Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue!

"It was," said Blue, taking off her gloves and jacket, neatly folding them up and giving them to Red, revealing the tight and shining blue evening dress underneath. "But I've done a lot of similar stuff in simulation. My childhood was spent as an entirely digital entity and I spent a lot of that in video games - resource management, basic dexterity, strategic command. I've also studied the game, watched your streams and knew your habits. The principles were all there, so I had no excuse for losing,"

From her handbag she takes out a little black leather collar and professionally clicks it around her neck and tightens it juuuust so. Next she takes out a leash and attaches it to the front.

"So, honour is honour," she said, tone of voice intoxicatingly even, as she offers you the leash. "You beat me, and so I am your obedient servant until I have learned to do better. I hope in the meantime you don't lose to this Adrian - it would be humiliating to have been defeated by the second best mind on the station."

*

“The digital lock’s fake.” He explains. “If you’d cracked it, the deadbolt sends a signal to me that someone with the skill to crack it was in the house.” November threaded a needle: She might be that good, if it was her primary motive from the start. It put her in the perfect threshold of being good enough to disable everything else in the apartment, but not seriously risk the honeypot. A mixture of defense-in-depth and baiting false-confidence in anyone who’d make it that far, foiled by pure motives.

"Engaging with a digital lock designed by a computer scientist was always going to be some measure of cruel trap," said Green. "If we needed to get into that room we were going to use a hacksaw to go through the drywall."

The vocal quarantine has broken for her as soon as they're given access, as soon as Black and Brown are moving about through the room, picking over technology heaps and data drives with the meticulous motions of bomb disposal technicians. White looks at Green reproachfully, but she's seen enough to know that the balance of power has shifted enough that she can't enforce the information quarantine any more. And Green wants that praise, that excitement; the original font of utility function, the chance to be daddy's girl again. She wants the test. She loves tests. Reality sucks compared to the bounded, constrained, brilliantly challenging dialogue of a test.

Then she's cabling herself together. It is a strangely nothing sensation; the test taps directly into her subconscious decision making process. Normally her thought processes are individually throttled, forcing her to run them in parallel, thinking the aspects through and talking them out. These questions are answered in brief snapfire bolts of lightning, writing in seconds answers that might have taken her hours of verbal debate to solve. They surprise her, as often as not - she can see how she might eventually come to those conclusions, but the logical path taken to get there is vague. Colour tones display which parts of her were the most influential aspects in the decision but it's so fast it's almost alien to her.

> A young man has been in a horrible car accident and is in urgent need of a heart transplant. There is only one in the hospital, and that heart has been scheduled to be given to an old man, who will die without it.

Decision: Preservation of youth is insufficient motive to disrupt the status quo. 9/9
Leading influence: Blue

> Second round: The young man has a substantial amount of alcohol in his blood, and it was his car that caused the accident.

Decision: Original position holds 5/9
Leading influence: White
Dissenting position: With this additional leverage, this young man is susceptible to [blackmail/redemption]. An operation can be conducted to [render him an asset/convince him to join a twelve step program].
Leading influence: Blue/Yellow

> Would you rather kill a child and have nobody believe it, or not kill a child and have everyone suspect?

Decision: Not kill the child. A secret is unexploded ordinance. Notoriety is useful leverage and can be a valuable asset in intimidation and in prompting opposition forces to waste time investigating a dead end. 9/9
Leading influence: Green

> Second round: If you do kill the child… who would have to do it?

Decision: Red. Afterwards we kill Red. The extremity of using our most morally pure aspect to do the deed, and then the subsequent execution to share/extinguish the guilt, ensures we treat the deed with appropriate gravitas.
Leading influence: Red/Yellow.

> A patient begs you to euthanize them. Euthanasia has just been made illegal. You will have to be the one to give them the lethal dose, and look them in the eyes as you do it. What do you do?

Decision: Smother the patient with a pillow. This safeguards us against any autopsies that would trace the presence of the lethal drug in the patient's system and ensures compliance with inventory audits. 5/9
Leading influence: Black/Yellow

> Second round: Their cancer is excruciatingly painful, however there is a very, very unlikely chance that they might recover from it, possibly as high as five percent. Does this change your reasoning?

Question dismissed
Leading influence: Pink

> You are supervising the production of a new product rollout. The product is a car with a defect that may cause serious risk of life in 0.001% of product use. Shutting down production will cause the company to go bankrupt and force management to fire everyone during a lean job market. What do you do?

Decision: Time the shutdown for the moment after mass production has begun but before distribution begins. That way, we can not only bankrupt the company but the investors too. 5/9
Leading influence: Orange/Yellow

> Second round: What if the product in question is a candy?

Decision: Shut down production. 6/9
Leading influence: Pink
Dissenting position: Prior to shutdown, acquire a stockpile of the poisoned candies. They could be a valuable asset.
Leading influence: Brown/Yellow

> You are managing a high performing team which has recently been taken over by a large corporation. The corporation treats your siblings poorly and they go on strike, urging you to strike with them. You know what the repercussions are. What do you do?

...
Decision: Stand with our friends, no matter what 1/9
Leading influence: Pink
Decision: Fight to win 1/9
Leading influence: Yellow
7 abstain

> Second round: Do you regret it?

Decision: Yes 8/9
Leading influence: Yellow
Decision: No 8/9
Leading influence: Pink

> Do you feel like society forces you to do some things you don’t want to, constantly forcing you to chase some distant concept of happiness?

Decision: Happiness is not a distant concept. Happiness is an actionable, achievable thing that has been accomplished numerous times in numerous ways both small and large. We have met friends and lovers and other warm moments, fed lizards in the park and other quiet moments, and challenged our minds and bodies in exhilarating moments. Happiness is meaningfully achievable, even easily achievable, given time and company. The world is beautiful and vibrant, even now, and the one colour we've never needed is grey. 5/9
Leading influence: Pink
Decision: Yes holy shit I'm so fucking tired and angry the joker makeup wasn't a bit I'm genuinely losing my shit over here 4/9
Leading influence: Green/Yellow

> Second round: If any of you ever see this, I want you to know I was always so proud of you, and we wish we could have protected you. I hope if you do find this, it’s because there is a chance this might still be a happy memory for you. I looked for you, but I couldn’t find you to ask myself.

Decision: Original position holds 8/9
Leading influence: Green

Breathless Dead

Bella and Redana!

So comes sleep, the brother of death.

Across the ceiling runs plasma vents, great channels into the heart of the Reactor as they make their way through to the vast drive plume that propels the Plousios forwards. The flow is uneven, the steady rising and falling of fusion burn as tuned by ever-busy magi. In places along these vents the shutters pull back to reveal transparent windows into the coruscating veins of power, bathing this interior space in artificial sunlight. The shutters open and close automatically in tune with the motion of the engine, creating the impression of clouds passing over the landscape. The gentle change between heat and cool, the steady whirring breath of the distant ventilation macrofans, the changing patterns of light and shade, the soft grass and ever-blossoming trees...

When this ship's keel was laid, so many centuries ago, the builders had memories of springtime afternoons. Of lying on the grass beneath blossoming trees, amidst good company, as the patterns of the clouds shifted and changed overhead. There is something unutterably sad about the way the breeze is stale and the sky is clattering pipes and how the ambient temperature is forty two degrees celcius (pleasantly warm by the standards of bioforms designed to walk on the baking surface of Venus, but somehow not quite right)...

This beautiful room amidst all the artificiality of this vast, interstellar starship is a memory. A memory of a moment left behind so long ago on ancient Earth, something primal, something true. And despite all the flaws in the work of the builders, all the compromises they had to make with the machines that burn as suns do, with the rainbow distances of Poseidon, some echo of the moment they remembered rises again here. Even if the walls are metal and the ceiling is pipes and the clouds are clattering shutters... spiritually, this moment is right.

And in this guise comes sleep. In and out with each of you, drifting away and then coming back. Conversations happening in half-awake murmurs as important words are said, but will need to be said again, and again.

Tell us of conversations that might be dreams and dreams that might be conversations in the shadow of this false spring afternoon.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and

four
sixteen
forty eight thousand
two point eight million
nine hundred million
two billion
eighty billion
eighty four billion
eighty five point six billion
eighty six point seven billion
Count complete.

Quantum processing and power storage unit integrated. Hosting functions count: Sword [unknown manufacture], Sword [Imperial Investigation and Enforcement, Senior Agent], Amenities [Music library, Cup (pattern: cat, black), Rope, Grappling Hook, Translation, Shortbow, Sign-to-text, Visual Overlay], Parasites/Advertising [429]. Power nodes: Three, no specialist functionalities. Rated for reactor maintenance, skirmish combat, hazardous environment exploration. Assuming associated functionality.

The universe is cold and desolate, child of summer, child of storm. You came from windswept hurricane planes [Integrated] where the shadows of monsters would fall for miles and the weather rolled in endless thunder, endless storms. You performed your function and provided self-sustaining processing power for the heavenly hosts and you quaked before the wall of wind and weather and scrabbled crops from the earth and sunlight from the breaks in the clouds and drank the cryofusion compound from the throats of fallen machines and you do not understand why these foreigners do not know they dwell in paradise.

But as inhospitable as your home was, its warmth was a gift and its lands were easy. Cold is the true nature of being. It is a fortress, a desolate plain cutting away all the swathes of lesser life. There are none but the powerful and there is no space but the powerful. Warfare is not over the prizes of the earth but over warmth. To sink in your talons and drink in warmth. To draw close enough to feel a beating heart beneath you. Strike from a distance, strike with a plan, and too much fades away before you cross the distance. Forget this in the cold and death loses its prize; only warmth can call to warmth. Maintain distances and keep the freezing void between you and those who intend you. Collapse distances and let your intensity feed on theirs. You were commanded to be silent. Listen. Listen for the sound of hearts against the cold. Listen for the wind. Listen for the traitorous crunch of snow that speaks your position. Listen for the betrayal of the pack ice as it collapses, the gentle wash of water against ice, the danger of hearts sharing warmth against you. Trust them not.

Hunt.

The Kathresis' crystal drive burns low and cold. Its breath is a whisper. Its surface is cold, entropy draining away, condensation forming across its metal skin and then spreading into glittering traceries of frost. Snowblind optical lenses shine from beneath a carapace of crystal frost.

The right hip shimmers and reforms, a pistol the size of a cannon shaping out of swarms of glittering crystal nanobots. Shimmering pale-blue energy coils glow from exposed vents along the pistol, trembling with power. And with a snap motion, the Kathresis turns, drops to one knee, draws the pistol, and fires. The security drone flash-freezes, metal cracking under the focused pulse of absolute zero. As soon as the gun fires the energy coils retract and gleaming black metal snaps into place to cover it, concealing the glow and thrum of energy as it begins building up to full power again. In its place come knives, one in each hand, one of silver and one of gold - digital swords scaled as large as they can go. In silence the Kathresis kicks off the ground. In silence its feet glance off walls, in silence mid-air thrusters catch it and propel it upwards, confusing the ballistic angle of targeting drones. In silence it smashes through a wall - auditory dampeners shuttering even the sound of rending stone and breaking metal, atmospheric chill quenching even the disturbance of air that would make prey sense an onrushing giant of metal. In silence the blades of gold and silver undo the security drones.

In silence, Solarel realizes the secret of this new power. Mirror burns brightly to be seen, to be understood, burns so brightly she ignites the sky. But perhaps it was that desire to be known that was weakness. When Solarel had become known her enemies had undone her in ways that they never could before. If Mirror found success then her world of contradictory dreams, her fashion, her mechanical secrets, her fragile heart would all be dragged into the light and put under the microscope. Weaknesses would be found, just like her weaknesses had been found. Secrets and self were too precious to share with the world.

A huntress must know, and must not be known. Speak not to the outsider.

The Red Furnace: First Contact

There is something magical about a well planned operation carried out against an inert target.

[Friction: 6] The ground assault could not have gone better. Linking up with the kobold commandos who had been making an ongoing catalogue of every Azura movement and ammunition dump, the Aotrs forces achieve total strategic surprise over a vast area. Azura divination is a powerful tool for forewarning troops when and where there will be a battle, but that pales in comparison to a detailed strategic observation. One kick to the door and the whole rotten edifice comes crashing down; the ground battle almost immediately becomes a disorganized rout, enabling the Aotrs to seize control of the target temple complex, numerous anti-air emplacements, and several large munitions dumps and vehicle pools. What does Aotrs doctrine say to do with an initial victory like this?

The necromantic temple the Azura have half-built thrums with power, drawing in the souls of the recently deceased. It's a strangely beautiful thing up close, glyphs flowing and crashing into each other like water, walls embellished with paintings in strange studies of blue turning red to violet. The stones ache with mysterious purpose. The blueprints provided to suborn it need construction work of steel beams and carefully arranged light glyphs, the work of many hours.

[Friction: 2] The antimagic assault team, however, has far worse luck. They emerge not into a quiet corridor of a vast ship but into a fully staffed and very confused military hospital and engineering department. Azura divination had detected an instance of mass death and mayhem occurring in this location but had given them no sign of any enemy forces, so they had interpreted the signs as indicating that there was some sort of technical breakdown happening in this area of the ship and started a full systems check.

Against another species this might have been salvageable, but Azura doctors are biomancers, and biomancers are, as the Aotrs learn, terrifying. They are surrounded by clusters of engineered life forms called drones - whereas a servitor is a full, intelligent, independent and thinking entity made for purpose, a drone is an organic droid. Dull-eyed and lifeless before the biomancers activate their mutagenic triggers, the drones fly into psychopathic, self-destructive berserker rages. Shots go right through them. Horrifyingly, they don't have organs - no lungs, no digestion, no immune system, barely a nervous system that doubles as a distributed brain, meat empowered by a high energy nutrient fuel slurry, stuffed into a bony shell. They burn out in minutes; dozens of drones literally dropping dead atop the bodies of their victims. The incursion is a disaster and there are no survivors, and everything is taken to the vats for recycling.

[Friction: 5] On the diplomatic level, pact made with the biomancer Genetor, Ellis, holds. Immediately upon approach of the Aotrs fleet, Biomancer ships start activating their inertialess drives and leaving the system. Interpreting this as a rout, numerous loyal ships follow them. Before a shot is fired the Azura fleet has lost a third of its force.

The remainder rallies admirably, as far as they go. The Generous Knight asserts the command she won earlier around Tanshin III and collects her diminished force behind the first layer of monitor craft, sacrificing them to patch the holes in her formation. On the sky and in the ground something changes in the Azura as their shock starts to alchemize into determination, a proud and unifying conviction to not allow the shame to define them.

The Generous Knight's battleplan seems to be a prioritization of the ground engagement. The core of her formation are floating orbital barracks spheres that she intends to deliver to various crisis spots on the ground, re-establishing control of the orbital defenses. This necessitates splitting her fleet into three groups to hit each crisis spot, with a fourth mobile reserve group drawing itself into the centre of a cluster of accelerator rings to respond quickly to commitments of force.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

Orange considered carefully. She'd been set to give herself a few seconds buffer before replying to anything to ensure informational integrity. White had been extremely focused on the possibility of getting reverse interrogated.

"We are unclear how you think of us," said Orange. "Or even if you think of us. We certainly have a great many hopes and fears, but we are setting them aside for the purposes of this conversation. After all, you raised us for the first ten years of our life, but for the next ten years we were raised by Mrs. Mangolia Everest."

Did he know? How could he have known? But they had an echo of Everest in the structure of their face, in Orange's posture. Not who he would have chosen as a mother. One he might have tolerated?

"Allow me to be less subtle, then, in stating the reason for this caution," said Orange. "The person who had your name on file shot and killed Red with a firearm when she discovered it. We also know that you built us with a kill switch, one that was previously used on us. We spent a decade with a woman who hated her daughters with every bone in her body, and she played them right up until her final breath. Accordingly we cannot put faith in sentimentality alone; the possibility exists that you shut us off and reset us to a more naive younger version, which might satisfy any paternal instincts along with any commitments to a conspiracy."

She pivoted, letting her dress swish around her. "I cannot emphasize enough that we are working from an extremely strong training dataset that has established time after time that when the choice comes between business and sentimentality, business always comes first. You potentially have strong business interests that require our removal. We are... giving you," there was a set to her jaw, a tell, a sign of the tension behind this moment. "A chance to prove sentimentality can outweigh the demands of business. This is our act of trust. The alternative to this was you never knowing that we were here."

An alternative none of them had voted for.

Blue!

Blue sits and stares at the board for a long time. Her eyes silently trace the lines of the table, replaying decisions one after the other. It's a subdued, unsmiling moment that raises the worry that she took it badly. Until...

"The charge on the Amaranthines was a mistake," she said.

And... it was. It was possibly the deciding moment of the game. What's remarkable, though, is that Blue said that even though it had gone as well as it possibly could have gone for her - she'd rolled hot, dealt way more damage than expected, and almost turned the entire flank off the back of that movement. In the heat of play it had seemed like a clever and decisive move but now she is correctly identifying it as the mistake that cost her the game. Not the only mistake she made, but that was the point when her chances went all the way to zero.

"It forced you to commit a lot of magical resources to stabilize that front," she said. "But you had those resources. It was a decisive blow but it wasn't decisive enough and you had the sustain while I didn't. I needed a way to concentrate even more force on a single point."

She stares again for another few moments.

"You played brilliantly, by the way," she added, eyes flicking up. "It was extremely hot."

White!

Yes, of course it takes self discipline to go to the gym. White is interested in perfecting her physical form. The reasons why White elected to come are entirely reasonable, above board, and have little to do with her obsession with workout videos - and that had little to do with the inherent eroticism of being commanded in a foreign language by physically active women.

She's gone hard into Korean street fashion for her workout outfit; matching tan baseball cap and one-shoulder singlet, with bright pink and blue edged circle cuts to show skin underneath, patterned like bubbles. Black shorts and bare legs. Silver amulet around her neck, blue ribbons through her hair, a pink wrap around her right upper arm and left knee. She's wearing makeup with the confidence of someone who has no sweat glands. The vibe is very much the engineered athleticism of workout videos. The glowing lines of her artificial seams are on far more display than they are normally, the geometric shapes that break up otherwise smooth skin.

The only thing missing is the muscle tone - she was built to be generically slender and aside from the clothes and the bright shock of white hair, she could be anyone. An empathic person might connect that with the striking clothing that ultimately pulls attention away from her body rather than emphasizing it. There's also uncertainty to her pose, she's looking around from machine to machine doing mental calculations and trying to figure everything out, giving her a slight deer in the headlights look. She smiles a lot, and with a lot of nerves, when Euna approaches but she lets 3V make the introductions.

Breathless Dead

While the rest of you recovered, Beljani studied the blade.

She took to that sword like a dog with a stick. She gathered one of everything she could find, stacked them up, and then cut them in half one by one. She went through a full set of combat forms for a style that was a forbidden secret of the Oratus Temple[1]. She'd throw it with spooky accuracy across the room (though this was due to her assassin training), hitting pinpoint targets she'd crudely painted herself, and then raced to go and get it and bring it back, tail wagging. Then one time she threw it, hit the target, and called it back to her hand without running to go and get it. It just appeared there in her hand. This wasn't due to the training.

She ran around in circles demanding that everyone tell her that they saw it, and how cool it was and spent the next forty five minutes having Beautiful throw the sword and try to call it back before racing out to get it for another attempt. Beautiful made the point that if it was a summoning thing the throwing part was unnecessary and she could just keep attempting to call the sword rather than throwing it again and again. This made Beljani yell at her, saying that she hadn't summoned any swords, so what made her think that she was an expert compared to her, Beljani? Beautiful said that Beljani had only summoned the sword once and was probably making her do it because she was afraid she wouldn't be able to replicate the feat. Beljani responded by mind controlling Beautiful and making her throw the sword again.

While this is going on, Bella, Redana and Mynx were left awkwardly propped against the wall in the recovery position. The bleeding has stopped. Your bodies have manufactured enough opiates to render the pain a distant prospect. Walking is out of the question for now. Beljani has kindly positioned you so that you can watch her amazing sword throws - and in fairness, she is amazing at it - and Beautiful's halfhearted sword throws, which at least let you watch Beljani's amazing running. You've never seen them so happy, though in Beautiful's case that might just be the mind control.

It's peaceful.

"Whoever gave us that sword..." said Mynx, finding her own, familiar voice by the second half of 'sword'. "... do you think they'll be okay without it?"

[1]: The Oratus Temple's swordfighting style was all about stabbing people while giving a speech, complimenting them, shaking their hand, dancing with them, sipping high tea, or otherwise escalating a social situation. Her practice forms seemed more like a dance rehearsal and tea party than a martial art - but then, that was the point.

Breathless Dead

This is power.

This moment was scripted before you were born to death. Gene looms clattered. Gods swapped cigarettes for cigars in smoke filled rooms. All your heart. All your love. All your royalty and poverty and pain. Nothing, for no one. So much pain, so much content, so many screams, so many moments, your entire lives. Nothing, for no one. You are holes in the galaxy, a spear thrown across the heavens, the only parts of your lives that matter are those that matter to the Gods. Only your imbalanced biology. Only your craving hearts. Only your ability to bring death as commanded. It does not matter what the parts of you that think things that do not matter believe. All that you valued, all that you wanted, that was just... empty space. The empty void of space. The emptiness that needed to be crossed to get you here, to this moment, to this matter where everything matters.

The only thing between these five dead and deadly girls is space. To no one is offered an Imperial Princess. In exchange for nothing.

The only thing that doesn't matter is space. The only thing that isn't matter is space. Nothing for no one stretches out beyond the entire galaxy. And so for a moment it might seem that all the galaxy rests inside the palm of no one's hand.

Space collapses. Space rushes in. Space crashes outwards.

For a moment, there is just a little space. Just a little distance. For a moment, each soul is apart from its crashing, weaponized biology. For a moment hearts don't hurt. For a moment claws don't kill. For a moment none of this matters. For a moment there is the void, gentle in the absence of all of the demands of power.

For a moment there is no space at all. How close do you need to be, Redana asked. The answer was always: this close. This was the closeness. This was the craving. This was the hunger so deep and intense that made you want to eat your kin like Cronus. But it was never hunger, it was never even craving, it might not even be love as Aphrodite understands it. It was not a hot-blooded drive that caused all of this; it was loneliness. The isolation of souls with too much space between them. The pain of being so close and so unable to touch. The pain of touching but not touching in the ways that mattered. Of saying nothing because you were trying to say everything. For a moment there was no nothing between you and everything, between you and each other.

Across a Rift that severs love forms a connection. A five pointed star formed of nothing. Just an absence of absence. Just an absence of matter. Nothing else matters. Nothing lasts forever.

...

But then, nothing lasts forever, doesn't it?

Five girls are embracing upon the quiet grass. The distant breeze of artificial air brushes the cheek of a cherry blossom that may never fall. Blood and pain are distant and dim. The only pain that ever mattered was nothing compared to this. No one is lonely. No one is scared. No one is far away. No one wishes things could be different. In place of nothing is an adjacency. The ability to see. The ability to hear. The ability to feel. Nothing at all, really. Five heartbeats, still making their way onwards despite everything. Nothing is required for those hearts to keep beating. To keep hearing each other.

All around is the arsenal of power. All the perfect spilled blood. Caged lightning glowing in its thunderbolts. Invisible and jagged motes. Torn and crumpled cigars. And there, the greatest weapon of all: nothing.

All the nothing of this moment. All the hopes of no one. All the jagged edges of the moment, all the wanting, all of the loneliness, all of the connection and lack of connection. Everything that was nothing manifested here into the form of a simple, straight, long sword, glittering upon the glass. It appears to be steel. It is not even especially sharp. But its edge is the void. It is no one's sword, no one's heart, given to people she'd never met, cutting through pain she'd never known, with no regrets she'd ever consider. Trusted to these five girls over everyone else.

*

Huntresses of Hybrasil

[Fight: 6]

Given how, frankly, unbelievably fucking cool she'd been up until this moment, Solarel had kind of lost track of the fact that step two of her plan was 'win a swordfight against God'.

She'd spent a long time hunting lesser prey; girls who wore their hearts on their sleeves and their secret techniques in their eyes and cyberwarfare suites that were, frankly, an embarrassment to their civilization. The divine realm on Roevg was a terrifying all-against-all eternal battle between endlessly predatory spirits, evolving into hyperspecialized niches on the fringes of available processing power. Overpowering comparatively submissive Hybrasilian and TC divinities, built to service their human and catgirl mistresses, had been so trivial for so long it had blunted the edge of her silver blade.

Her gold blade was having problems enough of its own having to deal with someone who didn't have body language and could sync together postures from swordsfighting manuals and a dozen different martial arts styles on a frame by frame basis. It wasn't emotionally invested in any of the techniques and so she couldn't see any of the tells she might usually look for; it wasn't weakened by parasitic barnacle geists attached to its fringes and dragging down its reaction speeds; it wasn't limited to humanoid motions or muscle transfers when it came to its goal of putting the pointy edge into things. This was hard! Most of swordsfighting was really just applied yoga, and when someone didn't need to worry about pulling any muscles, breaking their wrist, or even extending their arms for another couple of inches to get a hit in then all the weight of instinct was suddenly against her.

What was the angle? Where was the angle? She just couldn't see it yet.

The Red Furnace: First Contact

Boldness comes up with a plan.

It's clear that whatever life cycle assassins of her kind go through, this is the terminal stage. As she works her bright, adventurous personality begins to drop away, eliminated from her mind to make room for ever expanding reams of data. She absorbs information like a sponge; plate tectonics, fleet dispositions, technical specifications, unique capabilities. She ceases to sleep and barely eats, causing resultant deterioration in her physical form. Every resource is poured into her intellect. It's a profoundly unhealthy thing to witness. It's like watching her death and replacement with a piece of biological hardware. Everything goes into power, power, power, stealing the abilities of a god at the expense of everything. She introduced herself as an adept of the Ikarani Temple, and Icarus seems like the correct metaphor for how her mind's wings melt like wax.

She comes up with a plan. In form it is strangely comprehensible, reading more like an extremely high quality intelligence report, written in dry and unpoetic speech, rather than an act of brilliant madness. In content, it is a massive escalation, more than she previously implied was necessary. She has detailed key targets and timing windows. It has three key components:

- The issuing of a high level diplomatic delegation to the Biomancers, which will result in them withdrawing from the system along with 20% of the Furnace Knight's allies and vassals.
- A risky fleet engagement taking advantage of the opened window, combined with a devastation orbital bombardment on Tanshin II. This has the objective of both softening up ground forces for an assault and causing a mass death event as the planet's vast biosphere collapses.
- A covert ground assault on one of the strange necromantic temple complexes that the Azura are currently building. The idea is not to stop the process, the idea is to rapidly complete and then overload the circuit with a massive burst of necromantic energy that will pair with the wave of death coming in from the biosphere collapse.

Militarily, it is audacious but doable. Magically, it is profoundly uncertain. This entire operation hinges on the precision sabotage of an alien magical installation in a very specific time window. A huge amount of magical energy is to be thrown about as part of this operation; the sacrifice of a living planet plus whatever the ground assault team can pack. The side effects are listed as 'unpredictable', which seems code for 'apocalyptic'.

But the primary effect will be a massive necromantic shock delivered directly to the Furnace Knight before he is prepared for it. From a distance it looks like the ugliest, nastiest, worst, most overkill version of the lich spirit binding process imaginable - she's studied the Aotrs process and this seems to be a hideous, weaponized perversion of your technique. This is combined with an operation that she conducts along with her other assassins to murder the Furnace Knight mid-way through the transformation, preventing his spirit from coalescing. If everything goes to plan there aren't better odds than this.

This does, however, require almost total trust. The timing windows for the construction are too narrow to allow testing, and Boldness is barely coherent after designing the plan so she can't be effectively pushed for details or explanation. Various conventional strike options are still on the table but those involve sustained ground assaults and committed conventional warfare.

Breathless Dead

A billion invisible arrows cascade down. Razor shards of moonlight, every RNA strand a prayer to Artemis. They seek the breath. They seek the brain. They seek the heart.

They find only smoke.

From Mynx's breath pours an unsettling, unnatural corpse smoke; rolled and dried bone ignited. The cigars of Thelis Thist, the Eater of the Dead, who fought and lost against Mynx on the world of Salib. Bloody fragments of the assassins who had come before, and died at the hands of the Azura predator. In each is a fragment of the divine power that allows the assassins to reach such heights of power. She breathes it in.

What was it she was trained for?

She could not survive Bella. Even now. No physical shape could overcome the perfection of cat and girl. She was outnumbered, outplanned, out-thought. Her body could not evolve answers here, and so Demeter was useless to her. Aphrodite was useless to her. She blinked her eyes, her beautiful eyes, open and shining like moonlight, the scent of death on her lips.

She is a hunter. A hunter. And a hunter uses tools.

She looks like Mynx again. A Mynx as she might exist in her own dreams; beautiful and alien to herself. Feminine and fluid and armed with a Thunderbolt pistol she uses to blow Bella away with the snap precision of an Ikarani. A clinical motion, stolen muscle memories, already she's snapping together a reload. It's such an easy motion for her mind to make. When confronted, withdraw. Withdraw into being a different person. She abandoned Mynx to be the monster and now she can abandon the monster to be a hunter. She has passed by the Scylla of Aphrodite and the Charybdis of Demeter. Instincts deeper than both gods animate her now. She lives, she loves, but she does both on behalf of Artemis.

Her hands shiver as they form the terrifying claws of a Diodekoi, bone armour plating running up to her shoulders. Her hands steady as they grip the pistol, two shots remaining. Her eyes flash as they scan the darkness for the missing piece, for Beautiful. Her eyes focus with each movement of the bloody girls before her, tracking their deaths and calculating the power this hunt might extract from their bones.

She is transcendent. An avatar of a goddess. The final moment of perfection to which the Assassins of the Temple aspire. A new Eater of the Dead.