Thanqol

Aristeia! Becoming a Champion

Gata was famously not from wealth either. She was a parkour pickpocket urchin on the streets of Rio, when a hot pursuit lead her to crash into an active Aristeia! match. She evaded eight stars shooting for her simultaneously before finally being cornered, and signed her contract while in handcuffs on her way to the police van.

"Cross looks like instinct," said Gata. "But I don't think that's it at all. It's like she's surrounded by ghosts." Her ear twitched. Cats knew all about ghosts. "Titanomachia chose her for a reason. She's going to do better the higher she goes."

She hopped onto the top of the air conditioner unit you were looking at, her stare like a falling moon. "I don't know how to explain," she said, sun behind her throwing her face into shadow. "Maybe you do. Maybe I can correct. Tell me. What is the path to victory? How does all this work?"

Aristeia! Building a Champion

There was no way Titanomachia was going to sleep tonight. There was no w.ay

AWKKE

breathing heavily. Serpentine coils, hotter than hell. The screaming feline eyes. Dragons were cats, cats were failures, but there was no way out of this. Structure. Structure, the structure of the spiral - the nature of the Hexadrome was broken. Broken in a way that opened possibilities. Operational - run. Faster, from the twist and the fire, teeth snapping at her ankles. She didn't move like a horse. Enough to look like it from the outside but it was different. The tail was wrong. The hooves were wrong. The neck was - none of this was wrong. It was better than wrong.

It was impossible.

The blue astral path opened up in front of her.

She shattered through it. Light shattered too - but not in her eyes. In her hair. In her mane. The rainbow pulled behind her like a physical thing. She was above. Above the negative coils of Zanai-anai as they filled the Hexadrome like a hex. From above she could see the beehive tessilation of the hexes, how the dragon snaked through at hundred-and-twenty degree angles. She ran her hands up through her rainbow mane, up along her horn - sharp enough to pierce the stars - and she descended like Saint George.

The neck twisted, teeth rising to swallow her. Still she fell -

But those weren't the eyes of the Spiced Sin.

Those eyes were black. Hard. Plastic.

So she fell into those instead

AWKAE

Awake!

Awake

Staring into the eyes of Blanche.

Protection. But no answers either.

She felt shattered. That part was normal, waking into the feeling of being broken anew. It was a good feeling, the sense of all her mental bonds broken, mind as soft clay. But she'd never remembered what it was that did the shattering before.

Aristeia! Building a Champion

The flow of words stilled. Eyes, hands, voice - all settled. It was a magic trick, her shield, relying on preparation and infrastructure and above all initiative. Without that momentum behind her she went still, tense but quiet, as though playing dead. It was an unexpected attack, hitting her in a lull in her performance and preparations, and she had no counter.

So she sits quietly and accepts.

Her ears jolt when they're released - then eyes, looking to yours for the answer, the missed variable. Voice - incorrect target: "Thank you, Blanche." Hands - pushing her back up to her feet, rolling back onto her heels, searching for that rhythm again. "Would you like me to fold out the couch bed for you, or do you prefer the floor?"

The Three Mountains

"Agility," rumbled Angus, "will be our watchword. Liquid assets! Machine parts! Modular designs! Empty palms, ready to grasp the future by the coattails - ha ha! That's exactly the sort of direction I like to hear!"

He seem genuinely happy with the assignment. Hedging indecisively was what the man was made for, and you got the sense that he'd excel at this in a way that he wouldn't in something with clearer targets. The man was, after all, a political animal who'd gotten this far by being friends with everyone, and his only enemies were people already on the way out. Nothing could make him happier than being told his base political instincts were now company strategy, and that he had what sounded like five years in office before there'd be a change. By that time he'd consider himself to have done his time and step into retirement comfortably - if you'd tried to rip him out now and you'd incite the entire old boys network that had put him here.

"No problems from our quarter, I'll make sure of that!" said Angus, standing up heavily. "Oh - and you should catch up with the executives for a LAN party! We'd be thrilled to catch up with you when our hair was down a little, so to speak."

That was actually a valuable invitation - if you could stand it, the modern equivalent to the golf networking of old. Angus' generation had grown up on competitive video games and twitch reflexes rather than the wasteful old sport of previous generations; you could expect a room smelling of vape smoke, monitors arranged in a circle, players yelling advice at each other while targeting vitual zombies on retro games. It was a built-in way to develop a powerful loyalty base and network in the company, which could be especially helpful given the reported morale issues.

The catch was that aligning yourself with the old guard would not go unnoticed. Your ability to recruit from outside their ranks would be significantly diminished, meaning you'd lose the ability to ascend talented outsiders or reformists. But it was a rock solid base of support, favours and information that required almost no effort to plug yourself into.

Aristeia! Building a Champion

"I don't want a cat. No offense, Blanche. But I don't like cats," said Machia. "I have a - weird grudge against Gata. When I was small, I remember her - doing it wrong. Fighting HexXer. Losing, over and over. HexXer just downloaded her, was inside her ears, inside her instincts. Didn't matter how fast she was. I could always see where she was going to be, and HexXer could see it too. I wanted her to win but - doesn't matter how many squares the Queen can move across the chessboard if the hand controlling the pieces doesn't want her to move. So. I started studying HexXer instead."

HexXer. The Red Witch of the Hexadrome; the ultimate Placer. Her power was eye-wateringly simple: Vade Retro. With it, she could move people around. Herself, her opponents - in crimson dress and featureless white mask, she whirled and danced in her slow waltz, and by the end she stood alone on the scoring zone.

"Vade Retro. Simplest move there is. You could buy it off the shelf at mod stores back when HexXer was getting started. Same idea as the levitator over there, it lets you manipulate kinetic energy just a little bit. The technology isn't complicated, none of it's a secret, but doing it in real time? Doing it to the entire arena at once? How can you focus on an abstract point in space and decide its kinetic properties should be different, and then communicate that desire to the machine? At Aristeia! speeds? The only people who really use it at all are skateboarders who cluster around getting cool slo-mo effects during jumps. I thought I was going to be different - but I wasn't. After ten years of practice, I barely got the hang of Vade-ing myself, a tiny bit, let alone anything else."

Titanomachia was famous for her preternatural dodges; her ability to slip and slide into impossible angles and accelerate in counterintuitive ways. Different enough in application to HexXer's chessmaster control of the entire Hexadrome that nobody had publicly drawn the connection yet.

She looked up at Madeleine.

"I hope that's a good enough introduction for Blanche to protect me a little," she said. "But I don't know what animal I want. I chose horses as my DNA model because I thought there was a synergy between their strength and Vade Retro's precision - and there is, it's very effective, I'm happy with my choice and I intended to surpass HexXer by doing what she did while also being strong as fuck. For a guardian, I need something that compensates for a limitation in the same way - I'll think about it, and rely on Blanche for now."

Aristeia! Becoming a Champion

"Really?" said Gata, looking around. "Look. Here's where my advice caps out: International circuit, short of HexXer. She's still up there, champion eight years running - and if you skip Moonchild's year, champion for two more years before that."

Unmentioned, not worth noting: Gata was a three-time champion before HexXer's unstoppable rise.

"And she's only getting better. Her style relies on her mind and that's just getting sharper and sharper. I could barely match her when I was young and fast and it was only downhill from there. So - I can talk. Help. But my path's a dead end - least as far as I could solve it."

Aristeia! Building a Champion

"Through there," said Machia thoughtlessly. Her attention was elsewhere.

Her wardrobe was just a chest of drawers, sorted into the following categories:
- Socks: Uniform cheap, brown and interchangeable, except for a set of expensive high-tech running thigh-highs that have sunk to the bottom through disuse.
- Underwear: From a vending machine.
- Tops (light): A completely random collection of old battered t-shirts, expensive mens button-up shirts in a variety of fashionable colours, crumpled up into unironed balls, and a couple of those extremely nice high-quality interview shirts the media team gives Aristeia! competitors for interviews.
- Tops (heavy): Enough black turtlenecks to supply silicon valley in the post-Steve Jobs years, mixed with with handknitted sweaters and vests.
- Jackets: Purchased from a hiking store, high quality and durable and worn to bits.
- Pants: Black

When you returned, Machia was crouched down, deep in communion with Blanche. She was studying it as intensely as she studied anything; her ear turned to face you as you entered, but her eyes remained locked.

"How does one go about creating a totem like this?" she asked. She was too dumb and intense to be joking.

Aristeia! Becoming a Champion

"You're overthinking," Gata said, pupils widening into deadly circles. "Taowu is eyes. That's it. Listen to me. Do not give a shit about Taowu unless she flips Cross. If she does, then you're fucked."

Tension rippled through her. She focused. The adjoining skyscraper. An impossible jump. Every part of her body vibrated with readiness; a tension blinding, claws tearing apart the alumnium of the empty can. She was going to do it, she was going to -

She stood up, crushed the can, put it back in her bag. Walked like a human over to the service elevator.

"Don't do speed for speed. Not a race, not a horse. Know when to leave. Know when to wait. You don't have to do stuff. Don't be an eye guy. Later."

Aristeia! Building a Champion

Machia lazily reached out to touch the star in the center of the bitemark. "Twenty," she said, flicking her finger up, catching your chin in the motion, "percent. Also, I absolutely forbid any sort of solo pain training. You have more than one match to win, you have opponents other than Taowu and you will proceed according to my schedule exactly."

"Though," she said, suddenly thoughtful. "If you are that motivated... I suppose I could offer a little additional training, as an incentive. Be a good girl, hit your athletic and recovery targets, convince me you're going to make the finals, and I'll reward you with additional focus training. Sound fair?"

Aristeia! Becoming a Champion

"Argeltia, eyes," said Gata. "Lios, ears. Bit, eyes. Decima, eyes. Pash, eyes. Kraken, movement. Astra, eyes. Don't rate any of them except Kraken. Watch out for her. Maybe Lios."

She ran her finger over her lip, adjusting her legs under her. Patience and immanent violence in the same posture.

"Optical disruptors are shit at the speeds you want to move at," she said. "Smoke, same. Discoballer'll fuck everyone except Lios and Kraken, no brainer if they're both on your team. Eclipse, glitterdust, good enough all rounder. Albedo for Argeltia, Astra, Bit."

Optical Disruption Devices: Technical invisibility, a thirty year old technology at this point, now diffused to the point where it's in reach of regional police departments. Discoballers: wide-spectrum optical light displays like those perfected by Prysm. Glitterdust: Gata's signature technique, a faceful of clinging eclipse-particallate rainbow dust that rendered a target blind. Albedo: The inverse to ODDs, complex and ever-shifting blends of anti-camera technology. It's in a constant back-and-forth arms race with common visor types and settings so the exact composition will change month to month, but the overall trend has been against the visors.

"Taowu will make it seem unfair," said Gata, her tail wiggling as the pounce built its inner momentum. "It's not. Don't fall for it. She's down in nationals for a reason."