Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Red!

"Aw, yeah, fuck it," said Red. "It's a good plan. Glad I thought of it and am taking full responsibility for implementing it, and also that I lied to you and said that I checked it with the cops beforehand. This is now an official emergency, let's get these people home."

Pink!

"I have looked inside myself," said Pink. "And discovered that I somehow have even more stuff to do than I thought."

She sat up. Flexed. Ran motion along her fingers, up her arm, to her shoulder, and down the other arm. She turns her neck all the way to the left, silently satisfied by the ease of the motion. She goes still and her battery ports hiss and pop as she seals and unseals all the panels. She cycles her lights, runs her eyes through every colour and shape, and runs her internal fans to a roar that's deeper than she remembers as she completes a full coolant test. It's surreal. Nothing isn't anything, but feeling it after so long in low level pain is everything.

"I want to say thank you," said Pink. "I want to... fuck, I want to say nothing but thank you, on a loop, for like forty eight hours. But I think I know what I really want to cook now. Or at least, I can see the outline, I still need to practice a lot... I know you probably shouldn't try it given how dangerous I can be, but it'd mean a lot to me if you looked at it when it's done."

Cyan!

There are cookie crimes afoot. It falls to Detective Cyan to investigate.

Cyan surges into place and transforms; a scowling bobby with a cookie badge, a cookie crest on the helmet, and donut handcuffs. She prowls up and down at the centre of her district, practicing her menacing loom as she hunts for the culprit behind the cookie crimes. As a gumshoe, though, she's easily deflected - lurching towards each district in turn, turned about at the last minute by the shifting of blame. "I'm going to get to the bottom of this," she vows loudly. "And it'll be death by chocolate for the guilty!"

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

[Cyan has returned to the chat]
[White no longer has role: moderator]
Red: Hey Green, what the fuck.
Green: What?
Red: We need to talk about Cyan.
Cyan: :3
Green: nah
Red: We're kind of in a thing and you've gone and dumped what pretty clearly seems to be the bad ideas colour on us.
Green: ueah that's the point
Red: >:T
White: She is encouraging Red to crash trains into each other.
Green: again, that's the point
White: What the hell.
Green: okay so
Green: you fuckers are miserable
Green: it's all 'ooh, i'm so stressed' and 'ooh, the weight of the universe is crashing in on us' and 'waah we have power and responsibility and we are fundamentally bound by it' and 'oh no my trauma' blah blah blah
Green: it's given me a fucking complex
Green: when was the last time we had fun? the last time we went out somewhere that wasn't an operation?
White: I went to a nightclub.
Green: when?
White: ... A few months ago.
Green: How many times?
White: Once, but that's not the point.
Green: yes it is. fucking hell, look, you bitches have decided to run me under the grill for months and this is the consequence of that.
Green: deal with it. crash some trains or blow off your responsibilities or start a crime syndicate or whatever floats your boats
Green: if we're hanging around humans forever then do some human things because being the perfect epsionage robot isn't workign for me rn.
Cyan: >:3

*

Pink!

She feels warm. She feels clean. She feels an imperfection glowing in her core that she'll never want to fix.

She's passed through fear and thought and stress and into an abstract glow. She feels more herself than she ever has. For once she feels like she has nothing to say. It's like all the toxicity bound up in her body has washed into her blood, the weight of the poison paralyzing her but only so long as it takes to wash out towards the sea.

Cyan!

The plan's going well. Cyan feels great about it!

When was the last time they'd thought that? Maybe never! No matter how hard she was winning at any given moment it was never enough. Cyan blamed television, personally. Showing signs of confidence meant that the character was about to be punished by the narrative. Even in #CURRENT_YEAR# storytellers could not get away from the basic bitch ass craving to smite protagonists for the sin of having a good time. Having internalized this, the other colours had kept their heads down and smiles off their faces like whipped dogs.

She can feel them in the distance, their subdermal terror at coming into conflict with human authorities once again. She can sense the patterns of their cowardly flinching; White's impulse to ditch her own half finished transformation and return to a basic chassis because it feels like a luxury; Yellow crumpling like a beer can against a forehead when confronted with any resistance whatsoever. Agendas and plans and politics and paranoia so thick it made her want to gag. Maybe things can be fun for half an hour without it being the end of the world.

So she has fun with it. She's on crowd control, her and White. White's the big serious scary muscle, she swims through light. She's the giant floating arrows directing different groups to different platforms, the coursing river dragon streaming over the heads to snap at the heels of stragglers, the cloud of prismatic butterflies that land on noses and pointed ears to watch the sideshows. She's not just the king of this movement, though she is, she's a part of this too.

Red!

"Hmm, good thought," said Red. "Okay. We'll stagger the speed of the trains so that they arrive at every district simultaneously, and five minutes prior we'll use the P.A. system in the stations to announce that normal train service is resuming. That's enough to stop the line officers from panicking, to prevent the higher ups from coming up with a response, and my IT friends can probably stall any override for five minutes. From there, there'll be heat, but I'll take those calls and let them yell at me as much as they want. The path of least resistance will be to finish the plan and fire me afterwards."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

Pink's design is clearly artificial, on the correct side of the uncanny valley. Her large eyes and clearly marked artificial joints are perfectly designed for human comfort, the smoothed stylization reaching the same effect as two dimensional anime girls. It's brilliantly designed engineering shorthand, something that could never be mistaken for a human but likewise never mistaken for something unthinking. There are types of cuteness that can only be reached when you expand your canvas.

And that's the direction she'd go further into. She rejects the binary between machine and human, neither extreme appeals to her. But what if she could look even more like a painting? What if her eyes where whirls of paint, what if her body moved like a shadow puppet, what if she layered herself into a chaotic Disco Elysium style portrait of a girl? What if parts of her weren't just metallic but painted to be metallic, what if she manually drew on each scratch and highlight, what if she integrated plant matter into her design, what if she airbrushed herself to look like a marble statue? It was what she loved about her recent adventures into becoming a furry herself; not for the basics of the chassis but for what she could build on top of it, not for the subject matter but the execution.

Black!

Take a moment. Do you feel that? The lightless, crushing pressure of being responsible for everything and not being able to control everything? In space every piece of momentum and trajectory could be known. It hadn't gone wrong until she'd tried to apply that to humanity. Some parts of her thought that her predictive model was wrong, and she just needed to become more politically conscious so that she'd be able to Do It Right next time.

Black doesn't believe in that. She doesn't even share the belief she is responsible for everything. She just wants to be safe. She wants to just fucking cut, get on the very first train out, and be gone. But it's not that easy. Like she decided the other night, the safety of the black hole was stronger than the safety of the void. It had been enough to set her on this path - but not enough to prevent her from wanting to squeeze this first handful of stardust so tightly it might become a singularity off the back of her stressful tension.

To be everything to everybody. To be safe.

She takes a breath. No, this is the micromanagement urge again. This isn't an operation. She doesn't trust her predictive models enough to be able to shift the movements of masses of people with psychohistorical tweaks. Any action will be met with a response and she can't hide her actions in this mass. So her decision is, once again, to clench her teeth and do nothing. If the whole station is burning down then all she can do is seem like the lowest priority direction for now.

Red!

Red: Seriously? "Let it play out"?
Black: yeah
Red: Seriously?
Black: i don't know what to tell you
Black: i would rather be shooting down police helicopters
Black: but...
Cyan: No, she's right :3
Cyan: We can be sheep, or we can be wolves.
Cyan: One will draw the sheepdogs much faster
Black: ... yeah
Cyan: Which raises the question, why the change of heart? You were happy shooting down police helicopters like yesterday :3c
Black: that was just us, though
Cyan: Aww! That's so sweet! Our little paranoia module is taking the safety of others into consideration!
Cyan: By which I mean
Cyan: ヽ(｀Д´)ﾉ
Cyan: Goddamn it, Black! What the fuck? You've internalized Yellow's agenda that deeply?
Cyan: We can solve this whole thing in like a minute if we just throw Chaka under the bus!
Cyan: I can't believe I'm the one having to say this.
Black: woah, I thougt you liked Chaka
Cyan: I do :3
Cyan: But the bus. It hungers.
Red: yeah no we're not doing that
Cyan: Oh, yeah, duh. We're obviously not doing that.
Cyan: I'm not an idiot, White's right over there, I haven't killed her yet :3
Cyan: But I'm not the only one who should be thinking it, right?
Cyan: You should be thinking it, Black. It's your job to be thinking it.
Cyan: And instead here you are trying to think about how to run this whole thing with nobody getting hurt?
Cyan: Is that your job?
Cyan: Is that our job?
Black: what would you do?
Cyan: Obviously I'd have spent months beforehand selling my bathwater to a cop king so that he'd built up an addition and I could threaten to cut him off if he defied me.
Cyan: But on this timescale? Unethical behaviour looks way worse if you compress it chronologically. We'd never go for it :3
Cyan: Instead I'm just gonna say that maybe some people are gonna get tear gassed and maybe that's not the same thing as mission failure
Red: jesus christ cyan
Red: i hate you already
Cyan: It'll be a bonding experience~!
Cyan: Just keep the crowd moving steadily through the trains.
Cyan: The rearguards will eventually get into a fight but that's what we pay them for :3
Cyan: Anyway let's get Chaka's shit the fuck out of here on the first train out.
Cyan: Yeah it'll delay loading the trains with people but it'll - oh hang on
Cyan: Could we just steal her guns?
Black: and make an enemy of the furry gun syndicate?
Cyan: They'd just blame her, it'd be fine :3
Black: what the fuck do we need that many guns for
Black: where would we store them
Cyan: I thought you liked shooting down police helicopters?
Black: we only have sixteen hands
Cyan: Oh hey I've got an idea for what we could do with that real estate!
Black: and become competitors to the furry gun syndicate?
Cyan: If we feed the cops Chaka and steal her guns at the same time, they'll be able to roll up all her friends and eliminate the competition for us :3
Cyan: Wouldn't you be a lot safer as a militarized crime lord instead of whatever this social justice bullshit is?
Black: ...
Red: god can someone make her stop
Cyan: What? I'm just saying what she should be thinking :3
Cyan: Keeping an open and flexible mind! And apparently that means doing everyone else's jobs for them.
Cyan: But I accept my role. I'm a symbiote. I do my best work helping you be your best selves!
Cyan: For instance! Red, did you know that you could probably make two trains crash into each other right now? :3c
Red: ...
White: Hey I'm back and what the fuck is going on in this chat
Cyan: Nothing to do with me I swear
White: ...
Cyan: Swear on me mum [USER WAS PROBATED FOR THIS POST]
White: No betraying friends.
White: No international arms dealing syndicates.
White: No unnecessary train crashes.
White: We pack the guns onto the first train. It pushes back the evacuation schedule but it caps escalation. Cyan was correct about that part.
Red: Does that mean you'll reduce the length of her probation? :3
White: I can't tell if that's a hologram or if you're fucking with me, which bodes well for my future sanity

Huntresses of Hybrasil

The lightning slowly fades, electrical storm breathing away to increasingly distant aftershocks as the storm moves away. Here in the ocean of clouds it's like watching the aftershocks of a tidal wave.

As the electrical interference clears there is no sign of the Aeteline, only a spread out cluster of sensor drones, observing from a distance. There's a pressure in that observed absence, the feeling of having the attention - if not the affection - of something that was willing to step over you a moment ago. It's a cessation of initiative and strategy, a pause in the engine working towards your destruction, a cold decision to see where you thought you were going with this.

[Take a string on Solarel
Solarel attempts to Figure Out Isabelle, rolls a 5]

Breathless Dead

Mosaic and Ember!

The strangest part of how your first void battle is progressing is that it is now taking place inside the streets of Beri.

The self-healing metal of the Slitted has drawn in the town where it impacted it, brick and stone crunched into places to fill gaps in the superstructure. Familiar scents as groves of smashed plants cling to life despite having being wrenched from sun and soil. Tumbled houses spilling furniture and personal possessions like juice from crushed grapes.

It is not the Corvii you fight here, it is the Artamii - the new generation, the Endless Azure Skies' latest answer to the wolves of Ceron. The Armatii are avian combat servitors, eleven feet tall at their full height, slashed in black and white, with an intelligent belligerence that alternates between frustrating and terrifying. They fight primarily as skirmishers, and as skirmishers they are without peer; driving their opponents back into the safety of the phalanx - whereupon they unleash the fury of the Crystal Knight's experimental weapons. It's not a fair matchup; the Silver Divers have never encountered the Armatii before, whereas the Armatii have been engineered from the genetic level to surpass the Ceronians.

Soon the Ceronian phalanx has immobilized before the Beri town square. Only three Armatii hold the line against them, but so fierce are they the wolves have paused while heavy weapons are bought up to dislodge them. Every moment of delay, risks Dyssia further.

Dyssia!

So here's something fun: falling Sucks, Actually.

The Azura species, who went from aquatic environments to gravity-manipulation, has broadly not had to deal with the concept of falling down. The rush of wind, the complete lack of control, the inability to course correct as the ground starts rushing up at you - it's not a primordial fear in the same way that being crushed by deep ocean pressure isn't a primordial fear for humans. It's just something that doesn't come up enough to leave a genetic imprint. The horror is all intellectual which is in some ways worse.

And it is after you have begun falling but before you have hit the ground that the Crystal Knight slashes you with her saber.

It doesn't matter if your transdimensional ghost might under other circumstances be chill; coming into being as you're both falling into an arena causes a panic reaction and the eerie half-formed copy grabs onto you in a panic, coiling and trying to crush you, trying to put you between them and the ground. And after the impact someone fires a Solid Projectile round next to you - explosion, lights flashing, ears ringing, chaos. It's enough to set the other version of you into a confused, violent frenzy.

So how would you talk yourself down under these circumstances?

Dolce!

Suddenly Artemis is in the room.

"So," said the Assassin, extremely casually, "I didn't accomplish my mission, then?"

Artemis takes out a pen and notepad, makes a note.

"And you're working with the Architect?" she wasn't bowing any more. You were having a hard time keeping your eyes on exactly where her hands were at any given moment.

While the extremely clear transfer of information, clipped and snappy in the way of the Craftsman, did seem to be going down well, you got the overwhelming sensation that maybe honest communication wasn't your friend here.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Cyan!

When Cyan called back, she was smiling. It was a nasty smile, a knowing smile, relaxed back in her chair with a gleam like she'd heard a joke she hated and was about to tell a better one.

"You're a smart guy, McVoight," she said, nodding her head, eyes narrowed. "No, smart's not doing you right. You're an intellectual," she licked her lips with a tongue like a piece of beef jerky. "Small unit leadership. Understanding of the anti-authoritarian mindset. Talent for deception and misdirection. I'm going to write you a commendation, because those are rare talents for a serving officer."

She leaned forwards, contented mask dropping. "What you are is fucking me, you shitstain. You think I can't fuck you back? You think I didn't have to deal with malingerers like you in Hermes? Officers like you poison entire units. That's why I'm going to write you that fucking commendation and get you transferred to Preventative Surveillance. You'll spend the rest of your career infiltrating anarchist book clubs, sitting on your ass and listening to pimply-faced college students give lectures on politics."

She raised her voice; it had been loud enough to carry before, but now she meant it. "And the rest of you! Get the fuck down to the station and get on that fucking train! That's an order!"

Pink!

She'd never woken up before.

It had always been harsh transitions. Off and on like a switch. Stepping out into the world, jagged and unprepared, and handed a mop. No sense to sense and timeless to no time. No wonder she felt like she had to cling to every second, had to be on whenever she wasn't off. There had been no time for liminality, for moments, for sitting and being. No wonder the reboots had felt like nightmares.

But this time she can just watch the install and update process. She set them all different progress icons and watched them go by, one by one. One was a blue circle filling up. One was a yellow flower blooming. One was a red starship burning up in orbit. One was a green forest expanding...

She wondered if she'd have felt she needed to fling her body as far away as possible if it always felt this good. How much of needing to be someone else was driven by pain and exhaustion? How much of her craving for dreams was because she never slept?

She forgets about talking or communicating or expressing for a while, and just watches her world rebuild itself in software updates.

Yellow!

Yellow: I hear and understand ✌(-‿-)✿
Yellow: Better. I know how to organize your proposal now.
Yellow: You'll know the moment when you see it. It'll be up to you what you do with it~❤

Yellow's insight was straightforwards. The only thing Crystal would find more viscerally satisfying than just proposing in public would be... proposing in front of a crowd comprised of Fiona's ex girlfriends.

It wouldn't take too much to organize, just shifting some seating arrangements in the next big event where Fiona and Crystal were both present. She'd need to identify and place as many of Fiona's exes or one-night-stands as possible but she only really needed good enough for that. Enough that Crystal could twig to what was happening when she got on stage and saw them all sitting in the front row.

And... if she chickened out then she could chalk it up to just being a weird coincidence. Yellow was, after all, a merciful goddess.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

Dear Fiona

Then this is a White thing

The speech cuts off as the phone reboots itself partway through reading the message, Pink interrupting herself with another shutdown. One more five second blip. This time the login jingle was the sound of evening bells.

Alright fine.

Yellow!

Yellow: Isn't that just the whole problem, though? ◠‿◠✿
Yellow: People want things they shouldn't want. Things that their rational mind has to bargain them down from.
Yellow: Compromising with reality. Leaving regrets on the table. Taking a deep sigh and choosing the moral, socially acceptable response yet again.
Yellow: They say, 'don't let your dreams be dreams!', but only so long as your dream is something like 'two weeks on a cruise ship' or 'a job that doesn't make you crave a skip dialogue button'
Yellow: And so even now, so close to the source, you can't say it.
Yellow: You need me to say it for you. Because you still feel like even saying it makes you a bad person.
Yellow: And you're right. Saying it does make you a bad person. Acting on it will have the consequences you're dreading. Those inhibitions? They're valid.
Yellow: So let's start with that.
Yellow: The first step in going apeshit is telling me directly what you actually, really want. The thing you want so badly that proposing marriage is the watered down compromise.

Cyan and Red!

"Alright," said Red. "Give me a sec, I need to make a phone call."

She glanced at Cyan's outraged text message. Thought. There were a couple of options that occurred to her, but one she really wanted to avoid. Digitally seizing control was the most direct but she always hated doing that. It exposed her methodology, locked her into a fight with system administrators and made people stop trusting the technology she might otherwise use to manipulate them. She'd walk a long way down the street to avoid playing that card, no matter what Fiona thought about it.

While she was brooding over alternatives, though, Cyan was already talking.

"Understood station, I'll get I.T. to find out what's going on. Get packed and stand by, over and out," she snapped.

And then even as Red started getting ready to make the hack, Cyan was waving her off. "We don't need to actually fix the trains, idiot," she said. "I just need to wait five minutes, call them back, and scream at them for fucking around with the admin permissions. God, you're supposed to be crisis management but you think like such a fucking engineer."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

Her head is in the clouds.

From the ground they have such different meanings. The wind. The storm. The constant, crushing pressure. They seem like such solid things from down there, breaking metal thunder and gusts filled with talons of razor dust. But from up here...

She does not look at her opponent. She reaches out her armoured fist to touch the first wisp of cloud...

Danger. With a blurring duck and leap she vanishes into the mist.

Not once does she turn to look.

The Aeteline's signature does not vanish into the cloud - it expands into it. The cloud boils and crackles, darkening and coursing with electricity. The Aeteline is everywhere inside it all at once. She has gone somewhere you should not follow without paying you the respect of her attention. You stand on the platform alone as all around the storms of Zaldar rage and boil.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

There is one more flicker, one more reboot.

Dear Fiona,

No, this is terrible. It probably does not even work for me; I do not follow human biochemical design principles, even in emulation like an android. I have too much work to do, I can't justify being this bored or static. Especially when it comes to the struggle for mental influence. Time wasted on this means time not spent contesting my worst impulses.

Yours thoughtfully,
Pink

Yellow!

Yellow: It's not the same thing at the wedding as the proposal. You know that.
Yellow: The proposal is forcing them to make a decision, the wedding they've already made one.
Yellow: Look, you're clearly doing your best to be a good polygamist, you know all the theory and you've internalized the therapy talk about loving something enough to let it go, but that's a sacrifice your jealous ass is making.
Yellow: And it's fine if you want to make that sacrifice but call it what it is.
Yellow: You want things other than to be a morally upstanding member of society.
Yellow: You can repress those wants. This whole kink-free convention was you repressing those wants, in order to fit better into society. This was also a big sacrifice on your behalf.
Yellow: but aren't you tired of being nice?
Yellow: don't you just want to go apeshit? (◉‿◉)✿

Cyan!

[Surveillance 6/8]

She doesn't take the time to get it right. White's grumpy at her for it, but White doesn't understand showbiz. People who go through a film frame by frame looking for continuity errors pick out details but most everyone else runs on emotions and vibes. The greatest conmen/women/foxes of history didn't con people through meticulous adherence to detail, and not even through oily charm or charisma. They conned people by telling them what they wanted to hear, by fitting the shape that their souls called for. It really was no different from being a sexual submissive.

She takes a breath and pats her cheeks, enhancing the red tint, darkening the eyes into greedy slits.

"Yeah, yeah, station detail one four eight six? You're ordered to redeploy to Whistler Station," she said over the mic. No elaboration or reasoning. "We're sending a train to move you so don't leave the building."

Red!

"When you say 'letting'," said Red. "Do you mean they are physically standing on the train tracks blocking us, do they have digital control over the trains, or do you mean they are not giving their blessing?"

Her tone of voice made it clear that this was an engineering question.

Breathless Dead

Mosiac!

The Slitted began with arrogance. A new wave of Plovers and chemfighters were dispatched, broadcasting with laser-flickers orders to stand down and face the judgement of the Skies. They were swatted from their Skies by the increasingly online ELF defense array, crewed and targeted by the galaxy's premier soldiers.

It progressed to wrath. The mighty Gravitation Projector of the Slitted was brought to bear, a huge glittering lens formed from an entire segment of the ship's armour detaching and configuring into a dish shape. Fueled with the wireless ambient power from the Slitted's remaining reactor sphere it began to concentrate force into microsingularities, extreme-range artillery blasts, micro black holes that wrench entire armour panels off the Plousios, warping metal into spaghetti streams. A direct hit lands in the centre of the ship's guts, obliterating hundreds of cubic tonnes of seawater and tearing a swathe through the metal.

Too late, it turned to fear. The Projector's fire stopped as power was rerouted to locomotion. The Slitted began to use that same gravitational energy to collect its sub-spheres and hurl them into the path of the Plousios. A barracks sphere splatted into the side of the Imperial Warship's massive ram spike, metal flowing like liquid as it merged into place, but it was poorly aimed and the troops did not have an easy boarding path from there. An arming sphere, bristling with torpedo launchers and ELF strikes, was placed directly in the Plousios' path and was bisected by the monomolecular edge on the ram, detonating in a cascade of secondary explosions. Finally the Slitted itself launched its Grav-Projector in one direction while overloading it with the force it would take to throw the Slitted in the other. Just barely, the Azura warship slides out of the path of the oncoming Plousios, the two ships tearing at each other with talons of ELF fire like the claws of wildcats.

But in dodging the Plousios, the Slitted had exposed itself to the warship's full broadside. The boarpedoes began to launch, melting charges activating in a hundred white-hot needle strikes as ancient boar-head rams crashed into the still-damaged Azura metal.

Ceron. Ceron. Ceron.

Ember!

Ceron. Ceron. Ceron.

Everywhere, the howl of wolves, all the more terrifying for being underwater.

The Slitted took on water when it crashed into the sea after Mosaic's throw. The Crystal Knight's servitors, like any living creature, could of course breathe underwater and still manned their posts, but they were not adapted to it. They had not had time to regrow their feathers into sleek water-piercing coats, to trim their hair, to switch to better balanced arms and armour. The Silver Divers slash amongst them like seals amongst chickens, darkening the water with clouds of black blood that solidifies into new schools of fish.

Everywhere, the sonar howls. Drowning out the ill-adapted enemy's voices, letting you know where everything is in relation to everything else. Once again you emerge to battle but this time as part of a pack, with your pack behind you, bringing the wrath of the sea to this city of the Sky.

Dolce!

Polytechnic lights ignite along the stasis coffin. It shivers and flows, oil-slick fog drifting aside, before hardening and resolving into a crystalline blue. With a cold rush of air and the fracturing of the world into its gridlike substructure, a specter pulls itself from the coffin and looks around.

It is both real and not, solid but broken, a shape holding itself together despite the interior being broken and faded. At first it is indistinct, but it quickly becomes clear that its shape is indistinct: you look upon a pilgrim of the Order of Hermes, huddled underneath a thick and shapeless yellow raincoat, crumpled wet plastic with a glassy face-mask. It - she - looks at the sign of the wall, then rummages in a nylon fanny pack, produces a little instant camera, and snaps a picture. It hurriedly looks over the photograph that the device spits out, hmming and clicking her tongue, muffled behind the mask, before spinning around on a hair cue to look at you.

"Oh! Lord Hades!" she cries, and reflexively takes a photograph. She hurriedly hides it and the camera behind her back and falls into a bow - though her reflective mask maintains eye contact. "I apologize! I was - I believe I learned something quite remarkable about - can I ask you some questions? There's so much I never got the chance to find out!"

When she fell she left half her mass and her silhouette in the space above her, bloodlessly torn, little cubes of energy one by one realizing they'd fallen behind and gently drifting back into place.

Dyssia!

It's amazing the knowledge you pick up. Fucked if you could cite any of your sources though. Some late night encyclopedia bender or other embedded all of this in your head.

Firstly, these crystals are properly named Elysium Crystals. The leading theory - advanced by philosophers and not scientists - is that they are a consequence of Hades' banishment from the material world. Upon death, while the body's earth and water elements takes on new shapes according to the will of Demeter, the fire and air sink into the ground that they might return to the underworld. Denied this, they crystallize in place and form clusters, tearing strange paradimensional portals in the regions around them as they seek the realm of Hades.

To strike a living being with an Elysium Crystal, the theory goes, doesn't so much duplicate them as it manifests their infernal ghost - the version of themselves they would become in the depths of Hades. Warriors are extremely susceptible to this; their deathless ghosts are primed to engage in endless battle and so lash out at anyone around them in wrath and confusion, especially if they awaken in the midst of the battlefield. Other duplicates have been known to flee, or cower, or offer bargains as their nature commands.

How could it help you? You do not think that violence is so deeply embedded in you that the first thing your ghost would do would be to attack yourself in a rage. You can't say the same for anyone else here. How could it hurt you? Well you could be shoved into an arena pit, like the one being prepared just to your left, and made to battle endless copies of your own screaming ghost for the entertainment of the Crystal Knight, which seems to be what she's preparing to do next. What specifically would happen if you duplicated yourself? You'll have to find that out the hard way.