Thanqol

Breathless Dead

Mosaic?

Mosaic?

Are you feeling okay?

Someone's usually there to ask you that. Someone usually cares. You're the centre of a web of light, hope and dreams and desire. You're seen and known and looked after. Even if all you have to give is a charming smirk, it's enough to make the shadows fall away.

But shadows don't work like that in this room. In the centre of those beautiful spotlights there is not a single one. What look like shadows at first are in fact painted; every crease and curl of hair has its colour perfectly controlled. No mess or darkness here in the centre of this lightbox. All that darkness falls on you instead as the Crystal Knight rises ascendant. All the light falls on her and her glittering sword. All the light except -

The flash of a blade. She reels back.

A princess stands before you. Haloed in golden hair with a blazing eye of gold. She wears regalia of an Empire long beloved and long buried, an angel summoned forth from the underworld. You know her name. It touches your name in three syllables... or perhaps four characters. You don't remember her properly. They say scent is the key to crossing the Lethe, but hers is not right...

She spares a moment to smile at you. Like a hero. Don't worry. She's got this.

And then there's nothing but the blaze of warfare. The Princess and the Knight in a storm of silver and thunder. That prism-sword slashes at her, tearing dimensional fragments of her away, but they resolve into nothing. It's like it can't figure out what to copy, amorphous and distorted fragments of girls, of wolves, of twisted basilisks, all amounting to nothing. She fights the Crystal Knight as an equal. She drives the Crystal Knight back.

But the Crystal Knight still has some sins left in her. With a hand raised to the rooftop - to your home - she summons her bodyguard. The Armatii champion swoops from ambush, from behind, talons extended and trailing blades like autumn leaves. The Princess is still smiling.

But how far can you trust that smile when it is unbound by your ribbons?

Ember!

When one hears of the ocean, one thinks of leviathans. Horrors. Crabs. The vast and monstrous menagerie set forth to darken the depths between stars. One thinks of the worst the ocean can produce.

But the ocean too has horses.

The creature that snuffles against your hand is cold and hard, long nose like reinforced starship plating. It has only simple black eyes but huge radar projection ears that allow it to sense the signal distortions of ELF strikes from worlds away. From its nuzzling snout comes a long, striped, black and white tongue that pokes and tickles. It tries to open your belt pouch with the frustration of a creature that can't understand why humanity insists on such tricks.

It is after your food.

Dozens of smaller ones, bubble sized against this one's equine bulk, float around it; eggs newly hatched and equally curious. They lick their little tongues at your face and scatter behind their mother when they realize they have sent you into a spiral spin. The adult voidhorse ignores them and continues its single-minded determination to get at your ration pack, holding itself steady and graceful in the deep.

Dyssia!

And just as you've gotten to know her, Composite starts to dissolve.

The Crystal Knight's sword was not even meant to keep her half as long; it was a weapon for a disorienting strike in battle, not this prolonged process of teamwork and shared destiny. She fades back into the cubic distortion that conjured her before you've even finished hauling yourself out of the pit. There's no time to say goodbye, no time to ask questions - it's unfair how quickly it ended.

You went through all that trouble to save her and now you'll never see her again. You don't even know if she was real. Transported here from some other place, a copy of your spirit cast like a shadow against the wall, a trick of magic and mind? There are no answers for what just happened. Does that cheapen it for you? Or do you think she's still out there somewhere, facing the same questions you are?

You can't contribute to the battle; you don't have a weapon, don't have your Rail; you'd be a detriment. A warrior races up to cover you with her shield and escort you to the exit, past the Crystal Knight's spotlight servitors. You're done here... unless you can think of something you could add to the lighting.

Dolce!

"This was an easier problem when I thought you were mad," sighed 20022, pulling the biscuits from the oven. He was helping prepare the meal too, accepting your direction as a simple matter of fact and courtesy. He could hardly lounge about when there was hard work to do. His contribution was rather uninspired, though. He had produced a dazzling variety of biscuits, some with cream, some with icing, all of which somehow tasted both dry and identical. He had prepared a fruit platter that somehow seemed to be 90% water by flavour. Finally he'd produced a bowl full of boiled sausages - and even those were trivial to make without actual meat, he'd somehow made them taste like they had no meat inside them. Utterly unobjectionable food.

"When you were mad I could assume you'd get bored and give up," 20022 went on, "but now I have to face the very real possibility that you'll succeed at this. And then - what? You'll have the loyalty of a warrior assassin without parallel? Would you mind my asking, what do you plan to do with -" he caught himself. "No, that's not my business. As a member of the Service you are entitled to collect assets."

There was a little hitch to how he said that. He knows your feelings about the Service but is rudely ignoring them. But he can't have it both ways - pretending that you are with the Service means pretending to extend you all the privileges of the position he's selected for you. Sometimes that will cut against him, like here where he considers himself as not actually having the authority to stop you from doing this, even though he'd be well within his rights to do so if you were actually just a civilian.

That's an interesting fact about 20022. He can be rude, but he can't be double rude.

"I apologize," he said. "No, my question is more specific, and it relates entirely to my own mission. Do you plan on using the assassin against Liquid Bronze? That would be... inconvenient, but I couldn't in fairness stop you. He'd likely survive the attempt and likely consider it excellent sport. If he survives it would make our mission much easier, but it's more risk than I am personally comfortable with."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

The tricks run out.

They were bound to eventually. They were disrespect, weaponized. But now that Solarel has at last drawn her blade you can see the anger that drove them.

The way she fights here, at the end, is different. It's restrained, cagey, slothful. It's poor form by professional standards. She moves slowly, each step coming gently down onto the ground, almost slow motion. She moves like a samurai, blade raised, patient. Patient, patient, patient, letting the shoulders of the Aeteline roll and shift. The change is profound, from an all-out blitz into a serene, zenlike anticipation.

And now that you have survived her onslaught you can at last understand.

She fights like this because this is the only way to fight. All of her tricks, all of her tactics, all of her techniques: all of these are punishes. She never wanted to win the fight that way, with those instant hard counters. But she had to. If she was fighting this slowly then someone fighting at normal speed would destroy her instantly. She fights this slowly because she is taking into account every possible trick and tactic. She fights this way to be safe from all of them.

She shifts her stance, adjusting back two steps. She's doing this to be safe in case you have a hidden secondary blade. It costs her position. She doesn't know that you don't have that weapon. She adjusts as though you do. She assumes infinite competence on your behalf and that constrains the possibility space. The second blade leaves play as a factor because she never takes that risk. A shift of posture takes her out of the line of a sniper round fired from the cockpit; barely any movement at all. An outside observer would miss it. She assumed you had that weapon and that skill. She performs the check and the deflection and then adjusts her stance forwards.

And you step back. Anything less would put you at risk of a surprise flamethrower all in. You're ninety five percent sure she doesn't have that... but she might. All being safe costs is time.

The battle slows to a crawl. Time starts to bleed away. The dance is slow. But that's just how long it takes. The last time she did this properly it took a whole day, start to finish.

How could she enjoy it after that? Fighting against casuals. Opponents who weren't ready. People who weren't speaking the same language as her. People who thought that expressing yourself in battle meant being free to do anything you wanted! No, the fight had grammar. It had logic. It had a common vocabulary and a baseline of understanding that needed to be reached before it could be used to truly say things. It's only here, on this level of vibrating subtlety, that she can truly speak. Everything louder than this was the shouting of children.

She shifts and lowers her blade aggressively, steps forwards. A risk - if you had seeded the area with land mines she would have been vulnerable. It gains her an edge - an almost imperceptible one, freeing her to move just a little bit faster. But it adds to the damage of your foot, putting her into the lead. In a move as subtle as a chessmaster moving a pawn you now see boldness and confidence, a subtle read: I do not think you would bring land mines to a battle in the clouds. With the possibility ruled out the fight can accelerate slightly, and it will continue to do so moment by moment until it reaches its crescendo.

But only if you have the patience to see it.

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

A priest rushes to the Crystal Knight's side. Her eyes are wild with fear and her lips are heavy with prophecy. She sees the truth in your words, the violent application of the Law of Hospitality to the structure of the Slitted. She comes with a warning.

But the Crystal Knight is too proud to listen.

There's something spectacular in that moment. You can see her draw her blade and seal her doom, exactly like a character from a story. And you see in that Zeus' final riddle of Empire.

How do we know the will of the Gods? Through history, through ritual, through philosophy.
Who teaches us history, ritual and philosophy? Priests, writers, scholars.
Who are priests, writers and scholars? But mortals.
Who can stand before the wrath of the Crystal Knight? No mortal.
Only the Gods.

You feel your aching bones crackle with a divine spark.

The air before you bends and warps. The Crystal Knight's Grav-Rail has conjured a microsingularity ahead of her lunge and she curves around it, bending impossibly, blade of light striking from angles no mortal mind or reflexes could be prepared for. Acceleration is her plaything, distance is at the mercy of her technology, direction is meaningless. In the strike of this blade is warfare as abstract and alien as the interplay of camouflage and guided munitions, as mud and wire, as titans of steel and cobalt. The next frontier of Mars' ever-expanding spiral of violence.

But for all her skill and power, she is a guest in your home. And she has drawn her blade.

Ember!

Though all the world breaks.

She breaks Beri. She shatters the stone. She rends the doors. She whirls through memories and gifts, upends the hearth, tears the trees, tramples gemstones so they break like glass. A storm passes through the town and rends rooftops into stone dust. Lifetimes of labour and love shattered into material for the dying Warsphere.

In the end, she tires of it first.

In a fit of fear you fling yourself out of the ship entirely and into the wine-dark void. She glances at you, then turns her back. This is the leash that binds the Armatii, the mechanism by which the Skies keep such perfect killers contained: they are territorial. Even as she destroyed your home, she was bound to hers and can not leave it. To follow you into the black would imply an emotional investment in your destruction she simply does not have; you were an intruder, and letting you depart having learned the error of your ways was no different from converting you into molluscs.

And so instead you float out for a moment in space, with no suit or protective equipment, exposed to the trackless void of Poseidon's great ocean in all its enormity. You have come close many times before, in dreams, but never like this. Never so tiny, and unprepared, and mortal in the face of shipwreck. The hungering depths and dominating currents of gravity and tide pull you on invisible channels and you experience the cosmos as the tiniest speck.

Alive.

Dyssia!

Tigers are big, you know? An avalanche of muscle and talon that kills with a single strike on the pounce, and these ones are horse-sized so that an Azura might get the feeling of a human being up against one. You don't win a sustained fight against a tiger, them killing you is an event and not a battle. You and the other Dyssia both understand this.

And so, too, do you both understand that the easiest way out is for one of you to die. There's a lot of meat on an Azura.

Would you go for that, Dyssia? And if it's between you and your copy, how would you decide which one is going under the talons? Or is that not even on the table?

Dolce!

It's not your fault.

This might take you a minute, so I want to put that up front first. You're not dealing with someone who has ever been thought of as a person before. You're dealing with someone who wore a person as a deployment mechanism. Compassion and sympathy weren't unexpected or things that they'd never experienced, they were just another way to get close.

They didn't know that at the time. They know that now, though. Now their blood is up, their mission is active, and they got a taste of the absolute alignment of Purpose that came with being in the process of killing the Architect. This assassin's creator-god built the Meaning of Life into her and she got a sip. The motivating force behind a mother bear protecting her cubs, a starving dog biting its master, a yobbo on stage in front of six thousand cheering people as they encourage him to do a full kegger - all these instincts and more have been re-wired to pass through a part of her brain dedicated to killing the Royal Architect. The most mentally destroyed methamphetamine addict would be downright reasonable in comparison.

When she leaps across the table, bone talons ripping out from under her robes, she does it for love - and Aphrodite is right behind her, surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke that gives you the smell of what that kind of love means. There's nothing she values higher than even heading in the direction of that experience, even if it means killing everyone on this ship for a maybe.

The phantasm dissolves inches away from you, bone claws barely tearing a scratch in your shirt collar.

"Well, that was a bust," said 20022 from the doorway, distastefully jiggling his teabag. "Shall I have the crew throw it out the airlock?"

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Establishing shot: Outdoors, night time. A deserted stretch of country highway. Well maintained, avenue lined with trees and blossoming mountain flowers. Standing stones are draped in late summer ivy. A large orange sign dominates the scene, illegible in the dark. Gradually light begins to fall upon the sign until it becomes readable.

WARNING
HITCHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPING FOXGIRLS

And then an 18 wheeled truck smashes through the sign as it lurches chaotically down the highway.

"Lao tian ye!" shrieked Katherine Isabelle Fluffybiscuits. She's the newly minted and minty-haired foxgirl, two huge fluffy tails providing her with the bulk to fill out the driver's seat her slender body wouldn't otherwise occupy. She twists around in her seat, putting her head out the window to stare behind her, causing the truck to lurch wildly. "I think I hit someone! Oh no! Oh no!"

She doesn't see anything, of course, except for the attack helicopters.

Leaning over and grabbing the steering wheel is Cyanis, the frosty cool and smoking hot white-and-black haired foxgirl. Her bright teal eyes are hidden behind her night-time sunglasses - because she's cool - and her three magnificent tails have an array of chains, wealth-attracting charms, and spiked leather collars decorating them. She isn't panicking a little bit because she's a confident three-tailed big sister foxgirl now, as you can tell from her leather jacket and other accessories. "It's okay, it's okay," she said, in a cool way, as she fought to keep the truck from flipping. "Listen. Calm down. Have you ever heard of affluenza?"

A helicopter fired a missile. It obliterated a nearby tree, causing both foxgirls to shriek and duck under the dashboard. This did more than anything else to stop the truck from spinning out of control, especially because they were no longer fighting against the truck's built in safety computer.

"Oh no! Missiles!" said Katherine for short - or Kat for shorter. "Those can turn into hittles at any second! What have we done to deserve this!?"

"We did allegedly steal one of Princess Qiu's Sunshards," Cyanis said in tones of gentle reminder.

"Doesn't she have like a thousand of those?" cried Kat. "And she just finished conquering Ys and taking that one too! So ten thousand!"

"Four," said a new voice. Calm. Patient. Professional. "She had four shards. And now she's back down to three. Which is all well and good because this way everyone can keep calling her the Threeshard Princess."

Both Kat and Cyanis looked around in shock and awe. There was something about the way that Actia, the four-tailed third foxgirl, used numbers that was deeply intimidating.

It wasn't that foxgirls were incapable of learning numbers - Actia was proof that they could. But foxgirls had a system of mathematics already: there was this, which was what they had in front of them, and there was next, which was the thing they didn't have yet but were about to. Between those the entire foxgirl experience could be adequately contained; it didn't matter how much money was in that wallet, only that it was next.

But... the conceptual framework to not only assign a value to that wallet, but to decide that it wasn't next because something with even more value was next? That was frightening. That was Burrower Magic. Learning to think that way changed a foxgirl from a carefree nature spirit into something like...

Actia wore a cold blue sleeveless suit, glittering with shifting lights. They moved like incorrect reflections, capturing the eye, captivating the mind, shifting to emphasize her otherwise unnoticeable curves. She wore a cold violet digital tattoo sequence around her eyes, glowing softly to illuminate her eyes with sparkling purple lights like she was always staring directly into a set of studio lights. She had a long, heavy metal Burrower Mask on a quickdraw holster by her hip, cold red nail polish on her claws, and a cold 3 on her mouth.

Four tails. It was natural that the other two were a little bit in awe of her. It was like meeting a celebrity. Or a crime boss. Enough of both to get them both into this scrape.

"Now, calm down," said Actia. "Think. We've got Princess Qiu's Sunshard in the back. We know how she's attuned it. That's all the weapon," the way she said 'weapon' made them both shiver, "we need. Katherine," Katherine Isabella Fluffybiscuits sat up straight when her name was called. "What is Princess Qiu known for?"

There was only one answer. That made her think it was a trick, but she couldn't figure it out. That was the power of a four tailed fox. "S-swords?" she blurted.

"Correct," said Actia. "Which means that, this close to her Sunshard, swords can defeat helicopters."

Both kitsune stared at her blankly.

"... and you, Katherine, know how to use a sword," finished Actia patiently.

"Me!?" squeaked Kat.

"Of course you," said Actia expansively. "You traveled with the anime Yue, did you not? And the wolfgirl Hyra? You watched her swordfight with Qiu herself, didn't you? That makes you a fully qualified swordmaster."

"But!" Squeaked Kat. "But I've never! I've never actually - I mean, I don't even have a sword -!!"

"I picked one up for you," said Actia, pushing a dragon-hilted katana into Kat's hands. "Now be a good girl and go up there and destroy some helicopters."

*

She clambered with trembling legs up out of the truck cabinet as it raced down the highway. She flopped, face first, down onto the roof and gasped for air, clutching her sword in one hand and both her tails in the others. She shrieked a little as the truck lurched around a corner, and shrieked a lot when another missile lived up to its name. But she was a good girl, and besides... if Yue could do it, then she could too!

On shaking legs, she stood up on the back of the truck. She gripped her sword in both hands, holding so tightly that she couldn't even unclench her fists when she noticed she hadn't taken the scabbard off yet. She had to do that with her teeth and her feet. But then she was ready! She'd seen Yue do this stupid technique a million times, she could do it!

"This!" she squeaked, going through the first cut.

"Then this!" she had no idea how she was doing. She had no idea what she was doing.

"Ending like this!" she cried. And in that moment she panicked and threw the sword as hard as she could.

But Actia was correct.

This close to a Sunshard, swords definitely beat helicopters.

Kat only opened her eyes in time to see the parachutes lighting up in the distance, illuminated by the burning wrecks of two neatly bisected helicopters.

The truck sped off towards safety.

*

You might have noticed from the earlier descriptions that all three foxgirls were relatively thin, definitely pampered, and generally physically and psychologically unprepared for the hard work of moving a glittering magical rock the size of a pool table out of the back of a truck. They originally propose a solution of opening one of the windows of their hideout, opening the back door of the truck, and then reversing as fast as they can so when the back of the truck brakes hard the Sunshard will go flying out through the back of the truck and neatly into the house. This does not work. They settle for flagging down a passing car who hadn't read the warning about hitchhikers, enchanting the driver, and sitting on the lawn drinking pink lemonade while she sweats and huffs and hauls the giant rock into the house.

Finally, all three foxgirls gather around it. Cyanis, eyes ablaze, fierce, greedy. Actia, eyes calm, restrained, poised. Katherine, eyes nervous, still wondering if Actia is going to be mad that she lost her sword.

A Sunshard.

"Hell yeah! Good work girls!" said Cyanis, punching the air. "We're going to get our next tails for sure!"
"A-already?!" said Kat in shock.
"Definitely!" said Cyanis. She'd been checking her butt constantly since they'd escaped. "A crime like this? That'll do it for sure! But maybe we have to finish selling it first..." her eyes narrowed. "Or... or maybe only one of us can get the credit."
"But it was a team effort!" squeaked Kat.
"Yeah," said Cyanis, tossing her hair to reveal her very menacing and cool big sister spiked collar. "It was. Time for another lesson in Fox Law, cutiebiscuit~"
"Stop that," said Actia. "We're not done working as a team yet."
Eyes filled with confusion and relief turned to stare at her.
"But... why not?" said Cyanis. "We've got the loot. We're done."
"Sunshards are treasures," agreed Actia slowly. "That's their greatest disguise. They're so magical, so valuable that nobody looks at them and thinks... what's next?"
Now she had their absolute attention.
"The Sunshards have another feature," said Actia. "They are secretly keys. Keys to the greatest buried treasure of the Ancient World. Specifically, they're the batteries that power the guardians of that treasure."
"So we need to steal all of the Sunshards to get this treasure?" said Cyanis dubiously. That was a lot of Next. "Even Qiu couldn't do that."
"No," said Actia, gently brushing the Sunshard. "There's another way. A way only available to a nine tailed fox."
"Um, do you really think Damn Fox will help us, because I think she's got her next fifty years booked out -" said Kat, but Actia cut her off.
"We don't need her," she said dismissively. "I count nine tails right here."
Cyanis and Kat both shivered. That... wasn't right. That wasn't how it worked. Two and three and four didn't just equal... nine, did they? There were hundreds of two and three tailed foxes, but almost nobody ever saw a nine tailed fox. They couldn't just... do nine tailed things, right?

Actia smirked. "You doubt," she drawled. "Isolated and divided, you don't understand the concept of the cartel, the danger of collective bargaining. Techniques driven from consciousness and hidden in Burrower vaults where they could be wielded from positions of secrecy. But I know their techniques, and I know more than that. I know how we can use this one Shard to corrupt all the others."

She laid out her Technomancer's instruments. Masks of steel, rectangles of glass, wires of rubber. Treasures enough to tempt the lesser foxes to snatch, terrors from so deep they couldn't bring themselves to.

"The guardians are too powerful for us to fight," said Actia. "But we can make them fight each other. We can corrupt their memories and their hearts, twist their purposes, bind them to mortals and have them do battle to protect their mortals. From this Sunshard we can twist the entire system's information flow, and in the absence of accurate information even heroes will fall to chaos and butchery. And then..." she smiled wider, showing her fangs. "And then, rather than the energy of those guardians returning to their native Sunshard, we will collect them all here, in this one. This will give us the power to grant wishes, the power to breach the lowest level of the vault and claim the greatest treasure of the world for ourselves."

"A... a heist like that..." said Cyanis, trying to work herself up for it. It was hard. This felt wrong.
"A heist like this?" said Actia, examining her nails. "Why, I think it's not much to say that we could all be nine tailed by the end of it. It's hardly more to say we could demote every other fox back down to two, even Damn Fox, if we felt like it. Why steal casino chips when you can conduct a leveraged buyout?"

"Do... we really have to kill them?" said Kat in a small voice.
"They'll kill each other," said Actia. "There's no way that's our fault."
"But we're corrupting them!" Kat protested. "We're making them do it!"
"That's no different to an ordinary fox enchantment," said Actia. "Like we did with that lady earlier who pulled this thing in here. If she really didn't want to do it she wouldn't have. We're just... loosening them up."
"And besides," said Cyanis, trying to rationalize it. "They're not people, right?"
"Correct," said Actia. "They're guardian ghosts, bound in eternal stasis, unable to return to the underworld or on to the next life. Either they'd be delighted to be set free, in which case we're practically rescuing them, or they don't care either way because they're already dead and ghosts."

She held up a hand. "But if it makes you feel any better, I promise we won't hurt a single living person," she smiled. "We'll claim some of the guardians for ourselves, and we'll use our mystic seals to bind them all so they can only fight each other. What could be fairer than that? It'll only be ghosts fighting, and they're barely more than robots anyway."

Kat couldn't argue with that logic. Actia really had thought of everything, and... you know, how bad could it be to have ghosts fight? Yue had met a ghost dress and all it had wanted to do was fight so... you know... maybe... give her five minutes to think!

But she didn't have five minutes. Actia was already laying out the circuit wire and the microchips and the scales and balances and drawing the glyphs and codes onto the surface of the Sunshard in cold black. It stained the warm glow, pinks and teals radiating haphazardly through the ant tracks of sigils and glyphs. And then they were all holding hands around the twisted artifact, feeling energy rise and crackle along their tails.

Cyanis went first, straining against her own leash. She poured forth into the Shard her hunger - the twisting, relentless, predatory, snapping of jaws. What's next? What's next? Her curse, her corruption, soaked insatiability into the fabric of the guardians.

And then Kat felt Actia's stare turn onto her. She flinched, and when she looked at the Sunshard she flinched again. This... wasn't right. Yue wouldn't like this. But -

"Are you not brave enough?" asked Actia.
"I'm -" she squeaked.
"Are you not clever enough?" asked Actia, more darkly.
"It's all so fast -" she said.
"Ah," said Actia. "You're not quick witted enough." She wasn't being mean, just... disappointed. Like she was talking to a dog. "It's okay. I'll explain it all again from the beginning, so you can keep up this time -"
"No!" cried Katherine. "I can do it! I can -"

She didn't know what to do. She didn't know how to be as hungry as Cyanis. She was a house fox! She'd always had breakfast and, and, - she even had fluffybiscuits in her name! Actia was right, she was basically a dog, a slow witted, well fed puppygirl who couldn't even figure out how to be mean enough to do a simple ghost curse!

So she screwed up her face and her courage and sent sloth instead. Two of the nine would just... sleep. They didn't have to fight. They'd just never show up. Which they were already basically doing. That was enough from her, right? She only had two tails after all, she should watch Actia and see what she could learn from her. It was her turn next, and her chance to see how a four tailed fox dealt with things!

Actia walked up to the Sunshard and poured the most horrible emotion Katherine had ever seen into it. Like it was nothing. Like she was opening up a bottle and letting something already packaged and ready out. It was apathy. It was despair. It was cruelty. It was smug satisfaction. It was... it was the feeling of the world burning down all around you and being amused and a little bored. It was the spite of having lit the spark and the indolence of not sticking around to watch the fire. It was chaos.

"No!" said Katherine. "You can't -"
But Actia turned to her and her eyes were the same blank professionalism of a colon followed by a three, the stare of someone who has genuinely never done anything wrong in her entire life, the blamelessness of a cat - but of course, foxes weren't cats, were they? Foxes had to do better! Vixies had to be good girls, they couldn't just be...

The Sunshard erupted in twisted light and that was all she saw.

CHAPTER ONE:
KATHERINE ISABELLA FLUFFYBISCUITS DOOMS THE PLANET

Huntresses of Hybrasil

There's a beat right before you're finished talking, when you're fully into the flow of things, that the platform beneath your feet glows white hot.

Solarel hangs on the bottom of the platform, maximally charged energy round pressed against the metal superstructure. She fires clean through the flying metal superstructure, the pinpoint precise strike ripping into the Emberlight from below. The thruster in the left foot is torn to pieces, vulnerable steering components rendered into molten slag.

The damage is limited; a lot of power was lost when shooting through the platform. But this fight was already going to be hard, and now Solarel has taken first blood. And in that surprise attack you see too late the truth, your failure to understand.

This was not a cold execution, a calculating dispatch - if she wanted to do that she wouldn't have waited this long to hear you out. This was not the act of a master of war out to prove her superiority; if that was the case she wouldn't have attacked you before you finished talking. That would have been a lot of pride to sacrifice for such a marginal advantage. No, she aimed that shot to maximize her tactical advantage, it was the most power applied at the point of your least preparedness. And you see there your failure to comprehend the alien, the projection of your own standards on someone who does not share your culture, your history, your assumptions. All the way down to your belief that you have the right to speak to the outsider on the field of battle.

Solarel wants to fight.

Not because she doesn't care about her opponents. Not because she doesn't understand that they are more than this. She understands they are more - but she isn't. This is all she is. This is all she has. These moments of battle are everything to her. You are Isabelle Lorenzo, heir to a vast family fortune, player of political games, finder of love, something more than just your mech. You have a life. You have a story. You have a future.

Solarel does not. This moment right here is her final state. Her ultimate form. The peak of her entire life. You tell her that people are worth more than that; she knows. She can see them in the distance, shining like stars. Even Mirror, weaving beautiful dresses, wrapping herself in such beauty that her clothing becomes as awe inspiring as a God - even Mirror is beyond her. She has no skills, no hobbies, no motivation, no home, no hope, no future. Nothing but this, this, this. To wear the armour. To be a God. To fight using every scrap of skill, understanding, strategy and tactical awareness available to her. Her full self, made manifest at last.

And you disrespect her. You come into her house, with your life, with your dreams, with your self-righteous reminder that the people she fought had other shit going on - that you're only playing at this. That your heart and soul is elsewhere. That all this pride shit mattered so much to you that you sacrificed the tactical initiative. Now it's her turn. Now you're in her world. Now she's going to destroy you and let you go crying back into the loving embrace of your girlfriend, your family and your stupendous wealth.

And then she'll go onto her battle with the only other person who takes this as seriously as she does. The only person who has ever given her full, undivided attention. To the Mirror who reflected the love that Solarel put into every shot, every strike, every technique. This battle is her heart.

[Fight 8
Take a condition.
Solarel takes a superior position]

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Pink!

She tries to steady herself. Raises her hand and tries to hold it level. It's not right. It's wobbling and she needs to fix it. Needs to...

She needs scaffolding to start with. Lines of blueprints click into place, the bones of function - the frame of the paper. This is what she's working with, the raw materials of force and direction. Dispensed with in a moment, now she could think about how to conceal that function. False windows, twisted golden wire around the iron superstructure, golden roses, yellow roses, thickets of them amidst the blackberries. Thorns and thorns and - blackberries were red, secretly. Most blacks weren't black at all, they just buried their colours in their shadows. Take out the colours and they'd be as flat as vantablack.

Thorns and thorns and thorns, keeping the princess imprisoned. Pricked by a spinning wheel, a cursed creative engine. Sweet scents, sweet tastes, artistry in captivity. Have you seen a wall-crawling vine sprout? They release new shoots like springs, curling like pigs tails, unless they've found a branch or trellis and their spirals condense into strangulation. Neodarwinism is discredited, complexity is the truth that biological evolution is not a blind watchmaker but the organic discovery and rediscovery of certain deep mathematical constants. Civilizations too move between stable equilibrium. The princess was a stable equilibrium and her reign was beautiful, her slumber was stable too and the people got on without her...

But her hand is still not steady. She frowns, concerned.

"The axial tilt of the station is misaligned," said Pink. "I need more resources to fix it."

Orange!

[Traffic Analysis 0/1 2+3 5]

She used to like scanning the radio. It was one of the entertainment sources she always had access to in space. She liked the process of scanning, flicking between different channels, listening to enough to identify if it was music or commercial or headline and then flicking off again. She both loved and hated the Christian stations because they had a way better ratio of music to bullshit than commercial stations, but it usually took a while of listening to twig that all of these songs had a common theme and they weren't ever going to move off that theme. Brown didn't care what she listened to, but Orange wanted the full experience and was prepared to channel hop until she built it up.

November!

It's going to be Some Bullshit.

She feels that across her entire network, it's the tension across every colour. The environment isn't controlled and there are too many unobserved agents. Too many unaligned people with too much power. A sense that luck only intervenes against her. Her prediction is this: At any second something unbelievably stupid, terrible, mighty or all three is going to happen and she's going to be up all night dealing with it and up all night tomorrow thinking about how she might have dealt with it better.

The longer things have gone without errors the more fatalistic her mindset has become. By this point it'd be a relief more than anything to know what she's dealing with.

Spooky!

She's quiet for a long moment in the station after Chaka leaves. Some of the motion sensor lights dim.

Then she finally gives her comeback to the empty station.

"I'm twenty five," she said.

Not enough of a kid to think that comeback wouldn't get her deservedly laughed at. Not enough of an adult to not want to say it.

She took the case.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Spooky!

"It's not such a mystery," said Spooky. "It's just that you being a hero doesn't make us care about you less. It probably makes us care more."

She looked at Chaka and gave a long, slow blink.

"And yeah," she said. "What's the saying? AI is coming for your job. I wasn't joking about the revolution thing."

Crisis Management!

Orange is seconded to phone calls, working through Knightly's organization and co-ordinating the frame job. This isn't like the earlier fakery which just needed to deceive for long enough for effect; this needs to stand up to an investigation. Not the sort of thing she could do without the assistance of an existing conspiracy already sworn to secrecy.

The most important thing she needs is to remove Mycroft's alibi. It's no good framing her if there's recorded text and video of her elsewhere doing something different. For the critical window of decision making she needs to be off the grid so that November can replace her. There are two options she suggests if there's nothing more convenient.

One is for someone to get into into a Quiet Room argument with her, the kind of thing where two public servants adjourn into a soundless glass cubicle to have a Frank and Fearless discussion of agency direction, the kind of thing that is not tracked or monitored as a matter of policy. That gives her a very limited window of operation but probably enough to work with. Option two is to get her in transit - November can jam her calls for the duration of the ride and get the entire thing done before she arrives. Ultimately though, raw opportunism is king. Lock her in the bathroom if it comes to that.

Brown!

They'll have to bring in construction equipment to dig her out.

Pink!

"I'm nervous," Pink said. "But excited. I want to... no, I'll see how it feels first and talk about it afterwards. Thank you again. I -"

She laughed, surprised again by herself. "I was going to ask you not to tell my dad! God, why's that where my mind's going? That's an old routine, too, I think that's from Green. Did she expect me to do something like this? I'm overthinking it again. Thank you for everything you've done today. I'm really curious about the servers, can I just add hardware under these conditions? What would that even mean - ah fuck," she takes the cable and plugs it in. "I was waiting for you to do it and forgot it was -" she trails off, suddenly paying rapt attention, trying to notice what was changing and how.

Breathless Dead

Mosaic!

You arrive on the bridge of the Slitted.

Perhaps it is a joke of the Gods that your very own little cottage hangs upside down in the ceiling here, your own fireplace caught in metal treacle on its flight towards the throne of the Crystal Knight.

The light is wrong. Everything here was meant to be controlled, every reflection accounted for, every officer and engineer gene-tailored to compliment the effect. Everything was meant to surround the Crystal Knight's throne and make her seem as radiant and divine as the Endless Azure Skies themselves. It's not surprising they have not fixed it - what's surprising is how hard they're trying. Even in the midst of a boarding action, even with the ship damaged and flooded, this is where the bulk of the engineering core is, trying to correct the lights that halo the Crystal Knight.

They've almost got it. Shadow only falls on half of her face, like a scab falling to reveal a still-bleeding wound. Beauty is the first priority of the Skies. Beauty even above life. Beauty even above death.

She hisses as though beauty and hate were compatible.

Ember!

Mosaic has made her way. The Wolves have engaged the Armatii. But you have been separated from the pack and face one of these terrors alone.

Perhaps, on another day, in another world, the Armatii could be beautiful, even seductive. Most creatures have some sort of sensuality to them somewhere. You cannot even imagine it from where you stand here. This creature is too tall, movements less like a woman and more like a piece of malfunctioning construction equipment. Her skirt swings and slashes, the edges bladed so that she might dismember a phalanx with a pirouette. She wields her blades not like swords but like chopsticks, reaching down to impale a lesser warrior and then flick her away like imperfect sashimi. Something to the way she hunches makes her feel like a warrior statue, awoken to life and bending double to dispatch intruders. Something about that stirs a memory of someone who fought with kindness instead of this sociopathic cruelty.

There's no victory here for you alone. This is a monster from a horror tale, a trail of fish and rosepetals in her bloody wake. She clacks her blades together and pursues you as though born to it.

Dyssia!

While I am going to present the following information in a direct and straightforwards way, please understand that the context in which it is being given involves periodic interruptions of blinding light, choking gas, bone-rattling explosions and a general feeling like open wounds exposed to seawater except applied all over your body. Each interruption will be marked with a <3 rather than a detailed description of the hacking, coughing and violence implied by this.

"That's actually a common misconception. All of these rounds <3 bear the mark of the Intergalactic Clearing House, a logistical hub at the centre of the <3 Endless Azure Skies <3. The Clearing House is a planet sized warehouse for every exotic component, material, or fundamental resource <3 imaginable. Any Azura Citizen may request a delivery from the <3 Clearing House but as the minimum order size is one entire macrocarrier full of the requested resource, a single delivery of most resources can keep a planet stocked for generations <3. The local <3 solid projectile store is a partially buried macrocarrier palette that is mined <3 by local servitors, the unique <3 texture and flavour is due to sea water contamination and the <3 fifty year old bunker fire that <3 has partially curdled the admixture <3 <3 rendering it <3 less effective."

It's not really possible to die from Solid Projectile gas, but it can make you wish you could. By this point in the discussion you're both lying breathless on the arena sand, half-blind and half-death like you've just had the worst heavy metal concert experience it's possible to possess.

But you're not dead. You haven't killed each other.

So that's when they send in the tigers.

Dolce!

"Did you recover the ship from the Architect's station too?" asked the Assassin, face invisible beneath the hood. There was some sort of darkness emitter the Hermetics used; those shadows would stand up to a direct spotlight. "Don't worry about my mental state, I'm fine -" she reached for the tea, and knocked it off the table. She giggled. "Whoops!"

Artemis clicks her stopwatch.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

Oh no a crowd of people, that's almost as bad as social awkwardness, maybe she'll just hide in the corner of the hospital cafeteria.

Pink!

"That," said Pink. "Sounds perfect."

She was glad to not have to run this by the others; practically any of them would block it for any number of reasons. But she's always had a fascination with moving her mind in weird ways, stories about the alien and the broken. She was scared, and secondhand scared from all of her alternate opinions... but she wanted to have this experience from the inside, even if only once.

Spooky!

"My answer involves total political revolution so yeah, I get if you don't buy it in the short term," said Spooky. "But I'm not here about that. I'm here to tell you to get your shit together. Your exit plan involved you dying or getting life imprisonment, alone and drunk on an pile of guns, and now you say you're going back to the same thing. In this environment? With this amount of heat? How many of your girls would you have protected tomorrow if I didn't come along and pull you down off the ledge?"

Spooky made a face, looked away. "Listen, dummy. You, personally, are burned, right down to your fists and talons. They're all you've got now. Use them, and get someone else to pick up the hardware side of things."

Red!

"Hey, Knightly," said Red. "Listen, buddy, I've got a way to do some good short term and long term at the same time."

Very limited information control here, Knightly needs to know. "We followed up on Mycroft like we promised and flipped her superior. She doesn't know it yet, but she's vulnerable. Unrelatedly, we've got a massive furry convention here trying to get home before they become a Political Incident. So we're going to jack the trains to make that happen, last minute emergency rescheduling to central stations, it'll get everyone home safe but it'll make a lot of cops apocalyptically mad. Now, this'll get me omega-fired if I let it play out - but like I said, Mycroft is vulnerable, and I reckon I can swing it so that she takes the fall for this act of civic heroism. You know her modus operandi of showing up and seizing control over emergency situations and fucking up the response? I can make it seem like she's doing that again, but this time nobody's going to back her politically and she'll be out of your hair for good."

"I need your help to make this stick, though," finished Red. "I need you to back my impersonation play from the other end and help me make sure the real Mycroft is in between alibis for the critical window."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Red!

"You know, we're throwing away an extremely valuable asset for this?" said Cyan. "This is a real identity. Real documents. It's one of the few things standing between us and the consequences of our actions."
"Yeah," said Red.
"And when you think about it, we're possibly immortal," said Cyan. "Which means that a life sentence for us means more total years of prison than that old lady over there. From a utilitarian perspective -"
"No, stop it," said White. "Utilitarianism is the philosophy of incurious simpletons, and your status as a utility monster is proof of the philosophy's failures."
"Urgh, fine," said Cyan. "Maybe we don't pin it on the old lady. Maybe we pin it on Mycroft."
Red sat up. "Wait, what?"
"Of course!" said Cyan. "We're not going to get anything more from her, she's a burned asset. But she doesn't know she's burned yet. Like Dudekov said, all the information only flows one way. And we've also got Knightly who is both our own close personal friend and sponsor, who owes us a favour, and would like to see her apocalyptically ejected from his organization. So fuck her, you know? Let me get out the design tools and we'll have her show up and start giving orders like she did the last time. Add her clout to ours."
"Fuck. Yeah, alright," said White.
"... I'll call Knightly," said Red.

Pink!

Pink smiled. The movement was so easy and frictionless that she smiled wider even though it didn't fit the mood. "That's - sorry," she covered her mouth with her hand while she reset. "- sorry, yeah, that's another brilliant idea for Yellow. But it's actually really useful that's so unhelpful because it shows me that I want to go in the polar opposite direction."

"No, I don't want to keep breaking myself down into smaller and smaller fragments. I," she cringed a bit at this, "want to see what I'm like as a united entity. And - oh gosh, that felt weird to say. That's the one thing I'm never supposed to want! We've been fucking around with cabling a bit and even though we only went to three one time, and then it was to talk to Goat who's like the example of what happens if we cable ourselves fully... I don't want to see the little picture in ever more detail. I want to see bigger things. I want to look in the other direction, to see the gods and angels and where I fit in amongst them."

She smiled again, too wide, and held up her hands. "But like I said, that's ultra seriously mega unsafe for me personally and I shouldn't ever do it. But maybe there's something... like that?"

Black!

She goes down to visit Chaka, by this point on the lines around the station. She is curious.

"Do you mind if I ask, what do you plan to do after this is done?" she said. She let the question hang open-ended, not volunteering anything else until the tone is set.

Brown!

Oh god. Why did he wake up first? Junta you bastard! Fuck, why didn't she think of this? Is she supposed to tell him that she's going to quit? Like, now, while he's still in hospital? Or did Orange bargain herself straight to coup? She doesn't know, nobody tells her anything. This is too awkward to deal with, she's just going to fucking bounce and hope that he's too weak to follow.