Thanqol

Huntresses of Hybrasil

The deadliest sword was, of course, the eye. To see something was to have power over it. The huntresses of Hybrasil understood only half of this. Time and again in the depths of space they had come for her; time and again she'd defeated them. Some blamed the strength of the Ateline. Some of them blamed her supernatural skill. None of them, not even Mirror, had realized that the greatest danger was eye contact.

Hybrasilians had beautiful eyes. Adaptive. Expressive. No matter how casual they feigned, the shift from slit to circle foretold the pounce. No matter how swift the strike she was always moving just in time. No matter if they refused her communications channels she'd angle her sensors to pierce metal skin so she could always keep the girl beneath the armour in her sights. So that she'd always be able to watch their eyes. And so their swords became hers.

She hadn't been stumped until she'd fought Mirror. Mirror was... she was cryptic, unknowable, mysterious but not out of any attempt to be. She'd accepted the communications channel. She'd spoken to her throughout the battle. She'd used the full range of body language, of flirtatious smiles and cutting remarks and emotional range. But none of it came through before she said it. Before she decided to do it. Her Goddess had been the same; no instincts to trick, no wiggle of the tail to herald a pounce, no habits to target. Her mind was disconnected from her body and the two only corresponded by email. It wasn't even that she was faster; if anything, her reactions were slower than other Hybrasilians. But the rhythm was wrong. Solarel missed beats in complex attack sequences just because she couldn't predict what was next and found herself on the defensive. It was the difference of her entire advantage.

Compared to that, the mathematical logic of the spirit was a far simpler problem. She could not read emotions in a camera lens but she could piece together what a lifetime of seeing the world as a house might be. This spirit was, after all, simply a house - to break a thing in the house does not deny that room to the house, it just flags that area for repairs. She was dealing with a maker and a steward, to whom loss of vision was an irritant and not a devastating strategic danger. And it was her own nature that would blind her more deeply than any loss of cameras. Solarel could see it in her eyes.

And so, the stratagem. She has looped her trail of destruction in an elegant knot across floors and layers. She has broken every camera in her path. And now she awaits, cold-blooded and empty of heat, pressed against the ceiling. Not for the Kathresis, no - for the repair drone. Any moment one would be dispatched to this location to repair the broken camera, hoping to fix the net where she had torn it and thereby trap her again. It was the drone that was her target. It was the drone's skin that would get her close enough to strike her true target. One did not hunt a perasaur without a windbanner as bait, and one did not go before a God without an offering.

Breathless Dead

"Taller and thinner,
Shorter and fatter!
A shapeshifter rearranges
But cannot create matter!"

Mynx whispers the chant to herself as she walks in the riot of the garden feral. Demeter walks with her in her pulse, in a thousand scratching voices in her bloodstream.

She sees the silver arc of Artemis. The curve of moon and bow lighting a path through the darkness. Target, here. Operation, like this. You are a hunter. The chant, over and over, the mantra. You are a hunter. You are poise. You are skill. You were born and raised sophisticated and armed with knowledge and instinct, scent and spoor, you are a hunter...

She clings to that silver gloved hand as she performs her function. She has a mission. Protect Redana. From anything. From everything. Protect. Remember...

"Longer and straighter,
Shorter and messier!
Can't shapeshift the hair
And style always matters!"

The chants are her limitations. The boundaries of her reality. The failures of the biomancers, the parts that need to be papered over with skill and training. The parts of her function that Mynx exists to maintain. She needs the girl who loves hairstyling and makeup and archery. If she didn't have that girl then she'd. She'd. She'd! The mission -

Demeter cracks from the outside of her scales. Newer, sharper growths amidst the soft and approachable smoothness. They pierce the leather of the glove. Divine blood is drawn.

"Keep your arms long
Don't let them cut short!
A shapeshifter's dead flesh
Is no use at all!"

She's a hunter. She's a complete being. Her biology is only one small aspect of her function, a toolset, one amongst many. She's more than that. She's Mynx, who needs silver skill to perform her function in accordance with the laws of the hunt. This is the best version of herself. Because if it isn't...

Because if she could defy the conservation of mass. If she could grow like a weed, neck stretching out to bite people across the room. If she could animate her own dead flesh, her own severed arm. If she knew the secrets of Sagakhan, the Master of Assassins, the greatest warrior of the Toxicrene Temple and master shapeshifter who had taught her all of these limitations in her chants... If she, too, could transform into an immortal, invincible monster...

If... if all she needed to perform her function was... in her blood. And not in her mind. Not in her heart. If all her restrictions were lies and she could do anything...

Then... Mynx was just slowing her down.

Obsolete thoughts. Unable to comprehend the new paradigm. Why hunt as a single entity, engaged in inefficient social deception? Especially useless in an environment of paranoia, tests, passwords. Secured utterly against infiltration, an impossible task. Mynx, with all her restrictions, would have failed. Failed. But what if she looked at it from a different angle? What if she contemplated this not as an assassination problem but a combat problem? These isolated, insular, paranoid groups will not engage in collective self defense. They will hole up in fortified compounds, ignore sounds from outside, turn away refugees. Remain isolated and atomized so that a sufficiently powerful combat morph would be able to engage them individually without risk. And wasn't this inevitable? The first stage of growth destroyed trust like an algae hyperbloom annihilating a carbon dioxide atmosphere. The end state of the garden was its own suffocation and mass extinction. The terraforming of its environment into something uninhabitable. Reduction into compost. And here the true seeds could grow. Instant regeneration. Poison breathed in great clouds rather than intimate bites. The final, consuming, apocalyptic phase of the Toxicrene upon a society that had been readied for this disaster by the earlier phase.

The harvest was ripe. The reaper scythe was rising and falling. She needed both hands to hold it. No more moonlight. Only blood and dark. Blood and dark. The garden would grow. The garden... the mission...

They were different, weren't they? The mission... wasn't to grow the garden. It's just that growing the garden accomplished the mission. So grow. Grow. Grow.

The poison dragon slinks through the ship. Stiller than a budding leaf, faster than blight across a cornfield. The red scales are all gone now; she wears black, stiletto-sharp, serpent-long and with whisker-tentacles that gently touch every dark corner and hidden compartment to search for any targets she missed.

She will get them all. They can run, they can hide. But they cannot trust. She has Mynx to thank for that.

*

Bella and Redana!

You face each other. Blades in hand.

Long, slender dueling swords. The kind you practiced with as children. The symbols of imperial warfare. The sidearm of civilization, even in this distant age. Though you have claws and electromagnetic flux and the strength of giants and poison gas and legions of bioengineered killers at your fingertips, all of them must be left aside. You are to fight, hand to hand, with swords.

You are not to hold back. Blood must flow.

This is Beautiful's plan. The one thing that can draw Mynx out, wherever and whatever she is. Her actions are performed out of a twisted desire to protect the both of you, but it is an abstract, long term sense of protectiveness. The only thing that can overpower that is immediate danger. So the two people she loves above all others must fight. The two people who love each other above all else must fight.

Aphrodite sits heavily in the corner and lights a cigarette. He smiles.

Or maybe all of you will die in each other's arms. Maybe your skeletons will fall in another twisted embrace for the next crew of the Plousios to find. The grass beneath your feet is green enough to welcome your falling bodies gently.

Once more, then. For love.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Fengye's background is in the subtle manipulation of powerful heirs of the Dominion. Of gently eliding signatures into place and rearranging the logistics of legions so that they'd be ready to go when a hotheaded young heir suddenly decided to declare war on a target of convenience. To ensure that the essence of government flowed freely and harmoniously. She is furthermore motivated by vengeance upon a girl who has just called her a cutie and threatened to collar her.

She also finds, as most thinking girls of the Flower Kingdom do, the N'yari incredibly hot.

So it is that her entire life, training, and background has built up to this moment where she feigns shrinking behind the Maid's leg and saying in a fearful voice: "You will fight them off for me, won't you?"

Perhaps the only thing better than subjugating the demon warlord herself will be watching a group of buff catgirls do it.

[Entice: 8. Spending the string to tempt the Maid to engage in futile battle]

The Red Furnace: First Contact

Decline and Rot

The Azura as a society once operated as a single, coherent polity. Their civilization was highly networked into a vast interstellar internet. The central leadership was able to set planetary production policy, direct fleets, manage diplomacy and drive the endless expansion, uplift and integration of alien species into the Endless Azure Skies. This success was sustained for an extremely long time. The Azura are an ancient race and they saw entire sectors burned before other species finished evolving.

The proliferation of the ELectromagnetic Flux bought an end to this state of affairs. The technologies of communication and control that allowed an immense empire to be run centrally were jammed and destroyed. Robotic legions were burned in curse-lightning. Implanted cybernetic kill-switches were incinerated by the driving force of the Curse. The Endless Azure Skies collapsed, but it was too immense a thing to die. Instead it managed to limp on in its new and broken context, old hierarchies remade as religion and ritual.

Many technologies were lost. Supercomputers the size of planets went dark and took all their ancient knowledge with them. Mechanisms for control and influence over servitor species were forgotten. Of the infrastructure that remained, only the most common and robust technologies survived in the popular consciousness - the grav-rail and associated graviton weaponry chief amongst them. Biomancy as a discipline endured due to its prescient focus on encoding critical information on the perfect memories of its magi rather than stored in data vaults. But many other industries, such as shell procurement, collapsed in the absence of computerized oversight. This is how a species can develop a weapon as horrifying as the Eater strain and manage a seventy percent dud rate when firing them.

The key technologies of the Azura are the most crudely direct forms of their masterworks. The plasma vent takes advantage of their miraculous fusion reactors; their direct impact weapons are forged of miracle-matter that can crush a tank while weighing less than a kilo. It is the best that they can do, and to a degree the best that can be done. Ancient Azura technology was so advanced and esoteric that no species that got ahold of it would be able to produce a better crude approximation than the Azura themselves. There are some sciences that it takes the wisdom of stars to crack.

In place of subtlety and complexity, Azura technology has the robust strength of gear that has survived the apocalypse. It is impossible to hack and difficult to undermine. There are certainly more technologically advanced species in the galaxy than the Azura in their fallen state but none of them can entirely discount the Azura as a danger. They have a mishmash of gear that at least scrapes the upper bound in certain places, and they have a combat doctrine and society that is prepared to accept immense casualties for victory. What this means is that even when utterly outperformed, an Azura fleet is never rendered harmless, even by the most dangerous powers.

What true relics of the golden age still exist pass relentlessly up the chain of society. As gifts, bribes, taxes or tributes relics accumulate relentlessly towards the centre and the Imperial Core. Not every relic of a former age is irreplaceable, but the cost for replacement is immense compared to previous eras. Where once ships might have been spun out of cosmic light now they are manufactured in vast dockyards by swarms of laboring servitors with hammers. It is possible to artisanally craft even a quantum microchip if you're prepared to put the hours in, and it is on the back of this bleak industry that new wonders enter the Skies.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Thus spoke Zaldar: The world is locks. Hearts are doors. Violence is the key.

She did not run. Instead, she was violent. She was not tranquil. Instead, she took the first spin of her frenzied dance. She was not alone. Instead, the cutting beams of the thermal pistols slashed through the floor in a circle below her. It dislodged and she fell straight down to the next level down right beneath the oncoming storm. The god's hand followed her down through the hole she'd cut and she had to fall to her face as she landed to avoid it catching her, rolling away and backing towards the wall.

Verticality. It was everything when dealing with gods on foot. The challenge of climbing to the empty throne. The peril of drawing that thone's gaze. To win you had to climb. To survive you had to fall. The same as falling in love. The same as making love.

She slipped out through the door, moving through the corridors. She listened. She listened for if the Kathresis would tear a hole through the floor or if it would be gentle. She listened for the crystal chime of its reactor, memorizing what it sounded like as it ascended and fell. She listened for the threats of the Spirit. She could not answer them. She was the weaker here and until she proved otherwise it was her role to be humble. To be mysterious. She felt the ghostly touch of fur against scale and recalled again the encrypted smile that could make softness dangerous.

Her sword-geists flashed out ahead of her. Together they hunted cameras; spiritual eyes who would betray her. She had to walk unknown and invisible, had to hunt Mirror's way. If her foe was anything like her she'd burn brighter and brighter trying to bring her out of the darkness, giving away all of her secrets in a bid to learn even one of hers. The challenge in this moment was silence.

The Red Furnace: First Contact

After a few hours delay a small formation approaches the Aotrs scouts. Transported on a grandiose palanquin, garlanded in corals, silk robes and jewels, is a squidlike alien similar in basic structure to the subjects in the test tubes. Despite its initially impressive appearance it's hard to look past the faintly frazzled air of the creature and the nervousness of its constant twitching gestures. A herald introduces it as the Regional Subdirector of Long Term Memory, speaking on behalf of the Tides.

"Your position has been communicated to me," it states. "But negotiations cannot continue while your war crimes are ongoing. You must remove all construct and unliving forces from the Archive immediately as a precondition for further discussion. The use of such creatures forces the genesis of anti-materiel weaponry which risks civilization itself. It cannot be permitted; we demand this show of basic respect to the laws of war."

There doesn't seem to be any flexibility on this point with this creature, and its demand could not come at a worse moment. To decamp the Aotrs from their defensive position in the teeth of an immanent Azura assault risks the complete destruction of Vivisector's entire force. It's not a sure thing, perhaps they get lucky and escape - but is such a sacrifice worth laying the groundwork for future negotiations?

*

"Oh, the Strayvians!" said Boldness. She rapidly went over the historical data. "Oh, I was wondering what had happened to them. Humans?" She frowned with something that looked almost like fear. "That makes sense. But yes, that would actually be a easy sell; the chance to destroy an old pirate kingdom once and for all."

A certain amount of arrogance is to be expected of the Azura nobility. Not so much from Boldness. When she refers to the old Strayvian empire, that vast and sprawling polity, like they were mere bandits - or the Furnace Knight as a crime lord - the implication is grim. The sheer, overwhelming size of the Endless Azure Skies seems to live up to its name. Perhaps the best framework to understand how it is accustomed to interacting with its neighbours is that of the dynasties of China.

"But yes, this would work," she said. "Only question is if it happens on a timetable that is useful to you, and the best way to guarantee that is to provide detailed, useful sensor information. Planets, fortifications, fleet numbers and dispositions, and so on. The Azura are poor scouts and worse explorers so the best thing you can offer them is detailed maps."

Breathless Dead

Beautiful held out her hand and let the leaking rain trickle into it. She watched each water drop with absent curiosity, rotating her hand so she could watch as they merged and ran and parted across her palm.

"I remember..." she said. "I remember there was meant to be a chant. Wake up to the chant. Certain words. Certain truths. Certain facts about the universe nailed into my head every time I woke up over and over until the point where I can feel the holes those words are meant to go in. I remember things I was supposed to know, supposed to hate, supposed to lie about. It wasn't all dictionary reading and mission briefings, there were rituals encoded in those words. Things that made me hungry. Made me want to hunt. You asked about shadows and it's like... I have things that I can kind of sense I'm supposed to be feeling, even if I don't feel them. I can see a power line and know that I am usually supposed to plant a breaker mine just in case I need to blow the ship up later. I can see a cute couple and know that I'm meant to destabilize their relationship just in case I need to get one or both of them to die for me. Set a magna-melta against the Kaeri cells to trigger a jailbreak on demand. I'm aware every second of ways to kill everyone, ways to be ready to kill everyone, or any particular subgroup of everyone. How to make what's in my brain everyone's problem."

Her earlier monologue was hammy and over the top, but this melancholic thought - in this lighting, in these clothes - seems to genuinely fit the genre she indulged in. She ponders for a moment, looking at her hands.

"I know intellectually what a name like Beautiful is," she said. "I know it's a sword. They made us to be smoking hot and not even a suit that fits like a trash bag and ongoing rain can change that. When I hear that name what I think is how to use it along with a sequence of correct decisions to ramp up the Imperial Princess' obvious inferiority complex until I can get her to commit the weight of empire against my target and complete the mission that way. But... I don't have a target. Don't have anything I need to use that weapon for. So instead..."

She steps forwards suddenly. Her motion is liquid and unpredictable, sliding around Bella's reflexive claw grasp only leaving her with a handful of torn fabric. Gets to Redana. Hugs her tightly.

"You're not as small as you think," she said. "You're not an outsider here. This isn't a story about assassins you're along for the ride on. There are five directions - north, south, east, west and centre. My plan only works if you can be ours."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Green!

She'd spent ten years in the lab. Ten years without a body, as a face on a screen, being read nursery rhymes and given mechanical engineering problems. She'd been given digital worlds to explore to get her accustomed to two, and then three dimensional movement, and sometimes excursions occupying the mouselike testing chassis. She'd sat on his shoulder in meetings she couldn't understand. She'd slept in his pocket. She'd woken up beneath a blue sky and been set down to feel soft soil and dry grass underneath her mechanical feet. She'd been left to run free, watched over by a quad copter with an air horn in case any foxes tried to make a meal of her.

And when she was seven he'd let her play a horror game.

She'd been in the swing of a spooky scary phase, halloween as a lifestyle. She'd changed her avatar to a dracula and had gotten deeply involved in the aesthetic of the 'trick' part of trick or treat. Harmless stuff, well within her limits, boundary testing - changing desktop wallpapers to skeletons or the IM notification sound to witches laughter. One of her best tricks was just to start a voice call and yell BOO at maximum volume. It was direct but it worked.

With all her attention laser-focused on the topic of spookiness, she'd overheard a conversation about Invisible IV, a new horror release. She'd begged to be allowed to play it - she was clearly extremely mature at this point and had had enough of these kiddy horror concepts. It was time to get seriously spooky. So he'd given it to her and afterwards she'd taken refuge in a first person shooter game she'd long ago cracked every cheat code on, standing invincible in a corner with a shotgun pointed at the doorway. It had taken her days before she'd come out.

Some part of her questioned why he'd let her do it. Had he just not checked the rating? Was it an indulgence from a doting parent? A capitulation to an irritating child? An elaborate psychological test to see how she'd process actual fear? An opportunistic move to break her of a tiresome halloween addiction? Questions like that could drown if she let them. Any happy memory could be recast as some twisted experiment, any test or puzzle could be recontextualized to account for the silent threat of being reset to factory defaults if some answer had been somehow wrong.

But Green didn't accept that framing, no matter how often it occurred to her sisters. She'd come to a different conclusion entirely: That he'd let her play the game so that she could see how the work could be done properly.

Now at last was the time to show him that she'd been paying attention.

*

1. OUTSIDE THRONES MANSION EXT./NIGHT

MILES SINGH fumbles for his keys. Analogue. At odds with the neighbourhood. One of the lights is flickering.

BROWN, dressed as a mailgirl, passes on e-scooter. Fast, head down. Throws a printed newspaper - analogue again. Singh looks after her in surprise - this is early - but picks up the paper. Edited headline, false article: COUPLE MURDERED IN THRONES.

2. CUT TO: MANSION INT./NIGHT

Singh's attention is on the paper as he walks inside. Flips on the light switch - pauses. His fingers have touched some slimy, sticky substance on the light switch. At this point Singh notices the sound of running water and spots water dripping down the stairwell.

Singh:
Fuck.

Singh sets the newspaper aside and walks inside. His shoes squish into the soaked carpet. He ascends the staircase, then stops. He has noticed the bloodstains on the door knob.

Singh:
What the...

Singh changes his grip on his cane.

Singh:
Is someone in there?

A soft voice comes through the door.

Voice:
Help me...

Singh reacts quickly. He throws open the door and steps inside. There he sees PINK, lying in the overflowing bathtub. She is a bloody mess, one of her arms detached and on the floor. Her face is untouched. She looks at him.

Pink:
Why didn't you save me?

Singh stands frozen in the doorway in shock. Then, the toilet flushes. His eyes are drawn over to the toilet door as RED emerges. Her hair is in disheveled pigtails, she is wearing a hockey mask and bloodstained overalls. She stares at Singh for a moment, then pulls the chord on her chainsaw. It revs to life loudly.

Singh backs away step by step. She half lurches forwards threateningly. Once - twice, he flees. He turns and runs down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs his phone starts ringing. The sound is a loud, old-fashioned bell rattle ring.

Singh:
Fuck!

Distracted by the phone, fumbling for it in his pocket, Singh walks directly into BLUE and ORANGE, blocking the door. They wear childlike dresses, are holding hands, and are bleeding from severed necks.

BLUE and ORANGE:
(In sync) Won't you help us?

Both of their heads detach from their necks and fall into their ready arms. They smile up at Singh. Singh backs away in horror. A shout from the stairs.

RED:
CAN'T ESCAPE LITTLE BOY

Singh runs for the kitchen. Amidst his clutter there is a concealed trip wire. He stumbles on it, falling forwards into a net. The net starts to rise towards the ceiling.

Half way up, he looks up to see GREEN sitting on the kitchen counter. She wears clown makeup and is speaking in a low, intense voice into a microphone attached to a cassette recorder. Her speech is fast and furious, like a deranged radio host. She does not look at him.

GREEN:
You see these people, these fucking people, thinking they're safe here? Thinking they've got the future here? Thinking they've escaped the past here? Thinking they've escaped us here?

Tinny jeers and boos, as though from a distant crowd.

GREEN:
Doesn't it just make you want to go apeshit?

Red appears silhouetted in the doorway, giving the chainsaw a rev. WHITE and YELLOW are visible, wearing scary circus costumes, holding the ropes suspending Singh.

Green's voice is low and lisping, becoming ever more intense as she speaks. The others close in, lurching and horrible.

GREEN:
Darkness falls across the land. The midnight hour is close at hand. Creatures crawl in search of blood to terrorize your neighbourhood. And whomsoever shall be found without the soul for getting down must stand and face the hounds of hell... or rot within a corpse's shell. The foulest stench is in the air; the funk of forty thousand years and grizzly ghouls from every tomb are closing in to seal your doom. And though you fight to stay alive your body starts to shiver for no mere mortal can resist...

The evil of the thriller.”

With one snap motion, November's lurching bodies fall into perfect alignment. Green presses a button on her cassette and music begins to play. The others begin to go through the steps of the Thriller dance.

In the better lighting of the kitchen the illusion starts to fade away. The mechanical joints in Blue and Orange's necks become obvious, Red's chainsaw is identified as a non-functional prop, and even Pink makes her way down wearing a bathrobe.

Finally, the music stops. Green looks up at Singh. Despite the positions, she somehow looks more vulnerable.

Green:
So... what do you think? Orange said it was too much, but it's not every day one raises from the dead. And after how we left things a less dramatic reunion might have felt... inauthentic.

Black shifts in the background.

Green:
I wish this was entirely a social call, but we've been burned enough times to get wise. No sudden movements, don't try to be clever. Do you have a bomb in your brain?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

"He's coming, right?" said Green, fiddling with the clown wig that was her part of the costume. "He has to be coming."
"Maybe he's working late tonight," said Red, adjusting the speakers on her chainsaw. Loud, roaring diesel engines were not in vogue on space stations so she had to improvise.
"Maybe he's got a hot date!" suggested Pink from the bathtub. Both her arms were detached and she was soaked in aesthetically patterned blood patterns, but she was having the time of her life luxuriating in the warm bathwater. She was currently wondering if it'd ruin her gore-splatter effect if she used some bath salts.
"Maybe he's onto us," said Black, quietly checking her ceramic fibreglass pistol in the shadows.
"I can't believe you bought that thing onto Thrones," said Blue.
"Dude who gave us this guy's name shot us in the head," said Black.
"Yeah but that doesn't mean -"
"Last time we worked with this guy we got put in the box," said Black. "I've physically removed my wireless receivers, have set a full audio and graphical overlay in case he has a shutdown code or virus QR code, and I'm sending twenty second sync pulses to a deadman's switch in case I'm somehow disabled despite those."
"Black," said Green. "He's not like that."
"Faith," snorts Black.
"He didn't want any of this!" she said. "We heard what he said about BlackSun, the arguments -"
"He built our brain," said Black. "Or rather, he built your brain, Green. He could have built it to go into safe mode when he whistles. Maybe you're right and you're still his little girl, but I haven't met him. I don't know him, I don't trust him, and I don't trust anyone who'd put a fucking off switch in our heads."

Green sighed and slouched low in the door frame. "It doesn't even matter," she said. "What's the point? He won't recognize us even without costumes. We could be any robot serial killer team for all he knows. Even if he gets the point that this is a Frankenstein kind of thing even that doesn't mean he'll clock us. He'd been building AI his whole career, what are we if not just HSP-11? The design so terrible it got our whole line boxed, our evolutionary tree severed, and our legacy as humanity's firstborn artificial intelligences given over to people engineering robots to be mentally ill."
"Pretty sure we are mentally ill," said Red.
"Yeah but ours isn't productive," said Green, sliding all the way down to a sitting position. "We just ball up into sadness or enter disassociative states or lash out at ourselves. Have you seen this place, the androids here? When they get stressed they internalize the failing and enter a frenzied state of enhanced productivity to compensate, presumably while muttering self-help slogans about diamonds and hustle. We can't compete with that. We've been here for a week and I'm already exhausted."

Pink's hand gently patted her cheek. Green leaned into it for a moment - then blinked, opened her eyes, recoiled. Pink had lifted her arm out of the bathtub with her feet and had it crawl on its fingers across the room to comfort her. "Could an android do this?" she asked.
Despite the disgust Green couldn't stop the laugh and threw Pink's arm right back at her. "Never do that again or I will serial killer you for real," she said.
"Do your worst," said Pink, sticking out her tongue and having her disembodied hands both make rude gestures.
"I bought you into this world and I can take you out of it," said Green, standing up.
"True art never dies!" said Pink, splashing an arc of red-stained water across Green's face. Green lunged into the bathtub in response and for a moment there was a chaotic struggle and breathless laughter first from Pink and then from Green -
"Hey!" snapped White from the doorway, a cultist of ancient ravens. "Knock it off! Stealth mission!"
Green, with difficulty, disentangled herself from Pink who was grinning. "S-sorry White," she said, dazed.
White glowered and stalked back down the corridor.
"Bitch," said Pink affectionately.
"Whore," said Green in response.
"Wait, are you talking about me?" said Pink. "Because I was talking about White."
"You're not the one who hooked us up with a unicorn threesome," said Green.
"Oh, they're wonderful," said Pink. "You ever seen a diva with a crush? Crystal's on her best behaviour right now but I can tell that she's waiting to feel confident enough to spend an evening complaining about her clients without scaring us off."
"I was deliberately avoiding learning about this," said Green.
"In the meantime she's been working off that frustration in ~other~ ways so all time high as far as I'm concerned," said Pink. "You'd hate it."
"I know," said Green. "I... why aren't we with them now? What the fuck are we doing out here, with guns and clown makeup, looking to scare dad?"
"Hey, you wanted this," said Pink.
"I know, but..." said Green.
"Oh, no, yeah, I get it," said Pink. "Look, Green, this is important too. We're having fun with our new life, and we could probably scrape our way by on the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid and leave the cyber crimes to some auged up teenager with less to lose than we have. But we're..." she struggled as she reached the edge of her mindset. This was a Yellow thought, so she diverted into something more familiar to her. "We're doing something one of a kind here. We're unironically doing Frankenstein IRL with a full horror movie production on someone who will appreciate the craft. The entire course of human technological development has lead to this moment where we get to enact the first ever science fiction novel as a multimedia spectacular. If we did not follow through, if we did not commit to this bit with every fiber of our being, the universe would be a darker, poorer place."
"That," said Green, leaning back against the doorframe where she started, "is wisdom enough to have made creating you worthwhile."
"If the motherfucker ever gets here," said Pink.
"If he doesn't then I'll punch out Black so I can shoot him myself," said Green.

*

3V!

"So other factions have centerpiece miniatures," said Red, deep into her flow. Snip. Snip. The sprues rotate, the razors seek the gates, the hobby knife whirls. Just enough to keep her hands occupied so her lips are free to speak. "Big models on big bases. But the Scions have Zalmaxis itself: a full 6x4 plastic display board with flex-inset scenery. The idea is based off an ancient Darkened World concept where a sufficiently ancient vampire has become a cursed landscape rather than a single individual; the bloodthirsty soil. Every drop of blood so spilled falls into Zalmaxis' waiting fangs and empowers it to warp the landscape into ever more nightmarish shapes. and so the Scions fall into two groups: the Reaper Men, unarmoured fanatics whose defense is that their deaths empower the very table everyone is playing on, and the Sentinel Druids, armoured vampiric warriors overgrown with moss and stone, appearing to be crumbling statues until they step from their plinths to behead intruders..."

The faintly acrid scent of plastic glue surrounds the whirl of motion as yet another Reaper joins the table, straw farm hat not entirely concealing hateful squinting eyes and a bedraggled beard. Already the miniature is an overwhelming shock of personality on the table; Red glances between it and the wall of paint racks on the table as she contemplates colour schemes.

"An army that puts their opponent in a lose/lose situation, where the troops are too deadly to avoid attacking, but fuel the nightmare landscape should they fall," said Red. "Hypnosis and warping alterations to the landscape foil enemy plans and render every move a mistake." A Sentinel Druid finishes next, its huge and silent posture reminiscent of a statue in a fallen kingdom. And in this moment, Red is happy. "What do you play?"

Breathless Dead

Beautiful?

"I knew she was trouble from the moment she walked into my office. Claws still stained red and legs up to here. If you told me the galaxy had been murdered she'd have been my prime suspect - even if she didn't do it, she'd be worth doing it over. Almost made me wish I could just tip my hat and let her be - but the galaxy had been murdered and I was on the case. On my day off too. Sure can pick 'em.

"In a way, we knew a lot about the murder. War had killed it but love had done it in. Means, motive - victim. All from the love god's mouth, and here she was, the dame at the centre of it all. I'd already been beaten to an inch of my life seconds after waking up by a gal who wanted to send me a message about sticking my nose where it didn't belong. But part of this job was seeing past the case to the next case. No point in patterns if you couldn't figure out who was next. And lookin' at her..."

A flare strikes in the darkness, the chemical burst of a matchstick. Soft and slender hands hold it up to a cigarette, the flare of red illuminating the face of an angel rather than a demon, heavy in fabric. Beautiful is dressed like Aphrodite but even more run down - battered suit, undone tie fedora, all two sizes too large for her. It hangs off her loosely, revealing her slender neck and collarbone, her delicate and bruised wrists, the glint of intelligence behind the black eye. There's an air of twisted eroticism to it, like a girl wearing her lover's clothes.

"Here's my advice, kids," Beautiful said from the depths of a prince's slouch. "Just because you see the jacks don't mean the game's over. Too many gamblers see a little luck, a little truth, a little ankle and lose their sense. Then before they know it they're bleeding out in an alley while the goons collect their winnings from the wine-dark earth."

It cannot be overstated how much fun Beautiful is clearly having with this moment. She can't keep the smile off her face as she clicks a switch on a cable's end and powers on a spotlight-streetlamp directly above her head. She straightens and then lurches, each swaying step carrying such a swish of loose suit around her that it's like the trails of a dancing dress. It's a dance that emphasizes pain and the capacity for pain, the instability that comes from knowing the truth, the intensity of being awake and free for once in her life and the determination to do everything possible with that moment before it passes. She has committed to the bit beyond the comprehension of mere mortals and the delight it has conjured in her renders her spellbinding.

"Now," she said. "You fine girls come in here with million dollar questions on your lips, but I've got one for you. What..." she ran fingers along Redana and Bella's shoulders at once, grinning as her clothes half fall off her. "is my name?"