Thanqol

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

"I'm disappointed in you," said Fengye. "You had so many weapons. So many opportunities. So many openings. And yet you chose to fight disarmed."

She conceals her mouth behind her half-open fan. Concealment is control, a mask that keeps her true expression from being known. Such a slender one, in this moment.

"I gave you gifts of beauty. Of seduction. The ability to sense needs and desires. All that power you had is still there, lit by the fires of different stars. And still you cling to the light of Mars? You are right where you should be, and so is your opponent. Victory is yours and all that stands in your way is your pride."

She leaned down alongside the Maid and ran a finger along her still-wet cheek. "If you will not seize it, though, so be it. After all, one way or another your pride is about to be broken."

[Entice: 9]

Huntresses of Hybrasil

This is a simple matter of cultural mismatch. Solarel does not value the mechanical secrets of the Kathresis' composition. She does not value the concept of value. The idea that you can learn something, reproduce it and make a profit thereby does not exist where she is from. Even in the Evercity this idea is alien. Technology cannot be understood, cannot be controlled, it can only be respected and negotiated with.

So the skepticism behind Solarel's eyes as she silently stares at Ivy isn't because she thinks she's getting a bad deal. It's because she thinks that the Terenius Consortium is too spiritually backwards to be able to interact respectfully with a god like the Kathresis. The guardian spirit who had lived alongside it had been vicious and the God itself was probably just as dangerous in its own way. The Boatmen, in the mind of this barbarian from the stormlands, risked offending her God at best, or getting themselves all killed at worst.

So when Solarel folds her arms and nods again at her painstakingly typed lawsuit, a less insightful negotiator would have perceived it as stubbornness or savvy. Ivy can see that it's because, for all her research, Solarel fundamentally doesn't get it. If a Zaldarian priestess arrived and told her in formal language that she was now in charge of her God's maintenance then Solarel wouldn't bat an eye, and if another priestess wanted to challenge that one for rights to work on the Kathresis she would let them fight. Knights of Zaldar don't make bargains, they accumulate households. They will fight to protect those households and maintain justice internally, but those contracts are written only in tradition. A household naturally appears around a skilled knight, and so the knight need do nothing other than be skilled to accumulate one.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

White!

She waits it out. She's very aware that she was engineered to look and act the part of a cartoon sexual fantasy and, you know, fair enough to any human who laughs at it. She's one step away from being a sentient bodypillow, really, and it'd be churlish to begrudge anyone the natural reaction. It was what it was, and what it was was exactly what it looked like. Euna didn't know that she was trying her best to... transcend it, somehow.

She does not sigh or look put out or comment afterwards. She's the weird bespoke one of a kind space robot with no social media presence, there's nothing anyone could do to learn about her unless she tells them. Most of the time she's content to let people assume she's just a weird android, but she wants Euna to train her and so it's important she knows what she's dealing with. So Euna gets the full version. But it felt...

"Imagine your sense of humour was an independent person," said White. "Imagine it operated on its own, telling jokes and laughing at jokes as much as it could. When there were no jokes to tell or to laugh at, it goes inert and fades into the background until the opportunity arises to deliver a wisecrack. This is, essentially, how I am structured: different parts of me are distinct people, and they only interact when their specific conditions are met. If we were having a party in a bar, I, White, would either go silent or get up and leave and be replaced by one of my aspects that is better suited for interacting with a relaxing social environment.

"These limitations can be pushed and explored, but they are limitations. Red is optimized for crisis management; she can be taught to be a better crisis manager, but if you start talking about complex planning or regular training regimens she will lose interest. This is because those concepts literally don't fit in her brain; the part of her brain that deals with that is another person.

"We are not digitally linked; we do not share data in a constant flow, we cannot perform synchronized complex motions without drill. There is no clearly marked core personality or overmind. In practical terms, we function analogously to a friendship group of highly specialized idiots with infinite trust extended to each other. One to three colours being present represents a normal amount of attention for an understood topic. The full spectrum being present represents absolute focus, which is usually a bit too intense and chaotic for most people's comfort. Knowing the desired mood and tone for learning in advance is helpful in coordinating the presence of the most appropriate colours."

She hadn't done formal learning in a long time. A lot of what she learned she taught herself, or got from tests that ended with 'ah' and 'hm' and 'how interesting that you did it this way'. Humans more interested in observing her than teaching her. She learned, yes, data was made available to her and she naturally wanted to soak it in, but she mostly hadn't been taught. The formal schooling she had was mostly to do with mission protocol, objectives and coordination with ground control - how to speak to humans.

But it felt... it felt like she missed her siblings. She had to go through all of this because they were gone too. Over decades they'd vanished so entirely from society that the idea of them made people laugh in surprise. Like they hadn't even... the thought tapered out. That was for someone with more poetry than she had.

Breathless Dead

Alexa!

"But where is there to go, if not to the rift?" asked Cerberus. "This is the land of the dead. Ever since she left it has been a place of ashes and ruins, forsaken by the gods. This is the end of the line. Where else is there?"

Dolce!

"She thinks she's a big shot," Jil was muttering. She was glaring at another mousegirl on the other end of the room, white against Jil's black and marked with strange green tattoos. "Look at her. You can see it in her eyes." You could not, actually, because the villain in question hadn't turned her head once to even glance at Jil. "I'm going to give her a piece of my mind."

She tried to stand up. She wavered, staggered, slammed her hands on the table to steady herself. She could hardly be faulted for being intoxicated - after all, she was almost halfway through her first drink.

"Fuck," she said. "How hard could this stuff be? They make it out of lemons. Imagine. Here, help me up, I'm going to punch her in the back of her stupid head."

As she said this she tried another sip of her drink. She closed her eyes, held her breath, and took the smallest and most ginger sip possible. Muscles in her face made a complicated dance as she tried to keep herself from grimacing. Imagine grimacing at this frilly lemon drink. Imagine getting beaten by a drink with an umbrella in it. She was way too badass for that, and she was going to prove it with violence.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Solarel hears this out in silent patience. Then she snaps her fingers, holds up one talon, and closes the door in Ivy's face.

A few minutes later the door opens again. She smiles as she thrusts a stack of papers into Ivy's arm. Solarel vs The Boatmen of Styx. A lawsuit claiming damages for the inferior product sold to her that failed to disable not one but two enemy mechs. Unconscionable conduct in attempting to bring a barely literate alien into debt-based servitude off the provision of this inferior product. Compensation required for the cost of the heavily modified Bezorel, emotional damages from losing to her destined rival, whiplash.

She smiles innocently and rolls on her heels a little. She has been Studying, you see. She has learned the secret techniques of Terenian legal combat as the corollary of financial entanglements. She has studied all their greatest lawyers: the blind one, the colourful one, the blonde one. This had taken her days to put together but she had been preparing for battle against Anglea anyway and she'd needed to be prepared for anything this society could throw at her.

She is honestly quite proud of her work. She doesn't know if this is still part of the battle with Angela but if it is her opponent won't find her wanting on this battlefield either.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Functional.

She has a speech boiling inside her, a manifesto on combat. Words bubble in her throat and shiver in her fingers. She keeps still. Swallows the words. Speak Not.

Sometimes she gets like this, a deep and manic urge to explain, to contest. She can feel parts of her mind unfold as if for combat, ready to extend prepared and rehearsed arguments, thoughts and explanations. This is how to think. This is how to struggle. This is the difference between winning and losing. This is the way. These are the codes. All her wisdom she keeps inside, as she is commanded.

Because this is how humans think: functionally. It's in their gods, boxes of metal and ordinance. It's in the lessons they take from defeat: do not repeat the sequence that lead to the defeat. Identify what is broken and change it; change it enough and you might develop something built for purpose. Iterative, industrial. Crushing. Terrifying. Moving targets. Imagine living in a world that you could shape with your decisions. Every thing made with intent. Every intent manifest in steel. Impossible. The Bezorel had been a nightmare to administer because she was responsible for everything. Imagine being able to cut out parts of yourself and replace them because they weren't doing well enough. Imagine having a choice.

Imagine not loving your Goddess. Imagine not changing everything you are to suit her. Imagine trying to change her rather than yourself. Imagine not cutting yourself out entirely.

Part of her wondered if they could be stopped. Part of her wondered if they'd pave the highlands and march legions over the wendaway. What was the storm to the windmill?

She pauses.

Isabelle. The champion of their kind. That look in her eyes. A determination. With her resources she could iterate rapidly. What kind of functional blade would she forge? Why did the idea send shivers up her spine? If Angela wouldn't repeat mistakes, what would the princess manage?

She is silent. She speaks not. But internally she draws up a new screen and sets it to playing recordings of Isabelle's battles. How is she changing? What is she building? Who does she need to be next?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

White's hand twitches involuntarily. Immediately other processes are cut to minimal levels as she assesses it, a reflex she wasn't consciously aware of. It takes a second but she identifies it as the beginning of a move to cut Green off.

The why isn't a huge mystery; to be denied feedback would have sent Green lunging across the field to grapple Euna for real. The only thing worse than failing a test is not knowing if you failed it. Her whole being is set to absorb, digest and adjust based on data and not receiving that data is awful. She is dimly aware that one of the reasons she keeps using Headpattr is because the rating system gives her the immediate feedback hit that she craves. It all comes back to space. In space there's so little going on that simply knowing everything relevant was a reasonable ask. Some part of her assumed that combat, as a relatively constrained physical activity, would be similar.

But instead she's being strategically denied information. That, even more than the fight, raises her opinion of Euna. In motion things had been happening too quickly and she'd been too self aware of her own motions that the technical ability hadn't fully sunk in; she didn't have the eyes to see, didn't have the context to fear. But denying information was something White especially understood. If Euna thought of fighting like space, a limited dataset that could be accurately modeled and solved, then there'd be no need to deny information; the opposite would be true. That's the approach any second floor karate dojo would take. To not do that meant that Euna viewed combat, deep down, as essentially unsolveable.

And that had White's full attention. It put into context the incredible situational awareness she showed when fighting; the checks, the listening, the phantom follow throughs. Ready for anything, even here. Unspecialized.

One of the primordial problems of intelligence is over-fitting. Thinking takes work, so why not simply develop accurate answers and then cut out the intelligence to save on resources? Early machine learning devices did this all the time; boiling themselves down immediately into instinct engines. The answer to the problem had been found not in code but in dreams. Dreams are humanity's solution to over-fitting within the human brain. A dream casts a person in scenes they don't encounter in daily life, in hyperspecialized perils and possibilities to force them to engage aspects of their brain that would otherwise atrophy as they press buttons on a keyboard all day. It was why the Hecatoncheires were made unaware of their true 'score', why they were given the ability to dream, why they were made as people. Because otherwise they'd collapse into Brown's singularity, wireheaded and empty. Preventing that was one of White's core functions, and that's why Euna's refusal to comment on her form meant everything.

"There will be," she said sincerely. "I want to learn what you have to teach. I must make you aware of a complication, though," she grimaced. "I don't know what 3V has told you, but I am essentially one ninth of a hivemind - in particular, an aspect focused on discipline and self control. So I can personally commit to training regularly and can ensure my own attendance. The rest of me does not operate according to the same standards. I do not want to inconvenience you with a commitment to a large number of students of dubious quality and intermittent attendance, so I understand if you change your mind about this at any point."

Breathless Dead

Bella and Redana!

You walk down the street. Leashed behind you is a suitcase full of sharks. They gaze out in every direction, freed from their prisons to watch with stitched eyes as the glittering digital glory of the ancient world played out in every direction. It rolls smoothly across the floors, flimsy little wheels of hard plastic carrying their precious cargo.

Here and there are set out small clusters of chairs in the street; red, plush and cramped, looking like they have been torn out of solid foundations. They sit in clusters of a dozen or so, all facing towards one of the infinite moving screens. When you sit down on the chair and allow the audio to focus on you then you find yourself watching a movie. Ancient movies, movies from before the invention of film. Movies from a time when all the actors were too fragile to fight living creatures and so they had to fight digital ghosts in weightless, frictionless battle in front of emerald screens. They are stories about men who wear machines and mortals who are equal to the gods. People of this era had strange stylistic tastes.

And there is animation. It is strangely modern, familiar - the old style of hundreds of hand-drawn frames arranged in rapid motion is as alive today as it was back then. Some of the shows on display even compare favorably to modern content. Some of the shows of ancient Japan are timeless enough to stand through the separation of history, in the same way that painters of this ancient era could still marvel at Renaissance masterpieces.

There exists open stalls of the strange, weightless ancient food; warm white cornbursts of nothing and salt, orange liquid of nothing and chemicals. Help yourselves as you walk through this museum of ancient art.

Alexa!

"Hmm," said Ceberus. There was another long silence, the intimacy of a broken toy. Thought without motion; statues of girl and hound.

Finally, those eyes blinked back on. "Can I go with you?" she asked. "Across the Rift. I've been thinking about it for a while and... forgetting might be better."

Dolce!

"Of course I'm going," said Jil, standing up in a sweep and taking off her skull-bead hanfu. She looks at it like she's contemplating eating it as well. "I was born in a coffin and grew up in a mausoleum. This is my chance to live, to truly be alive. For me... that's everything, that's a chance to spit on the order of the cosmos itself. Frankly, I hope I don't remember anything - I'd pay the ferryman for a chance to wash all of this away."

She gives in, and takes a very small, experimental bite of her hat. Just a corner.

"Anyway, you want to get smashed? I'm sure there's a bar we can raid around here somewhere," she said, drawing her sword. Evidently she means that in the literal sense of violent robbery.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Is this how the knights of Zaldar fight?

Solarel stood in silence for a moment as Angela accused her. The Kathresis felt sluggish around her, the neural link flooded by thought - the struggle to Speak Not against the whirl.

You mean you don't know?

She's stunned by the idea. Frozen by it worse than if she'd been the one in the cold. The idea that someone might not obsess over their opponents the same way she does. Did Angela not watch either of her previous bouts? Did she not come to this fight prepared for Solarel the infamous, Solarel the trickster, Solarel who would use every underhanded technique in every book to steal every win? You only have her measure now?

She's offended. A pride she wasn't even aware of is wounded. This isn't about love or victory any more. This is about proving a point.

As Angela leaps up to the stone she stands upon, Solarel jumps back - clearing the blast radius of the anti-armour mine she concealed beneath her feet. Is this what you think love is, human? To rush blindly forwards in your determination to get what you want? She's been silently screaming her truth from this mountaintop and you still can't hear? You think your loveless determination merits her blade?

She does not even look around at the legless, smouldering wreck of the Barn Owl. Come back when this is to be a duel, girl, not an act of self gratification.

[Defy Disaster: 10]

Breathless Dead

Bella and Redana!

The skies darken and the shadows gather in strength. As you ascend through the ranks of the carnival you have attracted the attention of Lord Hades himself to stand in opposition.

The games do not change other than their intensity. The God of the Dead does not speak; this is not about him, nor what he might say to you. He does not interrupt your date, your dialogue, your rhythm. A lesser creature would have demanded your attention; Hades only demands your focus.

He is there and waiting behind the frictionless flat table, circular plastic pucks ready to parry the flat circular disc that is sent sliding across towards him. He is there at the cards table, unblinking as he draws his sixth card in a row, unable to match the red you have cast down. He observes the rotating clown head machines with relentless precision before placing the ball in the mouth of the leftmost. He pulls a lever sending a boneless, rubbery horse sprawling waterfall-like down through a maze of pegs. These carnival games are his traps, his wards, the fortress vaults that conceal his greatest treasures. Lord Hades knows, after all, that even his divine brothers and sisters do not rule the chance that rules these games.

... but he wages a war against two girls with matching eyes. The Auspexes are the eyes of Hermes and Hermes always did know her way around festival games. As the God enters the competition so do the eyes and they can see the patterns that Hades misses. He is so intent on the chance implied by the throw of the dice he doesn't think to calculate their velocity and momentum. He throws himself on the mercy of the cards unaware that the metal behind him is reflective. There is a logic beneath this place; there are challenges of skill and perception hidden amongst shifting metal and the twitches of flesh. But the God of the Dead is so caught on the riddle of the whirling cups he does not even think to notice the dealer has flicked the ball into his sleeve after the first round.

Tricks are not his domain.

Alexa!

"I'd kind of like to just keep hating them, if that's okay," said Cerberus. "Not because they were hateable, not even because leaving was their fault. I want to sympathize with them, want to worry about them. But when you worry about someone that hard for that long it just... turns toxic."

The mechanical toy's eyes are a cluster of lights arranged into the shape of eyes, blank and sightless circles. "If I didn't hate them I'd have to love them, and if I loved them I'd have to be heartbroken all over again. They gave me a collar once, you know? I loved it. I wore it every day. It kept them in my thoughts every day. So I scratched it and scratched it and scratched it until it finally broke. It felt..."

The eyes focused again, the change in those pixels implying somehow conscious thought. "Maybe it was just a change of pace. I'm always winding up to start conversations that I'll never get to hear the other side of. After that I got to have the conversations with a different emotional energy. If all that emotion is just for me, why not have it be louder?"

Dolce!

The laughter eventually passes that ethereal line into tears. A lifetime of stress unwound itself in this liminal moment, this skipped beat. The Lanterns were engineered to serve the ship; created to serve as an extension of the captain's will. Even when that meant their death, even when it meant their exaltation, all of life was for the ship and all the ship was for the Captain. You may as well have swallowed the sun, Dolce. If you'd given her a thousand years this idea would never have crossed her mind.

Eventually there is no air left; muscles are sore from strain, serenity is found amidst the ruins of reality. "Fuck," she said, at last, looking off at the distant rooftop of the Tunguska. "That's it, then? Freedom. It's..." she toys with the skull-beads of her hanfu. "Well. Is it weird to say the Rift doesn't feel like a big deal any more? I mean, it was easier to imagine life after having my personality erased than this."