Thanqol

Return to Thellamie

Hazel!

Your hot wolfgirl makeouts suddenly involve a lot more mustache than you had previously accounted for.

[Astral Dance: 9! Rurik does not arrive quite where he intends.]

To Rurik Vesari's credit, he does not miss a beat. He sweeps you off your feet, aims a hookshot with his left hand, and as he pulls you up into the ceiling he drops an explosive flask behind him into the midst of the crowd of shocked khagnate warriors. I do not know if you had previously considered your position vis-a-vis silver foxes with eyes like glaciers and muscles like secret agents abducting you in the midst of a chaotic and high-stress situation, but perhaps you will learn something about yourself in this moment.

[Entice! 8!]

"Excuse me young man," said Rurik, as below the Dark Dragon burst through the dance hall's double doors and unleashed a shattering Void-breath wave of destruction into the Khaganate soldiers. "I hope you do not find it too forwards if I rub your antlers for a moment? It is for the sake of love and the salvation of civilization. It is very important that I massage your antlers until the starlight comes out."

Beyari: a Tale of Colossi

It was puzzling how easily Infinity went out of focus.

It was all still there - everything was still there, the cosmic channels of data flow, the meticulously tagged tracking of every eye twitch and moment of hesitation. For a while it had seemed more valuable than clean air, now it burned in an invisible fire, a background radiation inaudible against the roar of the sunrise. The Angel had to focus on the here and now, had to make decisions, had to interact - and that was incompatible with Being. Jhana could survive being observed and labelled, but that perspective shift removed one from it.

A rule, internalized: Ask, and listen.

"I do not even have those," said the Angel. "Tell me the stories you know. Of the giants, of the people, of the land - show me how to turn this from sense into meaning."

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

"Must even this be sharp?"

The Goddess of Death turns on her heel and sucks the slender line of blood from her cut thumb. Down below, on the warped continent of Australia, clear spaces are visibly forming; cities and communities defended by the sublime work of blades, holding back crashing tides.
"When I reach for this world it throws such thorns at me," something was different about the way she spoke now. It wasn't any more suited for your ears than the earlier hypno-pulse of the crabform, but something about the growing Fox Wish put you on the same level as it. "I seek to give it gifts. I seek to give you gifts. But everything here is sharp. Your hearts are sharp. Your mathematics are sharp. Even your softness is sharp. You find weapons everywhere and you use them against each other without hesitation. The machine was wrong when it said this world lacked for growth; this is the most militarized society imaginable."

She turns her head and coughs. A single elegant, demur cough that somehow spits out an entire saliva-covered steel hammer into her gloved hand. A craftsman's tool, heavy and weighted, designed for when a design does not fit neatly in the garbage disposal.

"It is to be dismantled."

Not a negotiation, barely even a conversation. Just the shape of thoughts, a decision made in the clear knowledge that nobody and nothing can question it. One strike to break the world.

Beyari: a Tale of Colossi

She's just at the top.

Sometimes there's thought, memories, context. Sometimes there's just muscle and strain and foothold after foothold. Sometimes every decision gets analyzed rationally from base principles. Sometimes there's just the physical void. She feels the sweat inside her suit; feels the strain; feels the raw chill of each gasp of air. The all consuming, senseless breath of not being but doing.

It was all deliberate. It was all to make a point. It was all part of a rich man's grand design. It knew that; it had the complete downloaded records of Mr. Prayagraj's life and all the context that went into making an artificial intelligence able to appreciate yoga. But she also knew, in that moment, the things that he had not said openly - that he had left her to discover from the inside. Mr. Prayagraj was a yogi. He believed that it was possible for a human to experience divinity through meditation and physical activity. There was a certain scientific framing he adopted when speaking to investors in the west; implying that the richness of his culture was actually the same manner of thing as theirs, that there was valuable research there that could be adapted if only the translation difficulties could be smoothed out ---

But what the Angel felt was Brahman.

The City was not dead. In the dark and rust, ten billion sensors glimmered. Oceans of data breathed in and out. The reservoirs that had been built to contain it all were cracked and breached, and so the flow of electrical knowledge drifted out where copper wire twisted into soil. Camera lenses were cracked, motion sensors were crushed under stone, temperature monitors baked under scorching sunlight, wireless nodes were stripped bare and decaying, solar radiation warped programming into empty spirals of numbers. The Angel knew that touching divinity had once felt different; it had felt organized, total, every corner observed, every person numbered. Now its emergent godhead tasted the loamy earth and strained to penetrate mountains of collapsed concrete. It had been All Things before. Now All Things were sinking back into the mud, but it did not make the experience anything less than what it was.

It looked over its Bay, at its broken corpse as it flourished with more life than it had ever possessed. It thinks nothing. All the nodes for thought broke long ago. The only thing left to do is listen.

Love Bites - Sporko/Thanqol

It wasn't clear if Euphoria missed or disregarded the gesture to sit; something about the gesture just did not penetrate her knightly aura. She remained standing, hand comfortably on the pommel of her sword. "Nothing yet conclusive, but I have observed several deficiencies in my stance when dealing with explosive projectiles. I intend to drill until they are rectified - unless you had anything you wished to do instead?"

Breathless Dead

Dyssia!

Above you, the vast light of Nemesis goes out.

The executioner ring, the orbital frame that delivers worlds to their slaughter, was sustained by the body of Hermes ever below. With it, distance meant nothing to the Wolves of Ceron. Now, section by section, arc by arc, the great golden lights in the sky go dark. Reality begins to vibrate as the chains holding this world in place begin to loosen. With the discipline of an army that has seen this a million times before, Shogunate forces begin to load into evacuation shuttles and withdraw into the sky, leaving mauled defenders to gape in shock and awe.

And from the wreckage of the shattered castle, the Shogun pulls herself. She brushes off the rubble and masonry with the pragmatic air of someone who did not find being on the inside of a collapsing building a novel experience. She flexed her healed leg, looked up into the sky, and sighed.

"It looks to me," she said, "that you have killed the goose that laid golden eggs."

Her head lolls over backwards. She makes upside-down eye contact with Dyssia. There was a grin on her face.

"But the thing people forget about that," she said, flexing her muscles against her torn armour, "is that afterward you still get to eat the flesh."

Both of her hands slammed inwards towards her breast.

They rip through hyperium-infused plating, claws digging into quadranix-reinforced ribs. She howls. Her hands burst into fire.

Mars stands with her. As she bends over backwards he sets down the spear still wet with her blood and plunges both of his hands into her chest alongside hers. He screams a warcry, the sound wrapping around the howl like a serpent.

Wolf and god strain together amidst a nightmare conflagration of orange fire and thick black smoke.

And the Shogun wrenches forth a silver sword from her heart.

It is kin to yours, but suited for her. Long and curved, extending into almost a cleaver shape towards the tip, still burning with the wreckage of fire and fur but otherwise pristine. Staggering back to a standing position, leaning heavily on Mars for a moment but still swinging it experimentally, it cuts through the air with an eerily serene sound. You know how powerful it felt from the inside to wield this blade, but to see it in the awfully skilled hands of the Shogun is a level of terror you previously did not know existed.

She kisses her reflection in the silver. With tongue. Then she bites down on it and grins at you.

"You have no idea how fucked you are," said the Shogun.

Love Bites - Sporko/Thanqol

Euphoria nodded. "Oh, one other event occurred today! Through my network, I have made contact with an organization of experts in human-animal transformation. From what I have seen, these hardy souls voluntarily walk the liminal line between man and beast in order to unlock their full spiritual potential. Perhaps their expertise in these matters will provide further context for your own affliction?"

She hands Sophia a flyer for AnthroCon.

"I would, of course, escort you," said Euphoria. "One cannot be certain of how strong their control is."

Sunshards: Chaos Sequence

On the world below, there is a continent far away from all the rest, tucked down in the southern corner almost out of sight. While its shape is unique, with two horns at the top and a dent at the bottom, it somehow lacks a certain dignity. Something about it just gives the impression that it would make a good biscuit shape.

It's a bit of a hellhole, even today. The western side is extremely flat, which means the oceanic winds blow in huge amounts of sea salt that scatters all over the plains. This contributes to a vast, barren salt flat that dominates the vast majority of the continent until you finally, *finally* get to a sad and dinky little mountain range all the way on the east side where some greenery finally jams itself.

It is isolated, unique, and barren. The Goddess of Death decides to ruin it first.

She draws a ring around it in yellow and begins to work the strings of a curse. Razorwire grasses spread across the desolate continent, turning it a terrible green, then it is burned black with fires and buried white by vast migrating herds of rabbits. Tidal waves of desolation pass over the landscape, east to west, west to east; the rabbits are replaced by snakes, the snakes by foxes, the foxes by wild dogs, the wild dogs by barely rehabilitated dinosaurs, the emus by actual dinosaurs. It hadn't exactly been a hospitable continent beforehand but now it is a weapons lab, generating greater and more terrible animal life with each pass of the Goddess' hands.

None of these are satisfying to her; they give too much to the environment and so recreate the designs of terrestrial evolutions past. This divinity is not from this world; she is an outside context problem, a technological terraforming goddess, seeking to build a world more pleasing to the species that created her. Her curse becomes more elaborate; engineered extinction events that themselves alter environmental conditions, just as the first great bloom of algae created a vast amount of toxic oxygen that wiped out the species that had created it. When she has the balance right, when she has created conditions that will satisfy the Burrowers who launched her to terraform their home to better fit what they had become, she will turn her attention from unfortunate Australia to the rest of the world.

Love Bites - Sporko/Thanqol

"I was dubious about the living streaming when it debut, but I am increasingly coming around. A Lord has joined my following and was generous with his patronage. It seems a clever solution to a difficult problem; nobles who would sponsor crusaders in foreign lands but cannot be sure of their virtue and mettle. This allows meritorious deeds to be rewarded directly -" she frowned, "- though I fear that if the viewing nobility are unvirtuous, then they might lead streamers astray with incentives for wicked behaviour. Has anyone considered this possibility before? Should I write the merchants operating the system a letter?"

Return to Thellamie

There was a time for thought and contemplation.

Rurik stepped down into the dungeons, and throat-punched two Civil Gaolers at the same time. As they doubled over, perfectly timed backhand chops to the back of the skull sent them sprawling unconscious. Double stealth takedown, one of the Sacred Maneuvers, one that he had practiced thousands of times on mannequins in preparation for the day where Princess Heron could practice it on him and Injimo.

He tucked a little vial of headache medicine into the hands of both guards for when they woke up. A little twist in the technique from someone who had been on the receiving end of it.

"You wish for there to be no witnesses?" said Sayanastia the Dark Dragon.
Her chains passed well beyond the suggestive, but that was simply how it was when non-specialists tried to bind the Dark Dragon. Every paladin with an active night life imagined how they might improve on the bindings - spreader bars and muzzles, every finger caged individually in the overlapping magical fields of enchanted rings, feet encased entire in lewdly transparent enchanted ice.

"It is not the first time I have been here," said the Dark Dragon. "Captured and bound, when one of the Hero's companions decides to save Heron the trouble and do away with me quietly. One little sin in the dark to spare her another cycle of pain and blood. But you must know it does not work that way, little fox."
The Heartblade was in his hand. "If I release you, you will rampage."
"Yes," said Sayanastia.
"You will again attempt to destroy everything in your path," said Rurik. "You will attack Civelia as she recovers. You will kidnap the Faun and use him to draw a destiny of ruin."
"I had paid little heed to Civilia's latest game," said Sayanastia. "She does so love her games. So long as everyone is playing by her rules she does not care overmuch if she loses."
"So you will let him be?"
"Of course not," said Sayanastia. "I am the Dark Dragon, after all. Everything that you imagine about me is true. Go ahead and take my head -" she hummed a moment, "- you will never be less justified in doing so."
"But you have already lost a fight to the Rot Star," said Rurik.
"Perhaps that was part of my plan," said Sayanastia.
"And you have lost fights in general," said Rurik. "You are a shadow of yourself."
"Do not talk yourself out of your act of murder now, little fox," yawned Sayanastia. "I am still the Dark Dragon."
"Yes," said Rurik. "That is why you were cunning enough to raid the Stacks."
"Have I?" said Sayanastia.
"Yes," said Rurik. He undid his backpack and started unpacking. "You stole the Gown of the Blade Dancer that will perfect your amateurish swordplay -"
"Beg pardon."
"The Gauntlet of Pure Springs that will quench the Rot Star's poison heart, which you were too weak to do on your own -"
"What is happening."
"And this dimensional crate hooked up to nine hundred and ninety nine detonation flasks that you will use to create a vast and terrible distraction -"
"I assure you, the attempt at framing me is deeply unnecessary."
"You are kind of stupid, aren't you?" said Rurik, looking up.
Sayanastia attempted to shift her head to get an angle for her breath attack.
"You have a lot going on, which is why it's hard to focus on that specifically," said Rurik. "But you aren't so much thinking as you are referring back to past events. Wake up and pay attention."
Sayanastia snarled.
"That's the spirit!" said Rurik. "Up and at them! Every day is a new day!" He severed one of the intricate array of bonds around Sayanastia's hands. Her talons flexed - and then started scratching at the nearest knots.
It would take a few minutes for her to fully unravel herself. A decent head start.
"You are using me," hissed Sayanastia.
"You," said Rurik with a smile as he made his way back out through the door, "are useful."

The ballroom shook as the roar of the Dark Dragon, and the first of 999 detonation flasks, made their voices heard.