Thanqol

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Some of the food, it must be said, is great. You host a big public gathering of any kind and at least a few people are going to stay up all night cooking just to flex on everyone else - that's as human as cooking itself. But the main event is the Expiration Date Potluck. People bring in any ingredients they have that are walking close to the expiration date line and a large outdoor kitchen full of volunteers figure out what they can make with it. Anything that isn't usable goes into feed buckets for children to throw to the pigs at the petting zoo.

The potluck has a reputation for being exotic. One of the most common ways foods go bad is if someone gets something experimental, outside of their normal cooking range, and then they either can't figure out how to use it or realize too late that they don't like it. It makes its way to the back of the cupboard and then waits there, accumulating months, passing from the mind. It's not anyone's fault, people just like avoiding their problems. That's why it's important to have the potluck; it's the short-circuit that stops the feeling from resolving into shame and regret.

"The commitment to recycling," Caster murmured. His voice came as a surprise, like a ghost's. "Is this land as poor as Adam said? That you have so little that every scrap must be saved and repurposed?"

Space Soldiers(wolfsujiyama & Thanqol)

I was thinking of Liu Xing as an outright android; underneath the skin is metal, wire and circuitry. In that context, species and age aren't directly relevant. Or did you mean that synthetics were more like clones and robots aren't on the table at all?

Space Soldiers(wolfsujiyama & Thanqol)

Edits made!

I swapped Ko Mao to a fighter pilot rather than power armour.

So when I'm talking about Goetic sorcery, I'm not talking about a fantasy wizard, I'm talking about IRL wizards. Goetia is a real magical tradition dating back to ancient prehistory, practiced by real figures like Alistair Crowley. Goetia is, among other practices, about defining aspects of your personality as daemons, meditating until you can imagine themselves separate from you, and then fighting and binding them. Think of it like cultivating a multiple personality disorder so that instead of being angry for no reason you can say, 'ah the daemon of Wrath is possessing me, I need to cast them out'.

Lu Xing is an AI whose brain architecture is built around doing that extremely quickly and easily. Her power can be thought of as being able to be in a dozen places at once, operating a dozen pieces of heavy machinery at the same time.

Return to Thellamie

Cair!

Man, this guy had some sass to him? When had that been allowed to happen?? She'd been operating under the impression that Civilia's divinity was sustained by feeding on the sense of humour of her followers. Maybe she had lost her appetite lately? Cair made a note to check it out[1].

[1] Cair has tried several times down the centuries to cheer up Civelia, all operating under this assumption regarding her eating habits. The process always goes similarly; Cair starts the worst comedy routine she can concoct, and the Goddess gives her a look communicating exactly how Not Amused she is. Cair then feels so self aware about her bad jokes that she stops doing them, then takes that as delighted confirmation that Civelia just ate her sense of humour, and happily departs after declaring mission accomplished.

The consequence, though, was that she had to double down. Not even the flicker of a smile or offense, just Pure Hero - this guy was flexing on her and it'd be rude to interrupt him. "How many maids were there? And what did they take? And any notes on their dresses? This sounds like an undercover job and I need to get the style right."

Breathless Dead

Around other Azura worlds and installations, there is protocol. There are rituals to perform, soldiers inspections and the clear movement of the security apparatus. They dressed it up, drowned in the light of glory, but the wise sages of the Endless Azure Skies always understood that the architecture of military splendor and authority was but a simpleton's vision of what Heaven should look like.

Birds approach the Plousios. 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them.

The flock orbits the outer atmosphere of the Skies, the mass of an entire star reconstituted into feathers and claws. Each one is a riot of powder blues touching almost on white, deepening with vivid stripes of green blues that set them apart from the Skies. Their wingspans are vast and they touch them into the ring-shaped formations of the Grav-Rail to accelerate themselves along the twisted gravitational ley-lines that interweave the Skies. The Plousious approaches the Skies as an ugly and ancient thing, a brutal warship from the time when strength was measured in rectangles. Its armour plating can survive direct impact with a planet, its construction so powerful that it can endure the depths of a star.

It unfolds like an origami crane beneath the claws of the Skies.

Every panel is ripped and torn from its place. Fusion welds are undone by laser beams that glitter from eye lenses. The hull is breached and fresh air rushes in, and so do the birds.

Ancient cisterns are cut open and erased. Old skeletons still in cursed embrace are boiled down to their molecular components. The Engine is disconnected from its housing with delicate claws and lifted gently above the ship. Clothes are torn from bodies, personal possessions are ripped apart, everything that made this proud and ancient ship what it was is destroyed utterly. No fires could stop this, no blade, no rage; the birds undo every strand of inorganic matter as surely as a tidal wave washes over a sandcastle.

And then they rebuild.

Everything in the Skies must be worthy of the Skies, and so they reweave the Plousios anew. No longer the squat, lumpen warship of inert metal, now it is a delicate and unbreakable thing of sweeping arches and white crystal, of ultratensile fibers and glittering feathers. They weave clothing around protesting bodies, dresses and gowns and vests inspired by the ones their guests had arrived with but better in ways that could not even be imagined. They inject the stellar virus that makes the Engine burn with blue light and place it like a diadem atop the ship's crown. They rebuild the skeletons, but arranged in harmonious glyphic shapes that they might not cause a single flicker of dissonance with the patterns of the Skies.

They rebuild it all blue.

Some visitors harbour delusions of individuality when approaching the Skies. The Publica dresses in red as a show of defiance, the colour of blood, suggesting that the glory of the Endless Azure Skies takes second place behind the demands of life and suffering. A futile defiance, made by those who do not comprehend the scope of this vision. The right to choose your own colours is stripped away, as an adult might take a stone from a child's mouth. You are all recast in blue, and are so much better for it.

Space Soldiers(wolfsujiyama & Thanqol)

There's an initial three - take a look, tell me what you think and if I'm in the right ballpark!

Space Soldiers(wolfsujiyama & Thanqol)

Soldier

Hider

Name: Lieutenant Ko Mao
Age: 23
Species: Human
Gender: Female
Home Planet: Mars
Position: Air Superiority
Bio: The poster girl of Mars' Invincible Army and daughter of a minister, Ko Mao is equal parts celebrity, supersoldier and nepotism hire. In this it is unquestionable that she embodies the ideals of the Invincibles; propaganda soldiers given the latest space superiority fighters and experimental technology, promising a new future of endless victories in incomparable style. Of course it needed to be her carrying the Martian banner forth on a new colony ship, of course she needed to have a leadership role, and the fact that her skillset currently revolves mostly around airborne dance routines is not germane to the politics of the position.

Ko Mao is an energetic, friendly girl but she's been born and raised as a propaganda soldier and never been exposed to perspectives outside of her very limited bubble. She is long overdue for an encounter with reality, but she's a quicker student than many people give her credit for.

Hider

Special Forces

Civilian

Hider

Name: Yin She
Age: 33
Species: Dragon Anthro
Gender: Hermaphrodite
Home Planet: Neptune
Position: Crime Lord
Bio: Loyalty is a far more enduring thing than laws. This is the secret the Yin family has always known; no matter what glittering words are written on treaties or legislation, at the end of the day people will have problems, and they will hold loyalty to the one who can solve those problems. And that's what Yin She does - she is a fixer, the hard touch that can reach across bureaucracy or waiting lists, the smiling face that makes an impersonal problem personal, and the sharp claws that strategically re-introduce violence into society at key points.

She holds a vast web of favours, but has not yet cashed in - in fact, she is living a downright humble and communitarian lifestyle right now, a real woman of the people, salt of the earth. But she has her eyes set on a real prize: She wants to acquire enough loyalty to bend the new colony to her will, that once the colony resolves into a city she can reign like a queen, beloved by all. For now that means playing the long game and putting her best face forwards, but her aim is always power.

Hider

Hider

Name: Liu Xing Special Engineering Department
Military Name: Michigan
Android Type: OT10
Age: 25
Species: Elf/Android
Gender: Hermaphrodite
Home Planet: Earth
Position: Hazardous Environment Engineering and Disaster Recovery - Deserter
Power and Drawback: Technogoetia

It has long been considered evident that designing artificial intelligence should not just be a replication of organic capabilities - it should be an expansion on them. When Liu Xing's mind was being uploaded, rather than placed into a single positronic brain, an attempt was made to apply her consciousness over multiple smaller, independent processing cores. This resulted in a fractured consciousness that bore more than a little resemblance to goetic sorcery.

Under goetia, a sorcerer can exorcise aspects of their own psyche - their anger, perhaps, or their compassion - and bind them as daemons under their command. Liu Xing was designed from the ground up with this kind of modular personality, able to delegate aspects of her intellect to specific bodies and roles. Her mind can split at maximum into fourteen parts - seven virtues and seven vices - though she will often assign multiple aspects to a single role in order to keep herself in check. For instance, if she was to build a shelter, she might assign Diligence, Greed and Envy to the task, each of them able to operate as an independent entity. This ability makes her a multi-tasker without peer, able to deploy from orbit as a one-girl engineering section, able to rapidly build fortifications, perform scientific research, deploy scouting drones, and many more tasks besides.

The drawback of this approach is readily apparent: when you delegate the vice of Wrath to solve a problem then it is going to be solved in a very specific way. Moreover, with Wrath elsewhere, her core personality would be unable to feel anger even if it was called for.

Bio: Liu Xing, fully composed, appears as a severe and thoughtful person. She has an engineer's mindset and a focus on the problems of dirt, stone and cubic tonnes of material moved and redistributed. Under the surface she has a mind and soul in chaos; wild passions, furious jealousies and romantic ideals. She loves beauty and the thrill of the unknown, and is deeply possessive and grasping.

She took the option to cash out of the special forces when presented with it. Her passion was always science and engineering, and she appreciated the opportunity to run her own lab in a civilian context.

Her full form/workshop/self is a massive construct, a mobile factory/research base. When she delegates she activates specialized android bodies designed to contain specific virtues or vices. Once a sub-mind is delegated it acts as an independent personality, able to hold its own opinions and argue its case, but it always thinks of itself and understands itself as an aspect of the greater collective.

Hider

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

Berserker looked over at the Labour Market.

Many people found themselves over time picking up roles in the community. Maybe someone had started cleaning an old bridge, or putting out water for the local cats, or maintaining mystical wards over a stream connected to the Underworld. First it was fun, and then it was a habit, but one day it was time to leave it all behind. So the task was written out on paper - sometimes an entire manual depending on the complexity - and placed in the Labour section of the Dumping Festival. Sometimes there were photographs, sometimes the person was on hand to walk the new apprentice through it, or sometimes you were told about a run down little farm in the hills and given a front door key and cryptic warning about 'the ghost'.

The Civil Servants were out in force in this section, nearly twenty of them, wearing their brilliantly embroidered blue and golden robes and hats, contemplating everything and asking questions. Their presence was at least a little bit intimidating, for they held the power of Conscription - the power to outright tell someone to perform a certain task, perhaps backed up with a geas or curse for the recalcitrant. Not all adventures were voluntary, and sometimes the material world came calling when a Civil Servant knocked on your door with a mission from the province. Sometimes things needed to be done despite no one being interested in them, sometimes people needed to be shaken out of harmful or stagnant routines, and sometimes the kind of utopian tyrant who climbs the ladder of power wants to make the world a better place wants to try something new and everyone has to go along with their experiment.

Generally, they wait until the end of the day and pick up things that have been overlooked and do assignments. Sometimes they have a vision and move sooner. And yes, the Civil Servants absolutely sometimes decide that certain people should be dating and instruct them to begin a relationship until at least next year's festival. It works out more often than you'd think - some people are much better at being in a relationship than starting a relationship.

Berserker watches all of this and considers. Then she shakes her head mutely at Katherine. Instead she walks decisively over to the stand of a young boy where the sign reads SCARECROW DUTY. In crude handwriting, the child has written 'please keep the birds off the lawn i want to be a horse racer instead'. He quails as Berserker, a giant of black steel, towers over him (inasmuch as she can tower over anybody), and takes the notice in her mailed fist.

She looks at a distant mountain, and taps her finger pensively against her armour. She does not know if she will have time, but she had long wanted to see if she could learn to keep swallows away.

Return to Thellamie

Cair!

Each of them has a different angle on the Princess Heron's disguise - Sayanastia's mythic disaffection, Injimo's barely restrained violence, Rurik's dutiful protocol, Tsane's brilliant inspiration. Cair, in her heart of hearts, thinks that they're all shit at it. They all treat Heron as something other than a person.

Because the Hero of Ages is a person. She has a deep sense of humour - sometimes expressed through joyfully oblivious compliance with stupid instructions, sometimes through insanely over-engineered solutions to basic problems, sometimes just through a general gremlin energy. Injimo might have spent her entire life locked in sword-duels with Heron, but the two of them didn't have a single secret handshake. Cair and Heron had four[1]. They actually vibed together, and she'd always thought the others were to blame for not making the attempt.

(1)

Secret Handshake #1: Continuously high five until someone comments on it, at which point do two more high fives and then stop with no explanation.[2]
Secret Handshake #2: Initiated when Heron offers a handshake while wearing the Liquid Mercury ring. Cair absorbs the ring into her alchemical body and recreates a copy on a different finger. Messages are encoded depending on which finger.
Secret Handshake #3: Initiated when Heron is in disguise as anyone, and Cair disguised as Heron. Cair-as-Heron allows Heron to detach her hand and then hurriedly re-attach it, ideally done after establishing a sight line where only a particularly annoying/credulous person can observe it, thus feeding all kinds of wild rumours and speculation.
Secret Handshake #4: Thumb to index finger, finger shimmy on withdraw.

[2]This lead to tragedy when accidentally initiated in the Bonedust Expanse

She was wearing the Heron disguise now. Pointless not to. Insane to try going without it - she'd just be stuck in non stop 'but thou must summon thy manager' loops. Would be nice if she had some backup on it, though, but nobody was talking to her right now.

"What do you think we should do about it?" she asked. Heron's sense of humour wasn't to smart mouth, quip or argue with people no matter how stuffy. Hers was an approach that required restraint and absolute deadpan severity. So she kept any hint of a smile out of her face and delivered her line with all the gravitas that her outfit - a dart board face mask surrounding her face like a halo, on top of a red and black striped dress-cape with another full sized wooden dartboard hanging over her chest, attached with mithryl links - would allow.

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

A wise man once said that his favourite thing was getting dumped.

When you've been dumped then you've got unlimited license to Be Dramatic. "How are you?" "AWFUL. I just got DUMPED." - and whoever you're talking to will have their face crumple in sympathy. You can Wallow. You can Grieve. You can stand up on stage and let your feelings out in a furious karaoke ballad and every one in the crowd will Get It. There are so many complicated, powerful feelings to work through in Getting Dumped - the twin enlightenments of 'I will become better' and 'fuck you'. It's liberation, and like all liberations it is both harsh and joyful.

So why save that feeling for a relationship ending? Human beings are inherently animistic, and that means that we form bonds with objects as readily as we do with people - and those bonds are no more guaranteed to be positive than our bonds with people. Perhaps rather than adapting to the clunk and ache of your car's gear shifting to third it has become a gradual annoyance that has made curse words part of your driving experience. Maybe you haven't read a book in six months because you're halfway through a turgid and uninspired volume that you feel like you need to finish first. Perhaps there's a little goat path through the lawn where people regularly cut across at a direct angle rather than following the trail of concrete. Patches develop over broken things naturally, but every year at the Dumping Festival it's time to rip those patches off and fix the underlying problems.

Part of it is the market; the huge open-air garage sale, the trash-and-treasure where people have bought out all of their material possessions that no longer spark joy. Sometimes it's racecars, or houses, or pet elephants that turned out to be more trouble than necessarily predicted. Sometimes it's more conceptual; photographs, mementos, trophies, the physical things that make memories. Another part of it is, of course, Breakup Bridge. It's a comfort to a lot of people coming off the back of a failed relationship to find themselves in a crowd of people in similar situations. Even if a relationship has been over for months, most former couples still find the time to make it official by leaving in different directions over the Bridge.

But for every moment of someone getting rid of something or someone, there's a moment of something or someone being picked up. There's no better dating mixer than the crowd outside Breakup Bridge - everyone is guaranteed single, and everyone has something in common. There's no better place to fall in love with a new object than seeing it on the mat in front of someone who cannot love it any more. Desire is often a transitory thing; for every love that can deepen into the ocean's eternity, there's one that will glance off still water like a skipping stone. So, every year everyone airs out all of their dusty rooms, picks up the broken vacuum cleaners they were holding onto, or forgotten pool pump, or old allan keys for furniture assembled in the distant past. They let light into the dark corners by placing everything that had grown dusty into the open. An exorcism of possession, beneath the light of a single sun.