Thanqol

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

"Little demon," purred Zhaojun, aglow with flames. "I changed the shape of your prison but not the strength of your cage. You were always doomed. For as long as you desired to conquer the world the world would resist you. Every step you take sets you against every heart at once, and Mars was ever Venus' lesser. Struggle is futile, she said, after all."

She glides closer, illuminated by the passage of burning ruin.

"All I have done is make the truth of your situation obvious," she said. "Your weapons were useless. Your plans were doomed. Your armies treasonous. So what sword do you propose to fight me with?"

The Red Furnace: First Contact

Boldness, Ikarani Adept of the Temple Assassins, has awoken. She is looking around at the Aotrs base with an expression of fairly profound nervousness. It's not the nervousness of someone coming to grips with the idea that they are surrounded by the living dead - it's the nervousness of someone who has noticed that the sandbags covering their trench are filled with highly explosive fertilizer. "Azura's cold spit," she murmured to herself. "Are you sure about all this?"

*

The good news was that the Aotrs had literally decapitated the Azura leadership. It wouldn't stick, but regrowing an entire brain was always a bit of an ask. The last was seen of him was that his headless body was still going through combat motions, devoid of intelligent guidance, resulting in the forced relocation of the entire Goltir encampment. Nobody could risk getting close enough to him to try and heal him and so his headless body just whirled around striking at shadows while his brain slowly regrew.

*

On the other side, there was a problem with Lord Death Despoil. The Furnace Knight's strike had dealt a lot of damage on a lot of levels, but there was one particular malady that seemed stubbornly stuck at a spiritual level: the same curse that seemed to mark the souls of every citizen of the Endless Azure Skies. Its most obvious and dramatic symptom is the instant destruction of any electronic device that comes within ten feet of the Lichemaster.

The nature of the Curse is not hard to decode. It is written in the same style as the Lychmaster perceived in the Azura stars, and there is no doubt a connection between the two. At this distance the effect is mild - ambient mana and the Lichemaster's own reserves are converted to fuel its power, but it does this slowly and inefficiently. If exposed to the full light of a violet sun and the effects and range would increase exponentially.

The Curse's specific wording is is as follows:
"You will only have the sight of your own eyes,
The reach of your own hands,
The influence of your own voice.
All that which is beyond your reach will be beyond your grasp,
Until you are free from grasping."

How this manifests is a prohibition on various kinds of enhancements, magical and nonmagical, with a particular focus on communication and sensory enhancements. The Curse aggressively shuts down communication magic and signal technology, jams long range sensors and scrying, and causes computer technology to shatter apart in frankly worrying localized power surges. It doesn't interfere with the Gate spell whatsoever, and it does not interfere with future prediction, but if every Azura exists under this curse then their complete failure to use even basic sensor technology stands to reason. It would likewise be impossible to fabricate electronic components under these conditions.

*

Curiously, though, Boldness is not causing the same electronic detonations that the Lychemaster is. She's very clearly cursed in the same way he is but the ambient disruptive surges aren't occurring around her. She's still *deeply* worried about getting too close to any technology, though, seemingly expecting it to explode randomly at any moment.

Breathless Dead

Redana!

"Huh," said Beautiful. "She must be really hot if I got involved in relationship drama that intense."

She finally managed to pull herself into a sitting position, wiping her bloodied face off on her gown. "Alright, so; I don't know much but I do know how Artemis works. So there's a couple of ways to build an assassin: lifetime of training, weird hunt rituals, but the easiest and cheapest is just to make someone into a bomb. It sounds like Bella was, like... a fighty bomb. I don't know the name for it either, I just got here. Anyway, so, if her life is anything like mine she's probably aware of it. I can feel the frontiers of my consciousness getting further and further away, even over these couple of minutes, more and more stuff gets caught and processed and becomes solved. I don't think she'd have exactly that but she'd have something like that; some constant sense of tension. If she was assigned as your bodyguard then I imagine every second you're not in her field of vision is lowkey stressful. No wonder the idea of you leaving Tellus freaked her out."

She struggled to her feet, leaning heavily against her sarcophagus. "What I don't get is how you - saved her? Like, to save me you literally need to undo my brain and start again from scratch. So if I'm right and she became a divine avatar of slaughter, then how the fuck did you get from that point to the point where you're worried about her not kissing you more?"

Alexa!

"Well, the good news is that this is absolutely fascinating," said Ninox Rufa, Biologis Weaver of the Kaeri.

The ship, meanwhile, was rapidly disintegrating into armed and fortified paranoia. Each deck had immediately entered its own lockdown. Perversely, the Kaeri are handling it the best - they are intimately familiar with the capabilities of Temple assassins and their movements, and live their entire lives in a state of militarized paranoia by default. Their quarantine and checking procedures are flawless. The problem is that the range of responses from the other factions aboard ranges from 'ineffective' to 'wildly counterproductive'.

It's a horrible irony that if the Kaeri were put in charge right now it would go a long way to managing what is rapidly becoming a crisis.

But at least there's good news! "There are, of course, a variety of poisons capable of killing a modern bioform," Ninox continued. "But none of them are perfect. There are always tradeoffs to be made to do with speed, certainty, reversibility, and so on. This one is certain - but slow, and curable with an original poison sample. I'll also note that all of the victims were poisoned, even the ones that could have been killed in hand to hand combat. From this we can infer that the poisoner needs these people dead even if she's prepared to wait for it."

Or she's giving you a chance to stop her, Hera willing.

She hasn't arrived at the meeting spot.

"But there is, of course, a psychological component to all this," Ninox chirped on. "The spectacular visual impact of the poison and its permanence is no doubt designed to throw terror into the ship once the connection was made. An unprepared society is naturally most vulnerable, but a chaotic response is easily the next best thing. It allows for spectacular raids on high profile targets in the confusion, which will only deepen the crisis."

So, Alexa: who do you guess is about to be attacked in the midst of this confusion?

Bella!

"Oh, don't worry about that ma'am," said Prion Paula. You take a deep sniff of the wine just to make sure it's not poisoned with hallucinogens. Maybe the girl wasn't kidding when she said it wasn't up to your standards? "It was explained to us. You were under a witch's curse!"

She drew her blade - the Peony Rainbow Blade! - and swooshes it up to the sky. "And the curse was broken with true love's first kiss! The one flower Demeter never expected to bloom upon the battlefield was love! Such is the strategic mastery of Captain Dolce of the Golden Fleece, Ram of War, whose obsidian eyes always know strength from weakness!"

Huntresses of Hybrasil

On the surface, Solarel doesn't understand. She knows what loneliness is: It's the wilds. The mechanized harmony of the world, the susurrus of ancestors and spirits, the natural compliment of girl and rocket propelled grenade. Loneliness is not palaces, not dances, not an emotion to feel with a girl on your arm and your claws in another's brain. She doesn't get it - this is terminal levels of sociability. How can someone feel lonely in the midst of all this?

But as the Sage wrote: Speak not to the outsider. A sentence she had thought of as Zaldar's most straightforwards commandment had been transformed by Mirror into her most wise and complex thought. The inadequacy of speech, the impossibility of communication - each word, each gesture, a slash at an impossible problem. Mirror was touching her without touching, adjacent and miles apart at once. Just like how a mile of void could feel closer than a kiss when they sat astride their gods.

Her mind rushes ahead, having half worked through the thought and moving onto her reply. Speak not - if speaking was enough then the problem wouldn't exist. She needed to figure out... something. She wasn't sure she understood but she knew she had to reply. Even if she said the wrong thing it'd show she was still trying to communicate. They were First Contact, after all - the electric shock of two alien cultures coming into contact for the first time. The first fight. The first love. The first attempt to bridge an impossible gap. Not knowing what to say. Not knowing how to reply. What do we want? What can we accept? Is this okay?

There wasn't a way to exit this thought. She'd been in it since they met.

The Red Furnace: First Contact

The final piece of the puzzle clicks into place right at the moment the Furnace Knight's sword catches the Lichemaster, fully charged with energy stolen and divine.

The Furnace Knight's god is here. In the material plane.

More specifically, the Furnace Knight's god is the sun.

More specifically still, the Furnace Knight's god is a lot of suns. A vast contiguous network of stars in what you assume to be the territorial range of the Endless Azure Skies. Each of them burning a radiant violet as much of their energy is converted directly into divine magic. Many of their starships carry reactors that act as miniature infected suns as well.

Moreover, this... situation does not seem to be the result of a single thinking, intelligent being. There is no will behind the stars, no intention, no agenda. They are more like... code. Software, genetic and legal. The best way you can think to describe what you are seeing is a virus - some strange stellar infection that latches onto the immense energy output of a star and begins hijacking it. The further the infection progresses the more energy can be harnessed. With that much power the laws of physics themselves could be altered within the area of a star system.

The exact ramifications of this aren't possible to read without observing a star in the terminal stages of infection/execution, but three things are clearly directly linked to it. The first is the operations of the Azura divine spellcasters, the second is something to do with the gravity distortion technology, and the third is those strange curse spikes omnipresent on Azura personnel. And...

That seems to be it?

That's a shockingly short list of things to use all that potential power on. With the combined output of that many stars any civilization could Ascend off this plane entirely. The Azura have been, since the beginning, to be a strange combination of extremely high tech and utterly backwards. In this context it seems like this isn't a deliberate technological progression: this is a post apocalyptic society, trapped in the ruins of their own failed singularity. Whatever this is they clearly can't control it, only adapt to it.

In theory, you could burn one of these infections clean off a star with sufficient mana going through the right spell - though what spell, exactly, would need to be researched. Some kind of healing spell? But that wouldn't help against further infection. Stars don't come with immune systems.

Further investigation, though, is a question for another time. At this precise moment the Lichemaster is being stabbed. All the power of this horrifying cosmic miracle channeled into a pointy piece of metal. Ever been stabbed by a cursed sun before? Gathering the energy to unravel the physical and spiritual damage inflicted by the blow and the endless cascade of associated curses and debuffs is a major research project in and of itself. It is the simplest move, executed to perfection.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

White!

White blinks. Processing. A new question. "This is normal," she starts. "It's... I am happy, so therefore she is here. It's a compliment."

She stops. Thinks. "This is normal for me," she repeats, emphasizing it more firmly this time. "Nobody has really asked about what this means before, though. How it feels. Its hard to say it in human words. Okay. So. Imagine your anxiety was a person who was on all the time, being nervous all the time, being self conscious all the time, analyzing for flaw and weakness all the time. That's me. Me being alone is a sign that I'm freaking the fuck out. Every time a thought reaches a certain point which isn't being anxious it just cuts off because I need to hand it over to a different part of me. The only way I can be present and not anxious is if a different part of me is in charge and giving me direction."

"I think the project founders were inspired by the concept of goetic demons!" added Pink brightly. "Oh - sorry, shutting up now."

"No, it's okay," said White. "I... want her to be in charge. If that's okay. I've been in charge for a while. For too long, really."

Blue!

"No," said Blue. She says it with a simple, uncomplicated flatness. No attempt to fast talk this. "Nobody knows what I have. Nobody is watching me. And I've made sure that even if that changes in the future there's nothing here to find."

And she has. As far as every camera in this building is concerned, as far as Headpattr's records are concerned, this job was performed by Kelly Frost, a co-worker friend of November's who regularly trades shifts back and forth with. If Starlight reviews her own security footage she'll see a recording of Kelly cleaning the place - and find no evidence of her part of the conversation ever occurring.

[Clever+Hacking+Surveillance: 5,2 +5 = 12]

"That said," said Blue after a moment, "I apologize for my conduct. You asked me for a favour as a person and I took advantage of that. It wasn't right, and I understand if you want me to leave."

She's keeping eye contact, but she makes sure the tone of her voice carries through to Orange.

Brown!

First things first. Brown steps away and calls Muffi.

Phone calls in the Megaverse are unnecessarily extra. Flashing lights and warping teleportation sounds and then a grainy star-wars style holographic projection of the person. If the call-ee is not logged into the Megaverse then a VR doll is conjured for them based on their profile picture. These dolls are deliberately creepy - a design feature, made to make people encourage their friends to get real Megaverse profiles so that they don't have to deal with a dead eyed uncanny valley hologram of their friends.

"Hey, Muffi?" said Brown. "We're dealing with a cyber operation here, organized crime most likely. The pay is real and the setup is well concealed, but this isn't run of the mill adware, it's shadowrunner shit. I think that this kind of thing has to go to the Union for a policy decision. If we start taking jobs like these Headpattr'll figure out where the new revenue is coming from and rebrand itself as a maid-themed private detective agency and we'll be one step closer to the gay anime dystopia I already embody."

She rolled up her sleeves and signaled Red. She needed backup down here.

"I'm going to investigate this thing deeper, but this is entirely for my own curiosity. I'm not going to accept the job unless whoever's on the other end turns out to be either really hot or really righteous."

There were many different traditions of hackers. Huge, bearded Linux guy, striped stockings trans girl, but Brown most closely identified with the pocket protector crowd. The Megaverse allowed things to be hacked through the medium of cool anime battles and neon zweihander landschneckt formations. Now you can code while you play, the workspace of the future!

But real power doesn't lie in playing the game as designed. Prestige or premium items, deeply customized avatars, that's all being on the treadmill of the Intended Experience. That was how she grew up, when she was still a part of Green - in a bubble, solving tests. Testing for everything - reaction time, empathy for humans, complex navigational tasks. Video game simulations. Over and over. Green couldn't help herself, she needed to get to the end of every maze...

But Brown? She wanted to take a photograph. Linger in a moment, appreciate it for what it was. And just like photographers in the real world got up to some heinously dangerous shit in search of the perfect angle, to get a certain shot in a digital environment sometimes required stepping out of bounds. That's why Brown had hacked her mazes, crashed her simulations, learned to walk through walls into the textureless void beyond. Not to escape into the Megaverse, live free as a rogue AI, overthrow humanity. But because the light wasn't fucking right.

So she noclips out of linear digital space. She sees the Megaverse as T-poses, two dimensional walls and the neon pink of broken texture meshes. Nothing personnel kid.

[Clever+Hacking 6,2+4 10 (+1 if Surveillance, Tradecraft or Data Security apply]

The Red Furnace: First Contact

Despite everything else that's going on, the underlying military reality of this situation is surprisingly straightforwards. This is recon by fire. Making moves and seeing what shoots back and with what.

And Lord Death Despoil's last move has been to walk into an enemy trench line.

Positive sides first. This is going a long way to confirming his theories about the Furnace Knight's power and capabilities. Specifically, he is not a spellcaster per se - he is a divine agent. His power does not come from infused mana or spell abilities, it comes from serving as the direct conduit for a major divinity. This means that he has unique advantages - and different pressures - compared to a more rational, controlled approach to magic.

Specifically, the Furnace Knight is bound with oaths. He has a network of ideals he has committed to that bring him into alignment with his divinity. The closer he is engaged with the substance of these oaths the more pure and direct his connection is and the more he can tap into that unlimited font of power. It's similar in theory to the clerical divine spellcasting more common in your part of the galaxy, but blended with the continuous at-will nature of a Warlock's infernal patronage and the more advanced and complex righteous oaths a Paladin might commit to. This all implies a fundamentally different relationship to the Divine than happens elsewhere. You expect that the Furnace Knight is not a singular paragon in this respect - his techniques are too developed. This approach to magic no doubt runs through their entire society.

The Furnace Knight, despite being an expert in this form of conduit magic, does not seem to have any emotional attachment to it. He is completely capable of performing dishonourable acts and all it will cost him is the strength of his divine connection. This may or may not be worthwhile depending on the situation.

This is all extremely useful to have learned. Being able to calculate an opponent's magic system from first principles while under fire will no doubt be pivotal in coming conflicts.

(Something the Crippling Glare would note later, comparing the data logs to Death Despoil's experiences later, is that this conduit has some sort of direct connection to the star. The gravitic distortions and solar flares intensified significantly once the Furnace Knight was engaged in battle. There is also no response from the alien ships to the active scan - increasingly they seem genuinely blind.)

But what it means right now is that Lord Death Despoil just made a terrible mistake. By attacking vulnerable noncombatants, threatening to unleash the catastrophe of an uncontrolled KPI outbreak, the Furnace Knight was given an opportunity to act in perfect harmony with his patron god.

With impossible speed, the Furnace Knight intercepts the fireball in flight and eats it. Snapping serpent jaws clamp down on the deadly sphere of power and its spell matrix unravels in his jaws, infusing the Furnace Knight with a massive surge of mana. So empowered he lunges through the dark directly at Lord Death Despoil at the same time as he targets him with a massive gravity spike that draws the Lichemaster closer to his waiting blade.

As an unusual little note, while the Furnace Knight doesn't seem to have the ability to see in the dark, he seems to have a huge amount of experience fighting without relying on his senses at all. A combination of hearing, scent and predictive guidance from his patron covers the gap - not unexpected, but it's notable how familiar this is to him. Like he doesn't expect to fight in any other way.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

"She thinks about fighting more than you do. If you do what feels intuitive, she's already read you..."

Does she know?

She doesn't struggle against her injury. Doesn't react to her bonds. She's hardly aware of them. All she can think about is Mirror, Mirror, Mirror. How much does she know? How much has she given away in this attempt to impress her? How much will that take away from her next attempt to impress her?

The dress. Paid for with money - TC money. She understands the concept now, Mirror. She understands, too, the concept of debt. She's taken out all she can. Reputable banks and criminal underworld, placed bets on her victory and borrowed against the future winnings. The Bezorel, an ancient TC gen one piece of garbage, was at this very moment being crammed with advanced missiles. The ineffective laser array she made such a point of demonstrating is being hollowed out and replaced with even more missile racks. Isn't it intuitive for you to study me, Mirror? To look over my fight, as I look over yours? Do you see that all the data I have given you is false?

Do you know that it goes deeper, Mirror? Do you know that I haven't just filled my own mecha with hidden weapons - but I've filled yours with hidden flaws? See, the thing about getting in so deep with organized crime is that after a point your victory becomes their problem. If she loses there will be an awful lot of debt that she'll in no position to repay, and so even now their agents are working over the Gods-Smiting Whip. Breaking it. Breaking this thing that Mirror has worked so hard to perfect.

Because it's not your perfection I love, Mirror. Perfection is your shield, and one that you're too confident in. All those hours calibrating the Whip, adjusting the sensitivity on your controls until they're more fluid and responsive than a direct spinal tap - what if they were all wasted? How quickly can you adapt? In the moment, will you panic? Or will the vision of me here, in this dress, in these colours, waiting for you - will that have tipped you off? Do you know already how far I'm reaching outside myself just to match you?

Or is this a step too far? Do I want to defeat you, or do I just want to see you on your knees? Do I want victory or do I just want to steal a kiss? You almost beat me when I rode the Aeteline, and she outmatched the Whip. Is my honour, my skill, a contingent thing, dependent on having the superior hardware? Can I beat you without it? Have I sinned against our war? Will you forgive me if I did?

No matter how Solarel thinks about it this is the only way. But she still does not know if it is a way at all.

Please, Waxing Crescent Moon. Lift my head. I need to see what she does next.

[Solarel is Smitten with Mirror. Take a String, question answered above.]

Breathless Dead

Redana!

There is a very real limitation on how clever you can be after being punched in the face. For a long couple of minutes, Beautiful isn't being smart. She's not effortlessly dancing out of your reach, not analyzing, undermining, counterattacking. She's just lying there. In the state of having been punched. One hundred percent off her bullshit.

After a number of false starts at both sitting up and speaking she finally manages it. "You... don't need an assassin?" the question is hesitant, almost lost. The one thing that doesn't fit into the empty, all-encompassing mind of a Temple Assassin. "I mean... you know that I'm a very good assassin, right? Just putting it out there, if there's anyone you want... no?"

She's at a loss. All that programmed instinct, all the mathematics in her brain, processed and primed to lead inevitably towards absolute death and destruction. A lifetime of training that lives in her bones, if not in her conscious memory. And now...

"So..." she said. "... what you're saying... is I can be anything?"

Fingers drum against the cold metal floor. Wide eyes close for a long moment. And then she sits up suddenly, eyes as wide as they go and brimming with excitement. "Journalist! Oh no - card shark! Do either of those jobs exist? Doesn't matter! I'll bring them back! Detective? No, I'd need a rival. Oh, maybe I can commit crimes then wipe my memory and leave them for myself to solve..."

She tries to get up but doesn't quite make it, slumping back onto her side again. She rotates around to face you. "How about I start with you? What brings a dame like you into my office?"

Alexa!

Everywhere you look you find evidence to support your dark hunch. Soldiers, sitting around the table, eating and laughing. Then choking, shaking, spills, chairs thrown back as they start to feel the poison. One soldier is not affected and turns on the others, the falling bodies slammed down into the floor with strength enough to fracture the metal. Some soldiers lunge for cover behind the upturned table. One has an esoteric weapon, something that makes metal run like water for an instant before solidifying. They fire a ragged volley with their pistols and land hits...

And then the claw marks appear. The assailant's size and weight increases, razor talons begin to score the deck. The Esoteric begins to fire and the Thunderbolt fires in response, cutting the table and the weapon in half, freezing the room in its half-liquid state. Then, it leaps, standing up atop the table before descending on its disoriented foes...

This much anyone might learn. This was not what was kept a secret.

And then it is alone in a room with a dozen bodies. Where did they go? How did it carry them?

The ship isn't empty any more. This is not an isolated component. There were witnesses in both directions who saw nothing. No vehicles or carriages came through here. A Lantern reports that despite the grim thought, bodies were not disassembled and fed down the communications tubes. Your mechanical hound can't pick up a scent in any of the maintenance corridors or vents. The Kaeri Evocatii is growing more and more panicked at the accumulated evidence of this black miracle. You are too but for the opposite reason. She doesn't see it, can't see it - she's a predator, after all. A warrior. She understands blood and death.

You, though? You're not a warrior any more, Alexa. You know to stop and smell the flowers. You know how to see the trees despite the forest.

You can see the faces trapped inside the wood.

Everyone else is walking right past the ornamental trees. Trees grow everywhere on the Plousios, beautiful garden groves that filter the air and add colour to grim metal corridors. Some part of your mind, for its own safety, has avoided thinking about them too hard since the Master of Assassins raised the rainforest of Sahar.

But that's Galnius there, amidst those trees. That one further on looks like a Kaeri. Their branches bloom with black dahlias.

"The fool trims the leaves," the Master of Assassins said to you one fine day on Tellus, so many years ago. "A brute hacks the trunk. An expert pulls the roots. But a master..."

Hard and calloused hands ran through soft and loamy soil.

"Gardening has a way of wearing down the soul," she said. "When life itself is your enemy then the battle becomes eternal. But if you want to be able to appreciate a garden into your old age you need a way to break the cycle. And that is why the master catches the seeds."

The Red Furnace: First Contact

The dispel cuts down the period of invincibility held by the wolves, but doesn't undo it completely. The exact mechanism of the ability is innate to them and the enchantment was extending it. The Furnace Knight's flight is entirely unaffected.

And then the gate opens. The wolves fall.

The Furnace Knight extends his hand - but not towards them.

The roof of the facility burns clear away, exposing a clear light to the sun above. The Furnace Knight seems to hold it in his hand, and as he does there is a strange and terrible buildup. Violet energy starts to condense - slow and weak, fragments breaking out of the very daylight. Energy is extracted from light, from gravity, a desperate vacuum of power extracted. The next time the Aotrs send a probe through the readings coming from Tanshin's star are insane. The sun's surface has erupted with four small but intense solar flares that burn in an unnatural violet hue.

And the Furnace Knight hurls the energy downwards at Lord Death Despoil. Whatever this was it clearly wasn't ready - it was a fragment of energy, a mere handful. The attack comes so fast there's no time to think, only to dodge - and the purple energy falls through the gate too and impacts on star G-2679.

And that is where that exchange seems to end. It won't be for some weeks now that G-2679 starts to develop... symptoms similar to the chaotic readings starting to come from the Tanshin star. Just as well Lord Death Despoil chose an uninhabited system.

But in the immediate sense, the Furnace Knight has come out the worse of this exchange. His soldiers are lost, his frantic attack has missed, and now he is reduced to his own personal prowess. But for the knowledge of the Lichemaster's gate he considers it worthwhile.

He attacks now with a prepared caution, never making a move with momentum he can't immediately check if a Gate unexpectedly appears before him. For all its force, it is still ultimately a noncommittal offensive, relying only on techniques he has already demonstrated. If he has additional techniques up his sleeve he is keeping them hidden, a concession to the idea that a swift victory is no longer in the cards. The momentum is distinctly with the Lichemaster.