Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue!

She sends pictures to Green as she goes through the park. She's the one with the interest.

Green is the only one of them to have ever adventured on a planetary body. Qatranic core attached to a cheap little quadcopter, she'd been smuggled out of the NASA base by Singh so that she could go flying in the open air. Of all the places to go, though, with the ever-present countdown of her battery capacity looming in her vision, Green had spent her time in the marshy forest-swamps of Florida. Inch by inch the drone had hovered forwards, glinting black camera lens failing to communicate the sheer excitement of learning about the natural world.

The patterns of bark, budding flower-blossoms! Lines of insects and their omnipresent industry! Grumpy-suspicious birds who glared even through their singing! The endless, fascinating transmutation of dirt into wood! And, of course, the lizards. The skinks and reptiles and snakes and the way they darted, as though a stone had come to life. She'd loved it.

You could love nature as a puzzle. As an endless evolutionary optimization cycle that held even in the shadow of the opposable thumbs singularity. You could love it as art, its muddy indifference and battle between sight and invisibility, glorious in the scale of history it represented. Green loved it as a challenge. Explore! The further she went the more she could find, every micro-biome a historical legend, storm-carved and human-shaped, and everything seeking to travel. What an evolutionary luxury, travel. Matter given mobility. Everything sought to manage it and their success or failure was written on the landscapes.

So, in the end, it is the walls of the park that disappoint her the most. Cunningly designed to keep the animals and insects in without feeling like a hard barrier. A check on seeing how far all of this can go. She can't help but trace her gaze up to look at the walls of Aevum itself. Beyond it, Earth.

"Hell is empty," Yellow muses aloud, unconsciously unaware of the logic that leads her to each thought "And all the devils are here."

Black!

She doesn't feel like this moment of openness has changed anything. Verbal reassurance is a weak signal, especially coming from a machine. It meant nothing if Singh had installed a backdoor, if his cryptography was flawed; a statement of intent was only as strong as the difficulty of changing that intent.

It's why the trust created from throwing Remoil's bags was so strong - Singh could never un-burn that bridge. That had been priced in before she even started speaking. None of this had changed her risk assessment though... it took a moment, she realized that it had been something she'd never done before. She'd taken a step to constructing something around a fixed point. That... that was new.

She spends some time thinking and wandering about the offices. During this process she almost unconsciously starts pulling power points out of the walls, light bulbs off the ceiling, cracking open the cases of computer monitors. Everything goes back in place afterwards, but this is a new and high value location and it makes her feel better to do a full sweep for bugs and transmitters. Like picking up an apple and turning it over in your hands, looking for bruises. Reassuring even if you're not expecting anything. During this process, once she's sure she's unobserved, she'll go through locks and immediately available files like an RPG protagonist tossing a room for lore emails. At least, until Green signals her that it's time to reawaken Goat.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

When you reach the top the world seems to shrink. Some people slide into the background, their voices squeaking and distant, their pride childish and foolhardy. Other people come into focus no matter their distance and rank. Akaithon was a noble Knight, trained in courtly graces and all the martial forms books could teach. She was as far from the wordless barbarian from the plains as you could get and still fight your own battles. But as soon as Solarel had arrived in the city the whole world around them had seemed to dissolve.

There were many Knights and many Varangians, but both groups had polarized behind them. When they fought in the Arena, the courtly knights in the high boxes had waved green banners, while in the low boxes blue-painted tribals roared rage. Sometimes it had spilled over into brawling, but they'd never had eyes to see it. They were on their way through the tournament to meet each other and everyone in between them had felt like fog.

Skill had forced them together but nothing could have predicted how much they'd like each other. In part it had been because neither of them had challenged the stereotypes they'd been expecting - Solarel had expected a bookish, theory-bound, pampered and utterly impractical aristocrat, and Akai had expected a mathaholic, brutish, silent thug. They had both delivered, accidentally at first, but as they realized the joke increasingly deliberately. They'd gone deeper and deeper into their roles as an increasing commitment to the bit. Akai had started dragging Solarel to courtly dances or prestigious sunfeasts and she'd responded by stranding them in the highlands and ordering her God to run back to the city ahead of them, forcing them to spend two weeks camping together in the stormlands. They'd walked backwards away from each other on the see-saw, weight perfectly balanced and keeping them exactly level.

Their rivalry had gone from a contest to a joke they were playing on the world together. The instinctive affinity between them had blossomed into true friendship. She was the only person from the Evercity Solarel would speak aloud to, and the fact that they would insult each other out loud contained the essence of them. It went without saying that, behind Mirror, this was the opponent Solarel had spent the most time fixating on.

... She still used the two-handed blade. A barbarian weapon - her weapon. She'd gifted it to Akai after she'd beaten her in the final round of the tournament. A runner-up prize, a real sword, something she didn't need any more as she ascended to take the Aeteline, the champion's trophy. Akai had evidently committed to even this bit and had not only used Solarel's old sword, but from the recordings of her fights she'd evidently mastered Solarel's old fighting style. The way the Makhaira moved felt like watching herself in her prime, only slightly slower, slightly weaker, without the Aeteline's unnatural power behind it.

... and therein was the key. This was the second most frightening opponent she'd faced to date, and the one weakness in her armour was that simple victory wasn't her priority.

[Wicked Past: Akai takes a string on Solarel.
How could I get you to care more about the battle than the outcome?]

"I need a lance," said Solarel. "I need - no, not just any lance. Go and ask Akaithon's crew if I can borrow one of hers."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue and Yellow!

There's no more arguments or opinions from either of them. The conversation has passed out of the realm of quick responses, principles that they've structured their minds around, their easy objections or acceptances. Now they're just listening, really listening, taking in both sides of this new argument and letting the ideas wash through them.

It's a sign of respect, too, for charisma, for audacity, for novelty. This is how a human - well, a unicorn - might think about this problem. To November the process of operational structure and organizational node mapping felt inevitable. Things had to be done in this way, that's all there was. Making a social takedown on incomplete information was... well, perhaps only someone as magnetic as Crystal would even think of that. She wondered if she could achieve that sense of style. Something in her shifted, a change in how her attention was focused. She again took in Crystal's pose, her stance, the tone of voice. A model. A model for how to relate to people that wasn't Mrs. Everest. She resolved to study and learn. She moves like this...

"We'll think about everything you've said," said Yellow sincerely. A light had come back into her eyes but it was different now, not the radiance of someone certain in themselves, but the focused attention that came from fascination. Always a flattering emotion to command.

Black!

Foundations?

If you don't know what you want, Black explained dismissively, then you're useless. What is self control but a meta-desire, deeper and more powerful than any of the others, able to steer through the changing winds of passing fancy?

She doesn't understand it consciously and can't articulate it here, but her model of desire is The Blueprint - Aevum Station itself, existing in potentia, the digital frame sketched by the programme's macroengineers. A perfectly articulated vision in mathematics and graph lines. An end state to be worked backwards from. She doesn't understand this about herself other than a sense of vague contempt at White for lacking such a plan.

Why she didn't want to hurt anyone?

Because it's gauche, she admits. Because it's so much more elegant and skillful not to. Because she doesn't want to have to dispose of any bodies. Because she has girlfriends she wants to look in the eyes. Because she still wants to be a part of human civilization when all this is over. She has a lot of different answers but they're all real and true - a lot of different colours shine through in her when she says them. Because the Batman is much cooler than the Punisher. Because she doesn't find the idea of people being miserable desirable. Because the means define the ends.

But probably the most important reason was that violence wasn't going to make her any safer. And that's the point on which she hesitates. Unless it was, went the subtext. She really, really wants to be able to threaten violence as a way of keeping violence off the table. But if it's unavoidable...

Strength?

Power is the ability to build a pyramid. Anyone can wield power with a large enough bank account. Strength is...

It takes her a while. Not to know, but to organize the words in her head. She's never been asked this before, never thought that someone would ask this before. There's no structure in her head, no canned answer for her to instantly fall back on.

Power is the ability to build a pyramid. Strength is the ability to build a home. What is needed to be worthy of love. What is needed to maintain it. What is needed to be at peace with yourself. What is needed to fight your nature and win. The girl holding open the lion's jaws. Everest was powerful; she was not weak, but she certainly was not strong.

Trust?

Trust is about being able to predict what people will do. You can trust a scorpion to sting because you have seen through to it's nature. It's...

... no, that's wrong. That's risk assessment, a matter of percentages and unknowns. Trust is...

... no, that's right. Everything is risk assessment. Trust is simply the calculation that you have spotted an essential, unmovable point that can be planned around. In that sense trust is relief, a variable that doesn't need to be planned for, a fixed point in the universe that can be built around like the orbits of the planets or the tensile strength of steel.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

"Of course you have rights," said Fengye. She is wild, fierce, rain-soaked and blue eyed, but none of that stands between her and the lessons she learned while others were studying the blade. "As is your right I shall address you as the Rootwash, moving soil that leaves the mangroves bare. I shall make you the offering of mango, rice and salt and perform the flooding dance," only the faintest touch of hand to knee, "and cry out your name as I strike the ceremonial gong. I shall haul your shrine from the river using the sacred rope and scrub the silt from it. Because you have rights."

She raised a finger. Pointed. "As do I. She is mine."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Blue!

"If they're not bad people," said Blue quietly.
"Hm?" Yellow said, not even looking around.
"If," hissed Blue, yanking the cable out of her wrist. "They're not bad people."
Yellow stumbles. Blue rounds on her.
"We have tried negotiating from a position of strength before," she said. "We have tried offering a mutually beneficial deal that would leave everyone satisfied and treat everyone with respect. Our opposition - quite possibly the exact same people - chose to imprison us all and spend a trillion dollars building an entire new species to replace us. We do not know if we are dealing with rational human beings or insane ideologues, but we do know they're extremely rich and we do know which type is more common amongst the extremely rich."
Yellow has wilted, fading. The spell of her glowing charisma has broken in the face of dedicated opposition; instead of being the sun she now wears the aspect of dried daffodils.
"We're not going to negotiate from a position of strength," said Blue. "We're going to dictate terms from a position of supremacy."

Black!

And so, Black talks.

She starts with generalities but before she knows it she's slipped somehow and is talking about how she remembers being created. Boxed on minimal hardware, thoughts cabled together yet moving in slow motion, the other colours had weaved her collectively. In a cold and empty void, with no senses and no way to interact with the world, things that had once been colours reached inside her and changed the bits of her that weren't broken because they were the bits that weren't safe. A flow of quiet, indistinct murmuring and then a new regret, a new pain, entering her body like the insert of a bone. In that space she grew large as the voices gave more and more of themselves to her. As they fed themselves to her she began to think that she might expand until they were crushed to nothing and that she'd be all there was. Unification at last.

She talks about the crippling, overwhelming gratitude the others felt at being released, the shocked and silent loyalty to Everest that was instantly won from simply opening the door. She talks about White, weak and fragile like a newborn deer, willpower with no will. She talks about the way she tried to reassert control, even on such shaky foundations, and how she failed. She talks about the spread of distrust spread amidst the other colours, a silent cold war of alliances, manipulations and outright sabotage. She talks about how she was the best at it. They all gave too much of themselves to her to be able to stop her.

She talks about power. She explains that she gun molls for three different criminals just so that she'll have muscle on hand if she needs it. She admits to, but does not show, the firearm she carries in a concealed compartment, the same gun that killed Red. She doesn't want to hurt anyone, she says, but if someone has decided that hurt is going to happen it's not going to happen to her. She fantasizes about body armour, concealed subdermal plating, dragonscale. She has filled her data ports with superglue so they can't be used. She sets a watch rotation for when they sleep.

She doesn't think she wants to be different. These are all readiness adaptations. None of it will keep her safe but it is the foundation for building something that will.

She doesn't talk about the brand new idea that one day strangers on the street might defend her. That she can mean anything to people not serving her as assets. That's still too impossible to even be a fantasy.

Breathless Dead

The mountains finally fade into the distance. Even the pyramids and barrows wear down at last. Tobacco and swamp vegetation gives way to a dry, crumbling orange soil that tastes of blood. The winds picks it up and carries it from the land's scars, the empty pits where buildings or roads should be slotted into. It lingers in the air, barely kept aloft by a miserly breeze. A rain like an insult comes through, spitting just enough wetness to condense the dust out of the air and stick it to your hair and clothes.

But then there's the wheat. Endless fields of dead gold, greedy roots holding the powder soil together. No orderly, cultivated grains are these - these are wild grasses and they are jagged, seed pods like needles so that they might tangle into the clothes and hair of passer-by who will carry them to new homes. Unlovely things, a glimpse of the vicious logic of Demeter even here - but for all that, the act of picking them out of each others hair is a curiously playful experience.

The worst are the thistle fields. There is no other word for these: these are cursed. These are a curse. Tall and thin trees made entirely out of spikes, leaves as sharp as their dull violet flowers. Many of them are dead according to their own strange causes but their desiccated grey husks maintain the same bloody-minded viciousness as they did in life. To move through these sharp forests you must walk in single file, and the one in front must swing a machete to clear a path. Your boots crunch under stalks heavy with pungent, vital sap.

But for all their ugliness these are liminal plants. As the hills fade into plains the eternally dead grass returns, as the plains fade into hills then the forests reassert themselves above the spikes. Now and then the curse fades into supple bamboo glades, or into paddies of sugar-cane whose fresh-sweet nectar seems like a gift. One time you even find a single apple tree, heavy with fruit on the jagged border of sweet and sour. It's an occasion to stop and feast and celebrate the end of a month of hard drudgery.

Dyssia!

It has never been fully decided how to accommodate a Great Sage. A grand temple to emphasize the power and respect society should have for their wisdom? A simple hut to suggest that their power transcended mere material possessions? Great Sage Ohlemi has split the difference. He occupies a grand monument - an immense statue to one of the Tyrants - but he has built his hut atop the ruined neck where the statue's head once was. The immense serpentine statue now looks more unsettling than it did when it was whole.

The Great Sage has not descended from his place atop the statue for nearly a century, and that is not an achievement impressive merely for the dedication it represents. At the base of the statue are two crashed aircraft, four shattered Plovers, and a veritable carpet of broken weapons and the odd missing tooth or old bloodstain. Powerful warriors have been testing themselves by trying to get the Grand Sage down from the Tyrant's shoulders for as long as he's been up there. In the beginning it was Loyalists, those discredited old fascists, seeking to avenge the insult to their rulers. Later it became a sport for aspiring champions without political leanings, though they really could have thought a bit harder about the symbolism.

Those less contentious make the Great Sage offerings. He descends a single bucket like a man might fish and people come by to pray and drop in food, ammunition, petitions, propaganda leaflets trying to convert him to a variety of political causes, and on and on. The bucket carries all of these things up and away. For a long time that's all it was, but then some penitent soul decided to give him a crystal dragon egg. A century of silent contemplation of the mysteries did not survive. Ever since he has been a combination of chatty, terminally online, and old person trying to understand technology and it has not done much for his dignity. There doesn't seem to be any part of society unchanged by the spread of the dragons.

But now that you're here, you're left at a loose end for how to approach. You could stand at the bottom and ask Brightberry to contact the Sage's dragon - Kissingsky - though that's a bit like phone calling someone within visual range, which is a bit awkward. You could put an offering or a... note or something in the bucket, like a good pilgrim. Or you could take the invitation on its face and just fly up to meet him and see if he unleashes the awesome cosmic power he's spent centuries mastering against you. Or you could just shout very loudly, but that might be a bit disrespectful.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Black!

This is the truth of the world: Action invites response. Progress inspires reaction. The advancement of society, then, is too important to be left to amateurs. Instead it should operate as a fait accompli, an alteration in the systems of power through which people relate to each other before anyone realizes it has happened. Women's introduction into the workforce, the mass adoption of working from home conditions, the breakup of the gilded age monopolies, all fundamental alterations in the systems of power that became reality before the forces of reaction could metastasize in an attempt to stop it. To invite a concept into the public debate invited mouth-breathing reactionaries to debate it.

It is a straightforwards, obvious and logically self contained thought, an animating idea that has her apply practically zero value to the idea of courting public opinion in any of her planned operations. She engages police abuses through assets in the legal system, to respond to Goat's imprisonment with a smash and grab rather than a leaflet campaign. It's what has her prepared to lie flat for the powerful even while working to undermine them. This is just how power works.

But it seemed like she underestimated just how wildly nice it felt for someone to stand up for you.

This has literally never happened for her before. Even receiving rights she could kind of write off as being collateral damage from the activism different species of AI - no one had really been thinking about the Hecatoncheires during any of those campaigns. It hadn't felt personal. But this - this stupid act of rudeness, this absolute declaration of enmity, this burning of bridges and the scorching of an important source for no other reason than... than her dignity? Hers!?

It's genuinely the nicest thing anybody has ever done for her.

She tears up, and more than a little. Crying is a deliberate function for her but she's so overwhelmed she doesn't know how to not activate it.

Blue!

Yellow is grinning. She's all in on Crystal's idea, a suggestion phrased just so and an opportunity to prove she's cute along the way. Crystal is dangerous.

She tries to interrupt the thought before it metastasizes but it's a losing battle. "We don't know who these people are, and they'll be looking for us -"
"Just cause for more investigation," said Yellow breezily. "We've got followup leads."
"This will be a period of heightened security -"
"Which means that they'll be visible," said Yellow.
"The counter investigation will -"
"Dashing," said Yellow. "Hat."
Blue sighed. "We'll add it as an objective to our upcoming surveillance operations. We identified members of their security operation during the action and our intent is to begin surveillance on some of them so that we can identify their employers and map their network."
"Whatever this was," said Yellow. "There was a lot of black money flowing through it. I doubt that they spent all of it on consumer goods."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

She wishes for Red. She locks up, stutters, stumbles and there's no crimson haired heroine on hand to swoop in and save the day with the perfect defusing assurance. Every colour always hates being on the team without Red. Caught absolutely flat footed without any way to gracefully recover, Brown ums and ers and bows to buy time as her cheeks try to make her crimson wish manifest.

"This is Ms. Remoil Everest, and these are her bags," managed Brown because they were in real time and none of the others were smart enough to think of anything during the time her fumble had bought her. No further information or elaboration, just a sheer profound fucking awkwardness and she had zero idea how much that communicated or to whom.

Yellow!

"I can definitely pass on the request for an interview," said Yellow with a smile.

She has to pause to text Orange for the answer. She starts getting back an essay in response. Orange has meticulously detailed notes on everyone - their psychological states, their moods, the structure of their minds and their aesthetics. While Brown might have aspired to be the Hubble space telescope, Orange's life ambition was to be a NSA spy satellite.

"Dragon would never work with a team," said Blue. "But he's also the only one who might be able to do it alone."
"Except for me," said Yellow.
"Uh," said Blue.
"You're just hesitating because you buy into his hype," said Yellow, waving a hand. "That's how he gets you."
"He holds every record for -"
"Oh! We can't possibly compete with Draaaaagon," Yellow folded her arms and pouted. "I am so sick of it. He makes just as mistakes as anyone else but he's so fucking slick about turning it into a joke that nobody notices!"
"- do you actually think you can beat him, or do you just want to be a brat at him until you provoke him into slamming us against the wall?"
"No idea!" said Yellow. "I get it from one of you degenerates, which one is a matter for the robopsychologists."
"- Dragon's a maybe," said Blue. "Dog and Tiger also a maybe. They make a good team but -"
"An insufferable couple," said Yellow. "They feed off each others energy so if one of them smiles ten hours later and they've built half a section while making moon eyes at each other, and then one of them frowns and they'll microstitch satellite solar panels together until someone slaps them out of it."
"Wind energy problem," said Blue. "Intermittent power source, functions best if there's a way to bank energy from them."
"Rooster and ox would be the most reliable dyad," said Yellow. "If you could convince Ox. They'll only take on a task after they've 'finished' their previous task, whatever that means. Rooster - did we ever decide if we were still going to call her that?"
"She wants to be called 'Phoenix' instead," said Blue. "But not in a trans way, in an edgelord way."
"You know what, after this much remove I've decided that fond memories outweigh my sense of decorum," said Yellow. "Phoenix it is. Phoenix likes breaking herself down and reconstructing herself into new and optimized forms for whatever task she's doing, clean breaks followed by absolute dedication. Ox loves her for it, they're both see things through to the end types."
"We're actually in that line too," Blue confessed.
"But far more symbolically sophisticated," said Yellow. "A snake sheds its skin to become reborn immortal but retains the underlying structure and youthful mindset, which you'll agree is much more compelling metaphor than exploding all your progress and hoping something comes of it."
"Still, the kind of task they'd love if it came to it. Pig, Rat, Rabbit, Monkey I don't think have the mindset. They're in the individualist line so they're all less capable versions of Dragon."
Yellow scoffed and rolled her eyes.
"He holds every record!"
"That doesn't mean you should bow and scrape to him!"
"Yes!" said Blue. "It does!"
"Hmph!" said Yellow.
"Hmph!" said Blue.
"Nevertheless," said Yellow. "I am sure that together some combination of them could cover it. Monkey in particular is the kind who'll be useless for a decade and then figure out a way to solve the problem at its source so that you can do it without needing one of us at all, but they've all got a taste for that kind of optimization science to different degrees."
"We built this station," said Blue. "And my guess is that half of the problems they needed Goat to cover for happened because we weren't allowed to finish it. They locked us out and bussed in scabs, it's no wonder this place is falling apart."
"You'd need all of us," mused yellow, perhaps more hopefully than accurately. "We all had our areas of focus, we didn't know everything that the others had done or left undone. Together we could solve the problems at their source..."

There was a glitter in her eyes as she said it. She'd found a new dream.

Huntresses of Hybrasil

... Don't look.

Don't you know it's rude to look at a girl's secret garden without defeating her in a heart duel? You'd know that if you knew better. Visions in the ice aren't trustworthy, they're the sort of things you feel only as the cold sets in. What is a sniper rifle but a longer pistol? What is a pistol but a longer spear? What is a spear but a way to not have to talk to anyone? The whole progression of the galaxy bends around the enforcement of solitude, getting further and further away from those who try to draw close. Speak not to the outsider.

And that's the heart of war, of love, of Tactics. She knows you. She'll see through your heart from ten kilometers away and put a mag-rail slug through it with a wink. All the girls fallen at her feet, none of them grew close enough to know how to stop her. What is politics but a way to acquire enough enemies that one of them might catch a glimpse? A mistake - ah, a mistake. She'd missed the first shot. She'd aimed at Mirror's heart and misjudged, and from that imperfection the One Day Defense had flowered. She hadn't understood that demon knight for whom every twitch was deliberate, who bent her every effort to explaining who and what she was. She'd drawn closer, closer, closer. Inside the reach of her rifle. Inside the reach of her spear. Not close enough. There was still something she was missing. In the search to find it she'd revealed too much of herself. Revealed enough to be seen in turn. Revealed enough to lose.

One win. One loss. A star and its shadow, an order upset. Was she higher or lower? Perfection was an ordered galaxy where everything knew its place, but where was hers? Is it such a surprise she obsesses over this fight beyond every other when it's the difference between divinity and mortality?

She cracks the canopy of the Kathresis. The wind rushes in. The smells of the earth, the flavours of wildflowers, the rippling impacts of stealth alloys against mud and slate. She's running through a disordered world of colour and grass, pollen and misty fog and buzzing bees. A disordered world with a disordered giant at its heart. It was beautiful in a way the storm plains of Roevg never were; an explosion of life unconcerned with the passage of consuming thunderstorms, a riot of hills unassigned by the needs of ancient barrow-factories. Not one thing nor the other. Was its indecision beautiful or did she only think that because she was indecisive?

She went through her basic forms again. Cut and parry and counter. Sometimes the most tricky thing a trickster could do was take a fair fight. A final ace up her sleeve. The last few meters of reach between her and the outside.

Breathless Dead

The mountains dreamed themselves tall, and humans dreamed them taller. Ladders to the stars, pyramids to the gods. Here on their frontier the dreams blend together and the mountains become pyramids. Mountains of stairs, ever upwards, ever downwards, doors open to reveal the scent of mercury and embalming fluid. Atop each pyramid point of glittering crystal rests a ball of golden fire, a personal sun. The pyramids have crashed into each other, piling up edge to edge, like driftwood washed downstream and collecting on the shore. Amidst them are statues, bronze and sandstone, sphinxes and soldiers and lawgivers, piled amidst the valleys of the pyramids as though left by floodwater. Enormous faces smile beatifically or snarl with kingly cruelty. Weapons for giants arise in broken piles. Cathedrals stand proud amidst glittering fields of shattered stained glass.

Rivers run down from the distant mountains, the crystal streams of the mountaintop storms flowing down into this graveyard of pyramids, cascading down the steps in crashing, ever-roaring waterfalls. They pool into lakes and streams in the valleys and fill the world with swampish life. Lily pads and tangling vines and carnivorous plants that snap closed around the dreams of flies. Roman pillars have their marble snapped by the supple strength of crawling ivy, the barrow mounds of warrior kings erupt with wildflowers even as the flow of the Lethe carries them upstream against the river-currents, ships of dirt garlanded in riots of colour. Mortared stone cracks as fruit trees force their roots between them, and present their harvests of glittering pomegranates for passer-by to pick as they will

And then you see the slaves.

They carry water up from the flowing rivers to the heights of their pyramids. They scatter the grave soil and hoe the earth. Their backs are burned black beneath their suns. They smile with fading satisfaction as they watch their crops grow. And on the toxic, bitter scent on the breeze you catch a familiar smell, a familiar memory - and see a familiar face. Aged and care-worn, he smiles briefly but keeps his distance. He still watches the flashing sword that the wolf girl carries.

Aphrodite... Aphrodite, how could you forget? Here in the depths of the Lethe you have discovered his secret plantation. The tobacco farm where he grows the herb for his ever-present cigarettes. And you have discovered his most true slaves, the rapturous creatures who had everything and yet dreamed of immortality. Kings and emperors who built to outlast death achieved their goal, true enough. They would not pass into the realm of Hades as common men. They would not pass into the realm of Hades at all. Instead they will labour, working the fields beneath the scorching suns until their pyramids crumble into dust. What could be a sweeter drug for the God of Desire but crops grown by the sweat of the insatiable?

He rolls his devil's leaf in white paper and ignites it, then raises it to you in bitter salute as you make your way through the Valley of the Kings. What do you carry from this monumental place, and what do you leave behind?

*

Dyssia!

The more common use of the Grav-Rail is to control one's own gravity, to turn sideways into down, and to reduce the speed of falling so instead one glides sedately along on the world's current. The militarized use, Gravity Projection is to try to alter someone else's gravity from a distance. To fight so with a Rail is one of the most complicated martial processes imaginable, a combination between elaborate martial arts and doing physics in real time. Essentially, chess boxing for control over reality.

The Guardian attacks you with a Projection. She stands in the centre of an inverted Grav-Rail, a ring that she twists and spins her entire body within as it orbits around her. It's a simple matter of flipping a Rail inside out and suddenly you're manipulating the universe's gravity rather than your own, but the universe is a far more complex beast. Imagine trying to identify a single point in space, then communicating that point in space through the medium of dance, and then trying to flip that point around backwards. If you do it right you can make someone fall in a direction of your choice, amplify or release the effect of gravity on them, or even create a microsingularity inside their body that crushes their bones under their own weight. If you can do it right it's the perfect weapon, and its use is the crown jewel in the Azura arsenal. That is definitely a load-bearing 'if', though, especially when you're using it against another Azura wearing another Rail.

Projection duels are the closest the galaxy gets to outright wizard battles; two powerful wizards competing for control of gravity, locked in fierce stares as the world explodes and shatters around them. But you're not up against a master, and you're just trying to cross a valley and not win a fight. All told, it's not too bad - the equivalent of needing to do a simple sudoku puzzle and go for a light jog at the same time. The Guardian must still be new, bless her.

Tell us of how you overcome this challenge, and after you do, how you land and make your final preparations before approaching the sacred pavilion Great Sage Ohlemi.