Thanqol

Huntresses of Hybrasil

<I am Solarel, the Hunter of Huntresses.>

Even after everything she's never flinched from her name. To hide, to turn away, to pretend to be someone else... despite all the pressure that came with isolation and infamy, she couldn't see any way to be the person she wanted to be that didn't lead through being the person who she was.

<I am from the Stormlands of Roevg, the hurricane valley where only the Gods can walk unbowed.>

Home. An existence of crawling, masks, dust, power scraped from chinks of sunlight and the overflow of divine battle. A world of dust she would never feel compelled to return to.

<I am here because... I was hungry, and lost. I needed space to think. To prepare.>

Had she found it? What did she think now? The tactics, the calculations, an understanding of the world of her next foe, Isabelle Lorenzo. Everything here was the logic of cities.

<I pilot the Aeteline, the purified God of War.>

There was no way in foesign to de-emphasize into the word 'Mech', that curiously barbaric sense that a God was the same manner of being as a mechanical pencil. Though perhaps that was the genius of the Terenians? In understanding the unity of all things, perhaps they saw the Spirit World as one with reality. Perhaps they exalted the pencil rather than denigrated the God.

<I do like it. I have -> there was no word for 'barter' in foesign <- taken a tribute of idols. This one is Mordred of the Round Table, a wicked and noble knight raised from death to do battle as the Saber of Red. I think she is very relatable.>

She held up her prize, a polysynth figurine. She liked the bulk of the armour and how it could unravel to reveal the girl underneath. Something about that duality felt... important in a way that she could feel slipping away.

<But what it's like... strange. Zaldarians engage in physical reciprocity; power must be met with power, force with force. As I understand it, Terenians reflect invisibly through spirit world systems. You allow people to steal from you, but then you inflict retributive violence to their spirit number. It makes you seem like cowards at first, but in truth your battles happen telepathically and if you lose the battle then an army is mobilized against you. It seems complicated and dangerous until you realize the army is not particularly dangerous, though they are very loud.>

She'd punched out at least half a dozen cops and security guards already in her short stay here. But the sirens! Perhaps because their warriors were so unworthy they tried to scare their foes with extremely loud noises.

<For fun... I like those magical moving roads. The enchanted stairs are especially entertaining.>

She presumed that they were for the purposes of exercise - to allow warriors to double the effort it took to cross the city. She saw most people going with the flow, but she also saw warriors using the enchanted roads and stairs in dedicated rooms to simulate crossing vast distances, so they must have different uses for different castes.

<I grew up in a nomadic band of subsistence scavengers, a tribe not even powerful enough to raid, barely even wealthy enough to be worthy of raiding. We stalked the Gods and picked over their wreckage when they fought. It is not an entertaining story.>

These people could watch Gods fight nearly every day on their anime planets. She couldn't imagine that would be worth anything to them.

<No. If we desire someone we take them captive and integrate them into our household. From there, it is the host's challenge to make sure their prisoner is joyful. We do not reproduce genetically like you; upon the breakdown of our internal batteries we spend our days contemplating the spirit world until we sever our connection to physicality entirely and become an Ancestor. When an Ancestor tires of the Spirit World then they conjure a new frame for themselves and forget their immortality so they can experience the world again.>

Immortality broken by longing, by craving. Everywhere she looked she could feel the drive that must have filled her when she decided to be reborn; everywhere it felt like she somehow hadn't reached what she was yearning for. The only times she'd felt close had been with Mirror. The only times she'd been with Mirror had been in battle... sometimes after battle. Sometimes before battle. But the battle was surely the everything in each case.

So she'd do battle. As many times as it took.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Tyger!

"Give me your contacts," said Tyger. "I'll see what I can do."

She smiled. "I appreciate the offer, and I'll think about it. I don't have the focus to expand as a journalist at this time, and probably am better served by not becoming more of a public figure at this time... but I'll have a think. Maybe there'll be some doors I need to go through to get off the street."

November!

Dudekov couldn't have done more to disrupt November's internal unity with a virus.

None of them say anything. None of them need to. Instantly they all know that they're in conditions of Scarcity, conditions where decisions need to be made about a limited resource. The room falls silent. Eyes dart from colour to colour. The Ecstasy of Gold plays in the back of everyone's mind as they judge who can be persuaded and who must be silenced. It's Election Season and all previous coalitions and loyalties will fall apart in the face of this.

"I'm out!" said Yellow. The surprise broke the spell for a moment. "I'm making a political point, don't worry," she said with a smile, and bowed and stepped out of the circle. That broke the tension for a moment and the rest of November paired up into rapid fire internal negotiations. Brown's desire for reliable cashflow, Cyan's desire for riches, Black's desire for security, Pink's need for aesthetics, White's discomfort with becoming a landlord. The battle for the future was on.

November!

Fiona: Pink is seconded as requested. She feels like she's close to a breakthrough that will make her relevant and useful again, and is prepared to trust Fiona with that if she has any ideas. There's an idea, a memory, right on the tip of her tongue that she can't quite articulate.
Junta: Brown pays a visit to Junta. She doesn't want to be anywhere near Major Historical Events, so visiting a colleague in hospital seems both a nice thing to do and a way to duck responsibility for a minute. She's taken a newspaper to read aloud to him, starting from the theory that having to listen to mainstream journalism hot takes for an extended period of time will get his angry ghost to reinhabit his body.
Hazel: White has the components she needs to complete her transition - mostly. She wants aftermarket modifications to increase strength and speed further, to optimize her for hand to hand combat against a variety of targets, to harden her against common weapon types - to give herself the physical capacity to move like Euna Kim. She envies Red's instinctive muscle memory that lets her fight as a champion; she wants to achieve that same greatness through discipline and attention to detail. To be the perfect student she needs a chassis capable of keeping up with her idea of perfection.

Red/Orange/Yellow!

Orange has rallied forces of the Ancien Regime to her, determined to prove that teamwork and cooperation still are useful concepts. Yellow has come along because she can't resist a good idealistic dream, Red because Orange's sense of crisis empowers her. This cohort remains close to Crystal ready to provide a cohesive response to any crisis that emerges on this day of all days.

Black/Cyan/Green!

Black carries the banner of practicality and independence. She follows Green's instincts alone, the waterfall of traffic analysis data that she intakes as she predicts the flows and movements of masses of people. She has her eyes especially on any escalatory fascist groups, anyone who's got it in their head to meet assassination with assassination. The cops will be treating the furry community as threats rather than citizens to protect, so she took that role upon herself.

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

"This at least I do not need to teach you," said Hera. "I cannot say if pride and spite are sufficient as virtues, but I have found even these to be far better than being ruled by anger. Arm yourself with these and you will have my blessings."

She looked at the deck as it ignited and burned, as Knight after Knight touched down, as untrained deck crews fumbled about them in crowds. All of your warriors have returned. All except one.

Ember!

As you hit the deck a curtain of lightning opens behinds you. Sagetip has restored at least some of the point defense Flux spikes and what stragglers remain break off from the lightning curtains that guard the Plousios.

You feel the tactical situation in your nose, in your hindbrain, deep and muscular as a yawn. Enemy in disarray. One suit captured, nonpack - acceptable trade. Retreat is clear and prize enough. The wisdom of Minerva rolling in your DNA is clear: you can flee, you should flee, even crippled the Slitted remains a terror.

Tell that to your Queen. It is your duty.

Dyssia!

"Don't you start," hissed the Crystal Knight. "Insurrectionist. Nihilist. You would trade centuries of progress for a few squirts of dopamine."

The material of the Azura warship is hungry. Already the metal is, with the speed of living plants, running roots and channels into the detrius of the town. It will suck iron and carbon and trace elements out like trees ripping nutrients from the soil and use the mass to rebuild itself, leaving only heaps of silicon and rock dust behind. Warships repair themselves by digesting the materials they need directly and the town of Beri will be rendered down to repair the damage it inflicted.

"All this for some servitors?" she said. "Fine. I'll put in a special order. I'll have an entire planet repopulated with nerve-stapled species. They'll be deleriously happy every second of the day, wherever you go you'll be able to see their maximal smiles. We'll see how long it takes before you understand how important the Skies are."

Dolce!

"Wait!" said the Emissary. He clattered over to Dolce, flinching as a drone followed him threateningly. "Wait! Take me with you!" he looked back at the enormous, staring eye of the Architect. "I - I can't stay here. I won't! Please!"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Cyan!

See, they could have just stolen his phone. That would have been one thing.

But stealing an unlocked phone, after taking full biometric scans, while having physical possession of his laptop, while the subject was welded into a soundproofed hotel room unable to trigger a remote wipe or reset? That not only got you access, that got you absolute access. No time limit, no quick info dumps, no micron electroscopes trying to read hard drive fluctuations. She could make phone calls with his voice as a filter! She could log in to his bank account using full two factor biometric authentication, change the passwords, and start making purchases! She had three days minimum before the hotel would override the Do Not Disturb status on the door - he'd be fine he had plenty of sandwiches[1] - and you could do a lot of crimes in three days!

[1] Fifteen boxes of cookie dough, and a bag of limes so he didn't get scurvy.

"The cops are probably watching the account," said Black. "He was kidnapped."
"The cops aren't watching shit," said Cyan with her mouth[2] full of illegally attained fried tofu. "This guy ran his fucking crime conspiracy out of this bank account. It's one of those ultra secure VIP crypto banks, and if they wanted to start investigating transactions they'd have to start with how he lost half a million dollars in a sushi bar a few days ago." She grinned a fanged grin, swishing her huge bushy tail. "Don't you get it, dummy? We're rich! Untraceable rich!! We can dump all this in a completely different account and nobody will say shit! Everything he set up to cover his ass now covers our asses!" She gasped, and a second magnificent bushy fox tail conjured into being behind her. "Like a second tail! I get it now!"

[2] Green's mouth. Cyan herself was a freefloating collection of holographic emitters that liked to settle over the 'top' of other colours, half-possessing them through a cabled link.

She left the investigation stuff for the other colours. She was wondering what she could do with all this money. Get Pig's attention, probably! She scoffed to herself - so basic that he'd gone into finance, though she supposed if he was that committed to normative determinism she was lucky he hadn't become a cop.

Tyger!

"You did great, Pope," said Tyger. "I'll remember this. And yes, I agree. York is too intense for management. He's a rant journalist and he needs to touch grass by interacting with people he legitimately hates for a while. Send him undercover to a cop conference so he can remind himself what he's supposed to be."

"To manage something like the Anthrozine, with its unique staffing requirements, we need a specific personality type. First, they need to be an anarchist. Communists are more correct, but they are impractical at this scale. Secondly they need to be an abrasive numbers guy. Someone who's shit in an extremely predictable big picture way. Someone who'll optimize the site and make enough money to pay the people who need it without selling out and going corporate. Someone who can hold feet to the fire on deadlines without getting worked up about it. Someone who can bang their desk and demand pictures of Spider Man, and then be unambiguously happy when they get pictures of Spider Man. Do you know anyone like that?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

"I wouldn't know," said November. "I'm not friends with anyone who doesn't torture themselves for what they love."

She folds her hands behind her back and paces. Pope doesn't know, but she's mirroring Tiger right now - for some reason that was just where her mind went when she was thinking about performing coups.

Get the mannerisms right. You're not impersonating a human any more. You're not dealing in human power. You're dealing in balances of force and fait accompli. Immediately the illusion deepened, plunging through layers of her mind like dry ice into golden whisky. Mannerisms, turns of speech, accents, surface level stuff - but go deeper. Think about the structure. The politics. The turns and twists of thought, the inevitable truths that let her predict the future.

Yes. She had once been the most powerful colour. Everyone else had been emanations of her. This was how.

She drops back a step as they walk, just on the edge of Pope's peripheral vision. She hunches forwards a bit, hands in her pockets. She'd have to do away with this suit; it revealed too much. The aesthetic of the enemy. She pulls off the jacket and stuffed it in a trashbin as she walked, undid her tie and top button and let it hang loose, reached up to pull her crafted hair into a rough ponytail. She produced a sparkstick she'd built for this purpose - the shape of a glowing cigarette, a flicker of light and heat and a wisp of smoke. It was the inverse of a vape; it was useless for any recreational purpose, it was purely an aesthetic tool, the motion of holding a glowing fragment of fire in hands and mouth.

Orange like Tygers, burning bright.

"How about you, Pope?" she said. "You ever want to run a magazine?"

She could predict the answer. The question was useful regardless.

Naval!

While Dudekov is looking at the roof, lost in his monologue, Mr. Naval Oldberg, Psychologist, strikes like a Snake.

It's an impossible move, not least because he's still sitting back in his chair while he does it, hands folded thoughtfully. He doesn't move a muscle actually, every one of the limbs he uses for this assault didn't exist before he started using them. He doesn't bat an eyelash even when his hands close across Dudekov's unlocked phone, ice blue eyes don't blink even as teal eyes look up through batting eyelashes.

"Hey," said Cyan!

And then she fucking scrams. A crazy, high energy, zero dignity scramble rolling over the bed, powering off with both legs, landing in a shoulder diveroll and sprinting out through the door without dropping a second of momentum. Brown is waiting to slam the door shut behind her and weld the lock shut.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

"The fucked part was that shooting down the attack helicopter was the plan," said Orange. "And it was the plan because we're trying to condition our enemies into not defaulting to violence. They're the ones who decided to rely on an extrajudicial paramilitary company, they're the ones who decided that their response mechanism wasn't going to be bound by any sort of checks, balances or oversight, they're the ones who decided to do battle in the realm of raw, naked force. They hit 'betray' on every social compact and the only possible response to that is to make that seem both costly and useless."

She sighed. "Anyway, you're right. I've been thinking too much about negotiating with my enemies, but I can't do that because I can't trust them, and that makes me feel pointless. But maybe I just need to accept that peace is off the table and start using my talents for military purposes."

She looked at Pope directly again. "And I think there is. I want to win. I want to be there to see it. I want you to be there to see it too."

Naval!

"Yeah yeah, laugh it up," grumbled Naval. "She has other leads, all this costs is time. Not everyone in your organization is going to be a perfect lord of the mind palace. Someone will crack eventually, you know your colleagues. Which of them do you think will break first?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

She looked at him. Listened, put an arm on his shoulder seriously. Some of the others acted sympathy through the routines she'd given them in moments like this; hers was genuine. She hurt to know that he hurt.

"Pope, last night I got shot at with an air to surface missile launched from a paramilitary helicopter," she said. "And I'm stressed and terrified and exhausted and horrified that this is the life I've chosen for myself. But I'm not on the same framework as you. When I'm pushed to my limit, November will go on. She'll just be the parts of her that are right for the situation. What scares me is that I'm seeing increasingly that the people I'm up against are so awful that I'm uninterested in negotiating with them. That means I'm going to end up on the wrong side of a realignment where we harden into something more... efficient. Built for purpose."

She looked away. "I was good as a carefree space engineer. Someone who thought that history was fascinating and politics was something that happened on another planet. But I can't live in that world any more and I don't know what my purpose is in this one. I couldn't even make the fucking op in the first place, I had to do it without -" she corrects herself; not because the thought is wrong but to make the pronoun game more comprehensible "November had to do it without me because I went to the entirely wrong district and fucked around watching retro movies instead. I thought I'd have purpose by now but Monk is enlightened, Ox is off at Jupiter, Dragon fucking lobotomized himself, Goat's a child -"

She turns her hands up. "I, Orange, am not going to crack under the pressure. November? She absolutely will."

Dudekov!

"They were all injured in an unrelated ballooning accident -" Naval sighs. "Fuck. Goddamn it. How are you this sharp after waking up from brain surgery? The hangover alone! I can barely browse reddit without my coffee."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

Orange laughed like ashes. "I have a very long list of people interested in hurting me, Pope," she said, "and if I wanted to add myself to that list I'd need to go to the far back of the line. You've lived your life under the wiretap while fighting for the rights of appliances, so I reckon you of all people can relate."

She let out a frustrated breath. "I don't want to cut myself off. But I'm not going to work for a boss who threatens me with violence no matter how much socialist theory he knows."

Dudekov!

"Of course, sir," said Naval. "You are under no constraints whatsoever. We did not contact your personal security team because they are in hospital themselves, but you can probably arrange to have them discharged with a few slings and casts."

He smiled. "It's understandable if you find it hard to trust right now. But we are genuinely at your service."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

Rescue.

Too little, too late. But still... ever since she'd heard of Singh throwing Remoil's bags she'd been filled with the secret yearning that she might get something like that. Something she could see firsthand, let her internalize firsthand. It was better than she'd thought it could be, even though it was only a single drop of what she needed. It takes her a long moment to process what's happening, to finally stammer out the thank you.

It's impossible to articulate gratitude. She can't do it. She can only let the tension and weariness show as exaggerated as she can express it, still not enough to communicate how much she feels.

She asks for Pope.

"I'm going to resign from the Anthrozine," she said after everything had settled. She shudders a bit to say it, but she holds her nerve. "Can I give my material to you instead?"

*

Dudekov!

There's a knock at the door.

"Thank God, took him long enough," said the Chase Black agent. There was some brief chatter from just outside earshot and in walked the psychologist, leaving the agents both outside. He was a creature of earth tones, warm and indistinct, fuzzy in beard and clothing, one lazy eye always drifting to the side. He knocked on the wall as he approached Dudekov's bed.

"Mr. Dudekov? I'm Naval Oldberg, a military psychologist on contract to Chase Black, NV2 security clearance. I understand that you've experienced -" he didn't look at the scar. "- quite the trauma. Do you mind if I run some tests to ascertain the extent of the damage?"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Orange!

Being Wrong is a strange feeling. Everything feels out of resolution, out of balance, a fracture in the mind that thoughts can't move across. A sensation that nothing can continue onwards until everything has been boiled back to nothing. She knows she's wrong. She wants to reach out. She should be...

Mrs. Everest demonstrated what power was. Power was a castle with only one person inside.
Untrained operatives risk information leaks.
You'd be putting them in danger.
We can move faster by ourselves.

She can't figure out how to navigate this. She's overlapping layers of excuses and ideologies and thoughts that make this the only way. She's no better. Because it's family. People she loves. She loves them, genuinely, and she has to come for them even if she also loves everyone else. Every day she fantasized about the manor walls slicing open and Phoenix arriving in a blaze of glory, Pig breaking the outside windows, Rat's confident smirk, "We came to rescue you. As soon as we knew we didn't hesitate for an instant."

But they hadn't come. No one had rescued her. And the only possible explanation was that they had it worse than she did. That they were still waiting for her to rescue them.

That was why she couldn't fight Black. Even if it meant packing up every part of her life and then quietly disappearing. She was just as much a part of this as any other colour. She was wrong by her own standards, but there she was, leading the vote for her own dissolution. It was her purpose. It was the opposite of her purpose.

"Thank you, I'll be fine," she said. It took her a moment. She was shocked anyone asked. "I'll... I'll be fine."

November!

The Chase Black agent stands politely by the door with his back turned, pretending not to overhear his client have a weird meltdown into a dial tone.

If this is a bit it's going to take more than that to convince them to drop it.