Thanqol

The Red Furnace: First Contact

This is the ideal of a mismatch. These soldiers may be heavily armed but they are not prepared to stand up to spellcasting like this. They manage one disciplined barrage, one ragged one - and then they break. Within moments the survivors are in flight. Boldness gives you a wild thumbs up and races after them, leaping up onto interior buildings and racing along through the upper gallery, using the chaos to get a better look at where the points of organization are. She has a strange weapon in her hand and is aiming it down amidst the anarchy below. Her target is sure to be flushed out at this rate...

But just as things are going your way, you feel a new spell take hold - and your hands are too full with battle casting to do anything about it...

[Friction: 2]

It is a terrifying feeling, being on the wrong end of a Prophecy spell.

The timeline burns bright and inverts as knowledge is ripped from present to past. Everything rearranges around it. Chaos becomes organized. Initiative reverses. Perfect stealth is rendered irrelevant; that spell told them exactly where you were going to be and when you were going to be there. It is eminently, wonderfully well constructed - even a glimpse of the business end of the spellwork tells you that this spell is one of the keys of the arsenal of the Endless Azure Skies.

And into the field, amidst the wreckage of the retreating warriors, comes a champion.

He is a serpent, as large as an ogre, with four mighty arms and scales a richer blue than the sky. Armour heavy with divine calligraphy rattles and clanks with the trophy skulls of a primordial time. A sword like a sharpened pool table rests over one shoulder and eyes that burn with the heat of sacred fury radiate outwards. His aura is powerful enough to cause your scanner to explode from the weight of it. With a glance he stills all panic in the room. With a glare he lets it be known that he has taken your measure. With contempt, he unbinds the spell powering the acidic cloud.

This warrior is to a paladin as Lord Death Despoil is to a wizard.

He hefts his blade and - one handed, points it across the room at you.

"I am the Furnace Knight, champion of the Endless Azure Skies," the words burn with the might of a divine curse. You can feel the weight of it smashing in against you - compelling you to step forwards, aim your pistol, engage this creature in futile single combat, all thoughts of retreat and cunning forgotten. You might resist still - your divine ward was well chosen - but it weakens quickly in the heat of the Knight's presence. "I stand uncursed in the light of the Azure Goddess. I have your scent now, Child of Crimson, and neither you nor your kind shall escape me."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Ah, the city of the gods!

There are certain concepts that simply have not had the time to soak into Solarel's consciousness, and one of which is the concept of civilization. Her life is one of wilderness, of giants, of the void. It is a mythic place of gods and spirits and war. The tribe, the warband, close kin are the true family, the only ones who you might speak aloud to. Conversations built over shared experience in the aftermath of gods and battle, love unrestrained as deserving of comrades against the world.

And now this! A shining place of lights and colour and fabric and miracle! She compares it to the palace of the Empress of Zaldar. She was blinded then and she is blinded now. Already in her hand she's holding a Daral Box - a little holographic container containing a stupendously complex, and mostly pointless, mathematical problem. To a Zaldarian it's an intoxicant akin to alcohol - a certain amount of her cybernetic mind has shut off in order to contemplate it, resulting in an enchanting feeling of being productive, being useful. Buzzed from Daral it's easy to appreciate yourself, to justify treating yourself to further luxuries, to lie in the sun and contemplate as warmth creeps in at the perfect pace for discharge.

She's looking for Mirror. The second the Bezorel had landed she'd already been downloading the recording of her fight. She was holding that display in her left hand, the Daral in the right, mind blissfully buzzing as she contemplates equation and appreciates the flick and slash of machine tails. Part of her kicks herself - Mirror had drawn the fight out to test even more functions, while she had ended it as fast as possible with a trick that wouldn't work a second time. She could already feel the crack of the God-Smiting Whip against her armoured plating, her focusing mirrors shattering from a distance, her speed insufficient to keep up...

And then she was on her butt.

She'd been punched unexpectedly, both of her drugs dropped and scattered on the floor. Flat footed and dazzled she'd lost her footing and gone straight down onto the ground, breathing in through a lungful of fire. She looked up at her opponent, then started snapping her fingers in memory.

You, she signed, getting her bearings a little. Oh! I know you! she let her eyes trace down her body - with interruptions - before settling on her calves. How's the leg?

You don't forget a shot like that. Five kilometers through an asteroid field, timed just so to catch her opponent's god in the leg as it accelerated to max speed. She'd spun out of control and smashed through half a dozen asteroids before coming to a halt. Fully synchronized, a hit like that carried a phantom hurt that took months to shake off.

Her intention in asking was genuinely empathic. She hoped that it had healed right! But since she was communicating through sign language and smiling and making biiiiiiig eye-contact it might have inadvertently come across as mocking.

[Wicked Past: This catgirl is someone I defeated and humiliated during the war. She takes a string on me, and I ask her what are your feelings towards me?. I mark XP from Talons of the Past and we can each define a vulnerability we know about the other.]

Breathless Dead

Redana!

"I know exactly what you should do," said Iskarot, a serene being, filled with wisdom. "First you must find your rival, this assassin you have spoken so much about. Then you must challenge her to a fight. Use these." The Hermetic champion placed a set of brass knuckles on the table. "My father gave these to me, and now I give them to you. Make me proud, apprentice."

He nodded at you, a paternal tear of affection in his eye.

Alexa!

"That was what it was for," said Lacedo. "All the history. All the practice. All the training. All the centuries of dreaming. It was for glory. So that our lineage would rise and we would become the new right arm of mankind. A thousand warrior breeds have vanished into history seeking a victory like this. The alternative is dissolution and extinction and an end to the Alcedi forever. Just another skull on the throne of Ceron."

She hasn't said why. She doesn't truly know. This rivalry was woven into her bones, the same as with every other warrior servitor species.

Dolce!

"Uh, yeah, little guy," said Ramses. "Look, the army was, what, fifty thousand strong? Like maybe three hundred could actually see you. Riders went up and down the line and repeated your speech to them. Scared men and women, people with pre-battle nerves. So maybe they jazzed it up a little, made it sound like you were a big strong demigod ram of war who would lead them to glorious victory, and that's what the soldiers imagined. That's who they fought and died for. If I put in their movie that the Captain looked like a militarized plush toy - no offense, I think it's a great look - then they'd call me a liar. And they'd be right."

Bella!

"Because I am in so far over my head," said a voice as the Assistant Secretary of Fear and Doubt materialized. He wears a golden helmet decked with amethysts, a curling helix staff, a ceremonial orb containing rainbow light. He was there all along, pressed up against a wall, skin camouflaged to blend in with the wall and gilt adornments blending in with the treasure junk that washes up inside Poseidon's realm. A single eye fixes on you as tentacles nervously clutch at the staff.

"I mean, I was only ever the acting Assistant Secretary!" cried the squid. "My substantive position is as a Administrative Positional Spawning Six! That's not even on the management cognition track! but then a spaceship ploughed through my supervisor's office and then I was kidnapped by wolves and nobody ever relieved me of the position! And now I've got ten thousand battlecrabs under arms and another ten thousand on the way and they just hailed me as dictator! I'm following the Tidal Field Manual Policy as best I can but now entire specialist cohorts are hatching and a subsidiary administrative caste is coming into being and they're asking for documentation and I don't know what to tell them!"

"And..." he slumped a little, clutching his staff. "And the mice said that you were the best captain they ever had. That you changed their lives and freed them from tyranny. And so I was wondering if you could maybe help me, too."

The Red Furnace: First Contact

"Union wage, eight weeks paid vacation a year and great healthcare!" yelled back a wag from the irregular formation.

Some defensive and buff spells go up in response, arcane in nature, but the spellwork is definitely below Aotrs standards. There is some magic capability here but it's deeply atrophied. These strike you as second line, garrison or security forces in terms of training and discipline. Those weapons are a lot to worry about in terms of the sheer damage they'll inflict if they hit - but that's a very operative if. If there are serious hitters in this formation they're holding back. Despite this they're well trained enough not to clump up and are holding a skirmish formation with good attention paid to minimum safe distances.

"Ha! Oh, clever question. Whichever you prefer. And I know I got paid because I'm still sane. I'm a, how you say," she said another word, 'Ikarani', that made the translation skip; it came out somewhere between supercomputer/genius/doomed. "Leave me running too long and I'll go mad. Hence," she said, fingers touching her forehead, "my appreciation if you would help me make this kill."

She froze when you mentioned your antipathy towards honour, and then took a ginger step backwards. "Child of the Crimson God indeed," she murmured, voice sounding both impressed and appalled. "I mean, I heard stories but..." she clapped her hands together, and then tossed her head back to send the hood falling from her face. The revealed creature was a slender owlgirl, eyes wide and brilliant gold.

In a loud, clear voice she announced:

"I am Boldness of the Ikarani Temple, and I dedicate this sacred hunt targeting Archmagos Birstol to the Azure Goddess.
A violet dawn breaks,
redemption remains denied,
and the curse shall make itself known,
to our glory.
Three are the existences I might end, or one hundred if I am denied."

She turned to face you, Unlucky, eyes glittering and grinning widely. "But you can kill as many as you want! Show me what you got!"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue!

"Exactly so," said Blue. "In fact, I knew him quite well, though we never really spoke. I surveilled him for the better part of two months."

Blue smiled over the gently wafting steam of her tea. Exactly as the Mistress liked it. She looked more than a little like her in that moment.

"I've tossed his apartment. Been through his phone and his emails. I know about both his mistresses, his secret Delaware accounts, his connections with the Triads. I held the door open for him when he went to meet his contact in Thai National Intelligence. One time he came home unexpectedly[1] and I needed to spend the night lying under his bed so he didn't find me -" she laughed politely behind one hand. "Good thing I don't snore."

She set her tea down. Let the intrigue steep, the imaginations run wild.

"Of course, this was all illegal - but of course, I wasn't legally a person at the time. The Mistress was quite influential, as I'm sure you know, so she had her fingers in a lot of pies. Above all, she detested trusting sensitive matters to humans. She trusted us, she trusted her 2D girls, and she trusted her lizards. Evidently them most of all, given how the will worked out."

She smiles another mysterious smile, but this time she looked nothing like Everest.

[1]: It hadn't been unexpected at all, the others had just decided not to warn her, as a joke. Bitches, all of them.

Pink!

She's overwhelmed. She feels that. Sometimes she's not sure any of the others do. She felt it when they built a world. She felt it when they destroyed the Everest family. She looks up into the sky and sees Earth there, the glittering planet straight above them. This is thunder and lightning to her, concepts so powerful they need to be reduced to the shape of everydad to not terrify. Media is a god. Media is a wolf. Media is a thing that doesn't have ten billion screens and twenty billion eyes and a trillion tonnes of mass and momentum on the line. It's a story, a film, a singular event. Not a change in the material conditions of a civilization.

It's an emotion she wishes she could just fucking dissect with lasers and carve into the shape of a city block. She needs some sort of outlet for feelings like this. She'll go fucking mental otherwise. She doesn't have one - not for feelings this big.

Black!

There's an instinct to this. It's to take a broken part of the world and make it fit.

In Black's opinion, November's problem is that she doesn't understand this basic truth. She rationalizes it and processes it a million ways to Sunday but the truth is that there is a secret order to the universe. If you identify that order then you can start pushing things into it. The reward for succeeding is this: Shambala.

There are no thoughts in Black's head either in this moment. She's action and reaction, as pure as 3V is feeling. Every time 3V looks for approval, any time her sense of bliss wavers and nerves kick in, Black is there in her perception with an unblinking stare and the silent words "This is what I want. You are such a good girl."

She's fascinated, hypnotized by this, by her power in this. How far can her silence push 3V? How powerful is her mere presence? Is it enough to overcome every inhibition this ridiculous, beautiful girl might have? It feels like everything here is her doing; she is the scene, she is every hand and every fang, part director part god. Everything feels like it exists because of her and so it is all a part of her. She doesn't know how this works, how to stop, it feels dangerous and she's hyperaware for the cracks and every moment she doesn't spot one makes her all the more convinced this is correct.

White!

Amidst the complexity of White's personality stack there were certain things that had 'right of way'. Conversation had an unusually large number of interruption permissions. It could inventory and freeze certain ideas that threatened to consume all available attention if they threatened to interfere with conversational flow. Some of her cousins didn't have the same priority set, and so if you gave them an interesting idea in the middle of a conversation they'd go silent for potentially days while they worked through it.

So, to Fiona watching White for reactions, there was a moment there when she totally froze - surprised, overwhelmed - but then it cut out after a second and went hard in the other direction: active, aware, focused, social.

"That sounds ideal," purred White.

Beneath those gleaming irises, the backed up thought cabinet looks like this:
1: I am somebody's hero
2: Identification of the problem is inadequate as a solution

But it's the third thought in the list she has to give priority to.

"Just so you know, this is my first time," she said. She has to. Her fundamental drive is to identify and confess weakness and virginity is no exception. "With people who aren't me, I mean. Please guide me while also not making it obvious that you are doing so." She smiled, licked her finger, touched it to the base of Crystal's horn and ran it up to the tip. "So I guess the stories about unicorns are true, hmm?"

The Red Furnace: First Contact

Boldness laughed, bright and clear and beautiful. "Oh!" it - she? said. "So many questions! You'll leave the Crimson in no time at all at this rate. How to put it? The Furnace Knight's crime is," again the translation spell stumbles over an intensely complicated concept being boiled down into a single word. The best it manages is 'redemption'. "So, yes. All of those reasons. It's hard to explain."

The defense is centered around a set of bulbous light mechs. These are unarmed, slow-moving all terrain quadrupeds, quite unlike the gravity technology seen elsewhere. To a scan, they seem to be little more than mobile reactors, heavily armoured and given basic locomotion. Each mobile reactor is tended to by a squad of nine soldiers, each carrying a strange nozzled weapon like a flamethrower or a chemical spray, attached directly to the reactor by a thick cable/hose. If those guns need a reactor the size of a car to fire then they will inflict serious damage despite ostensibly being infantry weapons.

The aliens carrying them are a different branch from the ones seen before. These ones still wear yellow fabric, but rather than concealing their appearance behind baffling robes these ones seem intent on showing their bodies off. The diversity is wild; unrestrained biological and cybernetic modification allowing each individual to follow its own ideal of beauty. Aliens from a hundred species following a thousand individual aesthetics make this military formation look like what you might get if you built an army of interstellar bounty hunters.

"And isn't that interesting," Boldness mused, paying no heed whatsoever to all this. They weren't firing and she wasn't acting like they were about to. "You're an assassin who thinks like a politician, talks like a merchant, and asks questions like a philosopher. You also seem to have the authority to negotiate. I'd almost have guessed you were part of a mercenary warband, but you seem to think that we might pay you with diplomatic relations..." she snapped out of it. "Gratitude! I'm not sure, I get paid in amnesia. You, though? A wish is traditional, isn't it?"

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

It is unfortunate to be a demon against Zhaojun's Demon Binding Umbrella. As she opens the weapon's span the binding circle pattern snaps into focus, crushing down on the maid from all sides. Isn't it wonderful to be wanted? But she could not bind a creature of the Maid's rank and power for long, so she used it to batter and confuse, to throw her opponent off balance with the startling sight of the circle before entangling the crook at the base around a foot and sending her to the floor again...

#impossibly@ this is not her function. As enchanting a match this may be, she has a mistress/an agenda. Amidst all this chaos wouldn't it be wonderful for some disruptive, primordial order?

"You think I am the fairest?" said Zhaojun, swaying aside. "But you have not even seen my Mistress! With but a word and a thought and a bite I was captured, captured so sweetly that I am bound still. How can I fall to another with her eyes watching over me? How can I accept a mistress who has not proven her superiority? All of this stands as a gift to her; but would it not be enchanting if it might stand as a gift to you?"

[I Ship It: 9. Zhaojun gives the Maid a string on Victorious Vixen, the Maid may apply a string in return]

The Red Furnace: First Contact

There is a complete double take from the passing alien. And then there's more. You are drawing attention rapidly - something which does not seem to bother the assassin.

"Oh, clever answer!" said the assassin, performing that enthusiastic high-speed clap again. "Context games, interrogational reversal. Your society hasn't finished growing, then! Well, perhaps we can help with that - and I can skip a few steps in my own task. As children of the Crimson God you have yet to be," it says a strange word that doesn't translate at all. The closest the spell gets is 'devoured'. "So you can do things we can't. My name is Boldness, and I represent the Saoshyant, who has marked the Furnace Knight for death -"

Onlookers within earshot flinch, and then bolt. Suddenly the space around the two of you is abruptly empty and the facility more distantly seems to be falling into a panic.

"- and were you to murder him on our behalf his gratitude would be known across the Endless Azure Skies!"

In the distance an alarm klaxon begins to sound. Lines of heavily armed and armoured soldiers are forming up at distant checkpoints. Boldness, for its part, couldn't seem less bothered by all of this.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Spirits and ghosts swirl around her, the cosmic shockwaves of minds that learned to hide themselves in the spaces between atoms. Heaven is empty and the gods are all here.

She reaches out with crackling fingers and the world shapes itself to her need. Oxygen crackles and the air runs thin as it is dragged out of the air. Carbon disassembles into its component parts. The flames still licking at her scales run dry as their breath is stolen and concentrated into the point of her fingers. All this broken matter forms together into a flask made of blue ceramic, decorated with the white figure sketches of early 2000s webcomic artists. It uses a single boar tusk as a stopper, attached to the neck of the flask with a string, and when it is uncorked the pop is almost as satisfying as the grapelike smell from within.

Solarel tosses it to Nierka. Drink! she signs enthusiastically. You'll cramp otherwise!

And with that, and an enthusiastic thumbs up, she's gone.

She follows her own advice as she clambers down the side of the Sea Spike. Each time she has a spare moment a new flask forms in her hand - this one white tropical wood inlaid with rhinestones, this one a silken waterskin still bearing scars from lion's talons, this one reinforced plastic hard enough to endure a napalm strike... - and takes a single sip before letting it fall so that she can use both hands to leap to the next section. Each time the flask dissolves before it hits the ground and reforms in her waiting hand, shape and contents unique each time.

Zaldarians have between two and five power cores in their bodies. Fewer cores mean shorter discharge cycles, quick to fill and quick to empty. Twitchy girls. Five cores gives you the aspect of the bear; slow and deliberate and unstoppable when you get going. Solarel has three - one at the back of her neck, another above her tail and a third above her heart - and in the aftermath of a fight they ache.

She's not built like a human or catgirl, with their weird artificial seawater circulation. Her blood consists of a thick, golden lubrication/coolant nanofluid that forms into fatty deposits on breasts, thighs and most extensively in the tail. It's a multifunction compound - it can supercharge the nervous system, enhancing reactions and senses, it prevents muscle clusters from drying out and accumulating friction damage, it contains repair and modification naites. A Zaldarian with a big, magnificent tail is a Zaldarian ready for war. After running hot in a fight like that she's lost an inch from her tail she's gone down a cup size.

All this to say, Solarel isn't really thinking about the fight or the concept of victory or anything such right now. She's mostly just thinking she's insanely hungry and needs something more substantial than flaskposting to get her through the afternoon.

Breathless Dead

Redana!

"Hmmph! Hrmph!" Iskarot grumble-hisses when hugged, with an irritability only shown as false by the lack of claws. "Redana. Do you wonder why I never gave you a saffron robe? Why I'm not wearing mine now?" he gestured self-consciously at his face; the fur worn and tattered, the scars visible beneath. "Because the robe isn't a sign of rank. It's fashion, girl. Well, fashion and an attempt to make it more difficult for assassins to target us."

Even crippled, even missing his legs and sat down like a plush toy, there was a quiet dignity in his perpetual seething rage. His face made it clear of the presence of a biologically coded aggression, and his stillness made it clear that this war had been won a long time ago. "We're not united by uniforms, Redana. Not by rank or by blood. It is not knowledge that binds us together across a trillion kilometers of space. It is ideology. It is the journey. It is curiosity to see what is over each new horizon."

He looks at you, small and so very fierce.

"Were Hermes herself to take mortal form and command us to do differently, we would not. We know this because she did just that."

Alexa!

"We awaited this battle for two hundred and fifty years," Lacedo said. "Trained for it. Drilled for it. Wove it into our myths." She raised up one talon to a distant star through the window. "And we succeeded. We took the sky back. Before the eyes of Athena, before a galactic empress, we cast our ancestral foe down and redeemed our species. Our names will live forever."

She looks at you, an impossible emotion in her eyes and in her heart. "Do you think they will make more of us?"

Dolce!

"Gotta be a quadruped," said Ramses briskly. "A bipedal sheep would look like a cute boy in a wooly jumper on camera, not an intimidating war leader. A ram, though? That is fearsome! That puts the focus on your horns, makes it known you are a warlord to kill a king and maim a god! It makes your craving for E N D L E S S B A T T L E known through your visual design! That's just basic cinematography."

The script has you swearing a lot more than you remember ever doing, incidentally, and in more languages.

Bella!

Crabs proceed without fear. They attend you, Bella, in a trail of clicking pincers. Some of them carry single strawberries. Others little bowls of ice cream. Still more jewels or shiny buttons or fragments of tinfoil or other, prettier crabs. Around your feet they skitter just out from underfoot, holding up their tiny offerings. Poseidon's realm is a place of treasures, and the crabs offer them as though to distract from the dark, the warm, the wet. The infestation runs deep.

Then a larger one approaches, signal flags held in its pincers. It sweeps and gestures and all the smaller crabs back away to a meter's remove.

Another crab, painted gold and blue, approaches beneath the cover of the signal flag. It has a letter in its pincers which it offers, clattering. "Mighty Praetor of Tellus, the Assistant Secretary of Fear and Doubt understands that you are presently unemployed. It would like to offer you position as Consul, with all salaries and privileges associated therein."