feet.

One of the Kaeri soldiers cheers. Captain Lorventi punches him in the arm and he stops.

"You behold Praetor Bella!" said the Captain, stepping up to your side and kicking the wreckage out of your path. "Agent of Empress Nero, conqueror of Baradissar and your rightful sovereign! You will gather a full tactical assessment of this palace, its layout and resources and provide them to me and then you will stand by for further orders!"

"You..." Lorventi blinked her huge eyes in shock when one of the robots spoke. It kept its forehead pressed into the ground, smudging thick paint onto the stone of the surface. "... have come. As was. Foretold. We shall perform. The Dance."

"What the fuck?" Captain Lorventi turned to give you a look, halberd raised, silently asking if you wanted her to destroy this thing that dared to speak back to you.

Fellowship: The Heart

"You want to haggle with me?" said Ailee, Pride building up behind her like a bonfire. "You dare to haggle with me? You little fucker, do you not understand the position you are in? I am here to inspect you, not mop your floors like a fucking janitor. And the hubris," she spits the word as only someone lost in hubris can, "to dare imply that you can keep me from my appointed rounds, that I am in any way incapable of leaving when I choose to. Do you know what a station is? Two cheap benches and a ticket machine. Do you know who I am!? Ailee Sundish, Archmage of King Dragon! Safety is everyone's responsibility because it will take everyone's combined efforts to be safe from me!"

She felt good about this. She felt like she was getting through to them.

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

Canada exhaled. Some part of her had been waiting for so long to hear those words. To hear that everything was for her, to hear that everything that seemed so mysterious actually made sense, to hear that in the end people did terrible things because of love. A tension that had gripped her by the base of the neck for so long started to relax.

It almost made her forget it wasn't Tirzah who was saying it.

It almost made it not matter.

Her dreams had become tangled indeed if this moment felt like they were coming true.

She tried to give the next line, rehearsed endlessly in her imagining: "I can't be safe until everyone else is safe. Come - we can still make this right." It didn't make it out. Come on, straighten up Canada. Be the hero that everyone needs. Deep breaths, one sentence. "I can't -" try again, just swallow and try again, "I can't!" her face is bruised, her back and knees ache, just struggle through it like you always do. Every punch you take is one you saved someone else from. "I don't deserve to be safe."

Ah. A mistake.

"I'm not the hero this world needs. I'm not a saviour they can rely on. I'm weak and blind, and all I can try to do is make up for the damage I've already caused," she said. "After that I won't get in your way any more..."

Breathless Dead

THE PLANET OF BARASSIDAR
Response Level: 1
Location Stats: The Machines - the ancient armies of the Warsage still walk here.

*

The Museum of Victories on Tellus has an entire wing devoted to the Conquest of Baradissar. Within are spectacular moving paintings of Ceronian warriors descending on bolts of lightning in order to cleave through the machine legions of the Warsage. The Classical, the Empress' personal battleship, gleams like a miniature sun in the heavens above as it closes in on the terrible space-station, The Spear of Civilization. As the simulated battle rages, the Emperor Molech cackles and declares that his victory is predestined and none can outdo his perfected Codes of War.

(The Emperor Molech in the museum is, in fact, a clone of the original. All of the staff in the wing commemorating Nero's victories are clones of Imperial pretenders who Nero fought in her ascent to power. Recreating your conquered foe and tasking them with wiping the display cases of their defeats for all eternity is what is known as a flex.)

The Spear of Civilization is a wreck. The enormous megastructure, far longer than the planet itself, was torn to pieces as teams of Ceronian Legionnaires spiked every one of its ludicrous one thousand Engines (wouldn't a ship that size wouldn't use less than a tenth that number?). The resulting cascade of detonations has left the Spear a debris field. Trapped in the sun's orbit it resembles a shattered ringworld more than anything. There are the remains of battle here, too, but this is nothing like the starship graveyard of the Eater of Worlds. Despite the immense size of the Spear, the Museum of Victories does not seem to have exaggerated the miracle of Nero's triumph here. This could have been a battle to severely injure even the Armada, and it did not answer to her when she took Baradissar. The fight to take this fortress world seems, from the trails of wreckage at least, shockingly one sided.

Despite the glory of the victory you feel a chill deep down your spine as you look at the ruins of the Spear. Molech's final obsession, his ultimate organizing tool against chaos... it strikes a dread deep inside of you. There's something primeval, something cold, something... personal in that glimmering wreckage. It feels like you, personally have reason to fear it, like you have a highly specific phobia tied to that ruin. And despite how intimate it feels, when you look around you - at Galnius and their phalanx, or on the Anemoi in the unblinking eyes of the Kaeri, you see that everyone else feels the same way.

*

The Plousios!

"It is this," the Hermetician had said, "or someone will have to learn astrophysics."

It is not a matter that anyone felt like disputing. The ride from the Armada had been hellish - constant impacts, long delays, and during the roughest patches everyone had to pull 48-hour shifts to keep the ship in one piece. Traveling the void without an experienced navigator was a terrible proposition, and so when Iskarot had proposed that you might be able to scavenge a Shipmind from Baradissar nobody objected. The prospect of defying multiple Imperial Edicts and risking the dangers of the Planet of Machines seemed milder at that point than another week in the hateful void.

You had all decided wordlessly to try the planet rather than the Spear. Something there had struck you wrong.

As you gather aboard the shuttle to descend, there is a moment to reflect. This is a planet of ancient legend and terrible danger. Miracles and perils will await you there. What do you hope you might find?

*

Bella!

Aphrodite has sent you a favourable wind and you have arrived in advance of Redana. Your shuttle has touched down on the location the Augur pointed to - the Imperial Palace.

A mountain range has been chopped in half, sanded down, and carved into a ziggurat of cyclopean size. Enormous pillars rise up as though holding up the skies. You could have comfortably landed the entire Anemoi atop this building. The high altitude air is cold and haunting, and the view is infinite. It feels grander than seeing the planet from space - this is a perspective that strikes a chord that goes back to ancient explorers on distant Gaia. Broken mountains, shattered oceans, enormous machines and a sky that rolls and churns with hideous toxic dust. In the sky above the ruins of the Spear gleam balefully like cursed moons.

The Kaeri fan out around you. They are excellent soldiers and you have never seen a unit more motivated. They are united in their jealousy of the Ceronians for having had the honour of taking Barassidar and perceive in this moment a chance to outdo their ancient rivals. Captain Lorventi herself has come, magnificent crimson-black powered armour ready for battle, halberd unfolded and glinting with a deadly edge. Smoothly, she raised it into a combat stance and energized the blade.

You were being approached. A group of armed decrepit machine intelligences were coming towards you. Their body language wasn't threatening but you knew that didn't mean anything to these barely sentient devices. They had some distance and weren't moving fast, but more of them were appearing all the time.

"Say the word, Praetor," said Lorventi and you could hear her warrior's heart start to pulse.

Breathless Dead

It was one thing to burn the sky. It was another to ensure that the sky remained burned.

Caval-4954 only notices the fragment of blue above in passing. A long silent weather assessment module in her central cortex stirred briefly enough to mention it was the first glimpse of a blue sky in three years. It then makes the insufferable suggestion that Caval-4954 should pause to appreciate it. This idiocy is dismissed and a bug report filed. Caval-4954 has more important things to be doing.

The glimpse of blue and sunshine is blocked out. Above her towers a massive tripod walker, twenty meters tall, enormous particle cannon swinging around to lock on to her. She doesn't spare it a second glance - that particle cannon is as dry and dead as the oceans. The tripod maintains the target lock for a wistful moment as though hoping she'll run and evade but then gives up and returns to their shared task.

Caval-4954 lifts a shattered exoskeleton and tosses it to the side. The tripod flips a demolished tank with an elegant motion of its spindly forelimb. All around her hundreds, thousands of other Machine Intelligences in all their nightmare patchwork forms perform the same duty of picking over the dead. They maintain suspicious distances from each other, ten to twenty meters apart at all times, but all of them are rummaging through the immense heaps of shattered metal that mark the site of the war of apocalypse. Bones are brushed aside and kicked into dust. Mechanical circuits are torn open for replacement components. Some broken and deranged models tear at the dead with all the fury of their combat algorithms. None spare each other a glance.

Caval-4954 finds a replacement torsion motor for her fading leg circuit. She stuffs it into her tote bag - a bright and glittery thing with sequins and a cute-faced cartoon Artemis saying "Chase your dreams!" - where it comes to rest alongside half a dozen ruined radium pistols. She wrenches an intact head from a body for later interrogation - perhaps it would contain some precious uncorrupted software modules she could use to prolong her sanity. And then she pulls away the ribcage of a giant warrior to reveal...

The tripod stops. Its single-eyed stare comes around to focus on the treasure she holds in her hand. All around her the sounds of digging, tearing, and crashing metal slowly fade away. All around her the combat suits, battle walkers, abandoned cybernetics, and nightmare amalgamations of decades of field repairs come to a halt. Everyone is staring at her, Caval-4954, and the thing she holds.

A single clip of ammunition.

An electric ripple runs through the crowd.

Battle algorithms spool up. Tactical systems suddenly start considering locations, angles, targets. Scanners and eye-lenses try to take stock of surroundings previously deemed irrelevant, legs flex and stamp slightly to check to the stability of the corpse-piles they stand upon. The faint clitter-clack of mechanical brains can be heard over the howling wind. The anticipation is rich enough to taste and the world no longer seems godless.

Caval-4954 slams the clip into her immaculately tended magnetic rifle, swings about into a combat crouch, and fires.

The lightweight exoskeleton she targeted would have been a tricky target if it was given the opportunity to begin evasion protocols. It goes down with a crash of alloys. Next she comes around to face a hulking behemoth - a creature that had begun life as a main battle Plover but now had more in common with a bulldozer. Six precious rounds are required to tear through its external plating and shatter its brain, turning its charge into a blind rush. Caval-4954 evades and lets the machine sail into a cluster of warsuits forming behind her. Internal self-assessment logs tell her that she has moved faster in the past, that her tactical battle engrams are corrupted and virus-strewn despite her careful tending and her reactions are below KPI. She files the bug report thoughtlessly, but notes that she questions its veracity. She does not feel slow. She has never felt faster.

Like a thunderbolt she slides into close range of an undead Hermetic. The biological entity within those tattered robes had long since perished but the mechanical cyborg augments have endured the years on their own. No more. Two shots tear the mess of tendrils in two and she slams the wreckage aside to tear apart a mobile battlefield surgery walker with two three round bursts. It's bliss. Every action, every reaction, is in line with a purpose so long denied to her. This is war, this is war, this is the war she was made to fight...

She doesn't lose track of how much ammunition remains in that single precious clip. She knows as it rattles closer and closer to empty, each jarring kick to her arm a tick of the clock that counted down towards another decade of desolation and corpse-digging. She is careful, precise, the model of prowess and efficiency even in the face of a complex and unpredictable battlefield but even so the rounds tick away, tick, tick, tick. She knows when she's fired her last shot even as once again the weather assessment module advises her that the sun has been blocked out.

She turns to look. Above her towers a mad device forged in no factory, hunched like a gorilla, one arm weak and spindly, the other comically massive and raised in a wrecking-ball fist to smash her into pulp. Her combat algorithms run the numbers and conclude that this cannot be evaded. She is dead, but because her kill-death ratio is significantly in the positive, she has done a Good Job.

Cavel-4954 raises her empty gun.

"Bang!" she shouts.

The mechanical gorilla stands still and silent for a long moment.

And then, with a ponderousness that turns into shocking quickness, its feeble right arm gives out and it collapses into a pile of wreckage.

There is a moment of silence on the battlefield so deep even the clicking of mechanical brains cannot be heard.

Cavel-4954 turns around to face a silently standing combat suit. She aims her gun at it. "Bang!" she says. The combat suit collapses like a puppet with its strings cut. She brings her gun around to face the tripod walker that had loomed over her earlier. "Ratta-tat-tat!" she said and the tripod immediately dimmed all its optical lights and went dark.

"Bang!" - this wasn't her. She spun around to face the new threat - a mobile artillery cannon who was aiming its coaxial solid projectile gun at her. Cavel-4954 ducks back into cover. Next to her two other skirmisher suits slide into place with perfect discipline. One mimes handing her a grenade. She takes it, mimes pulling the pin, yells "Grenade!" and tosses it over her shoulder.

The artillery piece vocalizes "Boom!" and then shuts off.

By the time the sun had set amidst that impossible patch of un-burned sky, the war had returned to Barassidar.

Masks: BABYLON MUST FALL

Fall!

She falls.

She envies Atlas. He only had to bear the weight of the world. He didn't have to carry a broken heart in his chest as well. What did strength matter if she couldn't trust the ground she stood upon? What use were castle walls built on shifting sands? She couldn't survive this world of illusion and deceit and kisses. She knew that now - she knew that she was doomed.

She fell.

And she twisted in the dark.

It was her body that hit the ground first, Marianne cradled in her arms for safety.

It was liberating being doomed. In knowing that no matter how many times she was hurt the idea of revenge would never cross her mind. She'd been fooled twice, so shame on her - and weren't there worse things than shame? Like her beautiful friend crying in her arms?

"Shh," she whispered. "It's okay."