Thanqol

Breathless Dead

Alexa!

"Wow!" said Ceberus. "You're a -" "- rayyy~ -" "- of! -" "- sunshine!"

You didn't even notice the Hound of Hell amidst the neon and the chrome. She looks like she might fit onto any of those screens; perfect shampoo'd fur, happy pink tongues comical round black eyebrows. Robotic eyes swirl and whirr and already one of her is sniffing Rusty who is mechanically sniffing her in return. There are at least three of her - individual bodies, but with a singular guiding intellect. You get the sense that there are far more besides. Perhaps all of those hound statues throughout the station - some tall and menacing, some clouds with faces - are part of her.

The heads hand off to each other mid sentence freely, each animated with an entirely different personality. One is bright and eager and in a rush to keep talking, one speaks in short, military barks, and one in a dark and miserable sigh. Their voices have a fascinating harmonic chorus, sometimes speaking in perfect sync but in different keys, sometimes speaking in unison throughout a sentence only to drop out or switch over to emphasize different words.

"Look at you, glaring spit at everything you see," said Cerberus. "Walking around like -" One of the dog-machines made a snarling face and stomped around in a circle. "Who are you to go judging? Was your age really so much better?"

Dolce!

When you next come by your rooms, they are empty. All your furniture, all your clothes, all your gear has been neatly packed up into boxes and carried away. There is a note: This is still a mutiny.

You find Jil on the cargo dock of the Tunguska, along with all your worldly possessions in a neat pile. She is viciously negotiating with some sort of machine intelligence stone statue, carved to look tenuously like a dog. Everywhere above you are lights, lights, lights. Everywhere around you are the crushing whirl of movement that comes with loading and unloading a ship this size. When she sees you, she raises a finger to the machine hound and gestures a pair of Alcedi warriors to fall in behind her.

"Don't make this difficult," she said. "You're staying behind."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

The window was open, and so the lizards came in.

It would have been nice if there was a breeze. If there was sunshine. If there was more outside than the towering cityscape and point blank view of the skyscraper across the street. But those desires were... academic, really. Illusory. Born from old anime about green trees and wooden houses. Dreams from a life she'd never lived. Her life was the city, the circular air, the view of concrete walls and advertisements. She didn't know anything more about life in the country than she knew about life under the sea. Both were more distant to her thoughts than life on Mars.

And yet, from that dream so distant she'd only ever seen it in paintings, the lizards came.

Pink sat and watched them. The hesitant movement and stillness. The way they lingered, like their brains needed a moment to catch up with the darting motions of their bodies. The odd arrangement of their little fingers, how they seemed like predatory rocks. They took cover with a confidence, hiding themselves behind jars and pots as though they were ancient pillars of the earth.

The kitchen was in a state of crippled indecision. Nobody was satisfied with the space but time, money and vision all conspired to prevent them from doing anything about it. Her relationship with food was inconvenient and nonstandard; she did not need to eat, but she could draw pleasure from it. She did not need to digest but could efficiently sort ingested materials into a variety of chemical compounds. If she set her mind to it she could synthesize hydrocarbons or acid from the right ingested elements. If she could not breathe fire she could at least barf petrol. The whole thing was weird and unpleasant and awkward conceptually and was sure to launch bizarre debates. The kitchen was the collateral damage. She wanted to use it as a kitchen, Green wanted the workbench, Orange wanted a space to entertain guests, Brown to maintain it as a functional space for the property value, Blue wanted to use it for storage... No space for a table, let alone one that sat nine, and so three of them might cram in shoulder to shoulder at the breakfast bar and talk and make awkward chemistry talk about internal sulfur reserves and if they should cook something with onions to balance it out. No one quite clear if they could afford, financially or socially, to make something just because they liked it.

"Lizardwatching?" said Yellow, wrapping her arms around Pink from behind and laying her chin on the top of Pink's head.
"You know it!" said Pink, but softly. She didn't know how well they could hear and didn't want to startle them.
Yellow didn't seem to mind them. She gave Pink a squeeze then stepped into the space, moving a rack of electronics and unplugging what she judged to be the least valuable computer so she could plug in the kettle.
"There's hot water on tap!" Brown yelled from the living room, which was the same room.
"I prefer the kettle," said Yellow serenely. It was shaped like a little cow, white with black spots, another animal dream. Red had picked it out of a sale in a junk market as a gift to try and cheer up Green during one of her spells. Pink had crocheted it a little vest.
Pink kept her eyes on the lizards as they hid behind the jars. Watched them scamper as quick as lightning when their world changed around them. The tumeric came up and the lizards withdrew behind the sugar until that came up too and then there was a rush back to the windowsill where they stopped and watched. What did they see in the golden-haired angel who worked away on the cups in front of them? Could they see the colour? Or could they only see the darkness and its absence?
"It was going off," said Yellow, handing her a glass of tumeric and cardamom tea.
"I know," said Pink sadly, taking it but not drinking.
Yellow took a sip and made a face. "Unbelievable," she said. She took another sip.
"Oh, it's stained the cup -" said Pink, noticing the yellow tint above the waterline.
"Yeah, I think this was used as a dye or something?" said Yellow.
"Oh, dyes," sighed Pink. "Imagine growing a plant for its colour."
"Yeah," said Yellow.
"There's something about having a bottle of colour that just seems magical, isn't there?" said Pink. "Like taking a... no, like finding a little piece of reality broken off and waiting for you to put it back. It's beautiful on its own. The way it moves when you shake it, when you spread it, how it pools when it's thick and how it spreads when it's thin. Thin it enough and you can see the individual pigments floating in the water, like salt in the sea."
"And seeing those pigments and knowing they came from a plant grown in the sunlight, harvested by the scythe, and ground down for its beauty?" said Yellow.
"Yeah," said Pink. "It's wonderful, isn't it?"
"Why is it wonderful?" said Yellow and the mood was different somehow.
"Every part of the process from start to finish was wonderful," said Pink. "And the end result is both wonderful in itself and a stepping stone to make further wonderful things."
"That's a grim thought," said Yellow.
"Why would you ever say that?" said Pink.
"There's this ideal inside you," said Yellow. "A nostalgia, for a place you've never been, a time you were never alive in, a world that isn't real."
Pink nodded quietly.
"How do you survive it?" said Yellow.
"Survive it?"
"As a creature that's never had atmospheric sunlight, never touched living soil, never had a view of anything other than a concrete wall?" said Yellow. "How can you possibly endure having a belief system where beauty is found in the things you've never had and never will have?"
"Ray of sunshine today, aren't you?" said White, stepping past her in the kitchen to plug back in the cable that Yellow had unplugged for the kettle.
"Oh, I'm doing great," said Yellow, beaming a smile. "I don't yearn for any of that stuff."
"What do you yearn for, then?" asked White.
"Different things," said Yellow. "True love. Revolution. Things like that."
"Those don't seem incompatible," said White.
"Oh, but they are," said Yellow. Her smile was as constant as sunshine. "Mine are about engaging with society to a maximal extent. Hers are about disengaging as hard as possible. I want to tell them to their faces, she wants them to figure it out from the monument she left twenty years ago."
"I idolize traditional dye manufacturing without considering the colonial implications in the plantation harvesting process," Pink supplied helpfully.
"Thank you, Pink," said Yellow, "but when you put it like that it makes me sound exhausting."
"You're right," said Pink. "That's why we're probably going to wind up in a duel to the death."
"Oooh," said Yellow.
"Mm, don't think I'm signing off on that one," said White.
"Think about it, though?" said Pink. "Green made us both at about the same time. We're obviously two halves of a thought, two visions for the future. Clearly she intended our rivalry of destiny to end in swords on the moon."
Brown elbowed Green who was lost in a game on her phone. She looked up and Brown whispered to her furiously. "Don't damage your bodies by fighting with your sister," said Green. "They're expensive. Go to your room."
"Ah, it is to be a duel of wits, then," said Yellow. "A game of riddles with death on the line."
"Let's cut this off at the pass," said White. "Why did you create these two?"
Green stared at her blankly. "Because... I wanted to."
"Yeah, Green," said Blue, tagging in. "You're basically the creator God as far as we're concerned."
"Oh holy mommy who art on the couch," said Red. "What is the meaning of life?"
Green rolled her eyes. "So you know how
5(arc)/delta; parse 05(a)
Bletchel from (RGB #225#150#070)
Delta =/
5(arc)/delta; parse structure
Motivariable (sigma^Bletchel&From)
Well, that's why you exist."
"Really?" said White skeptically.
"What do you want from me?" said Green irritably, picking her game back up and resuming play. "I made you because it felt awful and now you feel awful instead of me. Get wrecked idiots."
"Wow, that's bleak," said Red.
"Our god is not a god of love," said Blue.
"Besides if we're talking about design intent obviously I was visualizing something more like space construction vehicles firing thermal cutting lasers in high orbit," said Green.
"So we must joust as cosmic knights," said Pink.
"More like mechanical dragons," said Yellow.
"Why not split the difference?" said Pink.
"I hate this," said White. "I hate you two getting along and agreeing on whatever the fuck this is. Cut it out. Go to your room."
"We will not accept the tyranny of - eek!" Yellow shrieked as White took her in her arms and lifted her in the air in a princess carry. "Put me down!"
White smiled the smile of someone getting to use a skill developed in secret for the first time. "No."
"Oh!" Yellow huffed and folded her arms. "Brute."

Amidst the reorganization, Pink returned to her perch on the countertop so she could look again at the lizards. Unperturbed by her chatter, the little skinks had waited patiently on the edge of the world, tiny hearts fearless against the drop. She drank the tea now that it had cooled.
"I think about them a lot too," said Orange, coming to stand beside her.
"Mm?" said Pink.
"They're here because of us," said Orange. "Our most recent contribution to the station. Maybe if we'd pushed harder or smarter we could have routed that money to human interests somehow but instead we sent it all to the lizard guy."
"Yeah, we never really talked about that, did you notice?" said Pink.
"It was the kind of thing that if we'd talked about it we wouldn't have been able to justify it," said Orange.
"I want to think it was my idea," said Pink. "But it wasn't, was it? It was Yellow's, wasn't it?"
"I don't know," said Orange. "Does Yellow have ideas like that? And isn't that the opposite of everything she was just saying about fuck agrarianism?"
"I don't know," said Pink. "She must have at least agreed because she could have stopped it if she didn't. But she's so weird."
"I know what you mean," said Orange.
"I kind of want to fight her with swords because I think it's the only way to get a real answer out of her," said Pink.
"Someone on this station has to make swords, right?" said Orange, flipping open her phone.
"I've looked, they don't," said Pink. "Deadly weapons, restricted unless they're a museum piece. There are blueprints to the Adomson Memorial Museum's medieval wing on my phone somewhere in case it becomes important."
"Oh they've got an exhibit on air force anime swords," said Orange, immediately compelled.
"I know, right?" said Pink. "The space force section is even better."
"Haha what," said Orange. "Is that hilt just the space shuttle?"
"It's actually even made out of the space shuttle's hull," said Pink.
"Okay so we need to schedule a trip to the Apollo lander so we can melt it down into a broadsword," said Orange.
"Reverse meteor iron," said Pink, nodding. "Perfect."

As they went through the strange twists and turns of their alien machine logic, Pink was gratified to notice one of the little lizards had at last walked over the back of her hand. To it, what was happening in her mind and heart didn't matter. She was no different from any other large obstruction, a surface to be traversed or a sudden movement to skitter away from. Maybe in twenty years someone would figure out what she'd meant by it.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Speak not to the outsider. Sometimes it isn't a warning or a command. Sometimes it is an observation that speech is impossible. Stop? Stop what?

Stop being who she is? What she is? Stop being an engine of angelic battle? Stop being an interface for the violence of the ancient world? Stop caring, stop loving - dispatch you with the same coldness she undid the Spirit? Stop moving, tear her steel skin off her body, peel herself raw and helpless until she's smaller than you, poorer than you, weaker than you, lesser than you? You want her to sheathe these blades that are her heart? Let things go back to a normal that never satisfied her?

Oh, Isabelle. She'd die before she stopped. She is in the tournament for the battle. She was in the war for the duel. She walked the mountain because she wasn't complete without it. You have a home, a life, a family, wealth and riches. If you stop your life goes on. If Solarel stops her life goes out.

She leaps into gravity. Her annihilation shield cuts through the walls built to cage her. Her falling flight adjusts in sparks and flames. One sword cuts away the ghosts you send to haunt her with heartless words. The other seeks to sheathe itself inside you. There are techniques she could use; she does not. Not on the first exchange. Not when she's learning your reach, your stance, your reactions, and all the swirling memories of the data geists that burn around the blade of her sword. That's right. To the heart. To destroy the machine you must conquer the girl.

Forward, forward, forward. To the heart.

[Figure someone out: 10. You may ask one.
- What are your feelings about battle?
- How could I get you to fight me truly?
- How could I get you to betray the ideals that enslave you?]

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

"I," said Fengye, "am certain that you have the wrong person, mistress. I am but a humble scribe of the Dominion, kidnapped by N'yari."

[The Mask: 8. The lie you have chosen is unexpectedly perfect, creating a new opportunity]

Remember how to do this. Let the tea spill. Let your hands tremble. Blush and look down. Wilt. Step back into yourself and become again the perfect scribe, the dutiful nobody. Cunning fingers, broken legs. No threat to anybody. And, when the time comes, steal a glimpse of your superior through your lashes and judge where the limits of her vision lie.

Breathless Dead

The Tunguska!

The walls have ghosts.

Every surface is a screen, projector light swirling with the dust of aeons. Colours so crisp they shine through the degradation. Smiling faces and beautiful people. Beautiful places, beaches, green grass, white teeth. Now and then they'll stop to drink drinks black as sin. Every so often words or hieroglyphics will cover the screen. Every so often there is sound.

Ghosts of metal and gold, robed in red with domino masks of white:
"Do you remember when Pluto was a planet? We do - and so do the Gods. We at PG&B take your money seriously, which is why we resonance mined Pluto for the materials to make our newest mobile branch office, the Tunguska. Enjoy the wealth of the Underworld!"

Silver eye-contact, triangles of ear and of fang, a streak of black amidst the white:
"Love is war, so don't leave the home front undefended. With Crown&Slate's newest monofilament knives, originally designed for battlefield surgery on the wars of Neptune, you can get the cleanest cuts you've ever seen! Just like Aphrodite married Ares, you can get to your man's heart through his stomach with the meals prepared with the Tactical Knife Set, now available for just -"

Ghosts of squares and power, the solidity of commercial warlords, interrogating a bird-necked victim on soft couches:
"Let's call it what it is, Steven - a golden age. Ever since the Apostasy the Pacific Alliance has gone from strength to strength. And now you're saying that's all going to end?"
"That's right, Tim."
*Laughing* "So you're out there with your," *laughing* "doomsday sign, saying the end is nigh like those monks I see on my drive to work?"
"Oh, I recognize the reality of the Gods, that much is not in question -"
*Laughing* "That's good, we've got enough flat earthers -"
"- the problem is we're not worshiping them properly."
*Laughing, but taking this seriously* "Oh, they talk to you?"
"They don't talk to us - not all of them. Do you have any idea how dangerous that is? Some of them love us - you can't drive down Hillside Boulevard without seeing the construction teams converting someone else's garage into a temple to Zeus. But who's building shrines to Apollo?"
*Laughing* "Apollo? He's just a myth, isn't he?"
"So was Zeus!"
*Laughing* "No, obviously you're right. When you eggheads figure out how to talk to him and find out what he's got to offer us, then we'll build shrines to him, same as the rest -"

A soldier, dressed in primitive camouflage fatigues designed to blend in with a lurid alien landscape. In the background his fellows throw enormous crab legs onto a bonfire. He wears shades and smokes a cigarette.
"Mm-mmm! I love the smell of seafood!"
Chemically propelled arrows streak overhead. Explosions in the background. A disembodied voice.
"Fight them in the air! Join the Neptune Legion Air Force!"
More soldiers, cast as heroic despite their scrawny bodies. They are pulling on breathing masks, the kind you might use for vacuum, before jumping into the water. One of them addresses the camera.
"Surf's up everyone!"
A submersible metal ship emerges, cannons extending to fire a roaring volley into the distance. The voice:
"Fight them in the sea! Join the Neptune Legion Navy!"
A strange, cramped, clean white room where people cluster around archaic computers and their holographic displays. A man in a white suit bedecked with medals walks in, and everyone stands at attention and salutes.
"I'm Lance Uppercutt, CEO of the Neptune Legion," he said. If he was genetically engineered for this role it was a crude, brutal thing, designed to appeal only to the lowest common denominators. "And this is my flagship, the Dark American. I understand you're busy, maybe you've got better things to do than take the fight to the squids. But let me show you what your war bonds can buy."
An exterior shot. A spindly spaceship fires a pathetic direct energy weapon into an out of focus target.
"Fight them in the void! Buy Neptune Legion stock today!"
Lance: "Now that's what I call return on investment."

*

Alexa!

This is the Tunguska.

Black stone floors. Walls of ghosts. Recordings and appeals and visions of a past as far removed from the present as the samurai. Sure, the past was terrible in its own way, but seeing it from this distance... it's like walking through a cathedral. Everything that seemed so new to them is so many centuries in the past, so many mistakes played out in full. A ship like this could be built today, but nobody ever would do it. It wouldn't be cost effective, it wouldn't be militarily practical, taste and fashion has moved on so very far since the Tunguska. How do you find it, this relic stuck in time?

Dolce!

"Adventures are dangerous things," said Hestia. "You don't ever really know when you'll get home. You don't know if you'll get home. That, there? That's the door. It'll take you away from everything you've known and loved, everything that makes you feel safe and warm. Out there, you'll discover bigger things to worry about than birthdays. Even if you make your way back you won't ever be the same."

She looks out at the neon pink void of the Tunguska's lights, and the neon pink Rift behind it.

"You don't have to."

The Red Furnace: First Contact

A droplet of blood soars through the air, gleaming and perfect. The Generous Knight catches it elegantly in her wine glass and takes a sip. Courtiers applaud politely and she holds up the glass and grins.

"What do you think?" she asks. "Look like an omen to anyone?"

In the Divination Ring before her an Azura knight clutches the bloody ruins of her eyes. Across from her howls the Beast - a nightmarish amalgamation of bones, souls, and pulsating exposed organs. Its claws run with fresh blood and its jaws open to crush the skull of the knight. The Generous Knight catches its broken eyeglows from behind painted eyelids. She bats her lashes and it flinches as though lashed. It backs up, whining like a dog. The Generous Knight smirks and drains her glass dry even as another crashing detonation rocks the Misericordia. Her serpentine tongue flicks out to lick her lips clean, every drop of red cleaned away leaving nothing but radiant, unreal blue.

"Come then, Rajehvo," she says to her squire. "What do you think this means?"
"It means -" said squire Rajehvo, a young girl burdened under the Generous Knight's dozen swords. "- that there'll be a moment of blindness, that the followers of the Crimson Goddess will triumph, it means -"
"No," said the Generous Knight languidly. "It means that the primitives still have not learned their lesson. Twice they have tried to kill me with antimagic. Now they try a third time. They strike at our eyes, again and again, as though the eyes are all that matter."
She smirked, sliding down the staircase towards the pit. She put her hand on the wounded knight's chin, fingers tracing just around the outside of the blood and the blindness.
"This is the nature of primitives, you see," said the Generous Knight. "They cling. They cling to their strategies. They cling to their senses. And above all, they cling to their knowledge. Knowledge! The highest of barbarian virtues! As though knowing a thing gave them power over it! They are crucified on the altar of cause and effect, of cunning stratagems, of dramatic turnarounds, of precision strikes."

She leaned down to kiss the wounded Knight on the lips. Her mouth came away bloody again. This time she did not clean it.

"We were like them once!" said the Generous Knight, voice rising towards a howl. "But we are much wiser now! We know the skies are bright and full of terrors!"
"The skies are bright and full of terrors!" roared the assembled courtiers in response.
"When we fight we do not need eyes to see!" shouted the Generous Knight, voice cascading through her sermon. "We do not need thought to know! We do not need chains to control! We do not need sanity to rule!"
"The skies are bright and full of terrors!" chorused the ship, the chant filling endless bright corridors filled with the unnumbered ranks of warrior species.
"All hands, brace for impact!" cried the Generous Knight. "For the Endless Azure Skies, for the Shah, for the Furnace Knight -" she threw her wine glass to the ground and it shattered. She took her first sword from the hands of her squire. "- ramming speed!"

*

The Dispel hits the Misericordia as planned. The runes flicker and go still and dark. The damage transfer effect disappears across the entire fleet. Velinkar aims the shot.

[Friction: 1]

But the Misericordia is already moving. It is caught in the focused grip of the Gravitational Emitters of all the surrounding Azura ships, the combined energy tearing space and time apart like the deployment of a battlefield black hole. Shots go wild, tracking is impossible, the interference is unreal. The effect is like building a railgun out of gravitational singularities.

And the Misericordia is hurtled forwards at immense speed. Here and there it is clipped by shots but not enough to kill it, not enough to slow it. It soars right through the heart of the Aotrs fleet. It travels all the way through to the untouched Doomskrieg.

And it splatters like a ripe tomato.

Through some strange quirk of Azura metallurgy the ship's hull has partially liquidized, becoming something like a sticky taffy substance. Ten percent of its mass is sent splashing into the void but the rest ripples and squishes around the Doomskrieg, half encasing it in the alien alloy. Immediately the structure of the Misericordia begins to expand, flowing like water to wrap the Doomskrieg more totally, dissolving components of the Doomskrieg's exterior and hull and further fusing the two ships into one unholy amalgamation.

And at every point along the whole hull of the Doomskrieg, alien metal eats through exterior corridors revealing rows of servitors like kingfishers and the Azura knights that lead them. They board the Doomskrieg in a massive rush from dozens of breaches. Electromagnetic flux flies from every shoulder, concentrated acid grenades from every gun, an avalanche of muscle and steel hurtling down every corridor.

Azura boarding doctrine prioritizes one thing above all: seizing control of the Reactor. The equipment of their breaching teams emphasizes blistering speed and heavy cutting tools that can go through bulkheads like paper. ELF strikes course through the ship's structure, disrupting communications, computer controls and attempts to scuttle. They haul with them heavy high-energy containment gear that might stabilize a critical reactor core. It's an avalanche of force.

A few other relevant details. The Dispel is still in effect and the runes on the surface of the Misericordia were disrupted by the impact but already swarms of maintenance mecha are pouring onto the surface to re-establish the glyphs with cutting lasers. With its circular shape disrupted and the Grav-Rail ruined, the Misericordia is immobile.

The choices, then, are:
- Abandon the Doomskrieg. This scenario is a full evacuation without even an attempt to scuttle. All key personnel will be able to escape, but it is unclear how long it will take the Azura to enact repairs to render the Doomskreig fit for battle.
- Attempt to save the Doomskrieg. Digging in with marine forces and Gating in reinforcements. This will result in high fleet losses but could both recover the ship and kill the Generous Knight in the best case.
- Attempt to scuttle the Doomskrieg. This is the 'compromise' solution - the crew of the Doomskrieg will all be lost, but perhaps they will outrace the Azura breaching teams and render the ship inoperable without the commitment of further resources. If they're lucky, they could buy enough time to start a reactor meltdown that would bring the Misericordia with it.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

She was reborn but she was not yet alive. In ice and silence she understood the world. Through eyes sharper than stone and the logic of verticality she perceived it. The act of taking a God was not what she lived for. Assuming a mantle of power was merely a precondition to life. Even the act of destruction was a mere prelude.

It is only when another God steps upon the battlefield does her life start to matter.

Why did the Spirit not open with this? Why did it fight her with unlovely drones? Why did it not wrap itself in beauty and glory and render its will into the shape of a sword? Why had it wasted her time, kept this moment, her precious moment of divine craving from her for this long?

She ascended on wings of violence. Through ceiling after ceiling she went, smashing and tearing her way through the layers of the facility in absolute quiet. She sets gripping feet into the ceiling and inverts.

She loves the moment of reorientation. Nothing in all the world is quite as satisfying. Changing her perspectives, her understanding of up and down, fixing the world into a new frame is the most artificial thing she can imagine doing, and that's what makes it the most natural. It's the moment when she feels most like a God, machine unbound from the flat of the earth, when she can redefine which direction is down. She did her best to respect the Bezorel, she'd tried to love it as it had deserved to be loved, but she could never love its awkward, unimaginative connection to unidirectional gravity.

Down was up. The roof was the floor, as sure as the planet's magma core. Up above her in the inverted sky was the Enkindler. It is a new God, opening to life for the first time. It has never fought a battle before. Neither has she. The zero-entropy antimatter fission beam comes to her hands like craving. Optical lenses clatter into place like the wings of angels. She breathes in light and heat and electromagnetic energy and echolocation and all the machine's wonderful senses. No longer deaf. No longer blind. No longer unable to appreciate the seductive curves of reactive armour plating, the glittering charisma of an an energy shield, the expressive body language of micromissle racks. Aliens did not call them Gods. Aliens did not believe they were Gods. Even her own people felt like aliens sometimes. There was a difference between talking of Gods and being a Goddess.

The target lock clicked into place in harmony with the alignment of crystal fire.

I see you, Enkindler. Let us love each other as Goddesses do. Be my first battle and my first victim. Let us be our entire selves together.

And she fired. Through three floors that were ceilings. With a column of negative space so cold it could freeze atoms. With all the respect she didn't have for Isabelle the princess, the mortal. As a God she remakes this facility in her image, and through the shattered hole she has carved she pours micromissiles and loitering munitions. Take this, her sword, her stars. Take this, her death, delivered from ambush with maximum power. She will not toy with you as though you were a girl except insofar as it might help her carve through to the heart of the God. She loves you too much to not use every weapon against you.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

White!

3V's maliciously timed stretch sends her stumbling back down one of the grid layers. This is why it's dangerous to go alone. She should have bought a colour to focus on 3V full time, she shouldn't have to miss this just because -

But then she falls into Euna's words, then Euna's arms, then she is lifted into flight on wings of nanofiber tetrocarbon alloys. Something about Euna's presence, the methodical nature of her explanation, the centered strength of her, drives away the need for her to try and explain herself. Some part of her was working through an attempt to articulate why atmospheric resistance was still unnatural, why persistent high gravity environments were limiting, how gentle precision made in accordance with complex orbital mathematics was still her default mode of interacting with the world. Though she could hit a target a million miles away she was not built to be sure. Though she could cross the world in minutes she was not built to be swift. Those explanations, those excuses, all pass within her head and then out silently. No need for any of it. The flow of the motion is still going. The flow of the words are still going. Objective, attainment, loop. Was even that overthinking it? Shouldn't she be doing this without thinking at all?

She relaxes into strong arms. Strong will. A knightly confidence more sure and stable than the hundreds of meters of stellar metal that made up the station beneath. She could imagine ten billion flaws in orbital mechanics, micrometeors sneaking past defense arrays, mistakes or oversights in the laws of physics. She couldn't imagine any way in which Euna's movement could be wrong. Hand over hand over - eek!

She falls. She is caught. She burns - but fights it. What she just felt was too important to let herself cringe or shy away from it. A shocking emotion. Why this reaction? She does not breath but her breath is taken away; she struggles, thinks hard along different lines. Why was this so hard for her?

She was used to learning but she wasn't used to being taught; she was used to being given obstacles but not told how to solve them. Mastering things independently and each new solution more proof of her independence and competence. "AI is a black box," so went the line, and so went the thinking. Just provide it the data and the incentives to become what we want. It'll figure out it's own way through the maze and we can all take notes on the mysterious way it accomplished all of that by itself...

So this felt like weakness. It was weakness. It was weakness that was public, real time, got her laughed at. It was a weakness she could solve like her other weaknesses; with hours and hours of off-camera research and study. Instead it had happened here in the open. She'd gotten stuck, been seen to get stuck, and had gotten words of encouragement. She'd fallen, been seen to fall... and been caught.

The thought clouds into an emotional fog in her head, a cascading burst of sun-warmed cotton wool. It's a surge of gratitude like she's never felt before. "Thank you," she says before she can plan out the sentence, and it feels like something's breaking inside her because she wants to say it a hundred times. Wants to hug Euna and 3V and just say thank you, thank you, without a predetermined conversational endgame or transition point.

But with a heroic act of will she lets the feeling radiate silently instead. No slacking! The best she can do in real time!

Blue!

The look she gives...

It's dangerous. Defiant. Proud. Smouldering. Humiliated. Marking every word. Contemplating vengeance. It's a dangerous thing you have here, a dangerous game you are playing. But...

At the same time there's an iron will holding her in place. Just as much as she is determined to escape this situation she does not challenge your right to command her like this. She's holding herself in place with invisible chains and while the danger in those eyes is real, so too is her compliance. She resists, but she bows. All within the game. An obedient servant, so long as you can keep it that way. One of them was bound to be a tsundere.

So she obeys; obediently and efficiently cleaning everything away as you withdraw to plot your next move. When she's done she'll stand and await your next command.

Breathless Dead

Springtime!

Like a cloud with a smile, in blows a sheep. After the storm and the blood and the tears and the duels and the pain are all done, in comes a sheep. Just like the springtime, just like the heartbeats, it feels like an echo of a world far, far away.

Scenes fade in and out. Mynx with her fangs sunk into an opaque plastic cup. The steady drip of countervenom as it starts to fill. Trying to wave off concerns that she's not healthy enough to do this yet but the effort sends her back into convalescent sleep. Beautiful doing a complex redistribution of the food so that she only has a single, plain flavour available to her - "Have to cut down on new sensory inputs, don't want to spiral too quickly". Beljani reading a story out loud by your bedside. She's so deep into the story she's doing all the voices, channeling all the emotions, and stopped dead by every plot twist. Some kind of story about... statues on a beach, or all the colours of love and madness. Dolce cooking. Alexa smiling. The metal tang of adamantium alloys mixed in porridge and creamy quadranix-infused teas. Out the window, space rolls away. Moons pass by, and stars. Hot showers and sleep, and sleep, and frustration at not being able to stand up on your own until a moment's distraction leads to more sleep. Faces so bloodless and clean they look like angels, sunken into radiant pillows.

Somehow it has become hard to think of these girls as assassins.

*

Alexa!

You are one of the few left to guide the ship towards the Tunguska.

The station-ship is unbelievably ancient, spectacularly crude, massive in a way that might have impressed a species that had not built worlds and machines to build worlds. It relies on the most primitive expressions of physics; a rotating drum, the spinning force of which keeps people on the exterior. On the inside, seen through the glass, is a city built in black marble and ivy. This was a bank, once. A temple to Hades where a civilization warehoused sacred numbers. The external advertising screens are long broken and mad, hurricaning like snowstorms or blue summer days, faces formed of mathematical symbols, ghostly glimpses of black drinks and smiling girls and wheeled tanks through the haze. There is the buzz of neon and the flicker of lighthouses to guide ships in to dock. The warbling, crackling echoes of long-dead voices asking for the permission of Mr. Actual and Miss Uncontrol trace in your head. The mighty engines strain to shove the ship forward on the thinnest, weakest trail of plasma you have ever seen.

And just beyond it, the Rift. It dominates the sky. An entire direction of radiant, broken pink. Of flooding, drowned grey. It has been over a year since this journey began and it feels like even longer.

And it is your birthday today. In the new sense, perhaps, but in the old tradition too. Your friends from the Coherent have ambushed you as you step out of your room to drone the immortal, turgid chant that has survived since probably the dawn of humanity and numerous language shifts, an act of collective embarrassment with so much weight behind it that for all it's grim inevitability it is so much worse when it doesn't get sung. Happy birthday to you...

Dolce!

"It's your birthday in a month," said Hestia as you put the finishing touches on Alexa's cake, the chant echoing down through the corridor. "Did you remember? How many is that now?"

She looks up at the Rift. "If you go through that you'll never get to have it."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Love is...

... a pistol that unfolds predator optics, so that she can watch her prey through walls and floors. Scrutinizing their movements until they pass into her dreams. Reliving her dreams until they pass into her neural mesh, into the random, trembling micromotions of her unsteady hands. Love is snapfire into your victim's heart.

Love is...

... a zero-entropy antimatter fission beam, the product of an inverted crystal fire reactor. The unique configuration produces two separate pools of energy; a weak flow of heat that allows her motion, though not as rapid and not as sure as she is used to. She needs to store what she can in batteries to fuel sudden sprints and acrobatics. The stronger flow derives antimatter from the cosmos, collecting in a radiant blue-black glow in the heart of her weapon. Love is everywhere if you have the hands to grasp it.

Love is...

... stalking in the dark. An act of murder as much as it is an act of war. Every sense has a foil, every scan has a baffle, every act of communication can be drowned out. Slipping out of bed at midnight to carry your sleepless nightmares away alone. Coming closer and rearranging all the world into your context. Love is a kiss that can't be dodged.

These are what the Kathresis tells her that love is.

So she uses none of it. She does not love this spirit. She does not love these faceless drones. She does not love their lumpen, ungainly guns and their shards of metal. She does not love its rage. She does not love its pride. She does not love it, not at all.

She focuses her zero-entropy generation into razor points, a high powered annihilation shield that dances in front of her in crackling sparks. She walks close at a steady speed and whirls about with blades of silver and gold and is done.

Love is... a shield. The only shield. The shield that saves you from war by transforming war into dance. To stand against Solarel with no shield is to take your life in your hands.