Thanqol

Sunshards

Yue the Sun Farmer!

The mask of Princess Kikil is wood and stone and electricity. It is slashed with blue and dusted with orange, bordered with swirling patterns in white. It is a meter tall, coming down below her chest and raising high in the air; painted crazed eyes and enormous lips and eyebrows made of exposed circuitry. It is a thing of beauty - or at least, is descended from one - but it too is a thing of monstrous power. The relief is stronger than the regret of breaking such a thing when the crack runs all the way down its centre and the heavy mask slides free and clatters to the floor.

And beneath you see a mirror.

You see exhaustion. You see elation. You see a heart that's filled to the brim with pride and wonder. You don't have to wonder what that emotion is like, that starstruck awe, because it's filled you a hundred times in a hundred ways as you saw all the beautiful people on your adventure. But now you're on the other side of it for the first time and it makes you realize two different things.

The first thing is that it makes you see just how special you are. You made a blade out of love, as keen as the First Princess' arrows. You overcame someone who was trying her best in a way that took her mask and her heart all at once. You left an impression so deep that this Princess will never, ever, forget it and will work her hardest over months of quiet future practice to try and incorporate into herself. You did something amazing, Yue.

The second thing is that it makes you see just how special you are. This expression? This shock and joy and love and awe? This is an expression that every maiden in the game of Princesses seeks. This is what they were all fighting for, the blow that they sought to land with each turn of their sword. They all practiced as hard as you do, Yue, spending weeks and months perfecting their art so that someone could look at them like that. Like this. And you gave that to them. You can see now that each time you looked out with love you made someone's day, you filled their hearts with pride, you made everything seem worth it. Now, finally, you understand just how happy you made so many people.

You stand atop a mountain in this moment. And though the climb was steep, when you glance back at the trail behind you, you see you planted a thousand flowers in your wake.

The mirror's tear-blurred edges resolve slightly. The hair is longer, the face is older, there is a new and unbearably cool scar that bisects the left eyebrow - still your face, but not quite. And her eyes are filled with tears too. "Ah - you dummy," she sniffles, "you cut all the way through my mask to my heart in one blow. D-don't you know you're not supposed to do that?"

And then Xiu throws her arms around you in the biggest hug she knows how to give.

*

Daily Affirmation Of The Way <3

You are kind of a big deal. For some reason.

You are by no means the most senior monk. No means the wisest. Definitely not the strongest - you washed out of the dojo at the brown belt level because that was the transition point from 'punchy yoga' to 'punchy other people'. These days you mostly procrastinate about weeding the garden and invent new and exciting bean-bag chair postures to lie in as you browse the internet. And now, here you are, with the entire martial/religious establishment of the Nine Kingdoms looking to you for guidance.

You spent a while wondering if it was because you were, somehow, the most enlightened out of any of them. Enlightenment was a tricky thing to measure, but maybe the other monks could see that you were the best at it. But then, why couldn't you see it in yourself? That had been an insight worthy of a status update: "A ladder leads to heaven and a stairway leads to hell. But who is the king of those who lie down to rest?" Everyone had read it, nodded quietly, and just as quietly assumed that that king was, in fact, you.

There are five hundred year old grandmasters, with eyebrows descending to their knees. There are young and fierce dominants on their quest to turn hell into heaven. There are rice farmers and there are ninja, there are hackers in striped stockings and there is a sushi chef who whistles as he cooks. Warriors in saffron robes ready to do righteous violence to those who break the laws of heaven, and dispossessed celestial bureaucrats who write the laws of heaven sitting on golden nimbus clouds and battle with ennui. They all watch the burning cruise ship and listen to the screams of foxes, and then they all turn their heads. They all watch you.

But who are you to watch? In the absence of any better answer, you watch Rosepetal and Princess Chen. You watch fire and water dance together and you see a strange sort of harmony there. It's no different from what anyone else sees, but still you feel the itch. You feel a calling, a tension in your brain. Something you have to do. And so you pull out your laptop, sit down on the cliffside, and type out a post.

It takes you a few tries. You start by trying to make it short and pithy, then you go into a rambling koan about harmony and chaos. None of it works. Some part of you feels the pressure of other eyes, but it's not them that compels you - it's trying to find the shape in the words themselves. Eventually you just write:

Daily Affirmation Of The Way <3:
Harmony creates harmony.

Finally, you look up.

Every one of the assembled monks produces their phones - some have laptops, some have digital watches, some look over other's shoulders, some read it out to those around them. The words ripple out through the crowd and they nod quietly and consider. They look at Rose and Chen together 'midst the fire and water and none of them can deny that it is harmony they see there.

And so they lower their nunchucks and fox nets and quietly stand down as the cruise ship full of cutie chaos continues on its way.

And then, finally it occurs to you.

It's not that you are the wisest. Not that you are the smartest. It's that you are the one who wrote.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

Power is the priority. For Orange it always has been. Though, she notes - with some quiet relief - that hiding evidence that she might be werewolfing doesn't seem to be on the priority list. She's not going to volunteer that information though. She knows she's not qualified to perform psychological assessments on herself, and to voluntarily subordinate herself to White's tests means that she would be taking her own - potentially critical - perspective out of circulation at a key moment.

Besides. Nothing's happened yet.

She dispenses with those thoughts soon enough; they're alien to her mental architecture. The context she understands is this: She is to do the best she can within the boundaries of the legitimate, pushing - but not breaking - those frontiers if necessary. She must strive for absolute brilliance and it's the duty of other people to figure out if and how to restrain her.

Mrs. Bandara, then. Oh, such a contact - but such an impossible one. One operating entirely within the realm of the legitimate, walker of corridors of power, a decision making node in humanity's great security force. She fantasizes almost viscerally of herself in a sleek black dress, cut with fiery orange lines, hair coiled up like an autumn inferno. A figure of sophistication and class who could engage the prosecutor as an equal. The maid dress she wears may as well be burlap. Professional conversations are not struck between servants and masters. Without an introduction Mrs. Bandara might as well be on the moon.

Well... perhaps. Nobody gets to be a District anything without having a willingness to climb the greasy pole of power. Part of the beauty of human organizations is that each node is a human. And there might be levers, priorities and rivalries that would allow even a maid to cloak herself in a dress of power.

So Orange listens. She cleans in patterns that keep her in earshot of certain phone conversations, tapping into invisible electromagnetic signatures, and communications channels. She listens and she observes. Where do the individual and the system meet? And where do they diverge?

She's always listened like this. She was the one who came up with the plan to bring down Mrs. Everest's heirs. If corporations and governments are a form of AI, then it stands to reason that they can get computer viruses too.

[Surveillance+Clever: 6,3+4 = 13]

Pink!

"Promethemouse back there stole fire from the gods," said Pink. "Enough to make me start thinking in terms of Ragnarok and Fire Giants."

Her eyes are vibrant and alien, the sight of Odin in neon pink. There's an eerie intensity to her statement, a private determination not to invoke such myths frivolously. She's far more confident than she normally is, a spooky focus.

"So I have a question, York," said Pink. "Say you were the first to receive Prometheus' fire in ancient days, the first one to take the forbidden torch 'ere the wroth of Zeus. What would you do with it?"

Yellow!

To be wanted is one thing; something you are familiar with. To be explored is another.

Yellow doesn't follow patterns of human intimacy; neither shame or shyness, nor confidence and power. She is inquisitive and slow and thoughtful, but never distracted and never unfocused. Nor is she interested in being touched herself - she'll gently pull away and whisper 'later' each time you get close. All that seems to interest her is the shape of your body beneath her hands and mouth.

She's curious about your hands, where the synthetic material is sensitive on the palms, and where along the back. She's curious about your back and where it connects to your shoulders and hips. She searches for tension as much as for sensitivity, gently working tight muscles or tender nerves - just enough to whet her own curiosity without taking you to relaxation or release. If there are stories in where your neck meets your ear or where your thigh meets your navel she'll find them and make you tell her in shivering gasps of breath. And then she'll move on again. It seems agonizingly accidental, the work of an inexperienced AI, but once when she tosses her head back and her golden eyes glitter in street light shining through the window you become aware that there is a playful cruelty at work.

Again and again, she insists on her own pace. Patience. Later. Shhh. She touches what she wants, satisfying her curiosity rather than satisfying you. And so she draws you out until, finally, she is able to press her thumbs down on the centre of your palms and the feeling is so intense and your nerves are so stretched so tight that it shatters something that separates the world from a broken universe of white.

She's surprised by it, a scientific and wide-eyed surprise. She didn't have a plan; didn't know how long you'd last; didn't know you fit together or fell apart like this. But after the storm has passed she draws close under the covers and lets still-curious hands at last be still.

She'll learn the rest later.

Sunshards

Yue!

"Oh my gosh, I know, right?" Princess Kikil said in a voice that sounded at once distorted by some sort of machinery in her mask... and also, beneath that filter, somehow familiar. "I can't believe how you move - what you're capable of! Who did you learn all this from!? I mean -"

She puts a burst of strength into her sword and forces you back. She raises her gladius, determined. "Don't you dare hold back! Don't think that I don't see you! You just want to see my ultimate move, don't you think I don't know what you're up to! Well, I'm wearing a mask - and if you know anything about duels you'll know that counts as a whole second life! When you get the upper hand you'll get to cut my mask off and you'll be so surprised at what you see underneath that I'll get a chance to turn the tables - and that's when I'll use my ultimate technique!" She stomped her foot in a show of determination, but her voice was thick with emotion. "And not one moment before! So don't hold back! If you don't show me how wonderful you are I'll never forgive you!"

She sets her stance again and flips a setting on her laser pistol. It hums as the power cell starts to shine radiant and glistening, infused with the direct energy of a Sunshard. Now when it fires it's raw dreamstuff, sheer potential. It's still dangerous but now it's a kind of danger that's reactive with your own dreams; if you dream of wolves then wolves will sweep by your legs and try to trip you - perilous at first, but also giving you all the materials you need to build your own technique if you can tame and redirect them.

*

Rose!

You take your eyes off Omets for but a moment. It doesn't even occur to you that you did; in this challenge constant eye contact is not a necessity. You fight a duel against a master monk, forgetting that you are still aboard a shipful of foxes.

Master Omets' challenge changes tempo; no longer a polite and restrained test but an increasingly aggressive sequence of motions. He drops a teacup, requires his scarf to be straightened, steps past you slightly and then back again, and despite all your efforts to take things slow and steady you find your balance slipping more and more. You're still holding on right up until the point where someone tackles you in the small of the back and you find yourself falling face-first into the deck as no less than three kitsune sit on top of you.

You blink and the illusion falls away - master Omets has a fourth kitsune, an orange and white vixen, cornered with her hands up at the point of her staff. "Wait!" said the kitsune. "Look! We've captured Rosepetal for you. Look, here's the deal - you let us four free, and we'll give you her and all the other Kitsune on the ship to send back to cutie jail. What could be fairer than that?" she flashes her biggest grin and offers her hand to shake.

You, Rosepetal, are being Betrayed.

Chen!

You can feel warmth rise up inside of you. It's a gradual thing, but falling into a flow state always is. It's the sort of thing that takes time and at the end renders time nonexistent.

The Sun in the Shard is not dead or alive, not asleep nor awake. It is not a living thing, nor spirit, nor demon. It is a source. It is an entropy-defying marvel through which new matter and energy can enter the cosmos. It is matter so condensed that physical laws stop applying and you can pull forth a kingdom from inside without reducing its mass in any way. But then there's something more to it than that, something that you can't see with your eyes. Something you can only see when you paint, when you're able to view a light-emitting object without light.

There's an arrow running right into its core. And that arrow is what hears you. It's not forged of steel, for what steel could cut a star? It is forged of love, the love of the first Princess. This arrow cut into the heart of this dumb font of raw power and gave it a mind by which it could dream.

And so you speak to it and that love vibrates outwards. You can feel the love rising and shaping the power that emanates, no longer raw heat and light but something more beautiful. Wow!, she seems to think. I love your dream!

And then you snap out of it because your dress is on fire. Your painting is on fire. A fair bit of the ship around you is on fire, actually - you're in the centre of a glittering radiance of Solar magic, but also a shipfull of kitsune who are screaming and fainting and being of absolutely zero help whatsoever when it comes to the rapidly spreading blaze.

Breathless Dead

Redana and Alexa!

There are allies, and there are slaves.

Slaves are all Sagakhan is left with.

The Master of Assassins has spent her deadliest coins but she always had fewer to use than her enemies. Now she must take the field herself as the storm of war reaches the edge of her pyramid once more. The tool she calls to hand for this moment is a ten meter long sarissa - a pike five times her height. From her position atop the pyramid she walks at a steady pace, stabbing down at those trying to climb the steps towards her. The motion is like that of a crocheting needle - a sudden and precise dip in and out of her victim's chest, threading a single bloody stitch at a time. So steady and precise is she that the offense is stalling out, morale collapsing as entire waves are sliced down in thrust after thrust and blood runs down the black pyramid in rivers.

She does not stand alone either. A unit of elite Kaeri Bloodfeathers have detached from the battle to help her hold this position, perched with wings unfurled along the upper edges of the pyramid like gargoyles. Now and then one will detach from the stonework and descend silently and alone into the enemy ranks. There she will snap the neck of a commander and then lay about her in bloody carnage with scimitars, dragging ten souls down into the bloody sand with her as she dies.

While the skill of these warriors represents a significant barrier, the real defense here is terror. The theory here is obvious: The way to defeat a phalanx, even one formed of a single hero, is to hold the line long enough to bring up an Esoteric weapon who can sweep them from their position at a safe distance. But the terror and disruption caused to the lines by the combination of the Master's presence and the Kaeri's bloodlust is keeping the lines too disorganized to properly shield the Hermetics as they approach.

Leadership is required.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

"Iselsi Shae, All Seeing Eye," said Zhaojun without stopping to consider the consequences.

This was a big lie to embark upon. To claim to be a member of the Dominion's secret service based on no evidence whatsoever with no endgame or plan. There were lies that would keep her below suspicion but this one made her worthy of absolute attention to anyone who heard it. And she'd done it because she didn't want to play the handmaiden. Evidently, though she wouldn't dare the dragons themselves, anything short of that seemed to be fair game.

She produced a notepad and smiled sweetly, feathered quill hovering above the paper.

"I am here to investigate Cathak Agata," she said, "in order to form an assessment of how she is performing as colonial administrator. Depending on the results she may be recalled or promoted. So, Ms. Piripiri, I grant you the leave of the Scarlet Throne to speak freely, without concern for station or decorum: How do you judge the Dominion's leadership in the Flower Kingdoms?"

Breathless Dead

"Athena!" howls Molech. "I would give you the galaxy! Grant me victory and I will dedicate every temple to your honour!"

Arrows pierce him in a dozen places. Blood-gold sap drips, a litany of wounds frozen in time.

"Athena!" cries Molech. "I would give you Olympus! Slay my enemies and I would face mighty Zeus with sword in hand!"

His body dangles on the spears of a dozen Coherent. He flexes and shatters them, the wood of their shafts merging with the wood of his body.

"Athena!" screams Molech. "I would murder your brother Ares! Help me survive this day and I would cut his throat in your name!"

The axe comes down upon his back. This is no longer a battle, this is the felling of a tree, and the blows have settled into a rhythm.

"Athena!" rasps Molech. "Grant me a kiss! Grant me a smile! Grant me any sign of your love and I will find the strength to go on!"

The execution drags on. Slashing talons threaten axemen but briefly. A new set of warriors has to be rotated out to deal blows to the increasingly miserable figure who, despite everything, still refuses to die.

"Athena!" croaks Molech in between the swinging axe blows. "Athena! Please! Tell me what it is you want!"

And there she is at last, and she is utterly unrecognizable. You were told you were made in her image, Alexa, but looking at her now you can scarcely believe it. You have never looked less like anyone. Her eyes are the colour of the stormclouds that drench the desert in rain, and there are poppies woven into hair slashed with blue and violet streaks. She is armed and armoured for war, but it is of no manner of war you might recognize: not bronze and steel but leathers and hoods and a gas mask with one broken eye lens.

She leaned down over him.

"Next time," she said, "try leading with that one."

And then she crushed his skull with a stop sign.

"Asshole," she said.
"Mm," said Aphrodite, coming up next to her. "Pity."
"I was talking about you," said Athena.
"I," said Aphrodite, hurt, "have been given a very difficult task, you know."
"Nobody gave you shit," said Athena.
"It is a turn of phrase," said Aphrodite. "Look, every other god in Olympus has found if not a wife then at least had a fling or two."
"And you thought this was the guy to do it?" said Aphrodite, heaving her bloody stop sign up over her shoulders.
"Look, he had a plan to at least get a kid out of you!" said Aphrodite. "Honestly, this is me taking your feelings into account. Entirely platonic, respectful, distant cerebral love from someone who'd never make an inappropriate advance, and who could help you reproduce without any of the things that you've already ruled out. And isn't that what you're all about?"
"You still have no fucking idea," sighed Athena. She pointed at Alexa. "Does she look like my daughter?"
"Well..."
"Does this look like my idea of a good time?"
"It's a war, isn't it?" shrugged Aphrodite. "One is much the same as another, surely? War never changes, after all."
"War changes all the time," said Athena. "It's love that stays the same. This man built a monument to a single fleeting instant, a mechanical simulacrum of me made of gears and cogs and sorcery. He thought it would "perfect" warfare. It was obsolete by the time he finished and he lost. And here I find the damn thing has survived on this side of the Rift."

She snaps a hand wearing a fingerless glove, and the sky changes. Above is the planet of Baradissar. Huge sections of it are crackling and aflame, enormous rents opening in the barren sands to reveal colossal grinding and tearing gears and machines. Upon its surface stands Athena as you know her, the four-armed and cold-faced goddess, the splitting image of Alexa in whose image Alexa was carved. She looks up into the sky, grim faced, and raises her shield.

"Look at this shit," said the true Athena. Then she hefted her stop sign up into a javelin thrower's stance - and hurled it.

Across the gulf of space it soared. A bolt of blinding light seen across all the galaxy, crossing the distance between Sahar and Baradissar in an instant. It punches right through the simulacrum's shield, through her neck, and out and down into the planet below. It crashes through the earth shattering gears and machines, driving through into the bloody and mad heart of Baradissar. Finally, slowly, it grinds to a halt in the planet's core. The red and white word STOP is still plainly visible as the gears grind to a final close all about it.

And then, the planet Baradissar and its enormous god machine finally and mercifully dies.

"You are impossible to please, you know that?" huffed Aphrodite.
"Shut up," she said, turning away. Instead she walked over to Alexa.

"Hey," she said. "I'm Athena. We haven't met. I don't come out this way much." she glances around at the battlefield. "Fuck, this is archaic. Cavemen hitting each other with clubs. I can't even remember who I'm supposed to root for in this situation. Anyway," she snaps her fingers again, conjuring a massive industrial hammer, more like a tool than a weapon of war, with a glowing force projection array in its head. She hands it off to you. "Here. You look like you've had a shit day, and you're the side that needs to break something massive and ungodly, and that's good enough for now."

Sunshards

Yue!

You know that there are different kinds of glass. Hyra explained it to you during an evening of cuddling conversation where the topic had wandered to embarrassing secrets. Some glass was like in the movies that you could just go through in a spectacular rain of shards, but some glass you'd just face-first slam into like an incautious bird. No quicker way to undermine a dramatic entrance.

With her example in mind you think to make a quick little knock on the glass window to Princess Kikil's room and are pleased to note the sound and the thinness of it. Good. Princess Kikil is, evidently, a professional.

And then with a massive two-legged kick powered by your jetpack you go crashing into her office.

She's sitting behind a massive desk, enormous oval-shaped blue and teal Burrower mask reaching down to her waist, gloved fingers steepled in front of her like a mastermind out of cinema. The second you come through she stands suddenly, flipping the table forwards in a way that at first indicates massive strength but from the surprisingly light crash of the wood perhaps indicates that the table is hollow instead and designed to be overturned in this way. Using the table as cover she fires at you one handed with a laser pistol while drawing a glowing neon-green gladius in her offhand.

It's a prepared technique, and executed well but... oh, this is interesting! She's not actually perfect. Qiu had that kind of deep confidence in her technique, Chen just seems to flow through everything instinctively and Rose is aware of her own power even when she's forgoing it. Princess Kikil has evidently thought about what she's doing so a lot, even practiced it, but she's very clearly in your league. She's keeping her stance strong but she's not, like, using perfect footwork to kite you around the room any time you advance. She's got a clever move where she can raise her sword up high and shoot a laser bolt into it, making it reflect like a mirror, letting her angle her shots around corners but not reliably enough to land immediate hits.

But at the same time she's striving to impress. She's doing stuff she never practiced or trained for as an attempt to push herself to live up to the standard you're setting. Angling shots off the shattered glass isn't something she's prepared to do but it's her doing her best because you deserve that from her.

*

Chen and Rose!

Jessic: Oh no! Chen has been captured by foxes!
Princess Kyoo: you've gotta talk to your sun
Jessic: I'm on my way to rescue you!
Princess Kyoo: ok so
Princess Kyoo: the suns are sleeping, really. sunshard effects are like their dreams.
Princess Kyoo: you can do stuff to influence those dreams. read books to them, show them movies, sleep on top of them and use oneiromancy to influence the dreams directly. lots of setup and even then the shard will bring its own ideas and perception.
Princess Kyoo: you want to do it fast, tho, you'll need to wake it up a bit.
Princess Kyoo: its not too dangerous though it will get hot as shit and the sun will be v impressionistic based on your descriptions

*

It is Master Omets who is the first to approach you, Handmaiden Rose. He is an ancient sage with a long and wispy beard and a robe of embroidered silk. He is so sedate in his calm that it is difficult to register that he just leapt over a mile to land before you on the deck of the boat.

Then he produces his pipe, taps it empty atop the deck, and reaches for a cup of tea while bumping and spilling another. A seemingly simple technique but one of deadly threat - not only is he splitting a diligent maid's attention between cleaning the deck of his tobacco ash, cleaning the spill, and serving him the tea he is reaching for without knowing his preference, his body position and his leg are subtly and cunningly placed to entangle a frantic maid's motions and, potentially, cause him to go tumbling into the pool.

How does the true handmaiden deal with such a complex arrangement of duty?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange and Black!

She wants to push for more. She needs to push for more. Her eyes are shining and her smile is steady but inside she's just howling. Names, connections, key positions filled in for the org chart of the cosmos. Freedom isn't money, isn't power, it's people. That's where she fucked up in the past, thought that just because she was a nuclear armed space dragon that she was free. Idiot! These names, these cards, were more freedom than had ever waited in the heart of an atom.

Even this came with danger. This man was close enough to Everest to have her card but not close enough to derive the connection with her - she was Icarus beneath an eclipse. She wanted Mr. Merkin's rolodex in its entirety, every connection and every introduction, wanted to know -

Black was moving somewhere behind Mr. Merkin. She was giving a cut-off gesture. Orange felt a flash of anger, of rage. How dare she!? How dare she interrupt her when she was finally doing the first useful thing that any of them had done since they'd Fucked Around and Found Out? She was probably worried about some inconsequential shit like blowing their cover, or blowing Mr. Merkin's brain, as though the information derived wouldn't be worth the price! It wasn't her department to figure out how to hide a body, it was -

She looked at herself in the reflection of Mr. Merkin's necklace. Ah, she looked so pretty, didn't she? The two needles in her hair in that Chinese style. Absolutely no sign that she was werewolfing right now. She was dimly aware that was a terrifying thought. It was not much better realizing what had snapped her out of the process, looking over the decision tree in her brain. If she burned out Merkin here then it would cause an alteration in the organization structure and thereby throw off her perfect model. Oh yes. And killing people was wrong. And all that.

She looked at Black again. Orange had never been in a situation where she'd held life and death power over a human before and she was shocked at how few safeguards there seemed to be. And Black had a gun. She was running that calculation all the time! Maybe... she'd been a bit too hard on White. Maybe she owed her a full bug report - oh, but how to explain all of this without blowing Black's cover!?

"I appreciate this, thank you," said Orange, collecting the cards and tucking them away. "I will repay with one of my own." She used a pencil for this - an archaic formulation of graphite upon a high quality piece of paper. Little artistic symbols of the old world, markers of sophistication and class she'd never gotten the chance to use before. The pencil flowed through the majestic lines of a copperplate font.

November - Operations
v8j@hdajp{[241njsdnf01%-01495Jljs#[e-mail]

The perfect handwriting had nothing to do with being a machine. That was just practice - being able to perform neat handwriting was the oldest of old world flexes and it had been a skill that Orange simply had to master. The, ah, content of the relevant email address indicated that she was an android. Humans had a weird relationship with data. They could remember thousands of complex faces but couldn't store trivial character sequences.

"There is a trick to this, however," said Orange. "You do not email this address. Instead, you simply set your spam filter to whitelist this address and then you will receive an automated email with a malicious hyperlink. Clicking that will allow me to send communications that are mostly secure - nothing is ever totally safe, but that will do against most non-state actors.. You may share this card around, but it comes with no guarantees. I am not looking for work but I am open to having my head turned. You may consider this the carrot."

She'd had a tail once. An enormous prehensile limb tipped with a Blu-class space excavation laser that would burn through an industrial diamond focusing lens within four minutes thirty seconds of continuous use. If she still had it, it would be wagging at the thought of critical members of Aevum's social infrastructure revealing themselves to her in a format where she could learn about them and their troubles and pressures.

"And unless there was anything else, I believe that concludes our evening," said Orange, catching another folded-armed stare from Black in the background.

She smiled sweetly at her, and finished her tea.

*

Pink:

She doesn't approve of the idea of Marco staying. How could she? You fight the gods and you'll lose.

Pink thinks in terms of gods. Certain entities or forces are so enormous that they pass beyond the practical and into the symbolic. It doesn't matter how many officers are in the Zeus Segment Police Department, it doesn't matter their equipment, training or competencies. They are the Police, the raw manifestation of finance and politics and self-serving legend. Not an individual but a tribe, and a tribe with its own bloody-handed god: the shepherd whose breath stinks of mutton. Dare not the gods.

To fight a god you need your own tribe. She knows this but can't articulate it to the others and their paranoid isolationism. You need your own tribe and your own god, because while mortals fight it is the gods who decide. In Pink's mind the only god she's met worth fighting for is the god of the Anthropozine. It was a curious and fearsome Beast that found Justice lying mauled and dying on a filthy city street, abandoned by all. It ate her, tearing apart the beaten and diseased ruin of her flesh. It took her into itself, as it was the only thing desperate enough to find her appetizing, in so doing the Beast became furious.

Now it hunts, and stalks, and is ready to kill those who crippled its greatest meal.

That is a god Pink can believe in.

Black doesn't trust anyone. Orange wants to play the game of thrones. Pink just wants to see the bloody animal that ate Justice finish its hunt. That means conducting the ritual. That means the unity of the entire tribe because the gods are more powerful than any mere mortals, no matter how independent they might think themselves.

She opens up the Anthropozine Group Chat.

Pink: Hey @Neon Czolgoz!
Pink: *A photograph of the contents of Elodie's kitchen, converted entirely into baked goods*
Pink: Can I bring some over?

Humans are terrible liars. They have body language that makes them flinch and blink and bristle when they lie, or even when they're just keeping secrets. Pink knows why. It's because they can hear the deep, low growl of the Beast. They can sense its hungry gaze turn upon them. And just because she has eight other bodies at varying levels of self-absorbed intellectualization doesn't mean that she can't hear the growl too.

*

Yellow!

"Oh!" said Yellow, blinking. "Um," is she blushing? "I - I don't know. I don't want to say no aesthetic but..."

She trails off, thinking furiously. You genuinely caught her off guard with that question. It's cut to the core of some long hidden thought process, the kind of internal discussion that you never truly expect to find yourself invited to share with another person.

"It's... all of them? None of them? Something else?" she struggles with the words. "I like seeing other people's aesthetics. I love this place," she said, gesturing around. "How those posters just perfectly frame that wall and make it like there are windows there even when there's not? The potential of being in a place designed to hold more people than just you, feeling like you could move around to all the different parts and be a different person in each? The little scuffs in the carpet where the chairs roll and you can see the ghosts of friendships in where they cluster? It's..."

She trails off a bit. "It's not nothing. It's not other people's. I've got something to say too, I'm sure I do, I'm not just observing. But... I just somehow don't feel like I'm complete enough to answer that question. I don't know how it all fits together yet, how I fit together yet."

Breathless Dead

"You think being fixed is desirable? You think it is just!?"

Despite everything, he stands. He is a mess of sap and blood, new shoots bursting out from ruins and tears. Still he blossoms, as unfeeling and unseeing as the wood that makes up ever more of his body.

"Of course you can't have what you want. If everyone could have what they wanted, where would we be!? Despite everything I did Athena never showed me the slightest tenderness, and I never wavered in her service!" The spite in that is absolutely feral, the hatred of a thousand held-open doors unrequited. "Because that's not how the galaxy works. You are nothing. Love means shutting up and waiting, even if you have to wait forever. Anything less is degenerate hedonism!"

Aphrodite, sitting off to the side, smiles a little and smokes a cigarette.

And then you feel footsteps next to you. Interlocking shields pass between you and he, and spears lower en mass to present the broken tyrant with an indivisible phalanx. The Coherent have formed up around you, a hundred warriors with a hundred different bodies and shapes, all acting with unified purpose when it comes to protecting you. And then, above you, Redana - Redana as you have never seen her, Redana radiant - reaches down with an extended hand and a smile. And here you are, amidst friends.

Say what you will about degenerate hedonism, but it has its perks.

Sunshards

Yue!

The tower seems to go on forever upwards, but with carefully timed jetpack bursts followed by wall-running you're making amazing progress. So amazing that Princess Kikil has to bust out a special enemy just for you.

Two innocuously small drones soar out into the air above and in front of you, and then with a flare they burst into pink and violet flames that immediately shapes itself into the form of two enormous hands. From the tips of these hands drop strings - and on the end of those strings, a machine, held like a puppet. It is tall, refined, strong, feminine, made of a deep black metal that reflects like chrome and shifts like water. It flexes into a stance, a short spear held in one hand and a long whip held in the other. And then it launches backwards because you're still going up the tower together. This is part fight and part race.

The biggest problem here is that you're not quite sure what you're fighting. Are you fighting the hands or the puppet? Is the goal to cut the strings or the drones right in the centre? How are you supposed to deal with the whip? Nobody's ever fought you with a whip before - eeek!

Something about it reminds you of Rose, though. It reminds you of your relationship with her. Everything about this technique from Princess Kikil is too complex, too alien, too incongruous with the rest of this place's aesthetic to seem like it came entirely from her own heart. This is something that she learned from one of her friends. What a marvelous person they must be!

Rose and Chen!

Oh, Chen. Oh, Rose. You do understand what you have become, don't you?

You have become tyrants. Cutie gaolers. The cruel authorities whose unjust demands and threats have instantly created an entire organized fox underground. It is time for fox magic to conjure the finest suits, dresses, and jazz music of the Prohibition era. It is time for foxes to develop fox-speakeasies where revolution might be plotted against their evil mistresses. And within these hotbeds of fox crime it is swiftly agreed: that what Chen really wants is to be tied up so that obviously correct foxes can take over captainship of the ship, and the only one preventing her from embracing that fate is the heartless fox-brutalizer Rosepetal, peer only to Meibelle for her cruelty and heartlessness.

It is time for every righteous fox to join la resistance.

The practical result of this is that for the first time ever things go quiet. They go way too fucking quiet. Nary a bushy tail to be seen. Only half-glimpses of shadowy foxes glimpsing out from around corners or behind doorways. Ten minutes ago they seemed to occupy every available space on this ship but now they are working to prepare a greater act of mischief than they ever could alone.

And about this point you hear thunder in the distance and see a storm rolling in.

This part is not unexpected. Some branch of the Heavenly Bureaucracy was assigned to overseeing the imprisonment of the foxes. In the distance, from a spyglass, you can see martial war gods assembling in the clouds, and on the seaside cliffs below you can see human monks, eyes closed in meditation, a wall of waiting martial artists. These are the legitimate cutie tyrants, the forces of monasticism and order who imprisoned the foxes in the first place and have amassed now to ensure their breakout ends before it begins.

And you are caught in the political centre. Too orderly to be embraced by the cutie radicals, too chaotic to be accepted by the cutie reactionaries.