Thanqol

Aristeia! Becoming a Champion

"Don't flatter yourself," said Maxima flatly. "It did not take that much prep to beat you. I came here to tell you something it took me too long to learn. The people in the hexadome? They're not your friends. They're your co-workers. They don't owe you anything. They're playing their roles. When they want to hang out, train together? They're trying to get something from you. One day they'll bounce. Don't break your knuckles over it."

She turned, raised a hand in a wave. "Keep the stuff. Later."

The Three Mountains

"Alright. I've got contacts who have done this sort of work before, I'll get up to speed on my own time. You won't need to babysit me over this," said Paradisia. "I need to get some stuff ready for the job. My, uh, first secretary schedule orders: You leave, act a bit pissed off, schedule some other interviews, don't put my name on any paperwork. Pretend this thing fell through for a few days, don't make a thing out of it. I'll come in when I can do so seamlessly. Also I'll need a big day-1 operational spend because part of how I'm going to do this is I'm going to buy every bit of black-market intel on your company structure I can get, both as training data for me and because that'll show up some interesting holes when I get to look at the official books. That's going to be - fuck, a lot. Like, two MacroCredits a lot, minimum. You're fine with that kind of expense?"

Aristeia! Building a Champion

Someone is applauding. A young woman in a princess dress is clapping extremely loud, blushing extremely red, a look in her eyes like something has just been awakened inside her and she has no idea how to deal with it. Her aunt tries to shush her but she maintains her applause like bruising her palms is going to help her remember this longer.

*

The next day, as you approach Titanomachia's suburban apartment, you hear a loud crash. Something large and heavy smashes through the window and lands on a bank of electric scooters, causing multiple alarms to go off. More pieces follow, sailing out through the shattered glass, making pedestrians run for cover.

Getting closer you see that it's Machia's cybernetic leg. Most of her toolbox has gone out too.

It's that kind of day, huh?

The last thing to exit the window is an angel - a vision in emerald green armour, set with impossibly fine golden filigree, platinum hair flowing in a supernal breeze as her radiant levitating wingblades fan out around her. She drifts down to the street, autumn leaves caught up in the aura of her divine machinery, swirling around her head in a halo. She feels more complete with them; a woodland miracle.

"Excuse me citizen," she said as she descends. "Have you seen - oh, it's you! Hello, Madeleine."

Lios Emiral, the Angel of the Forest, has only been in the Regionals two years longer than you but she already feels like a fixture. She spent a statistically improbable amount of time paired up with Titanomachia and, after some initial clashes, they found themselves becoming extremely compatible. On and off the ring they were close friends and training partners, though Titanomachia has not reached out to her since their retirement.

"Titan asked me to help train with you today," said Lios, glancing up at the window. "Though I sense it is not a good time to talk to her about it. Would you mind assisting me collecting these tools?"

Return to Thellamie

There are things that need to be done. Need to be done even if no one's around to do them. Well, no one's around!

Patch. That. Hole! The air hole, not the blood holes, though that needs to be done too. Respiration is the key to mana flow, it's the link between the self and the natural world. The deeper, slower and quieter the breaths the more the spirit is able to reach harmony with that flow. You can't intake mana while yapping, and snoring is even worse - it's the vocal chords scratching incoherent spell-notes into the mana flow, burning energy as quickly as it arrives. Chronic snoring can ruin a career as a magician as surely as it can get you kicked out of bed. And so a gentle little adhesive is applied, bringing the lips together and forcing that flow through the nose instead. As important as any bandage.

But we've got those too! Soaked in slow release relief spells, brightly coloured with rainbow glyphs and unicorn runes. The rainbow is important - you can be as contaminated by fiery red making wounds itchy and hot as corrupting black invites in decay. A constant oscillation of mana types is important to give the body time to work its own healing and reassert its own identity. Burn out the black with red, quench the red with blue, drink the blue with green and ignite the red before the fungus starts growing in. It's not so much about balance as it is about sprinting past consequences.

But as for the deeper stuff? The invisible problems, the wear on the bones, the stress that becomes insomnia that becomes eye twitching madness that becomes eczema? For the things that have gone so deep that they've stopped being identified as debuffs and look like bad stat rolls on level up?

Well...

No one can cast HEAL, right? Eclair said it herself. It's impossible.

So no one does.

Aristeia! Building a Champion

"Ha. Even now you leave the choice to me," said Machia, a smudge of cream on her lip that she battles to avoid licking. "You are asking me. Asking me to believe in you. Asking me to treat you like a person. And it worked - you got inside my head. But -"

Steel. Backwards. Choking.

"You are not fighting me," said Machia, looking down on you, hand pressing the remote. Her knuckles were white. "You are fighting everyone. And this does not work on everyone. Your gaze is set too low, Madeleine."

The pressure releases abruptly. Titanomachia's fingers have accidentally snapped the fragile joystick of the remote. Her fingers tremble as they hold it, as though they might crush it into powder, or place a ring upon it.

That was all she could say - a fragment of the storm that those haunted eyes had conjured inside her. I am a one time regional champion; you could cup the world in your fingers. I am useless to you if I cannot surpass myself; I am useless to you if I can be overtaken so early. I don't want to give up on my dream, and so I can't let you either. I want to win. I want to beat you for its own sake, and I am so close to losing...

Losing what?

She stood up suddenly, eyes cast in shadow. Wiped her lip with a napkin. "Not an unimpressive result. We will continue tomorrow," she said. And then she left, still crushing the broken remote in bloodless knuckles.

The Three Mountains

"Oh, fuck no, I am not taking company housing - or security, or augs, or any of that bullshit. Like you said, I am not going to be a corporate lifer - and like you said, my job is to not be reliant on anything company internal. I want briefcases full of cash, no brand loyalty contracts for my purchases, and no questions about where I'm getting the shit I need, and the second I feel like I've got enough to quit capitalism I'm fucking bouncing." She paused, a little taken aback by the passion that had crept into that. "Woah. I mean, like, I still need the money, but I want money as a way to freedom and not getting myself deeper into scary debts. I'm working for a paycheck, I'm not working to pay off top shelf augs. Seen where that path ends."

Ideas occurred beneath the surface. "Speaking of, is there any power in this role, or am I just, like, taste testing your coffee for poison?"

Aristeia! Building a Champion

"Hm?"

The train of thought continues on without her. It sails elegantly out the door and down along the road. A vision of a future no longer within the boundary categories of the world's possibilities, to be severed from the skein of fate by the machines of the moon. Macha's control is in her eyes, and they blink. Her control is in her lips, and they are silenced by immanent sugar and cream. Her control is in her mind, and it is blank.

Her cheeks slowly start to tinge and glow. Her breath gently disturbs the cream held close to her lips. Her eyes are lowered, the power of seeing broken by the power of being seen. Her hands caress the remote as they might midnight hair. For a moment there is stillness.

Then focus returns.

"You haven't won yet," said Machia, soft fingers becoming hard again. It wasn't about Khan or Sammy or anyone else in this moment. She wasn't anywhere but here. She wasn't even thinking about your training. She wasn't fighting for anything but to break open your lips.

Aristeia! Building a Champion

Machia slowed, then stopped. Her fingers traced the edge of her remote. She was frowning now, having shifted from focus to reflection. The pressures and pulls continued, but faded; her attention wasn't on it any more.

"You're doing it again," she said. "You start weak, gather strength, and then lose focus so close to the finish. It's like you don't want to win." She leaned back in her chair. Her fingers move mechanistically over the remote; no longer simulating the rise and flow of battle, but now going through the optimal counterforce motions to get you to spill your drink.

"I wondered if it was a biological problem," she said, already talking about the situation in the past tense. "If your heart wasn't strong enough or you weren't pacing yourself correctly, but this test rules that out. All the physical factors are controlled for and performing excellently. The problem is mental. But is it an inhibition? Fear? Rewards insufficiently tempting? Combination of?" She wasn't expecting a response. Her attention had turned from your neck to your eyes as she contemplated how mere physical control was insufficient for her purposes.

"I'm afraid this means your training is going to get weird," she said, pulling remotely on your bridle.

No Safe Port

You As you glare into those eyes you feel the structure of a plan. You feel it melt before you, dissipating into the air like a morning dew. The space pirate captain takes his ring-encrusted hands out of his pockets empty, holding them up in a gesture of surrender and obedience, even as the Stormtroopers shove aside the last of the cultists standing behind him.

"You there," one of them said to you, levelling a blaster, voice distorted through their helmet. "Let's see some ID."

Aristeia! Becoming a Champion

Maxima looked at you. The smiling, muscled COW! FIGHTING! bovine on her singlet looked at you. "It is a mystery," said Maxima. "But unrelatedly, there's a lot of different types of cow out there, you know? There was a period in the early 21st century where cow genetics were dominated by a certain genre of cow beauty contest. They judged cows based on how "feminine" their head and neck placement was, which is an insane thing to say about a 600 kilogram animal. It got to the point where the competitions banned plastic surgery on cows to prevent people from making them more "beautiful". This continued up until Tail and Eye Disease, the mass culls and the rise of synthetic meats and almond milk, at which point there was a window of time when it seemed like the most popular cow chassis was too synthetic to survive outside a factory farming environment and all the factory farms were closed. But luckily weird hobbyists had maintained certain reservoirs of legacy cow genetics - and the Desolation of the Equator was not just good news for sheep. In addition, illegal rural genetic engineering has created several particularly hardy and violent strains whose purpose is to keep Murray-Darling river hippos from ranging inland and murdering motorcyclists."

"Gata would have eaten shit if she tried what you tried," she said, continuing on from her hyperfixation without slowing down, changing tone or any visible sign of transition. "You ever see a cat try to fight a cow? No? Because the cat knows better. The only reason we're even mentioned in the same breath is because we were playing a game, and the game made us both do a thing that neither one of us wanted to do. If we stopped playing, Gata could never hurt me - and I would never see her again."

She took a sip of her canned vegetable smoothie. "And I never did."