Thanqol

Aristeia! Building a Champion

Titanomachia pulled out her phone, typed rapidly, then held it up. She looked from the phone to Madeleine.

"Hmm!"

She set it down.

"Not surprising," she said. "Underground matches are mobbed up. It's all about personal connections, and feeds in and out of mercenary work. Cyber Punks, you know? It'd take too much training time and risk to put you on a job to get you in the ecosystem, so..." she made a face. "I'll just have to go in with you. Leg and all."

She leaned back in her chair, a grumpy mood having come over her. "Four days of normal training. Psych training in the evening. I reach out to old contacts. Ideally get an underground match on Friday. Light exercise before, complete rest day afterwards. Then your tournament match. Listen, it's never going to be clear if an underground match is going to be fixed. Mostly no - they're a chance for professionals to blow off steam, make contacts and chase glory, their real money comes from mercenary work and they do this for fun. If it happens, it'll be a girl named Fingers arranging it. She'll sound you out like she's your friend and pitch suggestions - but they're not suggestions, just do what she says."

The way she talks about her makes you think that this is why she went pro in the first place.

Aristeia! Becoming a Champion

Decima had no reaction whatsoever to your act of heroic strength, did not flinch at all to the hand on her throat. Her reptillian eyes held a fatalistic fearlessness that was the exact opposite of your act of defiance. You know instinctively this goes all the way; if inevitable death came for her she would not die tired.

"None of that. Spend power budget on a neural uplink? No, it fires whenever I move the thing like this," she made a vague little wave with the gun. "There's a little metal maze that I shake the needle out of, it fires automatically when loaded. Might get the odd misfire but odds are nobody notices. Like I said, the gun is just a case, but it's a case that people project a lot of assumptions onto."

"Argeltia," said Decima, changing tack. "Never going to stop her. Point is to tilt her. She's used to everyone playing around her. Not used to pain, not used to being the target. I woouldn't be shooting her hands. I'd be shooting at her main body through the portals. If I land enough hits to lock her neck I think she'd panic and lose her cool. How do you plan to deal with her?"

Aristeia! Building a Champion

She only listened and thought. All information given was added to the simulation. It was that way with her; things that passed without comment would re-emerge later as though she had been thinking about her answer the entire time. Timing, timing, timing.

But you did not get the sense that she disagreed with anything you said.

She watches your hands. The motion, the limitation, the adaption. Her mind calculates how to strengthen the relevant muscles, what the tradeoffs would be, and if the current adapation meets requirements. She takes a second bite of her cake, then a third - and then slides her spoon across the table to you. Completely thoughtlessly, for a move so considered.

"... I haven't thought enough about pain. Too reliant on synskin protection. Will need to take this in stages," said Machia. "First, calibration. Then focus tests. Then - battle tests. My goal will be to get you to a state where you can wear my headphones in an active arena match." She tapped her fingers. "I know what I've been neglecting. I've been thinking in terms of this bloodless corporate Aristeia! for too long. That's not where it started, that's not where I started, and that's not where Taowu started. Have you ever been to an underground Aristeia! match?"

Aristeia! Building a Champion

A side bowl of kimchi and saurkraut. A main dish of stir-fried and diced capsicums, cashews, broccolini, onion, served over rice, seasoned with fiery central asian spices. A main of eggplant roasted deep and golden, a crunchy exterior shell that melted into butter inside. Chopsticks, spoon, water. A moment of consideration from magenta eyes before Machia picked up the chopsticks and lifted a cashew to Madeleine's lips.

"Hmmmm?" hummed Machia, finally converting that omnipresent observation into sound again. "Madeleine. This doesn't get solved in a day. We're planning on defeating the personal attention of the Demon Princess of the Hexadrome. One training session does not get you there. You're going to train for this every day up to the finals. It still might not be enough."

"But -" she flicked up the chopsticks again, this time holding a piece of eggplant. "I need you to get to the finals too. That means going through Sammy. Might even be the harder problem. Though maybe..."

Her ears went straight up, her hands stopped a bit too far away with the onion, making you lean in for it. "... A beautiful, impractical idea. I'll refine it on my own time. But for now, I want to come back to an assessment of my own abilities."

She set down the chopsticks on your side of the table, picked up the spoon, unlaced the ribbon-tied box she had found while cooking, and took a bite of the long delayed cake. Her eyelids fluttered in the first moment of less than perfect control she had shown since the ropes had gone on.

"I did not have a lot of lede time so I went with a soundstage I had prepared earlier," she said, setting the spoon down and picking up a pen. It felt almost like a penance for her tiny slip to delay her second bite like this. "But I need to make it more specialized. You already gave me some cues. You said you wanted it sharper. More painful." Her eyes flicked up. "You wanted me to bite you. Do you have any other feedback for my next attempt?"

Aristeia! Becoming a Champion

You make eye contact with Decima. Colder than blood.

She knows all about cats and snakes too.

Your Synskin locks up, all at once. Hits in multiple locations. No pain, just the flexing of neomusculature fiber strong enough to override your native strength. "Don't forget," she said, "I am your opponent today."

She crouches down next to you. "That's my trick for this round," she said, silver hair cascading to the left as she tilts her head. "I was not sure it would work. Now that you know I'll need to go for a full alternate loadout if you wind up on the other team. But knowing if it worked on someone with your instincts was important. Look -"

She pointed to a series of small silver needles embedded into your armour. They had not penetrated, they were lodged in the plating far from your synskin. She touches the tip of one with a finger and a crackle of lightning passed between the network, jumping between the different spikes. "Electroneedles. My own design, new. Subtle, invisible, quiet. No muzzle flash like you'd expect from this big sniper rifle - which as I showed you, is just a case and not where I'm spending my energy budget. What looked and sounded like me just walking and maneuvering my gun around was me firing eight shots. Individually the charge in these things is too weak to do damage, but with enough of them built up I can create a current that the synskin will register as a full body blow. My answer to heavily armoured opponents with low situational awareness, especially Lios, Bit, Astra and Argeltia."

"Knowing this, how does it change your approach?" she asked. "If you can be shot without any sort of sensory feedback, what is your counter?"

Aristeia! Building a Champion

"You have been holding that position too long," said Titanomachia, undoing ropes one by one. "Get on the table. I need to fix you."

It's too much to move cleanly; she moves you cleanly. Shirt off, face down, back upon the slab - more work to be done. This time without tools - only warm hands to knead your aching muscles, methodically and firmly gripping neck and shoulders. Each touch is a shock against cold sweat, fingers trying to reach through your skin and force your blood to circulate according to her design. Something about the rhythm of it matches with the pounding of hooves - there's a pattern here too...

She pulls you up into a sitting position, still behind you. Takes your hands, closes them around a water bottle, raises it to your mouth. Sits behind you for a beat. Pulls it from your lips. Waits a beat. Lets you/makes you take another sip. Slowly, carefully, arms around you, she makes sure that you move at exactly the speed your body is currently capable of.

Then she takes the bottle again. Pushes you back down, takes your legs and bends them back into a stretching position. "Hold," she says. Then she gets off, walks over to the kitchen, and turns on the stove. Vegetables are laid out already. She starts chopping an onion, then pauses halfway through with the precision of a mental timer. Walks back over to you and rearranges your position, physically lifting and arranging you into a new posture before immediately returning to her cooking. And on it goes; never instructing verbally when she can physically force you into a new position with her hands. And it feels...

Like a relief. After all the pressure on your ears, the silence and soft sound of sizzling vegetables and boiling water, the kinaesthetic motion of hand and muscle, being treated like wet clay to be sculpted - it deeply centering after the voyage into unreality.

Aristeia! Building a Champion

Titanomachia is, above all, a student of motion.

She has never really understood the potential use case of telepathy. Bodies give off so much information for her already. The way they move - habits and training, breathing and gesture, the blush and biting. Stare at the motion Musashi makes with her sword for long enough and she can see it as mechanics, starting with the flick of her eyes that lead to the intake of breath that shockwaved all the way down through shoulder, elbow, wrist, blade. Disrupt the eyes at the right moment and the whole motion unravels. It's so clear to her. They might as well be shouting.

Only a few people give her trouble. One of them is Sammy. She's a monster. Simply so fast, such sharp instincts that she can complete motions before she's operationalized her read. Another is Madeleine. She keeps trying to make reads and keeps almost being correct. No, that's not right. She's always been correct. Just correct for different reasons than she expected. She's never gotten it wrong, but the geocentric model produced actionable astronomical predictions until advancements in glassblowing produced high quality telescopes. There was a mystery beyond the reach of her chemistry, a dark matter distortion in her clockwork cosmos.

That had to be why she appreciated high-value observation sessions like this one. Having complete sensory control of her subject allowed her to precisely track call-and-response physiological reactions. One of her ears twitched in its headphone setup, the other was fixed directly towards Madeleine to observe the subtle changes in her breathing rate, the way the sound of ropes on skin altered with the addition of sweat, the steady, powerful rise of the heart she had helped engineer. With each interrogation her subject revealed more data; it was only a matter of time before she could extract that central secret too.

The moment came to test her hypothesis.

She was not counting on Madeleine forgetting her lines. That would require a far more extended one than this - had it been two hours already? She blinked. Should consider using eye drops during observation if she was going to - more extended session later. Still, she was simulating magical mind control done by a master of disorientation and hypnosis for the purpose of tactical advantage. Her best tool for making the simulation authentic was her own sense of timing and observation - and the five second time limit. And so she waited for her moment.

She'd know it when she saw it. The moment when the rapture was on the edge of overwhelming. Not when she would forget her line, but when she'd forget how to use her tongue. When she saw it she moved immediately, taking the headphones off in a motion she'd spent thirty minutes visualizing, holding the blindfolded girl's ears in her hands and saying: "The key phrase now."

The Three Mountains

"Well, the budget, ma'am," said Eager with a wan smile, holding up a hand to forestall the disconnection. "This kind of blue sky research, there's no upper limit to how money we can burn on it. The official paperwork says that we've been running on 20MC but we've been getting that again in laundered money from elsewhere in the corporation. Sometimes more, when your predecessor has found room for it. We've been eating well in R&D, but I think if you start looking around you're going to find that the corporation has been cutting a lot of corners to make this happen. I can keep the lab going for a year theory-only on 20MC and things'll be fine, but longer than that and we'll need serious capital injections to fund the next generation of infrastructure. If we don't get that we'll start hemorrhaging the most ambitious and brilliant staff.

"Put it frankly, past few years I've been the golden boy, top priority cost is no object kind of thing, and I've built a gold-plated R&D section to match. There's nothing on earth like what I have going here - not since they shuttered NASA. And, I think, that's very specifically the idea. Good night, Ms. Kade."

*

The VI glimmered as it processed future requests. "High priority items actioned. Medium priority items as follows:
- Economic Modernization with Finance Director Angus. Key concepts: Outdated infrastructure, declining brands, deferred maintenance.
- Corporate Justice with Interior Director Trajan. Key concepts: Low morale, court backlog, organized criminal infiltration.
- Reputation Management with Ambassador Lights. Key concepts: State Nationalization agendas, misinformation compliance, environmental impact.

Note: Any of these meetings can be delegated. Simply assign the division head a budget and they will prioritize according to their own agenda."

Aristeia! Building a Champion

You don't hear her interested hum as sound; you feel it as a change in the air - the invisible spark of inspiration that turns the herd.

Horses are things of river and ocean; this is known - but water cannot turn like this. This many bodies, panting breath, flesh and force and power enough to grind boulders to dust and churn this endless grassland into rasputa mud. And they turn. They wheel. The direction of the river changes.

They thunder closer. Not close enough to touch, not close enough to feel their breath, but close enough that you can hear the earth tear beneath their hooves, hear teeth snap, hear the water splash as they gallop across shallow lakes so fast that you can imagine them running over the top of it. They run past you, a fleeting moment in an eternal vista. A long straight line and then a sharp turn, running straight until they enter a gentle curve, another sharp turn, another gentle curve, and then rejoining the flow to form this almost circle around you. You are at the center of an equine whirlwind. The shape that they make with their course almost perceptible through the storm of them. If only you could see, could see from a little bit higher and it would all be clear...

Aristeia! Building a Champion

"Testing, testing," said Machia into the darkness. "Repeat after me: Kilo, Nine, Battle, Octave..."

She always took her time with calibrations. "Three tones. Which is the loudest, one two or three? This sound will gradually increase in volume. Flick your tail when it becomes uncomfortable. This sound will gradually decrease in volume. Flick your tail when it becomes inaudible..."

Her voice was quiet and focused, the only thing in your ear. In between question sequences came lulls; perhaps she was typing, perhaps she was looking something up, or setting up a new test. During those moments her mind wandered out her mouth as it ever did. "I know we went through these tests with your initial auditory integration, but this is specifically going to be testing your limits in a way we haven't done before so I need to be sure not to cause damage."

Hands on your head, adjusting the fit of the headphones slightly. Outside air on and off.

"I used to do this sort of thing in university," Machia mused. The effect was uncanny - you knew where her mouth was, but the words came as a breath directly into your ear. "Feels good to have the old equipment out. I financed some of my initial research this way - ASMR performances specialized for nonhuman ear structures. These headphones let me manipulate your sense of distance and spatial awareness -" suddenly her voice felt just as close but coming from behind you instead of in front. "- while also giving your ears freedom of movement. A lot of animal ears can rotate to focus on specific sounds, that's an important part of the sensory experience. The challenge for me is creating an auditory soundscape that reacts to the movement of your ears. The audio difference between a screen and virtual reality."

Her hands came free. Her fingers lingered for a moment on your hair.

"Your key phrase is: Chiron runs with fair ribbons through grand many stars. Repeating, Chiron runs with fair ribbons through grand many stars. We are beginning in five, four, three..."

The silence opened

Wind

Gentle wind across a grassy steppe. Oceans of grass extending out in all directions. Skies as clear as crystal. Lakes so pure that they were portals to infinity. And in the horizon distance a vast, endless rumble of hoofbeats, as gentle as a heartbeat, though all the world's ruin was heralded within.