Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

Black returns the fistbump gesture. She's glad for it, it breaks the touch barrier, lets her focus, lets her get her hand around to the back of Amie's neck to the sensitive cluster of nerves at the base of the spine. It lets her show claws and limits, as her other hand comes up to cover 3V's throat and mouth, holding her silent as 3V's eyes roll and her hands tap frantic patterns on the back of Black's fingers. There is both chemistry and it's lack; Black is not for him, but she will supply him with girls who are.

"She's not going anywhere without me," said Black. "3V is very precious to me. I need to make sure that she is treated as she deserves to be treated. I need to make sure she can't walk in a straight line tomorrow." She pulls Amie in closer, pressing herself up against the girl's side. "You're not going to let me down, are you?"

Blue!

"Oh please, please, sit down!" said Blue with a smile so glitteringly innocent she can only have been engineered for it specifically. It's almost like she's waving off a compliment in humble embarrassment. "You don't have to worry! Of course I don't do that kind of thing any more! Have you looked at the requirements to become a private detective? You need 2,500 hours of work experience with an accredited security firm and they only hire people with law enforcement, military or intelligence backgrounds. That's two years, presuming you get full time and don't get the '24th-hour pink slip', and I haven't even been a person for one."

As she's speaking she's standing up herself, sweeping around the table elegantly, and politely putting her hands on shoulders to guide people back into their chairs. "I do hospitality these days - so sit! You simply cannot go without tasting my Dou Sha Bao and caramelized orange sorbet."

As part of the same extended motion she is laying out fresh plates, sparkling with sugar, across the table. What human could possibly argue with an appeal to eat dessert?

White!

She steps out onto the balcony in a silver bathrobe. The dawnlight is just visible over the horizon of Earth above and it catches her wet hair. She takes a sip from a bottle of strawberry cider and leans over the railing, looking up at the sky, an ethereal creature in the four am notdark.

The girls are asleep at last. Finally there is time to work through some of these thoughts.

She quickly sorts through some of the ideas she can't process on her own, sorting them into categories to hand off later. They are cute when they sleep (Yellow) and insatiable when awake (Black). A contact (Orange) in the art market might be interesting (Pink). She'll need a treatment for bruises on her synthmuscles (Blue). She wants to do this again (???).

The decisions come quickly and easily. Previously it felt like the clutter in her mind was also on fire, too hot to handle, too bright to perceive. Now the stack has cooled enough for her to work through it. An undifferentiated mass of Problem now can be approached in parts.

The first thing she decides to think about, what she wants to think about, was how this felt. What it showed. She hadn't been born with a sense of sexuality but one had been included in the bundle of anime cliches she had been given during her reprogramming. Until now it hadn't really been hers. She had always kind of thought of it more like cosplay more than anything - performing a role for the benefit of herself, getting to act out elaborate fantasies. The original suggestion of having her take the role of a fearsome dragon taking advantage of a defenseless maiden was kind of what she'd thought that sex was all the time. That it was primary a cerebral thing, with a physical component almost as a side. She doesn't think that any more. There was a lot of the process that wasn't sexy, it was just... intimate. The confusion of legs and hips, the struggles of tongue and teeth, sweat and saliva, the impossibility of communicating 'if I climax one more time I will be able to perceive every individual atom that comprises my body'. She looked at her hands, turning them over. She hadn't thought of them as particularly sensitive organs in their own right, but the things they had felt...

Get wrecked, Black.

Underlying it all was a sense of possessiveness that surprised her. It wasn't that she wanted to control them, reorder their lives, make them do anything different... she just wanted them to be hers. It was an inarticulate thought, but a powerful one. She needed to talk to Yellow and see how that feeling compared to the feeling of being with 3V.

That lead into the next question. Was she a furry?

She took a long sip of cider. That was a fucking question, wasn't it? She could see where the thought terminated in questions of practicality and expense (Brown) and whole of network complexity (Green). But did she, White, now that she had faced and/hyphen fucked her demons, like the idea of becoming an actual dragongirl? Was her initial aversion just the rejection of something that felt too true to be real? Had her egg, so to speak, been cracked?

The cider bubbles in her throat, up into her nose. She sets it down and takes a deep breath. Well, girl, you came here looking for guidance with the dysmorphia that came from integrating a previous existence as a deep space macroengineering construct with a current existence as a cute anime girl. You've sure as shit now got some kind of conceptual answer as to how you might integrate those identities.

What if she was the only colour who felt that way? What would that mean for her sense of self coherence? They'd already upgraded Red so she was visually more beautiful than the rest of them, but what if they all started going in different directions...?

She shook her head. Hard answers, no evading into theory and concepts. Yes, the idea was interesting. She'd work through the concept. Hard thing to dip a toe into, but she'd give it an attempt.

The next thing that she needed to think about was something related to understanding how humans related to her past as a public figure, but by this time the sun had come up. A shadow loomed behind her, a set of beautiful arms wrapped around her, and she was pulled decisively back inside. Even if the appointments hadn't been important, Crystal was determined to ensure that she was extremely properly compensated for missing them.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Eyes blink up out of the trance, crimson and violet and burgundy, clear and bright. Cold hands pull back from warm ones, forming into a fist raised up and then slashed horizontally outwards at eye level. The challenge sign of Zaldar.

"Earn it."

It is a simple matter of honour. She has defeated this girl - in the contest of gods no less. She should, by custom, be her captive. To concede to her rhythm would dishonour the judgement of the gods. To submit to the defeated would be an act of madness.

She is awake now, eyes blinking bright and radiating a faint challenging glow. She can feel heat spreading out through her muscles. Ready to dance, fight, mate. To grab her opponent and begin the confrontation right here on this table. She can feel the challenge sitting against the base of her neck, focusing her attention like thunder on the horizon or the machine ping of a new contact on her DRADIS.

She doesn't have a plan behind the challenge. Does not have an alternative vision for the evening. Her mind is jumbled with equations and pattern-heat. She simply knows she cannot surrender. If she is to beg she must be made to beg.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

That radiant blue glow blinks, out of sync with the eye behind it.

"I am doing this because I want..."

What?

"I am the shift of desire. I am the flash of craving. I am the storm of yearning," she said. "I am change. I am creation. I am a heart filled with want. I want the thrones of the Incarnae. I want the thrones of the Yozi. I want the love of every maiden, every fox, every princess. I want everything. I want everyone to want me. I want to know how it feels to crave something. I want to know how it feels to want something so badly that you'll take action to get it. I want to have desire strong enough to drag me out of bed in the morning, I want to be able to enjoy food, I want to be able to make a plan and execute it, I want to be able to feel something when I look at pretty girls, I want to be able to touch myself and not feel empty, I want to have the ferocity to protect my family, I want to have the romance to make a family, I want to have a life that is more alive than 'I guess the fexin leaf is strong enough that I won't kill myself today'."

She hissed, divine strength increasing, stone-strong, pushing the barrel of the firewand against your forehead so hard it leaves a mark. The gun might not even fire with its barrel sealed like this; it might burst backwards, she doesn't care.

"When Venus was handing out motivations she overlooked me," she hissed. "And so I stole some. Now I'm finally alive."

Breathless Dead

Redana!

"Two questions," said Beautiful. Then she punched a hand clean through a loose panel in the ship's wall next to her, pulled out a solid projectile pistol concealed within, and fired it at your feet.

(The last time she'd been active, she'd instructed a priestess to conceal a weapon near her chamber, marked with a glyph of her own design. Her mind had decoded the glyph as instructions on the basic operation and effects of a SP pistol.

Under normal circumstances, Sagakhan or Mynx would have checked for exactly this.)

There is a flash and a bang, an overwhelming, awful explosion into every sense at once. While you're coughing and spluttering, vision hazy and deafened, you get a kick in the forehead that sends you careening backwards.

"One," said Beautiful, "what's a Tellus? Is it important? Normally people chant all that stuff at me while I'm waking up, there's meant to be this huge ritual and everything which is basically a couple hundred people reading different encyclopedia chapters at me all at once, so I'm kind of running on DNA right now."

She snap-reloads the pistol and aims it at you in a perfect firing position. Taking a SP round to the forehead never killed anyone but holy shit does it suck.

"Two," she said, voice ice cold. "Who is Bella? Why do I remember that name?"

Alexa!

Lacedo cannot speak. She is silent. She is still.

It took three hundred years to develop that thought. It took a minute to speak it. Who knows how long it will take for it to unpack in the Alcedi's mind?

But for now there's nothing but the thought. Every so often she makes a breath like she's going to speak, to argue or to agree or say anything, but each time the scale of the thinking she hasn't done yet tapers it off into silence. By tomorrow she still won't be ready. Maybe when a week passes, or two...

But she does stop trying to rally the Alcedi. And without her leadership in this moment the Fleets and all their glory pass into history.

Dolce!

"Oh, uh, Zeus' tits, little guy," said Ramses. "Listen, have you ever met an Order of Hermes Magos? We live and work on their ships most of the time. One of them literally built a corridor of ever burning flame just to reduce the rate we knocked on his door asking for cybersurgery. So we mostly take care of ourselves until the orders come down from above. So, like, the way I figure it, if I waste your time with unimportant stuff you'll get mad at us and cut us off entirely."

She coughed. "I actually was hoping these designs would build up some favour, but it seems like they're having the opposite effect so... uh, I should go?"

Bella!

"The crabs are like animals," came a voice as smooth and strong as a riptide. A beautiful merman steps out of a tidal pool, fish tail seamlessly parting and shifting into two human legs. His face has the cruel beauty of an elf, a shock of deep violet hair woven with kelp, onyx and amethyst. He smiles and gestures and a pair of crabs come forward to wrap a spectacular robe of cream and red silk around his shoulders, patterned with elaborate whorls and waves. He doesn't bother to do it up.

He turns to a massive battlecrab that approaches him. He smiles affectionately, letting his hand run across the front of its shell, affectionately scratching the eyestalks. It clacks its claws in what might be happiness. "It is not a perfect metaphor. Really, the crabs are more like our hands. They can think, but they cannot want. They can act but they cannot know. They are part of us, and yet separate. We must treat them with kindness as we must treat ourselves with kindness."

He turns back to face you and then smoothly bows. He shows respect without any understanding of courtly manners, instead showing genuflection while watching your eyes through the water's reflection for the twitch that indicates he has given the proper amount. "When humanity sought to leave distant Earth, it was the Lord Poseidon's will that the ocean would not be left behind. So he drank it all and spat it out in the shape of a man, and they lay together until they conceived twelve children. Those children, the Tides, were as the hecatonchires once were - the hundred handed children of Gaia. But one mind could not control all those many hands, so the Tides split themselves like starfish. Some parts of them grew into swords, some grew into hearts. Some are creatures for appreciating all the finest things the galaxy has to offer, some are to deliver the cups to their lips, but all are the same creature. But as the Tides grew larger and more complex, their aspects became more specialized. It is only here, in the aftermath of the trauma of death, reduced to barely ten thousand nodes and less than a hundred minds, do we again call upon the most ancient names of power. It is only now that it is worth creating more... generalist incarnations."

He smiled, and at last looked up and made eye contact. His eyes were orange; pink and yellow and salmon and...

"I am Eyes of Coral," said the merman. "One of several who claim that title in this region. To claim a Name is to claim a throne, and one must defeat and subordinate the pretenders before one can come into the fullness of its power. Right now we are entrapped in a hell of our own creation; we are of the lineage of a trauma incarnation. Too scared to leave the defensive crouch, too angry to let the knife slip from our hands, too broken to trust. Do not think Fear and Doubt a cruel or poor leader; he is the ghost of a starship through our brain pan. With him we are craven and obedient, without him... who knows how we might lash out?"

Eyes of Coral looked warily up at the crab. It had no fear in its eyes as it clacked its claws.

"As to what we are capable of, within a timeframe practical to you, we could build an entire million-soul battleship from scratch," he said. "Or take one apart. As to what we want? To be healthy and whole, to reckon with our trauma and learn to grow again. This eternal inquisition of the self is no way to live."

The Red Furnace: First Contact

The moment the Furnace Knight was alone with Lord Death Despoil he plunged the blade of the Law of Kings into the stone and took his hand off it as though it were scalding hot. In its place he drew a smaller, far less magical, backup sword - but even this he held at a low angle.

"Not much," he admitted. "Even less because this was an ambush. It has been a long time since I fought the living dead and your mental resilience was a surprise. The Crimson Goddess tests me."

The Furnace Knight drew slightly closer; a position that indicated he wasn't counting on his room-crossing reality-warping lunges any more. He was wary, but his stance still deeply favoured offense over defense. He knew that unarmed did not mean defenseless, especially for a spellcaster.

"I will accept your surrender," he said, producing a set of metallic cuffs from his belt and sliding them across the floor.

An energy crackles in the air between your eyes.

You know that he is bluffing.

You can practically feel the odds shifting around you, the tilt of the skein of probability. If his power comes from affronts to honour this puts the Knight at a low ebb. You have committed no crime here, he has no evidence of wicked deeds with which to strike you down. You feel like you could almost fight him now, with your bare hands, spells and chilling aura. Be sure: that would not be an easy fight by any measure. Winning outright is likely out of reach. But the idea of injuring him badly enough to make an escape seems suddenly possible.

He will get his surge when you do... but if he is impaired he might not be able to make it a killing blow. The alternative, of course, is to accept captivity and await a rescue.

You can see the same calculation happening in his mind. His fingers held the sword like a western gunslinger, waiting for the moment to draw.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

There's an inconvenience with sign language. It requires a certain distance - the sage Zaldar used it to enforce a certain distance. When someone has stepped inside her guard, inside the swing of her arms then their physical presence interrupts the words she's trying to say. How can a gesture be seen when the eye is too close? How can attention be commanded in a silence that leaves her beating heart revealed?

She dressed up for the occasion. A cream white X of a dress, leaving violet scaled hips visible, a necklace of pink roses collaring her neck and running down her sleeves like a waterfall to collect and pool along the cuffs. She's drybrushed her scales to match, a hot pink delicately powdered along the edges, a mixture of yellow and purple creating a deep burgundy colour that she ran into the recesses. Purple is such an ambiguous colour; it can be a magnificent expression of red or colder than black. Her dress shows that she's thriving, alive, almost princess-pure - but she didn't choose it because she thought it would look good. She chose it because of Mirror.

And it's to Mirror her thoughts go again now that she's distracted, taken away by the tapping and pressure and the implied mathematical rhythm of Crescent's touch. Her mind always goes to Mirror in moments like this. She would be dressing in something dark, wouldn't she? Something subtle, something dangerous. She'd thought at first that she might go to crystal blue coldness, to white lace and delicate strings - but not at a party like this. Not flushed with victory. She'd come predatory, redder than blood, blacker than space. A suit, maybe - or a dress sleek and elegant, enough mobility to raise a leg to the point where it could wrap around her opponent's neck...

Once she'd started thinking of that dress she hadn't had a choice in her own outfit. She needed something that would look good alongside it; something feminine, something vulnerable. Something lace and frills and impractical, something sweet and flowery and easy to stain. Easy to tear and mark with claws. There had been just as many hours searching endless online catalogues, listening to the advice of the ever-chattering ancestors as they suggested TC brands, and spirits to bargain with, and even just learning to sew. She'd even tried that, but the work was taught to her by hands used to weaving thick cloth that could keep out the arrat winds. She'd wound up with something cheap from a TC store and it wasn't right, but maybe that would just make Mirror look better when she destroyed it?

She tries to say all this, hands working when they have space, have time, have observation - or don't. But it's a feeling more complicated than the language Zaldar lets her speak in. It's an audience who isn't listening. It's a narrator who doesn't understand herself. Why is she like this, warrior of the wilderness, drunk on mathematics and the music of a catgirl's claws? Dressed in pink and white and vulnerability? She wants to win, yes, definitely, to confirm that she still has that capability - to show that she can know and predict and anticipate Mirror's actions before she made them. But it was Mirror's fault that the only way to show that was to dress like this - if she'd shown clad in darkness and power then she'd be doing the same thing but worse, if she'd shown clad in fur and godscale then she'd be rigid and inflexible, this was the only way. Can't you see?

She's lost track of where she is or where she's going, hand-speech slurred with the decisive emphasis of a drunk trying to communicate a revelation or conviction too deep for half a brain.

[Marking XP]

Breathless Dead

Redana!

A blink of violet eyes. Then she gets up - suddenly, awkwardly, bizarrely, like someone learning how to move one muscle group at a time. She rolls her head and her deep, amethyst eyes. Her head spins three hundred and sixty degrees around on her neck and you'd forgotten that the Ikarani are based off Kaeri genetics so it's frankly the worst surprise.

As spooky as this is, it's also somehow hot as hell. She's fucking Beautiful, after all.

Then, as her control over her body starts to settle, shivering up through her shoulders, down to her elbows, discharging in her fingers with a set of rapid fire finger snaps, she speaks. "No ritual," she said. "No target. No incantations of targeting and awakening. You," she points a rapid-fire snapping finger set at you, "must be a threat. A criminal, looking to defile a sleeping bride of Artemis."

She winks at you. "Well, you've got good taste," she said.

A silver energy runs through her. She reaches and flexes, wiry strength visible animating her slender body. She falls back into a simple combat posture right leg back, primed for kicking. "So, I could murder you so bloody that even I'd remember it," she said, "or I could transform you into a deergirl and hunt you all over the -" she sniffed the air. "Bunker? Spaceship? Really large industrial plant? - Cuter ending, that way. How cute you feeling, cutie?"

Alexa!

"It doesn't feel hollow, though," said Lacedo quietly. "It feels good. It feels better than sex. Even now I'm shivering with joy just thinking about it. You described all of that like you wanted it to sound bad but," she shifted uncomfortably, "all it did was make me want to pin you down and fuck your brains out."

She looks at you, a strange burning, haunted look in her eyes. "You know that humans don't get that feeling? They get to make the decision about who rises and who falls, but even then it's not really their decision. It's ours. We earn the win and they have to acknowledge it. When you think about it, they're the real slaves. What are they even living for? What is the meaning of human life?"

Dolce!

Ramses looked at you like she was resisting the urge to lean across the table and pat your head. "Listen, Captain," she said gingerly. "The crew was never going to come to you with their troubles. You could be the friendliest sheep in the stars but you're in the senior executive branch and they're grunts. You might as well be the Imperial Princess. Worse, actually, because the Princess works as an Initiate and they know how they relate to that."

Bella!

The Tides of Poseidon are often billed as unknowable horrors from beyond the stars. Unreasoning monsters that serve as the armed wing of the earthquakes they accompany. The punishment issued by Poseidon for those who have grown safe and complacent. The peril they represent is existential. If Odoacer had not defeated the Eater of Worlds - which was by every history lesson a precarious and narrow thing - then Tellus would have been broken and humanity ended.

But the Empire's leadership has long known that these are not gibbering monsters of myth and film. They have their own societies that exist in strange reflections of the societies they are sent to destroy. These can be subverted with assassination, suborned through gifts and broken with politics - and they will engage in the same in exchange. Far from being bloodthirsty beasts, perhaps the single most consistent driver of conflict with the Tides is that their relationship with Poseidon is so strong that they know exactly where and when to strike in order to take advantage of the chaos sown by the Rainbow Lord, and are ruthless about exploiting disaster for their own ends.

The end result of this is that the process isn't nearly as alien as it seems from a distance.

The chief problem, as you can swiftly identify, is that the Assistant Secretary of Fear and Doubt is well suited for his role. He has a military mind, and a paranoid one. He has directed all of his available resources to the production and maintenance of a battlecrab legion while also avoiding promoting any subordinates more than he strictly has to. He actually has the younger cadre of bureaucrats locked in an all-against-all struggle and minor armed conflict in an attempt to draw insight into which of them are the most capable, but he continuously dithers over actually promoting them, usually well after the point where the young officer in question has been killed by a rival.

The result, then, is a militarized society that can only support a comparatively small military due to its weak economy, and an ambitious officer corps only kept in check by its internal conflict. And this is actually the most interesting Imperial test you've faced so far, because what you are seeing here is actually ideal. The Tides, so long as the Assistant Secretary is in charge, are weak, divided and pliant. They are categorically incapable of posing any threat to you, Redana or the ship in this state. They will be a single mediocre battlecrab legion and nothing more.

You could fix these problems almost trivially - promote capable young brainsquid, devote resources towards economic and industrial growth, undo the paranoid security state. But that will start the ball rolling on them becoming a serious power player aboard the Plousios. The example of Odoacer as a powerful military commander is all the example you need to know what the consequences of that might be.

In the opera theatre, Nero's carmine fan sweeps under your neck - then under Redana's. "The riddle of Empire!" she said with a showwoman's glittering smile. "For the nation to be strong, the Empress must be weak. For the Empress to be strong the nation must be weak! So she must walk between the Scylla of a coup and the Charybdis of invasion!"

You might want to take some time to think it over.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

"Destruction of the Mistress' foe by way of falling to her death is considered to be unacceptably high variance," said Zhaojun. She holds Giriel's hand with one hand - and her other hand holds a firewand. A firewand is a thick-barrelled pistol that acts as a short range flamethrower; a fine trickle of the golden dust that serves as its ammunition trickles down onto Giriel's forehead. "Mistress!" she called to the Vixen, below the ring of battle, "Confirm instructions?"

She is the perfect servant. So considerate. Not letting this opportunity escape her mistress. If the Vixen hears her and replies promptly and clearly, she will take the shot. If she is wielded as a weapon she will kill.

But if she is not? Then she will wait, like a good servant. If that gives Giriel the chance to escape, well, then - it is not the sword's fault if it is not swung.

[The Mask: Secretly performing a loving act reduces Feelings to 0]

The Red Furnace: First Contact

The keen tactical mind of Lord Death Despoil shows him that the problem of the Furnace Knight is less impossible than it seems. Perversely, that makes it even more dangerous than it looks.

If he was simply a creature of Big Numbers that would be a far more manageable problem. The Aotrs has dealt with warriors with more power than common sense before and it's simply a matter of locating an even larger hammer. But, despite the initial shock of the Furnace Knight's charge, that's not how he's actually fighting. Instead he is fighting in a profoundly intelligent and deliberate way - just in a way that uses an utterly different toolkit than the Aotrs have access to.

Consider the opening sequence when Foul Skream and Shatterscatter attack him in a perfect flanking maneuver. If it were anyone with thoughts slower than Death Despoil watching the Furnace Knight's counterattack would have seemed just a ludicrous disregard of basic combat reality, but it's not that. He placed himself there to get flanked deliberately - and as the perfectly co-ordinated assault comes in from two directions, the Furnace Knight grows stronger. In fact, the more people are directly engaged with him the more powerful he gets, a fact which he exploits ruthlessly to overwhelm the core of the high command in moments without taking more than superficial damage. When Bowblast begins casting spells at him from a distance the Furnace Knight's gravitational singularities explode in power, extending his reach to allow him to maintain full assaults on three enemies simultaneously with no loss of efficacy.

That is just enough to save Lord Death Despoil from making a critical mistake - waving off Foul Skream and Blowblast right at the moment they had prepared their perfect rear-shot Coldbeam attack following his teleport step. The Lichemaster had seen his own extinction flash before his eyeglows in that moment: the Furnace Knight had been relying on riding the power surge he'd get from being engaged by two additional foes to put his blade right into the Lichemaster's skull from across the entire room. As it was he missed by millimeters.

That had been a Smite too. It might have been the closest Lord Death Despoil had come to extinction in a long time.

There is another moment of stillness, the Furnace Knight shifting between serpentine stances, blade seemingly in every direction at once. When the Furnace Knight smiles, this time he does not look like a boy at all. He looks ancient. The bearer of terrible experience, a cold-blooded warrior who knows every trick in his arsenal and how to drive them to maximum effect. One who committed to the frontal assault as a deliberate tactical choice. One whose ruthlessness runs just as deep as Lord Death Despoil's. Slitted eyes stare unblinking.

He's waiting for something. And Lord Death Despoil is wise enough to guess what it is: He is waiting for the retreat.

If this warrior gains power when outnumbered, then it follows that he may obtain a similar surge when his enemies attempt to flee from him. The Aotrs might make a virtue of their disregard for honour but the Furnace Knight's enforcement of it is weaponized. It's a trap as ugly as anything the Aotrs might have planned: stay and fight against a wave of invincible warriors until you are ground down, or flee and face the Furnace Knight at his most powerful on the way out.

Bowblast's assessment was correct, but for one thing: The Furnace Knight was not deceiving himself in the least.

*

"Oh, this is actually really bad," Boldness said dreamily, body synthesizing opiates to dull the pain she must be in. "I wondered why he came here. It turns out it was to draw him out. He's found a worthy enemy and he'll be able to use that to command public support..."

She'll live, it looks like, though barely. The shock of that impact would have killed a lot of creatures, and the fall would have finished her off if Lord Death Despoil didn't catch her. As she staggers alongside you a collection of broken, burned out protective charms fall from hidden pockets like blood-drops. She leans heavily on Unlucky as the two of them get through to the portal.

Unlucky doesn't realize it, but he'd just walked straight through the Furnace Knight's death zone and got away clean. Turns out the heroic rescue of a stranger got you a pass from whatever power bound the Furnace Knight.

*

Stab immediately came under fire from a volley of the acid projectiles of the wolf warriors. The acid was expected. What was not expected was the disorientation. Arguably the disorientation was the primary effect.

The grenades fired by the wolf warriors were absolutely, ludicrously vicious extension of the flash-bang concept. They detonate multiple times and on multiple spectrums, physical and magical, overwhelming all sensory input. At the same time they created burning acidic clouds. The ideal of this weapon was clear: to break formations and deny cover, forcing targets to flee into the open.

Once in the open they were targeted by the unit's officer, in the middle of a defensive shieldwall formation. He had a long bolt-action rifle that fired high powered specialized ammunition - a combination of lightning bolt and disintegration effects. In military parlance, the acid shock bursts were a maneuver element that cleared the way for a powerful squad level fire asset.

The Red Furnace: First Contact

The Furnace Knight raised his blade, in prayer, in salute. "The fire burns still," he says simply, quietly.

Not much of a monologue but enough to get him shot in the mouth by Deather. The Furnace Knight smiles as the coldbeam clears, lips blue and microcuts visible around his mouth. For a moment it seems like he could not be happier.

*

The star Salib rumbles. At this moment it lets loose a colossal gout of violet plasma, a solar flare that changes light itself all across the system.

*

It's incomprehensible, the way the Furnace Knight moves.

There will be time enough to examine it later, to contemplate the gravitic singularities that his divine spellcasting generates. His technique creates concentrations of gravity so powerful they bend light and time both. Around them he wraps, stretching to a hundred times his length, seeming to fill the entire room as an endless oroboros, a snake whose jaws unhinge to eat the world.

The effect collapses and he is amidst the liches, in the centre of their formation.

The sword is everywhere. The blows are crashing down again and again as he pivots from stance to stance, offense to offense, crash and sweep and spell all coming together so fast and unstoppable it feels like being on the wrong end of a turn based RPG. His sword flawlessly passes between all four hands and any hand not swinging it is either casting or countering a spell. Micro-gravitic singularities erupt around him like flowers, dragging opponents into his blows or shoving their aim aside. The Law of Kings - the blade's name is carved upon it - blazes with divine fire, a rainbow of blue.

(Above there is the crack of thunder - Unlucky glances up to see Boldness in the railings high above, having aimed a strange wooden rifle down at something in the chaos below and fired a shot that wafts like ozone. She's turning her aim towards the Furnace Knight when, offhandedly, he hurls a metal sphere at her that hits her shoulder at such speed it shatters her arm and sends her falling to the ground below)

And then come his allies. These are not champions with the expertise of the Aotrs High Command, these are not a host of legendary paladins - these are berserkers. A host of the wolf-warriors, each wearing blindfolds glowing with runes of blue, stripped to the waist, charging furiously with fang and talon and monstrous strength. The shock of their charge is impossible to stop: they wear divine wards that defer all consequences they are to suffer until after the battle is done, at which point they will drop dead. They surge into the opening created by the Furnace Knight and, heedless for their own safety, seek to overwhelm the High Command.

And as the battle breaks out behind him, the Furnace Knight has a few precious moments alone with Lord Death Despoil. He smiles still through bloody lips. Painted eyes sparkle with a boyish kind of joy. It's infectious, maddeningly infectious, an enormously powerful psychic compulsion to leave aside spell and strategy and fight this impossible monster hand to hand with a sword.

Scales coil beneath him, tensing like a spring. He is ready if you do not.