Aberrant: Children of Quantum Fire - [INTERLUDE] [Mature] Vignettes: Anavasi Rising [COMPLETE]

[WhiteRain]

LUCREZIA May 10th

Bit of mature content in this one

Some of us do not forgive. Some of us do not forget. We get back up, and then get even.

Scrambler would pay for what he did. Lucrezia swore it to herself and on the love she held for Chang, on the very night of their encounter in the crèche. Since then Lucrezia had put most of herself to the task of figuring out just how to do it. Under other circumstances she might have put all of herself to work, but there was too much afoot.

Several of her threaded their way through four different Pandaimonion parties, two events in the inner depths of the Blackburn, one in Ibiza and one in a secret enclave in Chicago. One of Lucrezia was there in official attendance, but she had slipped in additional copies at each to better get a feel for the flow of conversation and the general mood of the attendees. A dozen of her were spread throughout Ibiza, talking and calling people, lining up all the pieces in a row.

And the rest of her was curled up with her wife, all of them lying on a luxurious bed formed of Chang’s body. Some of her were inside Chang’s belly, wriggling against the flesh and kissing one another to better increase their pleasure; one was impaled on Chang’s shaft, twitching in ecstasy and stretched obscenely, the cock thrust right through her and jutting from her mouth. The rest embraced Chang from the outside, touched her and worshipped her.

My love, she thought, and her whole being resonated with the warmth of that feeling. I’ll keep you safe.

The Pandaimonion were turning against Chang, and rapidly. Narcosis knew that she had begun to seriously consider breaking away from her banner and putting up her own. The divisions between those who followed Chang’s lead and those who followed Narcosis’s were growing more and more intense every day. She had made no official ruling, but Lucrezia knew her wife’s mind, now, and she knew how it worked better than anyone. The gears were turning, and one by one the pins were dropping to lock them in place. Options were being considered, her present state was being compared to the possibilities that a split offered, and her safety was being weighed against the danger. But Chang Zha-Yang was never afraid of danger.

However, Lucrezia knew that sooner or later she would want the topic to be put before them all as a discussion. She did not exalt herself, Lucrezia did. Oh, everyone thought that Shiv was the one who came up with ‘The Mirror Queen’, but it had actually been Lucrezia who whispered the name in her ear and told her to keep saying it until it stuck, and who repeated it herself where needed. Step by step she had nudged Chang into the position of leadership she deserved. And now Chang would take the final step herself, and embrace the role she had filled for years on sufferance.

Well… she would after a couple of careful nudges, anyway.

Really, the decision was made the moment Sin-Eater made her proposal, just nobody knew it. Only, with Scrambler and now Narcosis rallying to dissuade her, the moment could be lost. Lucrezia would not allow that. Her scheme of years was coming to fruition, and she was not going to let anyone stop it. Not even her wife.

Lucrezia caressed Chang with diligence, eager to hear her voice twisted in pleasure. She wriggled inside Chang’s belly and around her shaft, squeezed and sucked and moved up and down its length. At her urging, Chang swelled even thicker, filling the air with the sound of flesh and latex stretching. Lucrezia felt her breasts being pushed so far apart that they were pointing out at right angles from her distorted torso. Slowly, Lucrezia began to urge her towards making love. “I want you,” she whispered with a half dozen throats. “I want you more.”

Those of Lucrezia in the Blackburn were bearing witness to the usual tedious bitching between Narcosis’s hangers-on. Chang herself was becoming the butt of jokes, though of course only behind her back and from miles away where they could be sure she would not overhear. Lucrezia felt angry to hear them talking that way, but she knew to let it lie. Chang did not care about the prattling of fools. What they said was not important. It was what it meant that mattered.

The centre cannot hold, Lucrezia thought with delight, nuzzling against the back of Chang’s neck as they began to make love in earnest. Another of her bodies stretched her mouth slowly around Chang’s shaft and wriggled down until she touched lips with her other body and the two kissed and sucked at once. Before long both would be impaled, and she was eager for it, hungry to be stretched around her wife’s enormity.

Show me what I am, beloved, Lucrezia thought. She touched Chang more insistently than ever, began to lick her all over with her long, flexible tongues and kissed her with passion, as one of her straddled Chang’s huge and writhing belly.

Inside Ibiza, the Pandaimonion party was losing much of its atmosphere. Arguments were breaking out up and down the ballroom, and several Novas had stormed out already. The Alchemist was long gone, and had taken her student with her; a former huge fan of Narcosis that was being seduced away like many others had been over time.

There was one body that Lucrezia kept away from the others. This body sat alone at a makeup table in a darkened room, staring into the mirror at her face. She refused to let it wear the gorgeous dark-haired face that she had decided was her favourite. Rather she wore a face based on that of Jason ‘Bombshell’ Bellefleur. That felt right. It was a failed fake face, unable to live up to the quantum-enhanced beauty of the world’s most desirable woman.

This body was as much the subject of her hate as Scrambler.

Lucrezia had forgotten who she was when she erupted. To date she still wasn’t sure where she grew up or who had birthed her husk. Since her chrysalis, that answer seemed less important than ever, but she still sought it out from time to time.

Meh’Lindi theorized that Lucrezia wiped her own mind as a defence mechanism, suggesting that maybe she could not have adapted to her new state of being without it. Back then there had only been ten of her, and they came and went. It took her chrysalis to reforge her anew, to give her more than two dozen selves that never went away. We’ve all changed so much, she thought. And there’s so much more to come. That made her happy beyond words.

Lucrezia knew she was close to the next change. Chang spoke well when she told her not to let go of how it felt when Scrambler violated her mind and body. Those hideous minutes were a litany of everything she was not.

There was something that needed to be done about that. She would not – could not – bear the idea of an ‘original’, of there being one of her with shadows shaped of flesh and quantum. That was for other Novas, different Novas. The seat of her consciousness was not in any one body. She was in all and none, one mind formed of thirty, with all of their ‘separate’ processing power working in unison on her every thought and plan. Scrambler tried to show her that was a lie.

That lone body punched itself in the face. “There is not one,” she said at the mirror. “There is not.”

Sex with Chang was not the revelation it used to be, insofar as she could no longer use it as the catalyst to harden chrysalis inside her quantum signature. These days it was a beautiful, ecstatic reminder of her true and glorious nature, as well as her food and drink. After Scrambler did what he did, she needed those reminders more than ever. Chang had sanctified much of her now, blessed the bodies with her love.

But she would never be touched by the one in the darkened room. That one was cursed, foul. It is not me.

Far away from the Rainbow Room, one of her melted into latex, puddle on the floor then oozed up a wall before slipping through cracks in the ceiling into the insulation. She heated herself up until she began to boil and burn through the wood panelling, then the concrete and steel until she was able to seep onto the roof and reform.

At that moment, Darion Mograine appeared, climbing up onto the roof with her, his silver hair and eyes glinting in the moonlight. He was clad in tight leathers and a flowing trench-coat, a casual stereotype of cool that he carried off without any effort.

Lucrezia turned into flesh and stood naked for a moment, just to let him salivate, before partly changing so it seemed she was dressed in a PVC halter top. She could not dress herself the way her wife could, but she could make it seem that she was dressed when the mood took her.

“And people say that the beaches are where the real sights are,” Darion muttered as he hopped over the lip and stood before her. He kept his voice down quiet, and his eyes strayed to the noticeable cracks in the roof. “Will we be overheard?”

By my wife, yes, she could have said. Even though Chang was screaming and her ears were filled with Lucrezia’s whispered words of love and moans of pleasure, she would be listening. She always listened. But not by anyone else, I think. “You say that, Darion, but I and Chang do make love on the beach sometimes,” she grinned.

“That is certainly true,” Darion replied, glancing around the rooftop, no doubt seeking spies. His perceptions were keen and his suspicions keener. He was older than Lucrezia though he did not look it, and had been playing these games as a baseline too.

Lucrezia had come by a knock-off noise filter generator; a far weaker variant of the ones sometimes employed by Utopia agents, and pre-installed it on the rooftop. She flicked out a tendril of her body and hit the button to turn it on. “Nobody’s listening now,” she said. “I don’t think the damage has been noticed, either.”

Darion nodded and leaned back against the railing with his arms folded across his chest. The wind played with his gleaming hair. “Given you’ve dressed yourself, I’m going to assume I’m not here for a sexual escapade.”

She gave him a mischievous smile. “Why, Darion, I never thought you were so single-minded.”

“It’s easy to be when I’m around you.”

“Well, then, I’ll keep it in mind for later. One of me is in the middle of stealing your sword from your bike. I’ve planted a little evidence in your apartment that will allow you to blame Kladach.”

Darion frowned, and then turned to peer over the edge of the building. “So you are,” he said, and peered back over at her. “Kladach? Geryon’s pal? What’d he do to you, lately?”

“Nothing at all,” she said, smiling with perfect lips. “That’s why you’re not going to blame him. The evidence will point to Kladach, but you will put the blame on Prudence. You’re far too smart to take things at face value, after all, and we’re all so... treacherous over here.”

“That might be the first truth you’ve uttered in the last month,” Darion said, frowning. “Prudence, eh? Shiv’s student? Do I even need to ask what you’re up to?”

“Obviously you do, but I’m not going to answer,” Lucrezia said, and her tone did not encourage further questions. “The less you know, the less you can give away. And if you want two or three of me for sexual payment later, just ask. You know I’m good for it.” She winked at him.

Darion nodded. “That’ll be nice. None of that freaky Harvester crap though. You can keep Sin-Eater’s ‘lessons’ to yourself and your wife. Sometimes I can hear the noises which come out of your room and that’s quite enough for this Nova, thank you very much. They remind me of some scenes from John Carpenter’s The Thing. How long is my sword going to be missing for?”

“That depends. But it’ll be safe and it’ll turn up.” Once I’ve picked out who best to blame for the crime. “No need to worry. And I’m sure we’re both very sorry for scarring your sensitive soul.” It was only partly mockery. She did like Darion, and so did Chang. He was an exceptional poet and a wonderful performance artist of various types, especially as a dancer and stuntman. He often appeared in music videos for various artists, and sometimes even went on tours as a backing dancer, though he had been focusing on the Teragen over the past few years.

Darion was the best choice for her scheme. His mind was difficult to read and he was a subtle operator. Even now he gained a calculating look as he tried to work out her goal, but he lacked the information. Most people did. Lucrezia had learned how to exploit the few weaknesses of the hyper intelligent by playing games with her wife. It was always about information denial.

Even now at the party on the other side of the island Lucrezia was sowing seeds amongst the Pandaimonion present, ensuring that they would all come down on Prudence heavily for this. The starlet had fallen in favour enormously since she took Shiv as her mentor and she began to change physically and mentally.

These were Lucrezia’s favourite games. She called them art but it was a private art, not to be seen or described or even comprehended. There were four of her at the Ibiza party, one of them there on official invite, the other three shifted into other forms. Of them, two had been discovered and identified, but the fourth was still maintaining her cover as a Terat sympathizer eager to join the Pandaimonion. That one was busy seeding the ground for Prudence to be blamed for this crime.

At the same time, while one of her walked away with Darion’s sword hidden neatly inside her body, two of her were at Darion’s apartment providing all of the necessary evidence to blame Kladach. It was important that someone other than Prudence be implicated. Lucrezia would make sure Kladach heard that he was being dragged into the vapid games of the Pandaimonion, and that would make him wroth. Geryon would hear, and be annoyed. It was a pain that Vigilance did not need. This would put a little pressure on Narcosis, she would no doubt be suspicious of Chang, and in turn Chang would be angry at the implication.

The point of this was to ensure that Prudence would go with them when the split occurred. Lucrezia had never been sure about her, and they would need everyone they could get in the early days. After the bitching and pressure that would be poured on her over this, she would be sure to side with her mentor and Chang.

Darion considered for some time, but finally nodded. “All right,” he said, “I’ll trust you. More fool me, but the sex is worth it.” He reached into the inner pocket of his coat, removed a small data stick from an inner pocket and tossed it to her. “That information you were after. Everyone I know of that is even peripherally associated with Chang within the Pandaimonion, and who might come with her if she splits off. I’ve included my own analysis of each candidate. I won’t pretend it’s not biased.”

Lucrezia caught the USB and nodded at him. She tossed the stick to her right, off the side of the building. Another of her walked out the front door at that moment and snatched it out of the air on the way to her car.

Darion laughed. “Another one of you caught that, didn’t… she?” He shook his head. “You’re confusing to talk to. Even after all this time.”

Lucrezia winked at him. “I know. And yes, I caught it. You better get going. I’ll be missed at the party.”

He nodded, turned and jumped off the roof.

Lucrezia sighed and liquified and poured back down the way she’d come, then hardened and headed back inside.

She pulled up the information on the data stick and began to sift it, adding her own considerations to Darion’s, and name by name, her schemes developed and complicated, growing into a storm front in her mind.

We will break away from Narcosis. And I’m going to make sure as many people as possible come with us. The Anavasi will rise, and Scrambler will fall.

In a private room in the Rainbow Room, one of her separated from the orgy with Chang and went to meet Geth.

The spindly, insectoid Nova gave his strange bow and showered her with compliments on her beauty. She smiled and moaned and twisted into a more… fitting shape, with too many limbs and latex tentacles and teeth. Geth complimented that on its elegance and ghoulish invention, and opened a gate to the Demon’s Den.

It was time to let her newest friend know what Scrambler had done to her. She cackled with many mouths, and disappeared through the warp. You think you’re safe because Chang won’t fight back, Scrambler? She’s never been the problem. It’s me you should be worried about.

[WhiteRain]

SHIV 13^th May

A fair bit of mature content here.

Shiv stood between two pianos, bound as tight as ever, her arms close to dislocated, her spine bent at an angle that should have been uncomfortable but for her felt as natural as walking upright. The warm leather mask over her eyes was tight over the sockets, and her long brown hair was up high on her head in a ponytail. Her world was darkness, as always, but she thought she saw more clearly than many with full use of their eyes.

Her breasts and buttocks were warped into arms, and it was with those fleshy fingers that she played, concentrating on precision and perfection of control. Shiv moved beyond baseline symphonies and sonatas long ago, from there into some lower skilled Nova-level compositions before branching out into her own creations, often based on the wildly morphic nature of the ‘limbs’ she used to perform. Her hands bore five fingers, then six, then eight, however many she needed to make the sounds she wanted.

She felt the music as much as heard it, felt the vibrations running through the floor and up the flesh of her breasts and buttocks into her body, where it thrummed up and down her spine and out into every extremity. She even felt it in her clothes, for they were as much a part of her as the node pulsing away inside her cranium.

The tune was uplifting, composed while she listened to rainfall on a corrugated steel roof and formed out of the many emotions rain stirred in her.

It rained that night, when she was raped and half-murdered, but erupted instead of dying. She felt quite detached about that evening now, like it was a faraway shore from which she was sailing, and it was almost out of view. Shiv remembered being angry, so angry she would carve her own flesh to remind herself of the hate and so angry that the beautiful body granted by her eruption was nothing to her but an engine of vengeance. But she did not quite know how that extremity of emotion felt anymore.

Her eruption gave the rain a new aspect, too. She could feel its percussion now, and hear every drop, distinct in the storm, as it fell and split upon the earth. Shiv’s skin was so sensitive that even the trailing of rain on her skin was an adventure.

Back then she went into the rain to cry. Somehow she missed the beauty of the rain for years, until Chang took her by the hand and led her out into a storm, just to listen.

The music swelled and shrank around her, never quite a crescendo but never quite a whisper. The sound echoed and bounced around her, and she adjusted even as she played to keep the sound reverberating just the way she liked. The echoes were part of the music, and balancing them was her current hurdle.

Her fingers danced and flexed across the ivories, sometimes faster than a baseline hand could ever move and sometimes slower and more steady than the most patient hunter. Shiv’s mind began to strain with the effort of co-ordinating her limbs so accurately.

But before too long it came to an end, and her arms retracted, one set rounding and plumping into her large breasts, the other set tightening into her pert buttocks.

Shiv felt happy. Not elated, or overjoyed, but happy and satisfied. Once, those had seemed like strange sensations.

Back before Chang, the idea of someone taking joy from what they did was a strange thought to her. When she had begun to devour people it was all part of her vendetta against the men of the world, a repayment one hundred times over of the pain a few of them inflicted on her one rainy night. She supposed she took a sort of enjoyment from digesting her victims… but never satisfaction. I was such a child, she thought, bitterly. I wasted those years.

Her efforts to walk Teras were largely failures. Taint had accrued far more than chrysalis. It was not about learning what she was, but about eviscerating baselines as messily as possible. Nobody cared to point out where she was going wrong. But why would they? Failures were an object lesson.

My student will not fail.

Prudence was nearby. Shiv could sense her weight on the floor, pick out her place from the way the air distorted around her and from the soft pulsing that was once a heartbeat. She was sitting just inside the door. “You play well, Shiv,” she said. Her voice was oddly girlish.

She answered with a nod, and closed the pianos with tendrils of flesh. “What do you think of the tune?”

“It’s good! I’ve never really been able to play, though. I always wanted to.”

Shiv led Prudence out of the instrument room into the main floor of her apartment. She kept it clean and sparse. Shiv had no need of furniture, though she kept a table, a few chairs, a bed and a workbench. She spent little time in the apartment, but it was clean and tidy.

“You maintain your human seeming,” Shiv said, turning her head towards Prudence. “Is there a reason for that?”

“No.” She sounded shy. “I just wondered if you’d ever ask.”

Shiv heard the distinctive cracking and popping sounds as her student began her change, mixed with the throaty and duplicating moan as her neck lengthened and she sprouted new necks and heads. She could hear Prudence’s limbs duplicating, her chest rippling and warping violently as five new breasts pushed out of her flesh, straining and then ripping the clothes she was wearing. She had come dressed in silk, from the noise the seams made when they burst. Under it all was the undercurrent of tendrils shifting about under the surface of her skin, betraying another unexpected development.

When changed, Prudence was easy to sense. The extra limbs and heads gave her a unique profile, and she was constantly moving, causing great fluctuations in the still air that Shiv’s sensitive skin detected easily. Prudence had not been like this at first, but had changed swiftly under Shiv’s tutelage. The changes came pouring out of her, in fact, so rapidly that it seemed almost as if she were relaxing a muscle that had been clenched since her eruption.

It reminded her of how she had been under Chang’s tutelage. When first Chang suggested bondage, Shiv had been appalled. Yet the moment she tied her wrists with a length of rope, there had been a sense of profound, almost haunting rectitude. When she found the correct get up and felt it bond with her quantum signature, it was akin to sliding a puzzle piece into place.

“Now that you’re dressed more comfortably,” Shiv said, “what’s bothering you?”

“Well, nothing really,” Prudence answered, in a tone that was full of lies and all but begged for her to be asked to vent. Her voice was strange now, not disturbing in and of itself but she spoke with a random number of mouths. One word might be said with one mouth, the next with two, and the next with all seven. It gave even basic speech a peculiar, enchanting music. Shiv vastly preferred it.

“You are practically moping. Normally you can barely contain your excitement when you transform.”

“Only around you,” she said. “Everyone else is getting catty. They didn’t used to be! Back when I was no-” she caught herself.

Shiv smiled, “Normal?”

Before her new powers surfaced, Prudence’s abilities had centred on emotional manipulation and prediction. It was an unusual form of foresight; she could tell what somebody would be feeling six hours later, even days later sometimes. Shiv was told that Prudence was very beautiful, but she could only feel such things in the smoothness of skin and the cleanness of body lines, the smooth play of muscle on muscle and the texture of flesh.

Now Prudence was taking on an unnatural seeming, and where before she was acclaimed for high level dramatic roles, of late she was turning heads as a new star in the horror industry, playing killers and monsters with the same degree of thoughtfulness and dramatic skill. While before her emotional control was loose, of late she had gained a definite affinity with terror, enough that she could enhance it in a chosen victim to such levels that it could cause their minds to snap.

She is a ‘beautiful monster’. Admittedly, Shiv’s perspective on ‘beautiful’ was warped at the best of times. A beautiful voice meant far more to her than perfection of shape. Prudence is an exemplar of part of what Chang is trying to do here. And she has the chance to be what I should have been from the start, without my miss-spent youth.

“Normal,” Prudence conceded. “Is there something wrong with me if I say that? She says, looking at her own heads. I mean… I feel beautiful. I can see myself, I can kiss myself. I do! And I’m a great kisser.” She let out a long, multi-voiced sigh. “Why should I be conflicted?”

Shiv tracked Prudence’s footsteps across the apartment to her bed, and heard her flop down onto it. “You tread a thin line these days, and will until you have truly found your path. It takes time when you change direction, as well I know. Teras is hard enough without realizing that you made a mistake at first and need to change your approach. Yet you seem more depressed lately.”

“My friends are less friendly.”

There it was. The real issue was the social changes she had not anticipated, the loss of friends she thought were fast, and the uncertainty which came with that discovery. Prudence was abandoning her entire identity, and rebuilding it from the ground up. Chang would have known the right thing to say. Shiv only knew that it was hard. She went through the same feelings when she left the Primacy for the Pandaimonion. Even now, years later, there were former friends who refused to speak to her and one or two who considered her an enemy of the entire Nova race. She thought that something of an over-reaction, all considered.

Shiv approached the bed. She knew where it was partly by instinct, but her own footsteps created small tremors that she could sense and use as a sort of directional sense. Additionally, she emanated systematic pulses of sound to keep a solid grip on her surroundings. Blind she might be, but her eruption and years of practice had granted her every gift she needed to deal with her disability.

“In what way are they ‘less friendly’ of late?”

Prudence sighed with three of her heads. “They keep fucking whining at me about Darion’s fucking sword,” Prudence hissed, her voice playing across her many heads, one word coming from each mouth in a flawless flow back and forth. “Fuck, I’m no thief! I’m a movie star! And they won’t leave me alone about the damn tentacles. Yes, technically, I could have grabbed the sword without stepping inside the apartment. I could have planted evidence, too. But why would I? I mean, yes I was pissed when he turned me down. Who wouldn’t be? He’s gorgeous! And he was a bitch when he did it, too. But why would I steal his damn sword? He’s still a friend. Shiv, answer me this: if Teras is all about individual expression, why am I getting so much shit? It’s not even about the sword is what bothers me. They’re going after me because I look different. It’s like we’re baselines or something. I don’t get it. Shouldn’t they be happy for me?”

“Perhaps not all expressions are born equal,” she replied mildly, well aware of the weaknesses of some of Narcosis’s hangers-on. “And not everyone we permit to call themselves Terat has the faintest understanding of what the Teragen is about. Shall we… talk about things?”

There was meaning behind that word. Prudence responded immediately. Shiv heard the tentacles emerging from her lips and reaching out for her. One snatched the jade key from her necklace and began to unlock her breasts. Others reached around behind her and began to untie her wrists. “Yes,” she said with other mouths, “let’s. I think I need a lesson.”

A shiver ran through her flesh as the strap fell away from her breasts and the scarf slipped from her wrists. She straightened up and felt her shoulders click back into their proper place. Prudence’s tendrils caressed her sides and sought out the laces and ties of her corset.

They began to talk. Even as Shiv was undressed, they discussed the philosophy of Teras, the new path Prudence was on, choices she had made which failed, ones she made which worked. They talked about old friends and new friends, about where she saw herself going and where she wanted to belong.

In time Shiv stood naked before the bed, her leather melting into a dark red mass that crept up her legs and sucked away back inside her body.

With a sigh, Shiv made her breasts swell, increasing their size dramatically. With more flesh came more options. For now she kept the shape, the fullness and softness.

Prudence began to move. Not in the normal way bodies should, but beneath the skin, rippling the tentacles which formed the basis for all her movements now. Shiv could hear them stroking against each other in the cavity inside her, pushing against the skin which contained them. They poured from her mouths and wrapped Shiv’s limbs, pulling her insistently forward, though without the strength needed to force her into action.

Shiv pressed her swollen breasts into Prudence’s wildly warping body, and sighed in delight. She could feel the tentacles writhing under her student’s skin, giving her flesh the feeling of storm-tossed waves at sea.

They still talked, and didn’t stop even as they made love. Chang taught Shiv much about how sex could be used as a teaching tool, to show a Nova in brutal fashion ways in which they were demonstrably no longer human.

It was time to pay those lessons forward.

***

They finished hours later, with Shiv’s breasts each larger than her body, warped into half a hundred mouths and tentacles and gripping limbs, and her attached body stretched across half the room, suspended on tentacles that penetrated deep into her and pulled her wide like a billowing sail on a ship.

Prudence’s many heads were still distinguishable, her mouths gaped inhumanly wide by the amount of tentacles that had erupted from within, her throats distorted and rippling like fleshy pipes. The rest of her, though, was a swollen bag of flesh, bubbling and rippling liquidly as her tentacles moved inside. They had duplicated once they began in earnest, and kept doing so, the mass of tentacles inside the flesh bag considerably larger than the shapely female body that contained them. Her skin never tore, but it did stretch to where she had to be unrecognizable from where she began. Shiv only had the sounds to go from, and those were alien and beautiful.

Shiv shuddered as she began to contract back to her normal shape. The tentacles slithered out of her throat and cleavage mouth and other orifices, one by one, and bit by bit she snapped back down towards her normal size. She sucked in the mass of mouths and tentacles into her tits and shrank them down, with a sound not unlike balloons twisted in hand.

Before long they were both back to normal. Prudence’s arms and breasts and heads were back in proportion, and the tentacles beneath her skin had merged again and compacted to fit inside her tiny human body. There was a degree of boyishness to her, Shiv thought. She was not curvaceous, certainly.

Shiv sat on the end of the bed, naked and pondering.

Sex always made her thoughtful. Prudence was a more… fitting lover than Chang. Shiv knew she was a lesbian, and in a far purer sense than Chang. What she did with Prudence was woman-sex, just with tentacles. And tentacles were not like cocks. Or they were, but they were not the same.

Even after all these years she felt confused.

The final clicks and cracks echoed out from Prudence’s body, and she let out a delighted groan. “That was amazing. You’ve got the greatest tits in the world, I’m sure.”

“The cleverest, no doubt,” Shiv replied. She parted her full lips and a mass of leather poured from between them, wrapped tightly around her face like a net before hardening into her bondage mask. It tightened over her eyes and trapped her flowing brown hair into a high ponytail.

“Are you okay? Did I hurt you?” Prudence sounded girlish when she said that, almost child-like. She was taking to her new path like a fish to water, but when her instincts subsided she quickly succumbed to doubts.

“I am extremely hard to hurt.” Save for where it counts. “You are a wonderful lover, and that does not seem to have changed. You appear to be more controlled than before. Your tentacles seem to have more rhythm in their movements. They’re less… writhy.”

Prudence giggled. “I work on it all the time. It feels good. Should it?”

“I have no idea. If it does then it does.” Shiv felt awkward in the role of teacher. Most of the time she tried to think ‘what would Chang say’ and then catch herself. What her mentor said bore no relation to what she said to her student. Or did it? The last time she asked Chang about it, she had been adamant in saying that Shiv needed to guide Prudence according to her own ideas. But so many of those were shaped by Chang, so how could she?

She was an exception to many rules, was Chang Zha-Yang, her Mirror Queen. Shiv bedded few men, and allowed male parts little contact with her, but Chang somehow didn’t count. Puck had his way with her once or twice, dancing on knives to get her guard down and coupling with her when the play was done. But he was a man. His bedding her was a victory for him, part of the rules of domination. If they could unlock her breasts and untie her hands, then she was theirs. Doing one was easy enough if she did not resist over much. Doing both was near-impossible without some careful negotiation.

Sometimes she could still hear the screams of men she’d swallowed and digested, or slit open or crushed or torn in two. I was so angry. Yet now she was like Chang. She loved to have her belly full and swollen, and it felt good. Now I scream with orgasm, and I can barely remember what being so angry feels like. In truth, most of her days passed in serene contentment. The clothes helped. And so did Prudence, in a way.

“I think it’s a good thing,” Prudence said, her voice still thrumming with sexual satisfaction, though now it gained a thoughtful edge. Shiv could feel and hear the Terat moving around behind her, caressing her multitude of bared breasts with five of her arms while folding the other two behind one of her heads. “I’m so good at pleasing myself, now. I worry, though. Like, maybe I’m still a Marvel at heart pretending to be a monster. Is this really monstrous?”

Shiv rose. Her large, round breasts squeezed together like pursing lips, and more leather boiled out from her cleavage. It clothed her body in her cropped corset, tightening around her belly and emphasizing her curves. The pearl necklace wrapped around her throat and the jade key came crawling up directly out of her titflesh, as if emerging from some jelly cocoon. She ran her fingers over and through her soft breasts, smiling at the sensations. Her body was suited to self-pleasure, too.

Her lips curved in a smile. “Is it our way to walk around wearing black capes, cackling at our monstrosity? Or should it be the way of others to deem us monsters, while we live out a way that is natural for us and us alone?”

Shiv’s buttocks swelled and tightened, and a mixture of leather, lace and rubber came running down her legs in a liquid slick that formed into thigh high boots, platformed and heeled.

“I love watching you dress yourself,” Prudence said dreamily. “What you said there, is that a quote?”

“From my queen,” Shiv said, very softly.

“She’s not like us, though,” Prudence said, rising from the bed. Shiv heard the soft ‘tic’ of one set of lips parting, and then the great fleshy ripple of tentacles rushing up her elongated neck and emerging from her mouth. They began to snatch up her clothes. She continued with another head. “I mean, I don’t mean any disrespect. But she’s not like us, is she?”

Shiv walked to her OpNet terminal in the corner, jinking around the table she could feel in the centre of the room. “No. Unlike us, she’s successful. Sure. Certain. Brilliant. Evolved.” All of these things and more, she thought. Chang was a beast with more tentacles even than Prudence. Grappling with ‘her’ was impossible. I hope I never meet Mal. I’ll probably humiliate myself. “Monstrousness que monstrousness isn’t our way, as Scrambler used to say.”

Prudence laughed with six heads. “You’d better not let Chang hear you say that.”

“The point is not to be ‘a monster’. It is to better understand the ways in which we are not baseline. For both of us, sex is part of that and perhaps for you more than me. Your path is not as bloody as mine. I can tell you to go forth, to consume and devour as I once did and do from time to time, but I think the only reason to do it is to be sure that it’s not in your nature. But we both know it’s not. For me,” she said, slipping into her chair at the terminal, “sex is still a scary thing. I am not quite comfortable with it. That seems a good reason to focus my attention on the area. Chang is never more monstrous than between the sheets. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with listening to her.”

“Me neither, I guess. And I have body issues, it seems, so that’s an area for me to focus on?”

“That would seem to make sense.” Shiv wondered what Prudence was sensing from her. She was rarely direct about her emotional senses and ability to foretell how they would turn over time.

“Well, I think I’ll be going,” Prudence said, rising from the bed. “Can’t avoid the harpies forever, and I better find out who the fuck stole Darion’s sword before the Terat police come and arrest me.”

Shiv chuckled softly. “The closest to a police force we have is Geryon, and trust me; James isn’t going to judge you for stealing a sword, or for unusual sexual appetites, for that matter.”

“No?”

“No. Oddly, I’ve always felt that Geryon might succumb to romance if he finds the right Terat. It doesn’t emerge often, but he has a definite desire for a family one day, when his fight is over. The Pandaimonion is uniquely small-minded because of the nature of its leadership and the character of its membership. There’s a reason Narcosis is held in contempt by many other Terats,” Shiv said. Though admittedly almost everyone is held in contempt by someone, and Chang is hated more than most.

She had a feeling that Prudence sensed that little contradiction, too, but she did not vocalize it. She just said goodbye and left, after coming over to give Shiv a little kiss on the lips.

That left her thoughtful again. You’d think she was my girlfriend.

“Speakin’ o’ swords,” came a booming, deeply masculine voice from behind her, “you and me need to talk.”

Shiv started, rose and spun from the chair. She had not tied her hands yet, and flexed her claws for a moment before relaxing. “Kladach,” she said. “Hello.”

“So that’s Prudence, eh?” He said. “Seems nice, should make a better Terat than most o’ the snakes around these parts.”

Kladach was a confidante of Geryon’s, once a member of The Primacy but these days full time Vigilance. Back in the day they were friends. They did not talk anymore. She wondered how long he had been there. Invisibility had always been a favoured trick of his.

“Why are you here, Kladach?” Shiv’s tone was icy. His dismissal hurt back then. She always respected him.

He gave a rumbling sigh that sounded more like a tiger’s growl. “Because I need to talk to someone in the Pandaimonion and I’m sure as fuck not talking to Narcosis, or your ‘Mirror Queen’ for that matter. Everyone around here’s far too clever-clever. You seemed like the best option.”

“I am a servant, in a manner of speaking,” Shiv said. She could feel the dimensional pocket inside her, full of little things she was keeping handy. Without a pause she plunged a hand between her breasts, deep into her cleavage maw, and slipped from the flesh-throat into the pocket. She pulled her hand out a moment later, phone in hand. “You should speak to my queen.”

“You’re not a fucking servant, Shiv. You’re a Terat. You’re free. That’s the whole damn point.”

That made her smile. “Ah, but freedom includes the freedom to submit. And submission is so very addictive.”

Kladach made a spitting sound. “Damn, woman. Chang broke you hard. Look, put the phone away. I just want to talk to you. Or do you need to ask her permission to do that?”

Shiv placed the phone between her breasts and gulped it down, again sliding it into the pocket instead of down into her belly. “You can explain why you’re here. I can use my freedom to ignore you if the mood takes me.”

“Fine. From what I overheard, Pru’s explained this shit with Darion Mograine. Correct?”

“It is.”

“There was evidence linking the crime to me. Fingerprints on the scene, signs of forced entry, and even burn marks fitting the behaviour o’ my fire. Somebody’s in the mood to stich me up.”

Shiv could suddenly feel the heat from Kladach’s body. He always burned hotter when his moods were hot. “I have no idea what you are talking about,” she said.

“I want no part of any of this, Shiv. You tell your Queen that.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Oh, come on, Shiv! You think nobody’s watching? We all know there are some issues between her and Scrambler, and her and Narcosis and pretty much her and everybody else right now. You think I can’t see someone trying to drag me into trouble I want no part of? Vigilance is not a pawn in anybody’s game, Shiv.”

She rotated her neck. “Nor am I a puppet to be made to talk at your behest. Unless you unlock my breasts and untie my hands.”

Kladach was silent for a moment. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means that you’re being disrespectful,” she said, her voice low and quiet and dangerous, “and you know I don’t like it when men are disrespectful to me.”

That earned a little cackle. “I wouldn’t go there, Shiv. You know me better than that. I don’t mean anything like that.”

“Yes you do. You disrespect my queen, my choices, my path, my pursuit of evolution. Which is kind of funny, given your choices, path and pursuit have led you and yours to destruction. The more I think about it, the more I feel like a rat that got away from the ship before it sank.” The words were intended to needle.

They did.

Kladach lurched forward and tried to grab her by the throat. But he had always been stronger than he was fast, and he seemed to believe she had grown weaker in her time away from The Primacy.

Shiv arched backwards, stretched her buttocks out into a pair of supporting tendrils, and then used them to pirouette around as if on a rotary table. Her claws tensed, surged and ripped out of her fingers. She whipped round fast, her hands flickered up and she felt her claws bite flesh as his arm past overhead.

He struck down at her, but she angled sideways onto one foot, spun again and leapt, spinning over Kladach’s arm. Again her hands flicker-flashed, she landed, leapt and flipped away from him, then landed on one knee. Her tendrils retracted and tightened into her buttocks.

Kladach paused. “Did you just… Oh.”

Shiv heard the flesh slide off his arm from wrist to elbow. It sloughed to the floor with a wet slapping sound. She raised her hand, and smiled.

“Oh, it’s on now.”

She heard a sound like gas igniting, and felt the heat that rolled off Kladach’s body in waves. “You’re going to set my apartment on fire.”

“You can get another one, bitch!” And then he swung for her.

Their fight was fought at a Nova pace. Shiv turned, twisted, leapt and spun, demonstrating balletic prowess she had begun to show shortly before abandoning The Primacy. She had transformed her fighting style. Once it had been brutal and straightforward, but now it was a dance and a thing of beauty. She struck to flense and flay, not to gut and eviscerate. Those were gory flourishes for a defeated foe or for moments of true desperation.

Kladach burned and pulsed with heat and threw jackhammer punches, roaring like a buffalo. His was the fury of inferno, he was massive and powerful. Shiv perforated him a dozen times before he made a solid connection, but when he did the blow knocked her through the wall of her apartment, across the street and through another wall.

As masonry came pouring down around her, Shiv rose, her hands burning from contact with Kladach’s body, bones and body reknitting swiftly. Pain was real. She called her fighting style Death’s Illusion. The real was nothing. Or so the spirit went.

Kladach tried to wrap her in his burning embrace, but Shiv leapt upwards and stuck her claws in the ceiling. She performed an aerial split, warped her buttocks into stabbing tendrils and impaled Kladach in both hands. He cried out, but as she retracted the tendrils he wrapped his fist around one and dashed her to the floor.

The foundations buckled. Shiv felt his fire burning all around her now, the room was ablaze. If she needed to breathe the smoke would be killing her now. She punched the ground with such force that it pushed her onto her feet.

“You’re hurt,” Kladach snarled. “Wanna quit?”

Shiv grimaced. “I heal faster than you. How’s the arm?”

“Hurts like hell.”

“Oh good. You’ll love what’s coming up next. When we’re done here, you’re going to Chang.”

Kladach laughed. “Am I, now?”

“A defeated warrior should give a request to his conqueror.” He had a code of honour. He would acquiesce to that.

“Fair enough. And when I beat you, you’ll go to her on my behalf.”

Shiv grinned. “Oh good,” she said. “Now you’ve agreed, I don’t need to play anymore.”

Quantum surged through Shiv’s body. Her muscles tensed and swelled, her shoulders gave a sharp crack and a second pair of arms emerged, new fingers exploring the air even as they hardened into claws that cut tank armour like air. Her buttocks stretched out into a third pair of arms, similarly clawed.

“Huh,” Kladach said. “You got new tricks.”

“And you’re about to get your ass kicked… by a girl’s ass.”

***

Their fight ended in the sewers, after Shiv dodged a desperate charge from him and at the same time cut a rift in the street. Even Kladach’s fighting spirit diminished a little after a dunk in Ibiza’s sewers.

By then he was missing all the skin from his right arm, the tendons were cut all down his left leg, and she had artfully emasculated him. None were wounds that could kill, but they were agonizing. That was the central idea of Death’s Illusion. Wounds and cuts made to inflict the most pain imaginable, not to kill.

Shiv was left with burns across half her body, over a dozen broken bones and several missing teeth. But she could walk without hobbling, and her womanhood was intact. Kladach decided to admit defeat before they went too far, and finally acquiesced to go to Chang directly.

Both of them went their separate ways in the sewers, avoiding the authorities who would surely want to know which two Novas tore up half of two buildings, burned one to the ground and ripped a twenty foot chunk out of the street, and why.

Shiv retreated to one of the safe houses she maintained in Ibiza. My pianos, was her first thought once the adrenaline stopped flowing. My music.

Two hours after the battle, she sat and meditated on her recent days, while her body restructured and regenerated itself. She let the wounds heal slowly, to feel the pain. Kladach’s fire hurt more than mortal fire ought to. It burned like acid, roasted flesh like crackling, boiled fluids, ate down to the bones and toasted the marrow.

But pain meant nothing to Shiv. She had honed her resistance to pain years ago, and her flesh could reknit almost as fast as it were cut when she wished it. That had come with Chang, with the leather and silk and the fetish-wear. She felt more like herself now than she ever did before.

The safehouse was another apartment, two-room, bare and featureless. Just a place to hide if Utopia came knocking, if everything went wrong. In truth it was a holdover from her Primacy days.

A strange trickling sound caught her ear, and Shiv partly turned her head towards it. There was then a wet splat from the direction of her bathroom, followed by a series of twisting, creaking sounds.

“Hello, Lucrezia,” Shiv said.

“Did you succeed?” Lucrezia opened the door and stepped through into the room.

“He will go to her, yes.”

“I saw that the two of you indulged in a bit of redecorating. I’m not sure fire goes well with your furnishings, though.”

Shiv retracted her claws. They let out a soft wet scrape on their way back in, and she felt them softening and dissolving into the core of her fingers. “I trust I’ll be refurnished.”

“Oh, to say the least,” Lucrezia said. “I have a next step for you.”

“Indeed?”

“I need you to start bandying the word ‘Anavasi’ around, just like you did for our queen.”

Shiv swelled and warped her buttocks to push herself to her feet and then squeezed them back in. “What game are you playing now?”

“The same game I’ve always been playing, Shiv. I should have thought that was obvious.”

“Nothing is obvious when dealing with you. I distrust this visit from Kladach. It feels like you.”

Lucrezia approached, and traced her fingers over Shiv’s breasts. Her touch was burning pleasure, and the kiss she placed on Shiv’s lips left her quivering. “It feels that good, hmm?” Lucrezia’s voice was pure seduction.

Shiv sucked Lucrezia’s hands into her breasts, softening the flesh to jelly, and wrapped her hand into the Terat’s hair. She tugged, and earned an excited gasp. “I could tear out your throat.”

“Yes,” Lucrezia whispered, fearless, “and it might be I want you to.”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t matter. You’ll find out when it becomes important. I trust that you aren’t about to engage in an exciting sexual game and want me to give you some answers?”

“That would be correct.”

“You could just ask you know.”

“We both know you find this more exciting,” Shiv said, smiling, and suckling on Lucrezia’s hands with her breasts.

“Guilty as charged. Let’s just say I had reason to believe Kladach would pop in on you before long. You have prior history, after all. Kladach is a good and dear friend of Mr. Booth, and once our queen convinces him that she has no idea of what’s going on and that she has nothing to do with the whole business, the word will go to Geryon from someone he trusts and they’ll naturally assume this was an attempt to turn them against her. Narcosis is naturally bitchy and doesn’t have Chang’s ability to be believed, everyone assumes she’s deceitful even when she’s being honest. Especially when she’s being honest, in fact, because the only reason she would ever tell the truth is because it serves her ends better than a lie. In contrast, even Chang’s detractors admit she’s honest, and that’s a quality that Geryon admires in her, even if he disagrees with her politics. In total, this will work in Chang’s favour when she goes to him for help, whenever she gets round to it. In the meantime, Geryon will rightly go to Narcosis and be cross at her. This will have a few convenient knock-on effects. Is that sufficient explanation for you?”

Shiv released Lucrezia’s hands and set her back on her feet. She put her hands behind her back. A leather strap whipped out from her cleavage, coiled about her chest like a snake and then settled across her nipples, with the attached padlock on the right. The white silken scarf emerged next and crept down her right arm like a snake before whipping around both her arms and tying them tight together. She let out a soft sigh, and then said, “It’ll do.”

She sat down, back arched. Properly bound, her spirits calmed. The anger seemed more distant than ever, and the fight with Kladach was old news that might have happened to some other person. She felt closer to chrysalis than ever. Somewhere in the fight, it had hardened in her quantum signature. It was right when she realized that she was fighting without hate. Not even an iota of it. Her words aped the form of her old rage, but none of it was reflected in her thoughts. And she fought well, with skill and precision. Maybe I can enter chrysalis soon, she thought.

Lucrezia sat down beside her. “I’m sorry your apartment got destroyed. I’ll make sure your pianos are replaced. Prudence is worried. She came to me in a panic. I calmed her down, and she’s talking with Chang right now.”

Shiv paused, feeling a momentary flutter. “I… appreciate that. About the pianos, I mean.”

“Of course. What else could you be referring to?” Lucrezia’s tone was mild, conversational, gently poking fun.

“The Anavasi, is it?” Shiv ran the word over her tongue. It sounded good. “What are you plotting next?”

Lucrezia kissed her on the ear. “You’ll find out. Or you won’t. But you’ll benefit either way. You’re precious to me, Shiv, and even more precious to Chang. So don’t worry. Everything I do, I do for you. It’ll all be better soon. I promise.”

“I wonder,” Shiv said. “Sometimes I doubt your sincerity.”

“Don’t. I’m really quite easy to understand, even if the details of my plans are not.”

Shiv cricked her neck left and then right. A few small bone-like chips were sliding back into place. Shiv had a skeleton, sure enough, but it was not made of bone. She had no internal organs, and her bones were flexible beyond logical measure. Even her nervous system worked differently. “Really?”

“Have you ever loved someone so much that you would die for them?”

“No.”

“Can you imagine it?”

She shook her head. “No. Honestly, I’ve never really understood how love is meant to work for Terats. We are focused on our individual evolution to the sacrifice of all else. Should you not discard her at the first sign of drifting apart? And you have, oh you have. How do you love each other?”

Lucrezia’s answering laugh was warm and playful. “You’ve tasted her cock the same as me. How can I not?”

Shiv’s fingers flexed. She could feel the claws just beneath the skin. It was a hard reminder. “Chang is… very special, yes. It is more than sex you want from her.”

“Yes,” Lucrezia said. “Of course, you’re starting to learn what that feels like, too. For all of the rhetoric, all the talk of individualism, we learn a lot from one another, and most of all from those we love. If you want to understand me, Shiv, you’ll need to understand love. And you know what? I think that might be what gets you into chrysalis in the end.”

Shiv turned towards her. “Do you, now?”

“Oh yes. Because you’ve become so hard and so mixed up that you don’t even understand how it works anymore. But I know you better, and always did.”

There was something unsaid in Lucrezia’s tone, something that put Shiv on edge. But after a few moments, she knew, she knew what the Terat was getting at. And oddly, it did not make her angry. “Prudence,” she whispered.

Lucrezia rose. “Well, who else to help the woman who doesn’t understand love than a woman desperately seeking it who has an intuitive understanding of emotions?”

Shiv felt and heard her walking away, back towards the bathroom. She would leave through the drains. A smile slowly spread across Shiv’s lips. “Thank you.”

There was a pause. “No problem. You’ve been… a good friend. And I mean that honestly. You know me and what I do, but you never seem to care. You remind me a little of Chang that way.”

“And when you decided to play matchmaker, you chose someone kind. Why?”

“Because I want you both to be happy, the way I am. Believe me, I spent a long while picking the right student for you. I want you to enter chrysalis, Shiv. I want you to evolve. You are so beautiful, and a walking proof that Chang is not wrong. That’s why I wanted your lips to make the Mirror Queen. And that’s why I want your lips to forge the Anavasi. In a very real sense, it all begins with you.”

[Toby Lupin]

Darrik 14th May

An intense look of focus was on Darrik's face, as he worked to finish off this carving that he'd visualized in a bit of chance inspiration. At Puck's suggestion, Darrik had begun to practice and expand his efforts into the different and physical spheres of artwork, and today, well, a chance remark about Lucrezia's predilection for different schemes and hidden plots had resounded when he perused the OpNet for inspiration.

Games Workshop was still going strong, even if the primary line of wargames that made money for them were eyed towards the allure and might of novas. But, the dedicated minority that supported Warhammer Fantasy and 40,000 ensured there was money to be gained from them, and thus the games still existed to be supported.

And there was something to be said for the symbolic similarity between Tzeentchian daemons and Lucrezia's talents. So Darrik had occupied a section of Puck's personal workshop for the past several hours since before dawn, shaping the pine to his exact detailed vision. The pine wood by now was well and magnificently carved into the statuette he'd wanted... now Darrik tapped and stroked with a brush to add proper color to the image.

It was almost finished- he paused, feeling a slight push of air currents. "Can I help you?" He inquired from where he sat.

"There's a visitor who'd like to see you soon." Marielle's voice came from behind Darrik. She was a dark-haired woman in her very early 30s, a poor ghetto Latina who'd come to the conclusion she'd needed to get out of her rut, and thus had applied successfully to Exalt! as well as divorcing her ineffective husband with the aid of the organization.

Incidentally, like the grand majority of the women in Exalt!, she'd taken well to Darrik and more than certainly desired the intimate attentions of the supernova-handsome male. Given that she was making great strides in painting, Darrik was considering such a reward for her hard work- she did have a nicely curvaceous figure and extra pert flesh in the right places.

"Just a dab on the eyes," Darrik responded, doing so, and looked on it with satisfaction at his production. "Done. I should let the paint dry anyway." He got up, and followed Marielle to his destination, though amusingly, the natural seductive little sway to his walk seemed to draw Marielle's eyes more than actually trying to make sure they were headed the right way.

But eventually they came to the doorway of a private meeting room, unintended detours at a minimum...

Masterpiece Carving

Having purchased Arts and Artistic Genius with XP...

Megas first 3...

Artistic Genius Roll:

Jeremy *rolls* 10d10: 5+10+10+9+3+6+10+7+4+4: 68

Popping Clever Quality

Jeremy *rolls* 1d10: 6: 6

9 sux there to be added onto the main Arts roll:

Jeremy *rolls* 12d10: 1+8+3+6+6+8+4+9+1+7+9+9: 71

Total Arts sux: 9+7= 16 sux.

The carving is ironically of Lucrezia, combining her image with that as a sort of Lord of Change from Warhammer 40k. Rather good, I would say, a definite masterpiece.

[WhiteRain]

Marielle gave him a shy smile and opened the door for Darrik.

Inside the meeting room was a simple white table and two chairs, with a beautiful painting of a bamboo forest on one wall. It was one of Chang’s, almost realer than real and detailed to a level even Nova painters struggled to match.

Marielle slipped into the chair on the other side of the table, smiled, and changed. She rippled and filled out even more, growing a touch less prominent in the bosom but more in the backside, her features became Caucasian and her long hair shortened to shoulder length. She took on a look of pure Nova beauty, far beyond human conceptions and possibility, and her flawless lips curved in a welcoming smile.

Lucrezia still wore Marielle’s clothes, though now she strained against them in places and they were loose in others. “Hello, Darrik. Nice carving. Though my arse is much better in the flesh, don’t you think?”

He frowned at her. “Lucrezia? Where’s Marielle?”

“She’s me and has been all along. I created her whole cloth a few months ago, with a little assistance of a friend of mine to play my oh-so awful husband. It’s quite funny, really. He’s gay and I’m bi. No wonder the marriage fell apart!” She chuckled. “I’m sure Puck will be annoyed when he finds out but hopefully by then this shape and persona will be of no further use to me. Please, take a seat. We need to talk. The small error I’ve arranged in the camera systems won’t last forever and I don’t want anybody to know I’m here right now.”

Darrik looked uneasy, but Lucrezia gestured for him to sit, and he did. “What’s this about?”

“Treachery. What else, when I’m involved? I need to ask you a question or two. First and most important, how good are you at detecting truths from lies? Don’t worry I don’t hold any of this against you,” she said, gesturing at her ill-fitting clothes. “I’m exceptionally good at pretending to be someone I’m not. The person or persons you’ll be looking for almost certainly aren’t unless they’ve sicced Turncoat on us, but he’s Orzais’s pet and I’ll be stunned if he’s involved. And if you feel you need to ask me any questions, best to get them off your chest quickly. Like I said, we don’t have a terrible amount of time.”

She relaxed. Darrik’s reputation seemed to suggest he’d be perfect for what she had in mind. But did he have the will and the way? It was time to find out.

[Toby Lupin]

Darrik settled down and smiled back at Lucrezia, quickly forgiving her for the role she'd played. "Well, all I will say on the note of Marielle, is that you were about to get a small reward for being so hard-working with the painting." He chuckled lightly, alluding to how Lucrezia considered men to be pitifully endowed in comparison to Chang. Then his expression became more serious as he focused to business. "A traitor in our ranks? In answer to your question, I'll say 'Very good.' As for my own questions, what did they do? And for you, do you mind telling me the whole story?"

He raised a placating hand. "You're hardly lying in the least manner, but I can hear the subtle concealment in your voice. There's more motives behind having me find the spy or sell-out than just the identification, isn't there?"

[WhiteRain]

My, my. Seems the rumours about the kids are more than that. God knows what their other siblings are like. Between listening to Darrik’s conversations, Coraline’s visit, and a few interactions she had seen at the Rainbow Room, Lucrezia was forming a picture of their little family. They were staying in the shadows for the most part, probably for safety. But it didn’t contribute anything to her trusting of Darrik or his motives for joining the Teragen. It could be a coincidence that two siblings of the same family happened to be courting her at once… or they might have their own agenda. She was inclined towards the latter.

“I do mind, as a matter of fact. Yes I have some oblique intentions behind using you in this regard, but I’ll keep those to myself. A plan unexplained is a plan that can’t be betrayed. In fact I’m specifically approaching you because you’re new and – by all measures and sense – you seem to be profoundly and unfairly powerful. Inexperienced, true, but a good kisser,” she winked. “Consider this your chance to pull one for the team.”

Darrik nodded. “For Chang, right?”

“Well, she’s a team in and of herself, isn’t she? You’re her student. I figured I could rely on you for this much.”

“What exactly do you want, then?”

She had suspected Darrik was a grifter from the moment she saw him, but he didn’t seem like a mega brain. There was no way he could piece together exactly what was going on, and she intended to keep it that way for the time being. “There’s somebody inside the Pandaimonion who’s spying on Chang and putting out information, most likely to The Primacy but maybe to Vigilance. I want you to find out who they are, and tell me. Only me. Not Chang, not Puck, not anyone in your family, just me. Keep it to yourself, as well.”

Via Clarity, Darrik is going to know that Lucrezia is intending to use this both as a test of loyalty for him, and the information itself as a weapon, presumably against whoever the spy works for.

Having beat her on the manipulation roll, Darrik’s going to realize that Lucrezia already knows who it is and has done for a long time.

[Toby Lupin]

Hmm... true words, Lucrezia, if it weren't for the fact that I don't need to hear it explained to know what it is... or at least, roughly what you have planned her for me. Darrik of course, had no such intentions of betraying Chang, or any sort of subversion, but grifters never really trusted one another, did they? Of course, if he passed the loyalty test with flying colors, would Lucrezia raise her suspicions instead of lowering them?

Well, best he proceed as if the thought that Lucrezia knew nothing of the spy was the truth of the matter. "Understood," he confidently stated. "I guess I'd best get cracking."

Darrik 15th May

The problem with determining how to find the spy, was, how would they get the secret's from Chang's Inner Circle? Or to be more precise- how would you find out who talked to The Alchemist when she'd committed another suicide and was filming it on the OpNet for art? Inconvenient, and Darrik's aesthetics never ran towards the necrotic.

Not to suggest Cindi had intentionally betrayed Chang, but as Darrik had reason to deduce, she was heavily influenced most when on a downer and desirous of willing consoling company. And no doubt a spy with the right abilities could ensure he or she had wind of the right information without being considered prying.

It had taken him this long though, in order to be able to spend some sit-down time with Darion in the Rainbow Room, discussing the OpNet video and how it had come on the end of a depressed period for the Alchemist. "Strange, though," Darion had commented, "that Trae was there to comfort her, or so Cindi said."

A name and lead, which Darion casually- or calculatedly, in the event he was aware of the investigation within Chang's faction- identified to be a nominal member, a psychic with some grifter talents, more connected to Narcosis' favorites. There were other caring novas who'd spent time with The Alchemist, but Trae was...

Most interesting and flagging as a suspect, which heightened the likelihood of being Darrik's quarry when later on, Darrik spied him dancing on the floor with Lameea, in a fashion attributable to close friends. Given the verbal smack-downs upon the snake-woman by Puck and Chang, a strong motive had been established.

Next step, was to handle an innocuous way of getting a conversation with the two, effected by simply heading onto the dance floor and letting the pair gravitate towards him. After a bit of the trio's athletics activities, Darrik pondered, as if curious: "I'm surprised you've been dancing this long with me. I thought you'd still be holding a grudge over the... conversation with my mentor."

Lameea looked a little taken aback, focused as she was on the fact that Darrik was someone she wanted to bed far more than that he was indeed Chang's student. But Trae, gratifyingly, smiled politely and shook his head. "It's something we were upset about. But time has smoothed things over and we've put it behind us."

Liar. Darrik let nothing but the carefully overlaid desire on his face show, while he ruminated on the petty retaliation of Trae. You haven't put it behind you, at least not until after you found something with which to pass onto her enemies that would hurt Chang. Whatever it was, you were going for some measure of blood, all for the rejection of a one-night stand and a lecture on 'What Goes Around Comes Around.'

Bored of this, her mind on other things, Lameea brushed in closer and began to move her coils around Darrik, lascivious eyes hooded to lure him and and advertise her lust. "Not tonight, unfortunately." Darrik stated, stepping back with an apologetic expression- though inside he was anything but.

Once he was away, and hopefully away from prying eyes as best one might be, Darrik tapped out a message to 'Marielle' on her Exalt! OpNet address. A message that, though suggestive in language, conveyed really nothing more than the wish to meet. And Lucrezia would really know what it was about.

[WhiteRain]

PUCK 16^th May

Being ‘Marielle’ had been informative. Useful, too, but informative more than anything, and Lucrezia was reminded again of how little use most shapeshifters made of their gifts.

It had been one of those discussions which spun around back when she first met Chang. Even then she was intense, focused, and seemingly obsessed about using her gifts ‘appropriately’. The Lucrezia of years gone by was an altogether less ambitious and less glorious creature. She slipped between shapes at will, yes, but only spent minutes or the bare minimum of time needed to get the job done.

Chang always talked about ‘experiencing’, as the truly super-perceptive tended to. I suppose the new me began back then, she thought, sitting at her desk in the Exalt! building and reading Darrik’s message. And good riddance to the old one methinks. Chang never looked back with disdain, and rarely even admitted to regrets, but Lucrezia did. She had been nothing more than a pathetic hanger-on for Narcosis before being approached to find Chang and bring her home to the Teragen. Talking with the future elder, sharing her bed, and staying with her through her long chrysalis changed Lucrezia forever.

Darrik was a quick worker by the looks of things. That could be good. The important point was that she now had time-stamped and dated evidence of him acting against Narcosis and The Primacy. She could not be sure who would side with Chang when the split came, but she would make it agony for anyone who betrayed her, and incentivise them all to stay.

Her copies were all over the world, now, boarding planes and ships, walking the streets of a dozen different cities and attending events all over Ibiza. The nature of the Teragen meant its members were all over the world. Even Chang’s closest confidantes frequently left Ibiza. Shiv remained in Ibiza constantly because she was a wanted criminal in multiple parts of the world. Almost every other member was frequently busy elsewhere. Meh’Lindi often left the Bar and Grill to baseline management, locked up her lair and went out to do field research, sometimes in very remote locations which took her away from her fellows for months. Most of the rest were in all corners of the globe on media events or working on artistic endeavours. Or at least, they would be without a guiding hand to keep them in one place.

Lucrezia had been preparing for this for a long time, and with a little difficulty had insured that projects were either postponed or completely fell through where it might have dragged Chang’s inner circle away from Ibiza. She needed them to be there to set the groundwork. She could pop in on all the isolated others and ensure the call was heard.

She was being pushed to her limit. It felt good. Lucrezia had added to her growing chrysalis several times already. I wonder if I’ll be ready to join her soon… She wanted that, so much. To be Chang’s equal in Teras, not her student-wife.

‘Marielle’ rose from her seat and left her room. It was time to set the next part of the scheme in motion.

She asked a few people where Puck was and ignored them when they said he was busy upstairs. This he would want to hear. He might be with his sister, but Lucrezia felt she would be fine around Eden. The girl was timid, not troublesome. Besides, she knew ‘Marielle’, and wasn’t likely to comprehend the nature of the deception. Puck would, of course, but he would also understand her reasons. Overall she felt more certain of Puck than any other periphery Nova, which was good, because he had a vital role to play.

Lucrezia reached the top floor and knocked on Puck’s door.

“Who is it?” He sounded as relaxed and comfortable as a Nova ever could, but he usually did these days.

“Marielle,” Lucrezia said.

“Oh, great,” he said, and she heard him approach. Then the door opened, and he grinned at her. “What’s up? You’re not having any more trouble with the family, are you?”

So to speak… “No, it’s fine. Can I come in?”

“By all means,” he said, and poked the door open.

She walked across the room, allowing her body language to shift out of the persona she created and return to her own natural seductive gait. By the time Lucrezia turned and sat down, Puck was already frowning. After a moment or two, he nodded. “Oh.”

Lucrezia flowed back into her natural shape, the one he knew best and which she felt most attached to. She leaned elegantly on the table beside her. “Hello, Puck.”

Puck held up a finger, headed across the room and closed the other door firmly. “Just making sure Eden doesn’t hear anything. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“You know, I’m hearing that far too often these days,” Lucrezia said, her tone mock-peevish. “You’d think I was some sort of herald of the apocalypse.”

Puck was studying her now, frowning. “I’m guessing Marielle’s an assumed identity?”

“I infiltrated Exalt!, yes.”

“Why?”

“Long story. In part to show I could. You may want to consider having a good hard look through your membership soon,” Lucrezia said. “If one of me’s here, you can bet someone else has a deep cover agent in the group soon. Maybe even Turncoat. There’s a lot of eyes on you now, Puck, even more than before. I don’t think I need to say why, hmm? But that’s not the real reason why. I needed to get close to you without anyone realizing I had. Don’t push too hard, the less you know the better for all concerned. So before I go on into gritty details, I need to ask you a couple of things. The first and second are: did you know that Scrambler attacked Chang recently, and do you know what Chang has been working on over the past month or so?”

[Shosuro Miren]

Puck pressed his hands together and gave a shallow nod. "I'd heard there was some altercation with Scrambler, but Chang was fine so I didn't much care. I've been...working to keep a bit more of an eye on him, though. He has a tendency to try to destroy anything or anyone associated with her...." His protectiveness of Exalt! was obvious enough to need no verbal explication. "As for what Chang's been doing...I've noticed some purchases and that she's been hanging out with the Japanese fertility nova...uh, Konohanasakuyahime, I think her name is?"

His eyes were unreadable to Lucrezia, an unsettling change from the nova child she had enjoyed playing with only a few months ago. "I would assume that she's creating something akin to a second Nursery, though I don't honestly understand why. Or at least why she hasn't enlisted Scripture and Bounty's help. Scrambler wouldn't have dared to touch her with their backing." The basics of what his mentor had been up to hadn't been hard for him to piece together, not since his Apotheosis, but what and how weren't why and on that account he was obviously still puzzled.

He waited for any more questions, watching Lucrezia with a deep, steady gaze that was a touch disturbing in its stillness. This was a side of Puck that very few had yet seen since his Apotheosis and hinted at the power and depth that the barely three years old being had acquired in so short a time. She fought the urge to shiver under that look.

[WhiteRain]

My, he’s gone and grown up, hasn’t he? She wondered how much longer he would be with her. The change in Puck was startling, and the waves of power rolling off him were chilling in their intensity. There was nothing playful in his eyes now, though she imagined that might have something to do with her infiltration of his beloved Exalt! Or maybe he knew already and did nothing about it.

Lucrezia knew people underestimated her intellect. She often played stripper and whore, and those were roles most Novas looked on with no more enlightenment than baselines did. Maybe Puck felt that way about her, now. It didn’t bother her much. Before her chrysalis it had, and she felt terribly inferior to her wife, but a Nova never made it into chrysalis without coming to terms with their nature and comprehending it. And Lucrezia had made Novas with minds fifty times greater than hers dance like puppets on a string. Given a choice, she would rather be underestimated any time.

She shifted, a little uncomfortable under his gaze. He was slamming down all the walls to keep her from getting a read from him. That was awkward. Better to play things close to her chest for a little while longer. There was too much at stake to be careless. Lucrezia knew he could probably pick up on all of this and maybe more. Chang could read a ridiculous amount of information out of mere glances at someone’s posture, and there was no reason to believe Puck could not do the same or even better. Chang, after all, was not a ‘people person’.

A mischievous smile crossed Lucrezia’s face. “Why, Puck, I should have thought that much was obvious. She doesn’t trust Scripture or Bounty.”

Puck’s expression didn’t shift one iota. He probably knew that already. He’s turning into one of those Novas. Well, maybe he can get Pedro to start talking again. I’m sure he could do with a friend.

Lucrezia sighed. “At least, she doesn’t trust Scripture. You’re right, though. Chang’s making something we’re referring to as a crèche. You may be able to figure out her reasons yourself. If not,” she shrugged, “you can ask her. They’re not really important. What is important is whether or not you’re willing to help her succeed. Scrambler’s influential in The Primacy, and as you’re well aware he loathes my wife. You are uniquely in a position to take some of the heat off, if you’re willing. She’ll never ask you herself, of course. Asking for help is one of the things Chang does very badly, and she considers it impolite to inconvenience other people with her problems. I’m not so hampered.”

[Shosuro Miren]

Puck blinked in a moment of entirely unguarded shock and surprise. "She doesn't trust Scripture?" He blinked several more times, looking utterly baffled. "Why?"

Lucrezia shrugged, "Ask her yourself."

Puck frowned and nodded, "I will."

There was an unsteady silence in the room for several long minutes as Puck thought things out. When he spoke, it was with a careful clarity. "I don't mind helping distract Scrambler. He's a thug and a bastard and I'm pretty much up for anything that pisses him off. And I know she's not asking." He gave his mentor's wife a look, "I'd be curious enough to ask even she even knows, but the point is rather moot. She knows you and she married you; she can decide if she doesn't like your schemes on her own, but she hasn't stopped you so far."

"As for the creche...." he shrugged, still looking a little confused. "It seems redundant, but if it's something she wants to do...." He sighed. "Another secure place for nova children to grow up doesn't seem like a bad idea to me. The Nursery is...I don't know why she would think there was a need for somewhere else, but that's her decision. Belief." He ran a hand through his hair, his particular little nervous tic, "I'm willing to help with Scrambler, and if she needs specific things for this creche...then lets just take that on a case-by-case basis. I've be thinking about what to do with nova children with Exalt! nova parents that aren't Terats. Darrik's lovers, they're not Terats and he'll be a father of three not too many months from now. I asked what their plans were for the children, after a quiet explanation that the Teragen had a safe place for nova children, but....well, Gwen and Agatha don't want to be separated from their infants. Which means we need to figure something out within Exalt!."

His expression darkened for a moment and he closed his eyes, reigning in some strong emotion before continuing, "We've instituted mandatory parenting courses for any pregnant or current parent in Exalt! and...eh, you probably either already know about the plans or don't care. Anyways, case by case on this 'creche', and I want to ask her about her distrust of Scripture first."

[WhiteRain]

It was gratifying, and a little relaxing, to see and hear a touch of the old Puck. He was still the same boy at heart, just smarter, and more beautiful, and more magnificent by far. But her trust did not rise up, and her defences did not drop.

You’ve grown too much, Puck, she thought, a little sadly. Nothing can be the same again. Now you’re an ally, an equal and a peer… and a potential enemy.

Not yet, though. She supposed much would ride on two little words. I will, she thought, echoing Puck’s words. And what answers might Chang give you? Lucrezia put that out of her mind for now, though. She had more than enough to think about as it stood.

“Chang doesn’t know what I’m up to and it’s better that it stays that way. Some of what I’ve set in motion hinges upon her honesty, and she cannot give the correct answers if she is aware of my activities. And of course I know about your planned parenthood plans. Being Marielle has been very informative.” She winked. “I feel it’s worth warning you about those plans. You know how dangerous the issue of Nova children is, and also how deadly the games of Novas are for baselines. Your not-cultists will suffer badly if you aren’t careful, and if there’s much of the old Puck in you…” she gave an apologetic smile. “Well, you always did seem to leap before you looked. These people love you, and they’ll follow you to the grave. No need to give them an unintentional push, hmm? You know as well as I do how destructive our enemies can be when it comes to preventing Novas from breeding. Hell, that's why the Nursery was put together in the first place, wasn't it?”

Puck ran his hand through his hair again. “I can take care of my people, thanks.”

“And if you need help doing so, maybe I can offer some. These things are always give and take, after all.” Mandatory parenting courses, she thought. I wonder if your sister has something to do with those? Brute was a frequent topic of conversation throughout Exalt!, and Lucrezia had managed to pick up some interesting facts about her by listening to them and to the titbits Chang let slip. “Now, to business, as it were. If you’re willing?”

“Sure thing,” Puck said. He was all business now. “I’ll keep what you said in mind.”

“You have a history with The Primacy and The Harvesters,” Lucrezia said. “I want you to piss them off. You’ve always ignored them before, but I’d like you to, uh, retaliate a little. I wouldn’t dare suggest a means; it’s quite up to you. Just keep ramping up the pressure on them. If their attention is getting split between you and Chang, she’ll be able to complete her goals easily enough. Does that sound reasonable?”

[Shosuro Miren]

Puck, 16^th May, 2027

Puck grinned at Lucrezia. "No, but I'll do it anyways," he quipped. "I'll leave 'Marielle' on the membership list, if you want. An unofficial channel for you to contact me. And I you're right, I do need to tighten up on security. I'm working on something already. Hopefully I'll have it ready to go by June. Please let Chang know I'd like to talk to her as soon as she has the time, about Scripture and this creche."

Lucrezia nodded and then slipped out of the room and building. Well, let's see what he can do. I really hope I don't have to kill him some day.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

17^th May, 2027

Puck had thought very carefully after Lucrezia had left on just what to do. There were several easy options of action that would piss off both the Harvesters and the Primacy, but most of those would also catch much of the rest of the Teragen, and Puck wanted to keep the friends he had there. When he finally put all the pieces together for a Goodfellow-worthy plan, about twenty minutes later, he grinned in glee and started making calls. By the end of the next day he had six Nippontai members, two dozen well-known municipal defenders and a score of DeVries Elites lined up, and an appointment with Marissa Clairmont, the PR director for Utopia stationed in New York. Marissa was a Greek-descended nova that had erupted while touring Greece with her high-school choir; she'd been with Utopia for almost eight years now and had been dubbed Aletheia after her appointment to PR director by a journalist that thought she was terribly clever. It had stuck not because most people had any idea what the name meant, but because it sounded Greek and pretty. The raven-haired nova had accepted the moniker with grace, but still primarily went by her baseline name.

Her office was a study in classic minimalism and her dress was prim to the point that Puck was fairly certain she didn't get laid nearly as often as she should. She smiled at him, tension in every line of her posture as she resisted the conflicting urges to order the Terat out of her office or to drag him on to her desk and do several career-ending and possibly illegal activities for the next several hours. Focus, Marissa. You're a nova, you're a high-ranking member of Utopia. He's a Terat and up to something.

Puck smiled pleasantly and asked blandly, "So, what do you think? Is Utopia interested in participating in the charity gala? It seems quite in line with the organization's ideals and certainly a wonderful opportunity to help baselines harmed by nova actions. Not to mention making wonderful soundbites for N! news for the next several weeks."

Marissa clasped her hands in front of her on the desk and watched him closely. He wasn't lying, she could tell that, and he hadn't shift an iota of quantum since he'd entered the building. Not that he needs to. Look at him. Why don't we have more on him? It's like he just popped out of the universe whole-cloth less than a year ago. "I think the idea is lovely," she replied neutrally.

After a heartbeat of silence, Puck allowed his smile to slip into a grin. "But you're wondering why the evil Terat would want to host an event for baselines, most specifically baselines that have been themselves or their family members harmed by novas when there's a good chance that it was other Terats that did the harming?"

She blinked. Well, that was....direct. "Uh, well, yes."

He leaned forward, mirroring her with his own hands just inches from her, "Well, there are a number of reason, like with most things. First, those people could use help. Novas can hurt baselines just by being careless; we're utterly devastating when we decide to deliberately hurt others. And generally being assholes about it." He let her take that in for half a second before moving on, "Second, I run and participate in a public organization that has an unfortunate PR problem with a bunch of loons on the other side of Central Park, so good PR is an asset I'd like to cultivate. As would Nippontai, DeVries, and several dozen cities that would like to show off their municipal defenders and attract tourism dollars. Third," he leaned back, "unlike Utopia, the Teragen are not an organization built on a corporate or military model. We are a confederate of individuals that share a basic philosophy, not a static hierarchy, and I personally think those that run around acting like baselines are chew-toys are immature and probably mentally imbalanced gits. There are always consequences to actions, and this event will show that a diverse and powerful group of novas are willing to stand together, despite ideological and professional differences, to assist those victims. Hopefully they'll take the implication that more than charity gala could be organized if they continue or escalate their behaviour."

"So, Mr. Puck-"

"Just Puck, please."

"Fine." She took a breath and started again, "Puck. You want me to believe that you, a professed member of an organization know for menacing baselines, ignoring the rule of law, and committing acts of terror across the world, that you want to host a charity gala to raise money and support for baseline victims out of the goodness of your heart? And you want Utopia to have a presence at this event because....?"

He shrugged, "It seemed like something you guys would be interested in. I mean, it's not like having you or some other representatives is going to make or break the event. It's just a friendly invitation. As for the goodness of my heart, I'm sure you have some file here somewhere on Exalt!, including membership files." He held up a hand, "Don't insult us both by denying it. It would make you look incompetent if you didn't, and I'm neither naive nor paranoid enough to care. There are a number of Exalt! members that have suffered at the hands of novas or the collateral damage they've caused. We're giants in a playground made of paper and glass, Aletheia. Even those of use that can't bring down a building with a single blow or blast apart entire city blocks with some quantum-fueled bolt of whatever."

Marissa blinked and tried to put this man together with the files of Teragen 'incidents', where entire families had been eaten in Ottawa, Kansas in a three-night terror spree of something calling itself the Devourer, or the village in the mountains of northern California where a Terat by the name of Aqua Mortis had flooded each individual building and drown the entire 2,000 population settlement despite open windows and doors. The water only drained once Nil had disrupted the quantum energies in the area. Marissa still had nightmares from the pictures of the bodies laid out, with so many small figures under white cloths, so many tiny coffins to be made.... She blinked, bringing herself back to the meeting and the room, hoping that he hadn't caught her wandering attention. "You seem very...different...from your...associates, Mr- uh, Puck."

"We're all different," he said simply, catching her maudlin shift in mood if not the details of what had caused it. "Look, I have my reasons for doing this. You've heard a number of them, and there are a number of others that don't really matter or are personal. I've jumped through your hoops for this meeting because the more novas that attend, the more money raised and the more people helped. That should be a good enough reason to agree." He stood up, his clothes falling into perfect lines, "And if that's not enough, then sell it to your superiors as a way to get a look inside Exalt! with an official invitation and to make sure the event and the money goes exactly as I've promised it would."

She stood and brushed out the wrinkles of her own clothes in an unconsciously self-conscious manner. "I'll...consider it, Puck." She swallowed and nodded, "I'll see if anyone wishes to volunteer. If there are enough responses to merit an official presence, then I'll send word to you."

He nodded, "By tomorrow, if you can. The gala will be next Monday, so we'll need the final list of participants as soon as possible." He held out a hand and shook hers, keeping his expression as neutral as possible as the poor woman nearly swooned from the touch. "Thank you, Aletheia. I do hope you'll consider participating. It'll be fun. I promise."

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Very early morning, 25^th May, 2027

The hate mail had started almost immediately after the afternoon press release on Tuesday that announced the event, and Puck had tightened security on the building just in case. All members were moved to the building, and applicants had had several floors set aside for them until after Puck assessed just how strongly the Primacy and the Harvesters were going to react to his little party. Scrambler specifically was a right bastard and Puck wouldn't put much past him. And the Harvesters....well, were Harvesters. Beautiful and monstrous and very very dangerous.

His other project was almost ready to go, too. The first group was almost there, he could feel it, and if it worked....well, Exalt! would never be the same. The world might never be the same, if they kept growing like they were. Wouldn't that be something?

So far the night had been perfect on each point:

1. Piss off the Primacy by auctioning off novas as companions for an evening for a baseline-focused charity.
   
2. Piss of the Harvesters by targeting families and communities that were favorite hunting/sporting grounds of the faction.
   
3. Piss them both off by involving four different factions of (as Rhea had dubbed them) whore-novas, novas that hired themselves out to baselines for money or whatever.
   
4. Avoid pissing off the other factions by steering clear of Panda, Casa, Vigilance, Children of Teras territories, while extending polite invitations to any members that wanted to participate and would abide by the rules of evening for their baseline bidders for the few that had decided to come play and participate in the auction.
   
5. Generate some good PR for Exalt! and reinforce the idea of the 'open door' policy on applying for membership, hopefully countering some of the Supplicant's attempts to be unwanted and sociopathic gatekeepers.
   
6. Cement relations with Nippontai to help with Exalt! Japan.
   
7. Throw a party!
   

He'd been delighted to see Aletheia leading the wedge of Utopian novas as they made their way through the party with a mix of nervous belligerence and utter bewilderment at the open and friendly reception by Exalt! members and Puck in particular. The media had been like little kids in a candy store where everything was marked 'free'; articles had started flying around the 'net after only the first twenty minutes of the gala, and by the time the actual auction began the entire block had been mobbed by baselines hoping to catch even a glimpse of a favorite nova or find some unattended back door into the party. Security had been like a game of Pac Man (so Peter Fars, one of the security personnel had told him, and then insisted that they sit down and find a sim of the ancient game once the party was over when Puck just blinked blankly at him), chasing off clever baselines and herding stray Utopian and DeVries guests back to the party areas. The Nippontai members were too polite to get caught snooping around and the MD's seemed to actually just be there for the party and to raise money for a good cause. All in all, Puck had had a great time and ended up raising several billion dollars in one night from invitation donations and the auction itself. He'd ended up bought for the evening by a brother and sister that were heirs to a multinational agritech empire and were quite...liberated...in their social mores. He'd kept them out of the bedroom by sheer force of will and a mantra that bought for the evening or not, he was still the host of the party and would be missed if he ducked out for several hours. That and a promise to take the two on a proper evening out later, given their eye-popping winning bid.

I should do this more often. It really was a hoot.... Perhaps as an annual event? It did raise an astounding amount of money. Even the couple of Terats that decided to come play seemed to have a good time and no one got eaten or turned into a drooling idiot. Well, intentionally on the latter.

He had had to clear out Supplicants from the crowds - discretely, of course - and had quietly taken Jeramiah out of the building himself early on in the evening, but still. All in all, the evening was winding down into everything Lucrezia had asked for as well as several other cherries on top for himself and Exalt!. It was almost two in the morning now and the crowds were just intoxicated and tired enough to be on the edge of snippy and unhappy morning-after pics floating over the net, so he gathered everyone back to the Grand Salon and hopped up onto stage, champaign flute of fresh sparkling cider in had.

"Ladies and gentlemen, thank you! This has been a wonderful evening and your generous donations will change the lives of so many individuals and families that have been in need and pain for so long!" He clapped for them, careful to keep his glass from spilling, and grinned as the applause caught on. "One last toast, one last dance, and then bonne nuit, my guests, until the next time!"

Glasses were pulled from trays or refilled from the bottles and elegant punch bowls spread around the room while he spoke, and finely dressed men and women raised them in unison. "To good deeds and bon amies!" The crowd murmured and shouted and slurred their assent, and drank. Puck downed his own glass of amber liquid in one gulp and a slow warmth spread through his body. That isn't right, he thought as the lights in the room seemed to grow impossibly bright and then dim fuzzily. There wasn't any alcohol...his thoughts dimmed just as much and he blinked, trying to take a step but instead pitching forward unsteadily and falling off the front of the stage as the leaden weight of his useless limbs pulled him to the floor. He could faintly hear the cries of alarm, the people rushing forward as he tried to move; he caught the dark curls and worried face of Aletheia kneeling down in front of him, calling his name - and then blackness.

[WhiteRain]

THE ALCHEMIST 18th May - 1 week earlier

It was nothing but thought, swimming in a sea of sensations. Scents mixed into the feeling of silk on skin, the touch of lover’s hands and a rage of lights, a symphony of sounds. There was no transition, no logic or sense to the progression of input. One moment it tasted cinnamon and cloves, the next it listened to the wind and the waves at sea.

There was peace here, in this place of not-quite memory and not-quite truth. It recognized sensations, but did not know from whence they came. An ecstatic scream echoed through its world, but all it had a feeling for were full black-painted lips, and no conception of the person they belonged to.

Sometimes there was light.

This was no mundane illumination, however. Rather the light was a pulsing heartbeat that defied any description of colour or character. It was only describable in terms of things it was not. It was not bright, nor was it dim, nor was it warm nor was it blue nor white nor green. Perhaps it was not light at all.

Of course, to say ‘sometimes there was light’ suggested there was time. But even that came and went. It sometimes knew that moments passed, and could measure the passage of sensations and not-images. Occasionally it was able to understand the shift of seconds by the presence or lack of the not-light.

At some point in the timeless flow of impressions, order began to impose itself. Sensations had a definite progression to them. It was not a logical progression, but it was there, shaped by awareness of the concept of ‘before’ and ‘after’.

Then came something approaching identity, beginning with the awareness that the light was a concept of light, an artistic rendering of quantum forces in the heart of her being, and with the understanding of gender came a much more rounded comprehension.

She thought she spent a day drifting. It was hard to tell. Her consciousness was still patchy. Her grip of time and place slipped several times, and she plunged back into being ‘It’. Genderless, close to mindless, just a raw existence planed of details.

Light – mundane light – penetrated into her world.

The Alchemist opened her eyes.

Her perceptions were supernaturally sharp, and the sudden clarity of input was like a razor slicing through her brain. Discomfort flooded through her, along with the scent of old blood, the soft reek of rot and wet clothes. She could hear mechanics ticking over, and feel the cold steel that penetrated her body.

Six spears pinned her to the wall. One had been punched through each wrist, one through each ankle, one through her stomach and a final one right through her throat. That one was really uncomfortable.

Nonetheless, she moved, and let out a soft crackling sound, a wheezy death rattle that was born from her first broken and ragged breath. It was a sound of death that signified the first stirrings of life.

Directly across from her, built into the wall, was her OpNet terminal. The camera on the top watched her coldly. She could see herself in an inlaid box on the screen, beautiful and maimed, her naked flesh washed dull red with old blood. Other boxes showed comment feeds from various websites.

She felt her Node pulsing in the back of her mind, and began to channel quantum through her body. Warmth filled her limbs, and she felt the flesh and bones softening. Her eyes tightened and she magnified her vision in on the OpNet screen, to study the comments. They had gone into apoplexy, with shouts of ‘zombie!’ and moral complaints through to people singing her praises and making lewd jokes. Some comments were from her fellow witches, welcoming her back from the place beyond.

The Alchemist stretched her right arm a little, bending her arm impossibly, and slid the limb off the spear. The wound closed up almost instantly. She coiled her arm around in the air like a snake, then pulled her other arm off and did the same before knitting the two together into a double helix above her head.

She gripped the spear in her throat with both hands and yanked it out of the wall and her throat. The Alchemist was stronger than she looked. It was effortless to do this, even though the spear had been driven several feet into the wall behind her.

For a few moments she let her throat gape open, before allowing her body to heal the wound. “Oh,” she said, and her rich, honeyed tones were unmarred.

Her movements were exaggerated, slow, like movements of a play, and each one suggested meaning which might or might not be there. Next she removed the spear from her belly and tossed it aside. Then she stretched her arms upward and gripped the main lighting fixture, before kicking both of her legs off the spears and landing on her feet without even the hint of a pause.

She walked towards the OpNet camera, until her blood-spotted face was filling the screen, her shining eyes, like orbs of liquid crystal, stared deep into the eyes of whoever was watching. Slowly, she smiled.

The Alchemist looked at the rolling counter at the bottom corner of the screen. She wiped blood away from the corner of her mouth. “This has been The Alchemist, turning lead to gold and death to life since two thousand nine,” her smile became a grin. “Live.”

She tapped the screen over the flashing button that said ‘disconnect’.

Her feed had been live for seven days, meaning her corpse had lain undisturbed for that long. She ran a hand through her dark hair, and marvelled at how it could remain so silken and soft after that time, even though it always did.

She felt a little disjointed, in truth. Returning from death was always bracing. Things were so different when she was dead. Slowly she slipped into the chair at her terminal and rubbed her eyes. There was a throbbing just behind them, a bit like a migraine. As a baseline she used to get a lot of those.

The Alchemist rolled her neck, then turned it right round two hundred and seventy degrees and stroked it, feeling the twists in the flesh. “It’s good to be back,” she said.

Looking around again, she laced her fingers and cracked her knuckles, then set to typing on the virtual keyboard. The comment threads were still going ballistic over what they just saw. Plenty of people were complaining and saying the stream should have been shut down, and they were turning into an argument about all sorts of things from her being nude to the graphic nature of her death a week ago.

She brought up the recording of the stream which her terminal had been recording, and ran it from the start. The opening was classic horror stuff, working with the angles offered by the fixed-perspective camera to suggest without showing as she moved around the room oblivious, before disappearing from the screen only for a dark figure to go past the camera. It was an hour later when she shrieked off-screen, was dragged into view by her hair and then impaled on the wall through her stomach.

“Bet they didn’t see that coming,” she thought. The Alchemist advertised the event as a simple live stream open to anyone who wanted to come and watch. She had no real timing for the attack. It was meant to be a surprise. Killing her – as usual – was difficult. Even the spear through the throat didn’t finish her off immediately. The Alchemist remembered fading slowly out over an hour, waiting, waiting, waiting.

She missed Hwangsin. That was the OpNet handle of the Nova serial killer who could finish her off with ease and with artistic skill. Those were good deaths. Without him it was back to suicide, which was becoming an increasingly elaborate arrangement. Back in the day she could hang herself when she needed a rest, but now hanging was just plain boring. She tried hanging herself with a long rope and jumping off the Eiffel tower, but her neck just stretched until her feet touched the ground. And she hadn’t intended it too, either. Thanks for that, Chang, she thought, with a mix of fondness and annoyance. Just watch, I’ll come out of chrysalis invincible. Won’t that be a pain in the arse?

Chang. Her Horned God, given flesh.

More than a Nova or a woman or an artist, Chang filled her mind like a concept, a beautiful caress to every artistic desire and spiritual instinct she possessed. Sometimes Chang felt like an incarnation of the Horned God, other times Diana, and often she felt like an expression of other, unnamed spiritual existences. There was desire, too. Lucrezia wasn’t the only Nova who could enjoy the pleasures Chang had to offer.

“Alive for twenty minutes and I’m horny already.” Chang was special that way. She made The Alchemist yearn the way few other people did. That was why she thought of her as an external representation of the Horned God. There were more beautiful Novas for sure, and way more seductive. But there was something more to Chang, and that was the soft link to the spiritual world inside The Alchemist’s soul.

She hit pause on the playback and rose from her chair to look around the room.

It had been set out normally. A simple two room apartment, this one was the bedroom and living area, with the attached bathroom off through an open doorway. The alcove with her altar was built into the wall on the right of the bed. Not that anyone would know that from the OpNet feed, of course. The furnishings were bland enough, all modern domestic niceness, lacking the sort of gothic styling she preferred in her own dwellings. For one thing, this room had strip lights, where she stuck to good old candles in her mansions. Some people, even other Terats, though she was being pretentious, but they probably didn’t realize that she could see perfectly in the dark. Most modern lights were horrible, designed to murder shadows and light at an annoying brightness. Candle flames, though, were warm and alive and beautiful, they cast unique shadows of their own. Every one of them was a little journey.

Okay, maybe a little pretentious, she thought, but it was a joyful thought. She would rather be pretentious than boring any day.

In the struggle which led to her murder there had been some damage done. A table was smashed to splinters where she had been slammed through it, there was a bloody smear on the wall where she went into it face-first and a lovely head-shaped dent, and a patchy blood trail on the floor leading up to where she was speared and pinned. The bed had not been damaged, though, which she found a bit odd. It was quite bare, with no covers, really just a mattress on top of the frame. It was there to control movement when the attack happened, and for no other reason.

“Clean up time,” she said, and rubbed her hands together. She was going to regret this.

The Alchemist pursed her lips, and sucked.

Quantum surged, and her suction gained strength, rapidly growing into a wind tunnel. The dried blood began to lift from the floor and the walls, the pieces of wall and table all swirled up and disappeared into her mouth and down her throat.

It only took a few moments to leave the room spotless of all the trash and ruined junk. But she gagged on the taste of old blood. “Oh, god. Well that didn’t work,” she said. Before she died she had tried to remove some of the chemicals from her blood in an effort to make it stink less and taste better over time. That little project had just been bumped back onto her drawing board.

She rubbed her belly. It was a little rounded now. That felt good. The Alchemist relaxed for a while, just enjoying that feeling of being just pleasantly full, reminding herself of another great thing to live for. Then she flooded her stomach with quantum and melted all the wood and metal trash down into what she generally thought of as ‘primordial glop’. No, not soup, but glop. She’d seen the stuff and run it through her fingers. It was way too thick to be soup, and she doubted it would taste good with onion. She liked onion soup.

The Alchemist considered for a few moments, and then converted the mass into brandy. She pumped that up into her breasts. She was not a busty woman normally, her figure quite slender without being elegant. This let her fix that for a while at least. There was enough brandy to add a couple of cup sizes.

She headed through into her bathroom, stretching one arm ahead to turn on the shower. One of her nipples lengthened and coiled up into her mouth, and she sucked down brandy as she might from a straw, shivering with the completely intentional pleasure of the action. In polite society she usually opened a vein and bled whatever drink was needed, but around her friends or alone… this was just better. Chang taught her that. Why not have pleasure, when you could have it and lose nothing? Not that she needed much teaching. Life had always been a blazing mix of joy and sadness for her, pleasure and pain. Her emotions twisted like leaves on the wind. Death always brought her back on a high.

The Alchemist cleaned off and washed the taste of old death from her mouth. Brandy was a bit of an old man’s drink, but she didn’t feel like wine. Bit too vampiric, really. White wine might have worked, though.

She turned the shower up as hot as it would go and luxuriated in it blazing off her skin, breaking up and washing away the blood. Soon the water ran red around her feet, and she soaped herself up. There was no need to wash her hair, but she did anyway, just because she liked showers and always had. There was something sensual about the feeling of the water pouring down over her, and it had the advantage of being warm. She appreciated rain for its natural beauty, of course, but it wasn’t as much fun as a shower. Except in the right circumstances, of course, where it could be a lot of fun indeed. There was that one time with Chang…

The Alchemist kept washing her body, but stretched out both her nipples, and put them to work easing the tension mounting in her thighs.

***

Fifteen minutes later she emerged from the bathroom as naked as she went in, with her neck stretched serpentine as she sucked up all the excess water from her skin and body, leaving her dry as a bone. She did get a bit of saliva in her hair while ‘drying’ it, though.

She flicked her nipples over to the wardrobe built into the wall and pulled a clean eufiber dress over to her. She distorted and stretched her limbs and torso to slide into it rather than dress conventionally, and slithered across the floor into her OpNet chair to get back to watching the playback. At the same time she opened up hit data for the Opsite to see how traffic dipped and shifted.

Unsurprisingly, it spiked dramatically in the twenty four hours following her death. After that things normalized and then decreased steadily over the next forty eight hours. All there was to see was a dead woman on a wall, after all. She was willing to guess that her coven made up a good part of the constant traffic.

But then Snow turned up. This was the real key to what they did here. She was as beautiful as ever, with her multi-coloured hair and vivid red and black shirt, and as great a performer as ever, too. “God,” she said, in a perfect imitation of a pouty, irritated teenager, “what a mess.”

And so she began to act out a ‘normal’ life, going back and forth across the camera. OpNet traffic spiked. The Alchemist giggled. She stretched her arm across the room to her wardrobe again and found her silver hand lattice. It was a roughly glove-shaped framework, latched onto a silver disk that was placed in the centre of the palm. Silver threads wrapped the fingers, and a single finger claw tipped her index finger. Most people just thought it a pretty little bit of jewellery. Most people didn’t know it was the single most expensive thing she owned, and cost over five billion yen in total research. Her takings from nine movies almost exclusively went to funding the creation of this lattice.

She drew the claw over the wrist of her left hand, felt it cleave the flesh as easily as it might cut through water, and raised her hand overhead. She swiftly broke down and recombined the makeup of her blood, and even as it came spilling from the cut it formed into red wine that poured into her mouth in a little flood. It was a good vintage, ‘aged’ to be over a century old, rich and fragrant, a delight to her tongue.

The cut closed up after a moment or two, leaving a trickle of wine-blood on the skin, which she licked up while fast forwarding through the footage.

Snow’s appearance and presence made a huge difference. The Alchemist had established her as a star in her movies over the last couple of years, and in fact Snow had appeared in every one of her productions over that time, at least in a guest-starring role. She had also been the model in a half dozen photo shoots. They were very much partners in crime.

Traffic stabilized at a high note, with millions of viewers in every country in the world. Snow was typically brilliant. She acted as if The Alchemist was some peculiar wall-hanging. At one point she actually pretended to find a chair – though actually just stretched her legs so she was taller – and dusted her with a feather duster. In fairness, she did look a bit cleaner afterwards, a real beautiful corpse, on display for the entire world to see.

“That’s fucking brilliant.” The Alchemist grinned and opened up another window so she could check her OpNet accounts. Unsurprisingly there was a build-up of messages. There always was. “For fuck’s sake, guys, why do you wait until I’m dead to send me messages? Do I look like Jesus?”

She wondered sometimes if Jesus of Nazareth – assuming he was a real divine entity – was pissed that people waited until he’d been dead for several hundred years before clogging his inbox up with requests for guidance. Or maybe heaven was the equivalent of God’s e-mail server and being dead was just the smartest career move. For her part, she had never felt the stirrings of that divinity, though there were several he could be an expression of.

Snow came and went, the door was heard to open and close. Traffic tended to stay high even when she wasn’t there. A full day went by without a single thing happening. Oddly, traffic was at a constant high in that time.

About two days ago, Snow appeared again. She was in her ‘ghost girl’ shape, her hair black, her eyes white, with a strip of masking tape across her lips. She just stared into the camera, still as death, occasionally altering the angle of her face, like a bird studying something. This went on for an hour, and The Alchemist was rapt through all of it. There was terror in that dead gaze, a feeling of creeping dread, as if the girl could see her and was studying her. And over her shoulder there was The Alchemist’s corpse, pinned to the wall, framed just so, as if to remind the viewer of what awaited them. There was another viewer spike over that hour.

This shape of Snow’s was a representation of Ereshkigal, death goddess and queen of the underworld. The Alchemist made the connection explicit in ‘Doorway’ the movie which used that shape in the starring role, but only fellow Wiccans picked up on the metaphor both in the ‘monster’ and in the plotline. Snow knew all that, of course, but she mostly wore the shape because she really liked it. She was no Wiccan, and had too much respect for The Alchemist’s faith to pretend.

The Alchemist fast forwarded after that, and stretched one hand over her shoulder and down her back to rub herself between the shoulder blades. That helped relax her some. Snow was really chilling in that form, as she ought to be. She appeared several times after her ghosting, usually in normal, girlish shape, doing as she was told. She moved around the room ignoring The Alchemist completely, once even brought home a lover who was never quite seen and had noisy sex on camera, with her bouncing enthusiastically atop him, long blond hair flying.

Bet the boys all got off to that, she thought, grinning.

The Alchemist was pleased. She wanted to do more than just die this time, and Snow really helped her do that. The occasional appearance of ‘ghost Snow’ helped make, if not a coherent artistic statement, then make a mood and an impression that she hoped would last for the many, many people who had either watched the whole cast or at least recorded it.

“Wonder how long it’ll take before I get sued,” she murmured. Then she stretched her arms out and began to gather some materials and her Book of Shadows and Book of Mirrors, both of them hidden away in a wall cupboard. Not quite a religious text, the Book of Shadows was rather a gathering of spells that she had found to work over the years. The Book of Mirrors, on the other hand, was a collection of her thoughts, feelings and experiences, and how she felt Novas played into the Wiccan godhead pantheon from various angles along with how being one affected her own faith. The answer had been ‘not at all’, but even most Wiccans were doubtful of that. Being a Nova just made her a bit happier, and through Teras she was learning more about herself every day.

Her book was one of the least ostentatious parts of her life, bound with black leather and inscribed with runes, and locked with two engraved iron clasps, it certainly looked impressive. But inside the pages were white and fresh, not the usual faded faux-parchment that one might have expected, nor did she use some of the old tricks to look awesome, by falling back on archaic language and bizarre fonts. She always figured that writing a spell down in a book guarantees that sooner or later someone will read it, and probably try it themselves. If she was writing down a spell designed to bless the foundations of a new house or banish the pain from a place of suffering, the last damn thing she wanted to do was to make the steps so hard to understand that the actual ritual would end up intensifying it. By her own reading, the Threefold Law would bite her in the ass for that.

After getting everything together and putting on her collar and pentacle necklace, The Alchemist reactivated her stream. It only took split seconds to connect.

She set up the beginnings of a spell, drawing the larger pentacle on the floor and setting up the necessary ritual equipment, though the apple she chose was a little off after a week in the cupboard. She hoped that wouldn’t mess the spell up. Biting her lip, she bobbed her head side to side, considering. “Fuck it.”

With a surge of quantum, The Alchemist reknitted her blood into a rejuvenating agent that had been used in agriculture for a few years. It was partly experimental but all the reports on it were good. She had to spend a lot of money to get the formula for that. None of her research had revealed how they made it. Then she slit her wrist and poured the thick, pink stuff out of the cut onto the apple. It began to be absorbed immediately, and she set the apple on a stand in the centre of the pentacle. In an hour or so it would be a little more vital.

Fortunately changing her clothes – all of them spun from natural materials, not eufiber – and making all the remaining preparations for the ritual took about that long. By the time she was done, the apple looked a little healthier. She licked it, and her vastly developed sense of taste detected the changes, the restoration of its flavour and health. Hope it’s not an illusion. That’ll fuck the spell up good and proper. In other circumstances she would go out and buy another one, but she had to use materials from inside the room for this, which was why she bought in everything she would need before getting things rolling.

When she went back to her computer there was a massive spike in her stream, and she saw in the chat a lot of greetings from her coven. The Alchemist smiled. She was now dressed in a pale blue robe, girdled at the waist by a length of rope with leathern pouches hanging from it. The only things remaining from her usual dress were the silver hand brace, her collar, and the pentacle necklace, though the latter would have been worn as part of the ritual anyway.

“Hi, guys. I just want to make a couple of announcements for the coven before I finish things up.” She picked up her book of shadows. “This is my book of shadows. I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the spells I use lately, and I know I’ve been a bit mysterious in my answers.” She grinned as the comments flicked by, many of them faithful and kind, others kind and funny, referencing how she had strung them along for years. “Yeah I know. I’ve always been worried that you might take too much of this as wrote, because I’m a Nova, but hey, time to let you decide for yourselves. The usual warning stands. These are my spells, my rituals. That doesn’t mean they’ll work for you. None of them are based on quantum trickery, though, so there’s no exact reason why not. I’m currently working on converting the contents into a transferrable OpNet file, and I’ll make that available to download when it’s done.”

New comments flashed up, so many and so fast that only her vastly enhanced mental processes allowed her to read and process them all. She nodded. “Yeah, I might make my Book of Mirrors available, too. The thing is it doesn’t actually contain much you won’t have read already.” She waited for a few more comments. “No, most of my essays and philosophical writings are based on what I’ve wrote in there. Yeah. Well, I’ve got a hell of a lot written in there about being dead. But you’ve all read Nightmare/Dream, right? Ninety per cent of Nightmare/Dream is just a better edited version of what I wrote in my Book of Mirrors. And the rest of my book is me either being incredibly depressed about politics, poetry to memorialize things, or going ‘yay, Novadom is awesome’ which I think creates a lot of negativity for baselines, Wiccan or otherwise. I mean, we’re still people, and my life experience is of a notably higher quality than most of you. So, I’m not completely certain about that. To be honest if I do convert my Book of Mirrors, I suggest that all of you perform a ritual to banish negative feelings before reading it. Just to be safe. Speaking of which,” she said. “I am about to take a risk.”

She laughed out loud at some of the responses to that comment. “No, Tristan55, it does not involve an exploding semi-truck. This is a far bigger risk. I’m about to perform a ritual to banish any negative emotions remaining in this place after my resurrection, and hopefully that’ll help people see it for what it was rather than what they think it is. However, my version of the cleansing spell involves an apple. My apple has been in a cupboard for a week and it’s looking a bit bad. However, I have to use things from my environment. Accordingly, I’ve used a bit of the Pink Avenger, otherwise known as the very sayable compound three-two-seven-six-five. Utopia – blegh – used a lot of it in Ethiopia.” She crossed her fingers. “I don’t think that using this will damage its essential appleness, but I guess we’re about to find out. I have to do the ritual, and I have to do it now. So, I’d like you all to wish me luck on this one, I’m going to do it live. If any of you want to do a supporting ritual to help me bind this, say now and I’ll give you half an hour to get set up so we can go in unison.”

It warmed her heart to see the number of people who said they would.

[WhiteRain]

***

An hour later, The Alchemist finally left the room of her death and resurrection. It was always good to get back in touch with her coven. She had added a few lines of poetry to her Book of Mirrors after all the rituals were done. Later she would have a proper sit down with it and write properly. For now her head was still a little fuzzy.

The spell seemed to go well, though. Most of it was about enhancing the apple’s natural energies via the other ritual objects. She felt a definite energy in the air when she stabbed the apple with her ritual knife and cut it open, and not the sort of black, dread energy she sometimes felt in graveyards or old, angry places of stone and steel. An apple stood for a lot of things, but knowledge and new life were the two strongest, and she wanted people to see the last week with wiser eyes than she knew many of them would. Her coven knew, though, and they mattered more than the rest of the baseline masses. Half of them saw the word ‘Terat’ and assumed it also intrinsically meant ‘Terrorist’.

Her door opened out onto a concrete tunnel, and the door at the end of that opened onto a perfectly normal living room, well-equipped for comfort. There was a massive TV, several games consoles, a large bookshelf, and two separate OpNet Terminals. Snow mostly lived with The Alchemist though she did have her own places to stay when she wanted to.

Snow was watching TV from the couch but talking to Trae, who was lounging about in a chair in the corner. “Ob, you know. Polyamory, triads, partner-swap, and variants depending on individual quirks or possibilities opened up by powers. I just find these ideas interesting. Baselines can almost never make them work but we ought to. We’re meant to be better. Everyone’s so quick to measure ‘better’ by the size of the apocalyptic wasteland we can leave behind if we lose our temper. Why can’t we be better in the depth and breadth of our love for one another?” She turned and beamed up at The Alchemist as she entered. “Oh, hey Cyndi. How’s life?”

Her head still felt a little fogged. She blinked against the lights. They were flaring oddly. That happened at times. “Suits me as well as ever, hon. So what’s this you’re talking about?”

Trae raised his shaggy blond head and waved. “Snow’s going all hippy on us. Been reading again.”

“Don’t I always?” Snow replied.

She did. Many Novas had developed ways to absorb information quicker. Some could drain it right out of a computer and convert the patterns into wave forms that fit on the map of their brain. Some could gain the knowledge from a book by simply looking at it. Snow took a more… straightforward approach to the matter. She could just read fast. Very, very fast. She could finish a standardized novel inside a minute, reading so quickly that it seemed she was just riffling the pages. They all figured she would have read every book ever written inside a few years. She could read something around fourteen million words in an hour, and even faster when she pushed herself. This had the bizarre result of her being one of the best educated Novas in the world despite her apparent youth.

“I think it sounds nice,” The Alchemist said mildly, sliding onto the couch beside Snow and kissing her on the crown of her head. “So who you thinking of getting polyamorous with?” The TV was turned to the N! Network, currently showing a special on the rise of the Teragen, mixed with an opinion piece on the organization’s wide-ranging influence in society. A boxout in the corner said they would be re-running the interview segment between Chang and Count Orzais in an hour.

Snow shrugged. “Whoever, I guess. I’ve got to find other open-minded Terats who interest me before I say for sure. Chang and Lucrezia seem like a good place to start. They might be married but it’s no conventional marriage. They always make encouraging noises when I talk about this stuff with them so why not?”

Why not, indeed? The Alchemist stroked Snow’s hair. It was glorious to look at, a cascade of colour going from the roots outward, blue, purple, red, yellow and purple again, chest length and tied in place by a collar around her neck which pinned it flat before it flared out below. Wish I had that sort of gall.

She had loved Chang from afar for years. Most likely she knew about it. The Mirror Queen was like that. Nine times out of ten when people came to tell her things she already heard it from a random conversation they had an hour ago on the other side of the island. Oh she didn’t say that she knew, she was polite and courteous and usually thanked them for the information unless in a particularly awkward mood. The Alchemist knew better, though. She was one of Chang’s oldest students, and over time had grown very familiar with Chang’s oddities.

Chang rarely made a fuss about what she knew, of course. She just quietly went about her way. The Alchemist often told herself she was a much better fit for a wife than Lucrezia. She was a much better artist, for sure. When Chang got into hardcore muse talk, Lucrezia usually went quiet. The Alchemist didn’t. They spoke the same language, though their choices of expression were different. She worked best with tech, Chang worked best with music and her hands. But they connected there, in that maddening instinct to create, that feeling of being itchy under the skin until they let their feelings out in some concrete form. If there was one power she wished she could express but had yet to, it was one that would allow her to take photographs without needing a camera. Maybe if I could somehow photograph it on my skin and just peel it off, she mused.

Over the years Chang sent the odd signal her way, but The Alchemist wondered if it was wishful thinking. Seeing her with Lucrezia, and the look in her eyes, always made her doubt that she could ever love another woman. Maybe I can get Chang alone and talk about us this time round, she thought, but knew she probably wouldn’t. The sex was still good, and Chang was free enough with it. Maybe if Snow got this Polyamory thing going The Alchemist could slip in like a ninja and nobody would notice.

Trae and Snow were arguing, as it turned out. They often did. Trae had a conservative aspect to his politics. Snow was interested in pretty much everything and entertained even the wildest ideas. They probably disagreed frequently on the colour of the sky.

Still, the talk got her thinking. Maybe it was being a bit selfish to go hunting for monogamy. Both Chang and Lucrezia seemed big on sharing. Or maybe they thought about it some other way, and what she saw as a monogamous love was something other. Both were elevated Terats, moving rapidly away from even the shared experiences of Novas towards some new form of existence. Neither of them shared their innermost thoughts, either, save with each other. Lucrezia often seemed to but was just pretending in order to steal trust, and Chang… well, sometimes it seemed like she preferred to share nothing at all beyond philosophy talk, like emotions didn’t matter to her all that much. The Alchemist never doubted that she loved her dear Mirror Queen, but nonetheless there were many things which motivated her to hold her tongue.

One of those things was her firm belief in the Law of Threefold Return, and her uncertainty over whether expressing her feelings for Chang would be a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ action. Under the law, one’s actions came back on them in equal measure on the levels of mind, body, and spirit. The Alchemist had felt its workings and seen them all around her, throughout her own life and in the short, bloody history of The Teragen. If expressing her feelings to Chang was good, then she’d be in for some sort of reward. If bad… well, some people thought Lucrezia was harmless. The Alchemist was not one of those people. It felt like there was so much both to lose and gain by telling Chang how she felt, and in the end, she supposed she was just too scared of how she might respond. And the Threefold Law was a terrifying prospect for her. As far as anybody could tell she was truly immortal, dying and reincarnating in a self-replicating cycle, quite possibly until the end of time whether anyone wanted that or not. That was a hell of a long time to suffer consequences on her mind, body and spirit if she royally fucked up other people’s lives. It wasn’t as if someone getting angry and killing her would help. She would just get better.

That was an issue, too. One of the darkest results of the Threefolk Law was the potential death of the witch in question. She would reincarnate with a – more or less – clean slate, having suffered her consequences. Rage was usually expended with the death of its object. But she broke that fundamental emotional truth. She was like a weeble. She wobbled but she never fell down. Someone angry with her could never expend their rage, instead creating a self-replicating cycle, with The Alchemist returning from death to taunt them over and over again. Being a Nova had changed that crucial Law forever. And hurting the object of one’s love – itself important in the faith – was a terrible crime. Many interpretations of the Threefold Law – hers included – suggested that the level of negative return could indeed result in the death of the witch.

In the end, The Alchemist supposed it was another way she talked her way out of taking the plunge. But it was a good and valid one that could not be ignored. Few Novas took her seriously when she talked about it, though. They trucked out the usual bullshit about ‘human religions’ and ‘needing to grow beyond it’. Yeah, tell that to Jeremiah fucking Scripture and Divis Mal. Angel boy and Jesus, if you look at the painting. If Divis fucking Mal was going to steal Christian iconography, anybody who thought Novas were too cool for Wicca needed a reality check.

“Anyway,” Snow was saying to another of Trae’s objections, “it’s not like I’m stuck on anything. I’d be as happy to see if I could get them to wife swap. But I don’t think that’s appropriate with Chang and Lucrezia since you could only swap Chang. I just think we should try. Give love a chance. That jazz.”

“I’ll let Geryon know,” Trae said. “A lot of us still get freaked out by the fact you’re sixteen you know. You’re jailbait.”

“I’m not fucking sixteen!” Snow hissed, and threw a truly murderous look at him. “I’m at least twenty six. I just look sixteen. And so fucking what? We’re Novas, aren’t we? What exactly is ‘underage’ for us?”

Trae held up his hands defensively. “Just saying, is all.”

“No way are you getting off with that, Trae. Puck’s two and he spends half his time in bed with someone or another. And you’re suggesting I’m underage?”

“Three,” The Alchemist said blithely, watching the TV. They were talking about Terats in the media now, and how they always differed in opinions when asked about the nature of the Teragen up until about ten years ago, when things became a little more consistent.

“Yeah but he looks more… mature than you.”

“Whatev.” Snow refocused on the TV, shaking slightly. Her temper had never been good and she hated to be called a child.

The Alchemist coughed a little. The lights were looking fine again. Death’s haze was fading from her mind, and all the little joys of life were slipping back into her skin. “Ah, arguments. The proof I’m a Terat.”

The doorbell went. “I’ll get it,” Trae said.

Snow leaned in and lay against The Alchemist. “Glad you’re back again, Cyndi.”

“Me too, hon,” The Alchemist said, and continued to stroke her hair. “You did a good job murdering me, by the way.”

“Oh, thanks. I asked Darion for tips. He was all technical and stuff. It’s pretty easy to get myself into that mind-set now. Being a serial killer is easy,” she said. Her tone was bright and relaxed.

There came a little explosion of voices from down below, and then the sound of feet on stairs. The Alchemist recognized the voices and rotated her head as Prudence came in through the doorway. She stretched out her arms and hugged her from across the room. “Pru! My other star! How are you doing?”

Prudence was Shiv’s student, but The Alchemist’s star. They met back when both were hardcore Pandas, and it had largely been The Alchemist going completely over to Chang which slowly dragged in Prudence as well. In a very real sense, Prudence was The Alchemist’s oldest Nova friend.

She was a beautiful woman, almost a classic Nova starlet up until recently. Now she cut a dramatically different figure. She was bald, hairless, and her skin was tattooed head to foot in a myriad of patterns which always shifted and changed based on new designs or ideas. Prudence wore very little show so she could show them off, usually no more than a sports bra and trousers or even less when relaxing. She was wearing military combat trousers and boots with her black top today. And she smiled broadly when she saw The Alchemist, gladly held her hands and did a running jump, flipped in the air, and came down straddling her on the couch.

“Cyndi, you sexy thing! You’re not dead anymore. I’ve had the most unbelievable fucking week and I want to bitch about it. Do you mind?”

The Alchemist wrapped her arms partly around Prudence’s body and gave her breasts a hard squeeze. She could feel the tentacles under the surface. They rippled against her touch, and stroked back through the skin. “Sure. Is Shiv coming up, by the way? I can hear her talking to Trae downstairs.” The Alchemist’s perceptions were pretty formidable, though nothing like Chang’s.

“Yeah, she’ll be up in a bit.” Prudence didn’t step off The Alchemist, she slid, her flesh warping and moving like an elastic bag as her tentacles shifted under the surface. Since her transformations, The Alchemist had begun using her as a monster in her movies, and she was fantastic. She’d always been a superb actress, and it turned out she could be as sadistic and menacing as she could be intense and soulful. It was why they made a good team. Prudence relaxed next to her on the sofa, leaning way back. Snow still watched the TV, but Prudence only had eyes for The Alchemist and this blessing of a friendly ear.

Prudence started filling her in on the week’s events, on the theft of Darion’s sword and how she was being blamed for it, about Shiv fighting with Kladach and him confronting Chang in the Rainbow Room. Apparently since then Geryon had been involved in a royal bitch out session with Narcosis, and everybody was getting angry at everyone else. The fight resulted in two blocks of apartments burning down, and the police were looking for those responsible, while Darion and a few other people pulled tricks with their contacts to bury the issue. By the time Narcosis wanted to get involved, Darion had sorted everything out and Chang was getting credit for fixing things. By the sound of things, Kladach was happy to let the issue drop. Darion’s sword, meanwhile, was still MIA.

“Man, no wonder my inbox is full. I pick the worst times to die, don’t I?” The Alchemist said. “Was Shiv hurt?”

“For a couple of minutes at least,” Prudence said. “They went at each other hammer and tongs, man. I saw the aftermath, though Shiv had cleared out by then.”

They chatted a little more on general matters, about projects that were being proposed and the continuing arguments between them and other members of the Pandaimonion.

“I’m getting sick of this, Cyndi,” Prudence admitted. “I’m in a position where everyone’s looking at me funny, either because I ‘stole’ something I didn’t, or because I’m not begging to get between Narcosis’s legs. I used to love the Pandaimonion. It was fun, and we did awesome things, and all those Utopian lickspittles were getting bent out of shape because the baselines loved us and not them…” she shook her head. “It’s not fun anymore, Cynd.”

The Alchemist put her arms around Prudence’s neck and hugged her. Her friend didn’t move her arms, just the tentacles underneath the surface. Her skin stretched, partly wrapping around The Alchemist in her own version of a hug. “We’ll be here for you, Pru. Me, and Snow, and Chang and the rest. We’re all Pandas, right? We’re not so bad.”

They separated, and Prudence’s flesh slid back into its human proportions. “Maybe.” She finally looked over to the TV. “Or maybe you just call yourselves Pandas, for lack of something better.”

“Such as Anavasi,” came Shiv’s soft, seductive voice from the doorway. She looked as good and weird as ever, blind, bound, bent sharply in the back in such a way that those huge round breasts were at full prominence, especially with the aid of her red leather corset.

The Alchemist leapt up from the couch and ran over to her. She jumped up at Shiv’s chest, and held herself as if she were going to be caught by someone’s arms. Instead she wrapped her arms around Shiv’s neck and stretched her legs to wrap twice around Shiv’s waist to keep her supported.

“I appear to have an oddly-shaped recess monkey attached to my chest,” Shiv murmured.

“Wheeeeeee!” The Alchemist cried, feeling entirely girlish and glad and giddy to be alive again. “Spin me.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“Still no,” Shiv said. Her huge soft breasts rippled, and tendrils extended from the upper and lower swells. They very firmly began to unwind Cindi’s limbs from her body.

“You’re no fun,” she said, and tried vainly to prevent the multiplying fleshy tendrils from unwinding her.

Trae stepped past her and returned to his seat. “Shiv was just telling me about how she kicked Kladach’s head in with her butt. Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d say.”

The Alchemist relaxed in her struggles, and turned towards him. She always possessed a certain feeling for languages, or at least in how they were put into use. It was partly what made her a good actress on her own merits, and why she could always tell a good one when they were in front of her. There was disgust in Trae’s voice.

That’s weird, she thought, while Shiv finished unwinding her and put her down. The Alchemist’s elongated legs coiled underneath her like a makeshift snake’s tail, while the tendrils of flesh whipped back into Shiv’s breasts and they settled back into perfect, full roundness. “So Shiv,” she said, “how have you been?”

“Very well, Cyndi. I’m glad that you’ve returned to us. Things are changing, as Prudence implied.”

The Alchemist rose back up and retracted her legs. “Do tell.”

“The time has come for us to leave Narcosis behind and forge our own path. Our Mirror Queen requires subjects, so to speak. The Pandaimonion are Narcosis’s servants, but we are The Mirror Queen’s subjects. We are the Anavasi, as of about a week ago.” Shiv said that last with a tone of definite amusement, and wore a smile on her full, ruby red lips.

She didn’t know the word, but it spoke to her nonetheless. The Alchemist had no need to hunger for an identity, but she had been chafing against some of the expectations and stereotypes her ‘fellow’ Pandas brought on themselves for years. And the wannabes who flocked to Narcosis’s banner, who barely understood Teras let alone wanted to follow it, drove her crazy. Those who did looked on them as ‘useful’, as potentials in the future but tools in the present. The Alchemist hated that. It was learning from Chang which did it. The Mirror Queen was always so passionate about philosophical purity, about how the Teragen was compromising its principles in the name of necessity. She was an extremist, sure. They all said that when The Alchemist pointed it out to them, but they always said it like that meant Chang’s words didn’t matter.

The Alchemist nodded and grinned. “Anavasi,” she said, tasting the word. “Sounds good to me, though I do have to ask, are we actually doing the whole ‘queen’ thing?”

Prudence laughed behind her. “Only so long as it makes Chang frown. You’ve got to admit, it’s funny seeing a third-stager look so damn uncomfortable. She could probably break our minds into tiny little itty bitty pieces, or something nastier, but all we have to do is get in a line, curtsy and say ‘your grace’ and all of a sudden those glowing eyes get all bit and shiny.”

“She probably thought we were taking the piss,” The Alchemist said. “I guess we were, at first.”

Shiv moved a little more into the room, though she made no effort to sit. “You know your mentor’s feelings, just as I do. The idea of a Nova monarchy is patently absurd and goes against every principle that Chang holds dear and which she promotes. There is more to this than humour value, though.”

“Yeah, I know,” The Alchemist said. “So you just here for social fun?”

“In a way. I have a gift for Snow.” Her breasts rippled, and slowly a tome emerged from between them. “By all means give it to her.”

The Alchemist took it, glanced at the spine. “Shadae,” she read. “Don’t know it.”

“Oh, I do!” Snow jumped up and turned round, knees on the couch and hands outstretched. “Gimme, gimme! Thanks, Shiv.”

The Alchemist handed it over. Immediately, Snow flipped the cover open, put her thumb on the page, and began to read. Her eyes blurred, her lips moved soundlessly, and she flicked the pages by. It was hard to believe she was reading.

“So what do we do when she’s finished?” The Alchemist asked.

Shiv chuckled. “Add it to her library, of course.”

There was a snap of the book being shut. “Wow,” Snow whispered. “That’s really sad. Have any of you read this book?” Nobody had. “Okay, then I won’t talk about it. Read this book. It’s amazing. Holy shit it’s amazing.”

Snow sat down again. Her whole body language was different now. She seemed emotional, almost devastated. The Alchemist took the book from Snow’s hand and placed it on the shelf with the others. The girl had an eidetic memory. She would never need to read the physical copy again, but she was a near-compulsive hoarder.

The apartment was a bit small for five Novas. Trae was quiet in the corner, now, mostly just watching and listening. Prudence relaxed and eventually transformed, extending her seven necks and arms and breasts. That was spectacular to watch, not least because of the way her tattoos extended and wrapped round her additional parts and appendages.

She felt more comfortable being that way, and honestly, The Alchemist liked her better that way. Once she had seven heads, there was always one of them with tentacles pouring from her mouth, and that was the way it ought to be.

Trae, though… there was something odd about his mood, about the way he looked at the four of them and at her in particular. You’d think he wasn’t happy that I came back, or something, she thought. No. It’s Shiv that’s making him uncomfortable.

It became obvious before long. Shiv just stood stock still where she had been, two feet in from the doorway and one foot towards the wall, her back facing it. She stood like some sort of weird bondage statue, saying nothing, not even breathing. And Trae kept looking over his shoulder at her.

Meanwhile, Snow, Prudence and The Alchemist just chattered about nothing in particular, crossing topics as simple as their favourite – and sexiest – shape and all the small ways they could enhance or change their look for different effects, to the best ways to play a certain kind of scene or character through to particular points of Teras which were bothering them of late. They were all used to Shiv just not talking sometimes. She was often like that. Yet for some reason, Trae was uncomfortable.

When Shiv did eventually stir again, the sound of her leather tightening was startling. “Trae,” she said, in that always-sultry voice of hers.

He looked around. “Shiv?”

“I wonder if I might speak with you in private.”

“Why?”

“It concerns a certain lie you told to a certain Frenchman.”

Trae stiffened up slightly. He licked his lips, but rose. “Uh, I’ll be back in a bit, Cynd. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t, eh?” He winked at her.

She gave him a salute.

[WhiteRain]

***

Trae was gone for hours. Whoever ‘the certain Frenchman’ was, it seemed like Trae shouldn’t have lied to him. The Alchemist didn’t bother herself to think about it too hard. She was back from the dead, she felt great, and she had no wish to mess with that.

Sadly, Pru left with Shiv and Trae, so it was just her and Snow. Going from five Novas to two was a weird thing. They spent a while speculating on who The Frenchman was, going through possible candidates, before settling down again and watching the re-run of Chang’s interview.

“She sounds so pissed off,” Snow said, and giggled. “Do you think they actually nailed her down so she couldn’t leave?”

She does hate interviews. The Alchemist didn’t. She gave interviews all the time to help promote her movies or her photography projects or her writing or whatever. Chang wasn’t half as personable, though. “You never know. Those N! reporters’ll do anything for a scoop.”

When the door opened, The Alchemist expected it would be Trae. But the step was too light, the way they closed the door behind them too gentle. A few moments later, one of Lucrezia came in through the door.

Seeing that beautiful face stirred up a whole hornet’s nest of emotions, most of them related to Chang. You lucky, lucky woman, she thought. Or maybe ‘women’ would be more appropriate.

“Hello, Cyndi,” she said. But she didn’t smile. She seemed sad.

“Is something wrong?”

“Can I come sit?”

“Sure thing.” The Alchemist moved up a little so Lucrezia could sit down between her and Snow. “Do you know why Trae’s been kidnapped?”

Lucrezia sat down, elegant as ever, but lacking that effortless seductive sway that made her such an amazing dancer. “Yes.”

The Alchemist exchanged a look with Snow. Neither of them liked the sound of that. “Are you going to explain?”

“No. It’s ugly enough. You shouldn’t have to deal with it so soon after your resurrection. He’ll be back in a bit, I suspect. I’ll be gone by then. For good.”

“Lucrezia,” she said, not even pretending not to be worried, “seriously, are you okay? You sound like me when I’m on a downer.”

“I’m depressed, yes,” she said. “This body is,” she raised her hand and regarded it with a critical eye, “defiled. I want rid of it. Before that, though, I want to ask you a question. Shiv mentioned the Anavasi, I presume?”

“Yes, she did. We’re all Anavasi now, unroll the banners, fly the flags, all that stuff.”

“Yeah,” Snow said, “one nation under Chang! Paintings for everybody.”

Lucrezia smiled down at her. “Yes, something like that. Cyndi, I presume you’re well aware that we’re going to be in a spot of bother when we break away from Narcosis. Shiv’s very good at getting what she wants,” she said, smiling. “Shiv wanted a Mirror Queen, we got ourselves a Mirror Queen. Now she wants the Anavasi, and I’m pretty sure we’re all going to jump on the bandwagon eventually. Unless you have some argument with what she’s proposing?”

The Alchemist shook her head. “No. It’s just putting a name on something we all feel already, right?”

Lucrezia turned back to her. “Yes, quite. I was wondering… have you considered going completely independent? I mean, breaking away from Pantheon Productions?”

“Well, I’ve thought about it,” The Alchemist said. “My last contract with Pantheon was not to my liking. I’ve had the feeling Narcosis is getting more out of me than I am out of her for a couple of years. Pantheon’s got great distribution penetration, though.”

“Yes. More than enough to seriously inconvenience us after we’ve broken off,” Lucrezia said. “The Anavasi will have an awful lot of content to produce once we’ve formalized our membership. We can’t be beholden to Narcosis’s whims. The only way that can be avoided is if we have our own distribution company, one that can stake some important talent from the get go. If we can secure a contract for the illusive White Rain, which I think I can arrange,” Lucrezia said, and for a moment she seemed her old seductive, confident self, “and add your own productions to the banner, I think we’ll have a good economic base to get going. But I’m not exactly a business woman. What’s your take?”

It was a good question to ask. Making money was one of The Alchemist’s specialities, and she was one of the richer Novas out there. Not Count Orzais wealthy, mind, but she blew most Novas away. About seventy per cent of her money came from her movie endeavours. “It’s viable, I guess. If you want to talk investors, they’ll respond well to the words ‘White’ and ‘Rain’ and ‘Contract’ in any sort of combination. Chang’s redistribution rights are a massive deal for Pantheon Productions. Pretty much any music company on earth would beg, borrow or steal to have those rights. But if you want to really go for it, what we need is a studio album and the rights. That’d redefine the landscape right there. Don’t get me wrong, I’m awesome, but Chang’s a giant in the art world. You tell investors and distributors we’ve got exclusive rights to basically all of her stuff, and that’ll get things rolling right there. The rest of us can just jump on ship as lots of yummy, yummy icing on top of a Chang-cake.”

Snow giggled in a devilish, but also very girlish kind of way. “Oh, I dunno, Chang seems to have plenty of icing of her own, don’t you think?”

Lucrezia raised one eyebrow and gave Snow a searching look. “You, my girl, have a filthy mind. I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

Snow cackled. The TV was losing interest for her, and she was focusing more and more on their talk. “So this company, what’s it going to produce?”

“Anything it needs to. Independent and studio films, music, art exhibitions, really whatever we need from it. The point is to have our own company, one that doesn’t have to go through Narcosis’s channels. This is our venture, our future, and our statement. She’s not an artist, and she doesn’t care about the work we do. Narcosis cares about how good it makes her look to have us producing stuff under her banner. Shiv thinks it’s time for a change. I agree with her.”

The Alchemist felt an actual upswell of pride in her breast, and maybe a little anger. It was true. Narcosis didn’t care about the work they did, unless she was directly in line to make money off of it. There was no harm in that, of course, there was nothing in her faith which compelled her to dislike Narcosis for her directed focus. But she wanted something more, something she found in Shiv and Chang and the other… well, Anavasi.

There was no name for them before, and now she had that name, it was changing things in her mind. Before, her friends were just those members of the Pandaimonion who ‘got it’. Now they weren’t part of the Pandaimonion at all. They were the Anavasi. They were different.

Snow was the one who spoke first. “If Shiv’s tits say we’re Anavasi, I’m not going to disagree. They’ll beat me up.” Her expression and her voice hardened. “You both know I don’t like Narcosis. She’s taken liberties with me, compelled me to do things I can’t forgive. Well, unless she’s right there in front of me. But I’m smarter than she is. I know what she’s doing and I don’t appreciate it. So yeah, you’ve got me, not that I’ve got much to offer. I’m just an actress.”

Lucrezia put her arm around Snow and kissed her on the head. “You’re probably the world’s best child actress – I know, you’re not a child – but you can still play one better than anyone when the mood suits you. So your support means a great deal. Besides, who’s cleverer than you? Chang values your mind, you know. I’m afraid as much as I love her, I can’t provide her with the most stimulating of conversations. You, though? It’s embarrassing. She won’t shut up about you after you’ve left.” Lucrezia smiled even as she complained, though.

Snow’s expression lit up. “Thanks.”

“Okay,” The Alchemist said, “let’s do it. If you can get Chang to agree, I’ll talk to Shiv, a few of my contacts, and maybe we can get something going.”

Lucrezia nodded happily. “This is great. Shiv’ll be happy, I know it. She’s been visiting loads of people, and putting me up to visiting even more. This is going to happen.” But then she drew herself up and her expression became grimmer once again. “So now I guess, it’s time to put the past behind me, and get ready for the first movement in the Anavasi’s history.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want you to kill me.”

“What?” Snow was looking at Lucrezia with wide eyes. “You can’t be serious?”

Lucrezia smiled at her. “Just this one. Not all of me. Like I said, this one is defiled. I hate it. Scrambler ruined this body. I don’t want it to be part of me. It isn’t part of me, it’s a lie. But I don’t want to just set fire to myself or blow myself up or do something ugly. I want to do something beautiful, to really redeem this waste of skin and latex. I figured you might want to help,” she said, almost shyly, and looked into The Alchemist’s eyes. “I don’t pretend to be a spiritual person, Cyndi, but I know you are. Doesn’t this fit into your beliefs anywhere?”

There was a pleading tone in her voice now, and it cut right to The Alchemist’s heart. “Oh, honey,” she said, and reached out to hold her. Lucrezia let herself be enfolded into an embrace. “It does, sort of. There are spells I do sometimes, to banish negative feelings and pain. A witch I know developed a special one after she was raped. She used it to ‘clean’ herself, physically and spiritually. But I guess that’s no good to you.”

“It isn’t what I want.”

And death doesn’t mean the same thing to her as it does even to me, The Alchemist thought. If anything human remained in Lucrezia, it was a fragment of a woman being purposefully strangled to death. It was no secret that Lucrezia was an amnesiac. Whoever she had been, she wanted nothing to do with her.

“What do you want? How can I help?”

Lucrezia looked her right in the eyes. “I want you to eat me. Like Chang does, but I don’t want you to let me out.”

The Alchemist pursed her lips. “Oh.”

“I want you to melt me down and convert this body into something new. Something tasty, even. Just something better than what it is. A sort of… resurrection, I guess. Like what you go through, but different. You can do that, right? You’ve said you can convert any matter into whatever.”

She shrugged. “Well, in theory. I’ve never tried it with a living person before.” Hello, Threefold Law, I now present you my arse, have fun destroying it for eternity. She drew back a little. “I’m not sure about this, Lucrezia.”

“Why not?”

“Actions have consequences. You’re asking me to commit murder. That’s a big one. I-“

“Will only be killing one of me. There’s another twenty three of me out there. And I’ll replace this one inside a week, with one that’s part of me.”

“I know what you’re saying,” she said, her voice full of sympathy, “but this one is a part of you. Getting rid of it won’t get rid of the memories. I-“

Lucrezia put a hand on her cheek. “It’s not the memories I want rid of, Cyndi. It’s the flesh. This can’t be cleansed. It can’t be fixed. Scrambler ruined this body on the quantum level, he raped my node. Believe me, you’ll understand once you’ve been through chrysalis. I’ve been thinking about this for some time, believe me. I want this body gone. All I’m asking from you is… a chance to make this body beautiful again, no matter how briefly. Turn it into liquid metal and give it to Chang to make an engraving out of, maybe? Build me into the foundations of the crèche. Just…” she swallowed, “help me fix this. Please?”

The Alchemist looked around, and bit her lip. Her mind raced, considering the implications of what she was being asked, of what it could mean, of the moral needs of her faith. The way Lucrezia said it, this sounded like a good action. But the whole credo of Wicca was to do as she liked, so long as it harmed nobody. This would quite categorically hurt someone. In fact that was the entire point.

“Awww, shit,” she said, overcome with nerves. “This is putting me on the spot, Lucrezia. It’s a tough one. I don’t know if it’s right.”

“Then that’s all the more reason to do it, and find out,” Lucrezia said. “You can’t reach chrysalis by playing it safe, Cyndi. You need to take risks. We both know that.”

Oh that’s so low, she thought, but didn’t say it. Teras and Wicca were rarely competitors in her mind. She fused the two together, in much the same way she figured Scripture fused his seemingly Christian faith into his new condition. But here… The principles of Teras say ‘fuck you!’ Crone, give me wisdom. But then there were the other calls, of the Horned God and the godhead she named Arrokesh, the female devourer who filled her flesh with fire whenever she put her powers to work at their extremes. Arrokesh was stirring now, at this new, frightening, exciting possibility. And fuck you, too, Arrokesh.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll… do this. For you.”

Snow stood up. “Uh, should I go?”

“No,” Lucrezia said. “I’d like you to stay. You can bear witness.”

The Alchemist nodded. “Three’s a good number in Wicca. In some ways we’ve got the feminine godhead here. You can stand in for the Maiden – you’re the youngest in seeming at least – I can stand in for the Mother, because I’ve been around the block a few times, and Lucrezia… well she is an elder. You get to be the Crone.”

Lucrezia looked up at her, and screwed up her lips. “Now I definitely want this body dead.”

Her nerves were growing all the more intense, but she had said it now. “Look, let me make this part of a spell. Just to be sure.”

“Whatever you need.”

The Alchemist rose from the couch and left the room, returning to the attached room. There were still plenty of ritual components in there, more than enough to adapt one of the spells from her Book of Shadows. But which one?

An idea struck her.

She took the book and ritual components with her and returned to the main room. “Snow,” she said, “will you read this?”

The Terat’s dark eyes brightened up the way it always did when someone gave her something to read. “This is your… spellbook.” To The Alchemist’s surprise, she touched it with hesitation, and reverence. “Are you sure? I mean… I love the theory and the sound of Wicca, and it sounds beautiful when you talk about it… but I’m not a Wiccan. Isn’t this like sacrilegious?”

“Not if I want you to read it. It’s mine, after all.”

Snow took a deep breath. She undid the clasps, and then read The Alchemist’s Book of shadows. A big book, to be sure, the result of over thirty years of faith and practice as a witch and packed with spells on every page. It took Snow three seconds. The pages moved so fast that The Alchemist was scared they’d tear, the paper seemed like it couldn’t handle such speed. Yet no harm was done, not even a crinkle.

The Terat bit her lip and closed the book, put both clasps back on, and handed it back. “Thanks, Cyndi,” she said, her voice low and soft and quiet. “This… means a lot. We should totally try the sex magic. That sounds fun.”

She hit Snow on the shoulder, playfully. “Those are serious rituals you little bitch. Fun indeed,” she said, but couldn’t prevent a smile from forming on her lips. “Look, you’ve got a perfect memory, right?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I want to adapt a cleansing ritual for this, to make damn-diddly-certain that this is a purification we’re doing, that no bad spirits come out of this, and no negative energies are birthed from what we’re about to do. I’m torn between a few spells. I don’t think anything I’ve got in there is perfect, but I could maybe alter the ritual of Spring Morning or the Parting spell.”

Snow nodded, her eyes bright and intense as she considered what The Alchemist was saying. Lucrezia observed, curious, but she made no comment.

“Well,” Snow said, “from what I read in there, and cross-referencing with some other things I’ve read about your symbology and other talks we’ve had, I’d say you need to do something brand new. What if you do the Parting spell, use those words, because Lucrezia wants to ‘part’ with this bit of her, right? I mean, the whole point of the Parting spell is that you want to part painlessly, am I right?”

The Alchemist nodded. “Dead right,” she said, and then caught herself. “That was a horrible choice of wording.”

Snow laughed.

They hashed out a ritual in the next ten minutes. Mostly The Alchemist bounced ideas off her, and Snow talked about the various spells in the book, compared them, and helped her decide what elements to add or subtract.

In the end, she was ready.

Snow adjusted the furniture. She was a bit like Shiv; supernaturally strong, but she didn’t look like it at all. She lifted the couch up with one hand like it was nothing.

Once they had enough space, The Alchemist drew a pentagram on the floor in chalk, and lit scented candles at the five points, two of them green, one black, one pink, and one white. While she was doing that, Snow quickly went out to a nearby store and bought some salt and sugar, which The Alchemist sprinkled over the chalk lines with painstaking precision. Everything had its meaning. The salt was referencing the salting of the earth, that this was an irrevocable parting never to be undone. The sugar, though, was to signify that it was not just painless, but actually a sweet parting, something desired and even needed. Each of the candles was intended to incite and strengthen positive emotions and forces, healing for the green candles, positive energies for the white, negative energies for the black, while the pink embodied love, friendship, romance and femininity. The black and white were opposite of each other on the pentagram, with the green candles at the bottom points, balancing them out and focusing both positive and negative energies into healing. The top of the Pentagram’s points housed the pink candle, in the hope that through the healing process Lucrezia would emerge a friend, a lover, maybe even a romantic partner. You said it, Snow, The Alchemist thought. Polyamory. Why not? Love me, Lucrezia, you and your wife. Heal, and love me, and be loved.

Snow watched with fascination. Lucrezia seemed more indulgent than anything else.

That didn’t matter, though. This needed to be done right. It needed to be done her way. And if she had a slight ulterior motive and wanted a touch of her own desires in the ritual, why not? The Alchemist felt a sense of calm blending into the fear. “Lucrezia,” she said, “join me in the pentagram.”

Lucrezia knelt down in front of her, silent. She watched as The Alchemist lit the five candles, the white first, then the black, and then the two green candles in turn, and finally the pink. Then she spoke the ritual words, locking it all in place.

The Alchemist’s nerves faded away. This was always a line she tried to avoid crossing, but she already had. Her spirit was in it now, the candles were charged with energy, the pentagram was aligned with purpose. There was no turning back. A lot of Novas had blood on their hands. Far more than the OpNetizens knew or suspected, and some of the most unlikely ones did, too. From violent eruptions to spontaneous attempts to defend themselves, the ways Novas could end up killing someone directly or otherwise were many and varied. But this… this was where she joined them, in her own special way.

She kissed Lucrezia gently on the lips. She needed to work up to this. But Lucrezia’s returning kiss was almost desperate, pushing hard against her mouth. That long tongue of hers wormed its way down The Alchemist’s throat, rippling her pale and slender neck on its way down. It licked at the base of her oesophagus.

The Alchemist dripped quantum through her flesh, softening it, rendering it pliant. When Lucrezia pushed against her lips this time her mouth stretched open a little. She rolled with it, gaping open and around the beautiful Terat’s head, then widening slowly to engulf her shoulders. She had watched Chang and Shiv do this many times but never done it herself. It was pleasant, but frightening. Arrokesh stormed inside her, hungry, desperate to feed.

Lucrezia began to force herself further down, wriggling into The Alchemist’s throat until gravity had her.

It was easy after that. She just kept her head back and guided Lucrezia’s smooth, lissom legs together and inside. Her belly bulged out huge and round. She remained on her knees in the pentagram, positioning her belly so that it lay in the dead centre, the focus of all the magical energies she was invoking. The mingled scents of the candles tickled her nostrils. The stretched skin of her belly seemed almost to burn with sensation. Inside her, Lucrezia wriggled, the way she had for Chang a hundred times, but only once for The Alchemist.

Snow approached, her mouth slightly open. “Can I… come in?”

The Alchemist whispered a welcoming couplet. “You can now. Just don’t break the outside lines.”

Snow knelt down beside her and gently stroked The Alchemist’s belly, smiling. “That was beautiful, Cyndi. What are you going to turn her into?”

The Alchemist shrugged. “I don’t know yet. Want to pick a wine? You can drink her yourself.”

“Hell yes.” Snow’s chest rose and fell, almost heaving with excitement. “Hell yes. I know this sounds lame… but can you turn her into lemonade for me?”

The Alchemist burst out laughing. It was the sweetest, most innocent thing she could ever have been asked. And it was perfect. “Sure. I’ll make it the best lemonade you’ve ever had. Now, let’s get going.”

She prepared to start, taking deep breaths. In her mind she kept repeating the ritual words. The spell was alive and powerful now. She could feel it coiling through her.

“Wait,” Lucrezia said from inside her. “Turn me into poison. Tailor it to Puck.”

The Alchemist’s eyes widened and she frowned down at her rippling stomach. Snow looked between her face and her belly, and raised one eyebrow. “Something up?”

“Uh… sort of,” The Alchemist said, and gave her a reassuring smile. What the fuckery fucking fuck is she playing at? I can’t do that. You… you… can’t be serious… But before she could really work herself up into a panic, Lucrezia spoke again.

“It’s not to kill him,” Lucrezia said. “Just make it strong enough to really make them think it will. Believe me, this is a good thing. It won’t hurt anyone. It’ll strengthen all of us.” There was a caress on the inside of The Alchemist’s belly, a brush of fingers, and her whole body tingled with delight. That touch was was half an orgasm, and it was so hard to think straight enough to resist the request.

As if to make the point clearer, another of Lucrezia’s bodies entered the room, and nodded firmly at her, just before Snow looked in her direction. Lucrezia’s eyes were dark and intense. Do it, they said. Do it, and don’t question. Then she was smiling and kneeling at the edge of the circle to watch.

The Alchemist settled her heart and set to work. Quantum flooded from her node, down through her flesh and into her stomach. Instantly her belly began to churn, audibly and visibly, moving like waves on the ocean as she began to digest Lucrezia’s copy.

A rush of sensations crept through The Alchemist’s body. It was a little like a drug being injected right into her. Inside her soul, the devourer Arrokesh sang the sweetest of songs, as she did when The Alchemist was processing anything of note, from a dumpster to a tree.

She felt cool and warm at the same time, her skin prickled and felt alive with sensation. Inside her the firm limbs and perfect shape of Lucrezia’s body began to soften, to melt. She had felt this with steel and gold, silver and iron, copper and bronze. The Alchemist had stretched her mouth around dumpsters and even an entire limousine once, and waited for her body to melt it down. But she had never done it to a person before. It was a line she never crossed out of fear, but now she had, it felt good.

She felt wonderful, glorious. A real man-eater, like Shiv often joked she was. Lucrezia softened; she screamed as pain overwhelmed her and her body began to break apart. The Alchemist felt it then, the gathering swirl of taint, flooding through her node. It was easy to take it, reshape it with her mind, and add it to the growing film of chrysalis that was building in her quantum signature.

There was no doubt in her mind that the ritual had worked. The chrysalis formed so easily that it was like dew in the morning, like a natural outgrowth of the ritual itself. This was exactly right, a true fusion of Teras and the Wiccan faith. Epiphany left her shuddering, unable to speak, or even to think for some time. All she could do was bask, and love, and wish the best to everyone.

The Alchemist watched her belly churn, processing Lucrezia. Her stomach became hugely rounded, then swelled as she converted the body into liquid. Using things was always more efficient than using her own body fluids, even though it took time to process them. And it was as true now as ever.

As she put molecules together inside her body, converting parts of the Lucrezia-sludge as it was converted. The living body produced an astonishing amount of raw material. The Alchemist edged backward, and manoeuvred herself into the point of the pentagram which held the pink candle. She even squeezed in her legs to avoid being pushed out of it. Her belly swelled to fill the entire central circle.

Snow stood on the fringe now, watching in amazement. “Holy shit. You’re huge!”

Lucrezia looked happier than ever, somehow, and ran her hands through Snow’s hair. “You should have seen how big she got when she ate the limo.”

“You ate a limo?”

The Alchemist laughed. “I’m very stretchy, darling. Maybe not number two after Chang, but I’m sure as hell top five. Didn’t look much like me while that was going on, mind. Would have killed to be able to shapeshift into a big snake or something,” she said wistfully, still piecing the compound together. “Shiv had to pick me up and carry me. It was very unladylike. I sloshed. Fun, though,” she sighed.

And it was. It felt good to be like this. She always forgot, somehow, until she did it again and filled herself up with something or another. It was an addiction, for sure, but not one of those crappy addictions like drugs. Every time felt as good as the last, and sometimes even better. It was Arrokesh, the devourer within. It was as much a part of her spirit as the node was a part of her body.

She rested her head on her gurgling belly, and closed her eyes.

Puck. She focused on Puck, while Snow leaned forward to stroke her groaning stomach. The noises changed as the raw materials percolated, bubbling and shifting around with The Alchemist’s will.

Poison for Puck, coming up. They had kissed many a time, shared a bed on a few occasions. It wasn’t hard to shape something just for him. Making it so that it would debilitate was easy, and all she had to do then was make it incredibly concentrated. She hated the idea of him in pain, though. He was a friend. But maybe he’s not. Maybe she knows something? Lucrezia was clear that this would be good for them all. Puck was Anavasi too, surely.

It took ten minutes to put the compound together. She pumped the liquid up out of her belly and into her right breast, rounding it out and creaking against her eufiber. “All done,” she said to Lucrezia. “Want your brew put somewhere?”

“Yes,” she said, and plunged a hand into her own body. From the latex mass under the flesh, she withdrew a sealed jar, and unscrewed the lid. “In here, if you could.”

The Alchemist bared her breast and stretched her nipple out into a stinger, curled it over to the jar and emptied the poison. It was golden brown, similar to vinegar or other condiment. She’d made enough to half-fill the jar, and once done she whipped her nipple back before covering up. “Well, now. What to do with the rest of you?” She lengthened her arms so she could reach underneath and heft her massive gut.

Snow leaned against the skin, listening. “I don’t care, just make something. The noises are fascinating. Why did you never let me listen before?”

The Alchemist laughed. “It’s not like I have specific times of day when I do this. It’s kind of spur of the moment. Normally I just convert my blood and slit a wrist, which is vampire-rific but not exactly a spectator event.”

“Bet you and the limo was.”

“Oh yeah. I’ll make sure you’re around if I get that hungry again. Okay. First, lemonade. Then we can talk about what to do with the rest of this mass.”

Lucrezia smiled, and looked over at Snow. “Make sure everyone knows what Cyndi did for me, Snow. Trae will be gutted when he finds out he missed this.”

“And really jealous,” Snow said, grinning devilishly. “I’m going to make him so jealous.”

The Alchemist relaxed. It had worked. She knew it. But she should have known that all along. Resurrection days never went badly.

Lucrezia rose. “I have to be going, I’m afraid. I want to enjoy this wine with my wife.” When she said that, there was a hidden message, a ‘tell nobody what this really is’ that The Alchemist knew instinctively. She would obey, too. “But another of me’s on the way over. I want to see just how much stuff you can turn me into. I’m beginning to think you should do a drink for everyone in the Anavasi. A round of me.”

That was a good joke. “Sure thing, Lucrezia,” The Alchemist said. “I’ll just sit here and enjoy being full for a while. We’ll get to work when your other self gets here. Bring bottles. Empty bottles. Lots of them.”

Lucrezia nodded, then turned, and headed out. Her hips swayed, her stride was long and confident. The Alchemist could feel no hint of the ‘defilement’ anymore. Lucrezia was back, and beautiful, and seductive, and better than ever.

She was cleansed.

[Shosuro Miren]

Puck

Late evening, May 26^th, 2027

Exalt! Building

Slowly sounds filtered back in: the beeps and electronic whine of the machines next to him, the voices down the hall, the squeal of tires and rain outside, the birds and fish in the ocean for miles around. The beeps in the room changed, gaining pace and a head-splitting high tone as he sat up and began to peel off the monitor nodes. He could hear the excited babble of voices getting closing, light steps quickly tracing a path to the room he'd been moved to on the Wellness floor. He'd put himself, and the events that had put him here, together before Sara and her team made to his door.

She threw her arms around him, abandoning any pretense of professional distance the moment she saw him sitting up and smiling at her. "Puck! Thank god!"

He hugged her back, cradling her gently; he could feel the tremors through her body as she fought off crying in front of her trainees. Not that most of them were paying her much attention; the hospital bed groaned as the dozen baselines in the room crowded to hug and touch him as well. "Shh, I'm fine. It's okay," he soothed them.

Sara looked up at him, tears in her eyes, "We didn't know...the poison...it...I couldn't heal it. I-I'm sorry."

"Hey," he lifted up her chin and shook his head, "Not. Your. Fault. Okay?"

She nodded mutely but didn't let go of him. He sighed and hugged her closer for a moment. "There are people that don't like me, don't like us. What I did..." he blinked, realizing he didn't know how long he'd been out.

"Almost two days," Sara answered the unasked question.

"Well, two days ago, then; I knew it would make certain people angry. Actions have consequences." He hugged the whole group as well as he could, "But I'm still here and I feel fine now."

Sara laid a hand on him and Puck could feel the flux of quantum around her; she nodded. "It's out of your system now," she said quietly.

"Okay, then let's move on. Why don't you all go let the others know I'm fine? There are some things I need to do, and....I should do them on my own." He stood up and opened the doors for everyone, cutting off any protests just by force of will. "I'll be upstairs for a while, and then I'll come down and we can all have a talk in the Grand Salon. We need to talk, all of us, and decide where we go from here."

The group dispersed, spreading the word throughout the building as Puck made his way to his office. Lucrezia, you are a bitch. Bait them, fine, but you could have at least given me some heads up that you were going to poison me. He mulled over his mentor's wife and what she might be up to - and how his poisoning worked into that. Easy enough to place at the feet of the Harvesters. They're more likely to attack another nova and another Terat than the Primacy, and a number of them could make something poisonous enough to put me in bed for a few days. But it's more subtle than they usually are, and it only hurt me. Harvesters would more likely have attacked the entire gathering, or at least have followed up poisoning me by terrorizing the building and killing the Exalt! baselines they could get their claws on.

He slipped into the leather chair behind his desk and picked up his OpBook, tapping through the news reports that had gone out about the gala and his collapse. Everyone had theories; Aletheia was having a hell of a time trying to convince a number of sources that it wasn't Utopia. Poor woman. I'll have to make a statement. Utopian's are misguided, but I invited her myself and I never intended for this to spill over to make problems in her life. Mmmm.....the Harvesters....it just doesn't feel right. The Primacy, normally they wouldn't attack another nova and Terat so publicly - nor with something as chancy as poison. Which could be perfect. The Confederate is still in Chrysalis, so leadership is less secure and suspicion, especially suspicion that could never be definitively resolved, could drive a nice wide wedge between the radicals and the moderates in the group. A split in the Primacy could be good for the entire Teragen movement; getting them to clean house on their psychopaths and outright serial killers just using the banner of the Primacy to justify their killing sprees. If nothing else, that might lead to an influx to the Harvesters and create some nice tension and bad blood between the two. Yes, better to lay this at the feet of some Primacy member or two than to go after the Harvesters. "Everyone" knows the Harvesters are monsters, this would just be business as usual for one of their members.

Nodding to himself, he wrote up several OpMails to various people he knew within the Teragen, asking where certain Primacy Terats had been for the past several weeks and who'd they'd been seen with. He also set up several anonymous OpMail accounts, sent out messages to a list of reporters - from muckrakers to truly talented baseline investigators - making both pointed and subtly charged inquiries about the details of his own poisoning, then deleted the accounts. After that was a public statement on the Exalt! website about his return to health and his belief that none of the invited guests nor their sponsoring organizations were at all connected to the dastardly deed done that night. He grinned, I like the word dastardly. One of the better ones in English. He added that in the future he hoped that those so vehemently opposed to novas and baselines working together for the good of those in pain and need would have the courage to face him directly, instead of hiding behind poison and the cowardly mask of anonymity.

There. That should get the public where I want them, and start the wheels turning inside the Teragen. He sent one last OpMail, on his private account, to Utopia's New York PR director.

Aletheia,

Please accept my apologies for the suspicion that's been cast on you and Utopia for what happened the other night. I did not intend to do you nor Utopia damage and have done what I may so far to allay those accusations. I am still new to being so publicly regarded, so if there is any more I may do to help you and diffuse this situation, please let me know. I bow to your years of experience and training; please feel free to mail me back at this address or call to the Exalt! building. I am at your disposal.

Sincerely,

Puck

He ran a hand through his hair, sent the message, and then began sifting through the reports that had managed to be made during his convalescence. This better be worth it, Lucrezia. Aletheia might be a Utopian but she was my guest and had no part in our internal squabbles. And I have a distinct dislike of being poisoned now that I know what it feels like.

On the desk his sword flickered in and out of existence. It better be worth it.

[WhiteRain]

DARION MOGRÁINE 26^th May

Bad dreams are always with us, just the same as good ones. And sometimes, dreams come true. Darion lived with that truth every day of his life. Of late, though, he was being haunted by dreams that he hoped would stay where they belonged, in the land of not-real behind his eyes. Last night he dreamt of his wife sitting on the porch of their old home, playing her zither and watching him with eyes full of heartbreak and sadness. Miya, I miss you.

Mi meant ‘sea’ and ya ‘night’. She had been a traditionalist, a believer in names and language and words. He was a poet back then, and not much else. They came together so easily it was like they were born to be together. He thought of it as true love. Then the bad dreams rang true and his baseline life ended in a mundane nightmare, edged with quantum-laced insanity.

Darion rested his elbows on the desk and leaned forward, arching his fingers before him. He was surrounded by communications and surveillance equipment, powerful computers and a whole array of different interfaces, several of them virtual, flat planes in the air that he interacted with via the metallic sensors built into the fingertips of the gloves he was wearing.

There she was before him on his screen. Her name was Autumn Jade Tomson, though he’d rather it were Mográine. She was his daughter, and she erupted four years ago at age thirteen. Her friends called her ‘Woo’.

Much of his efforts since he learned of her existence seven years back had been expended on keeping her safe from afar and ensuring that she wanted for nothing. By a quirk of fate, he even caught her eruption on tape, listening to one of the first copies of White Rain’s Edge of Infinity, the first album she recorded after emerging from her second chrysalis. You’d think I didn’t have enough to thank Chang for, Darion thought.

Autumn was growing into a beautiful woman, Nova-scale like her dad, but she had gone punk. With her new quantum abilities this allowed her to try out truly dazzling variations of hair and tattoos, and she always seemed to be piercing something new. Under the skin she was a being of liquid metal, which made piercings rather convenient to say the least.

He didn’t quite approve, but his opinion didn’t matter. Besides, half of the people his daughter looked up to were friends and peers of his, and he had the phone numbers of the other half. Admittedly, some of them would be extremely angry if they found out, but that was not the point.

Autumn was watching him watch her, though she didn’t know who was on the other end of the video feed. He could tell that from little twitches in her eyes that betrayed the thoughts in her head.

The tiny camera in her room was supposed to be discreet, but she knew where it was the moment he turned it on. Autumn always knew when someone was watching her. It reminded him of Chang, and had to be a quantum manifestation. She sat on the edge of her bed resting her elbows on her knees and arching her fingers, staring right at him, still as a shadow. She couldn’t know she was mirroring her father’s pose, so exactly as to be eerie.

This happened from time to time. She would stare into whatever viewing device he had arranged to be planted, he would stare back, and wonder if she knew, somehow, that it was the father she never met who was on the other end.

Autumn possessed a piercing in the right eyebrow today, three in her lower lip and one on the left side of her nose and left ear, all small rings. There was a black tribal circle tattooed around her left eye, emphasizing the liquid silver of that eye. She never changed that tattoo. Her other eye was fox green. Her hair was a mix of red and black, cut so short it formed a marbling pattern on both sides of a perfect mohawk. She wore a fishnet top that hid very little, and she had two ‘X’s of black tape over her nipples, and through her immodest top he could see a complex and colourful tattoo all over her upper chest and shoulders. Autumn had used her abilities to make herself into a professional tattoo artist and fashion designer. He liked that, though her chosen subculture was alien to him.

Darion watched, blinking his own liquid silver eyes, wondering what to feel. He received a file update the other day which said Autumn had a girlfriend, after a few failed attempts with boys. He was indifferent about that. The girl in question was a painter. That he liked. Better that than a warrior. Of course, her best friend – also a Nova – was all teeth and poison and claws in multiples. Good-looking, though. She was also a black rights advocate, stripper when the mood suited her, and a passionate dancer. There was blood on that one’s hands, though admittedly all in self-defence. Her name was Grace Stephenson. A painter and a killer, both tugging on a girl with the power to be none, either or both. Which way will you go, Autumn?

In another life he might have been there to advise her and be ignored. He was in no position to father anybody, though. Not after what he’d done. Darion could never forget, either. The eruption, eager to make him hurt, forced an eidetic memory on him. The first ten years of his Nova life were full of things he would rather forget.

Autumn’s room was cramped, showing a lot of lazy hallmarks. Clothes piled up on the floor, posters askew on the wall, bed unmade, and there were few signs of cleaning. Autumn eschewed eufiber, preferring good old fashioned leather, metal, denim and PVC, with a veritable fashion show’s worth of T-Shirts and tanktops. Autumn raised one finger. There was a click from somewhere off-camera. She had picked up a bit of his telekinesis along with the eye.

The rolling, harmonic hum of the title track of Chang’s ‘Edge of Infinity’ echoed out over unseen speakers. Autumn was a massive White Rain fan, almost obsessive. No surprise, given the nature of her eruption. She had even been one of those people who attacked The Muse’s art works.

Darion had to call in a few favours to bury that one.

Being a punk, Autumn was no fan of Utopia. In general those subcultures were the ones most drawn to the Teragen, and least attracted to Utopia. It seemed quite likely Autumn might become a Terat herself one day. She was not yet prominent enough to be on anyone’s shortlist, but if her fashion endeavours really came to fruition she would be in no time.

She rose from the bed and came over, then sat down facing the screen. She leaned in almost to fill his vision. “I want to learn to fight. Me and Gracie both do. Any other time I need something, it turns up out of nowhere. I figure I’ve got you to blame. Call it a test,” she said. The words were rare. Normally these little exchanges were silent. She had never directly asked him for something before. “I’ll find you one day, you know.” Her eyes were distant, her expression cold. Darion could feel her emotions in the way she moved, though, the confusion, the hurt, and the failed attempt to look indifferent.

He lowered his gaze, unable to face her. In his periphery he saw her reach out towards him, and the feed ended.

Darion slumped in his chair.

Autumn was his greatest shame. He fled to Japan to escape the pain of the breakup with his first wife, never knowing the woman was pregnant. He also never thought to check back in, and so Autumn grew up never knowing he existed. Back then he was still a baseline, worried about nothing more than tomorrow’s meal and whether or not someone would buy his poetry. It used to be that he yearned to have those days back, but he managed to put that behind him after a few years in the Teragen. Being Nova was better than being baseline. It just tended to mean that everything was upped to eleven, the good and the bad. The trick was overbalancing towards good, an art he had been singularly bad at so far. He was learning.

He had thought of going to Autumn openly several times, but time and his own actions set that boat to sail long ago, with every passing day making it a worse idea. His second marriage, the tragedy that ended it, his eruption, and… what followed…

There was no going back, no pretending that there was a peaceful ending in store for him.

Darion closed his eyes. Behind them he could still hear the roar of the chainsaw’s engine, the scream of metal as its teeth whirred up to speed. It had been custom made at great expense. Novas were very hard to cut, and he couldn’t afford a mistake. He could still smell the viscera and gore, hear the screams, all as fresh as if he were there right now.

His fingers flexed, then clenched into fists.

He often thought about questions of parenthood, and what he ought to do. Watching from afar was easy, safe, and it could not hurt her. He was tainted now, not in the debatably positive way which came with being a Nova, but in the inherent and irrevocable way which came only with bloody vengeance.

He pulled up Autumn’s quantum profile with a few taps on one of the virtual interfaces. Each tap caused a momentary glow on an icon, indicating what he had done. Autumn was superhuman in almost every regard, like Darion himself. She suspects, he thought, certain it was true. She suspects it’s me watching. Her intellect was greatly expanded, and there were enough facts available to her to assume that whoever her guardian angel was, they were not some independent, completely random observer who was taking an uncommon interest. As far as he knew his ex-wife had erased him from existence, so to speak, and said as little as possible about their marriage. Nonetheless, she knew she had a father out there somewhere. If Autumn ever confronted her mother about it, he could only imagine what she would have said.

Autumn just said she wanted ‘to fight’. It was a test, alright. She wanted to see how well he knew her. Darion drew up a list of Nova martial artists and XWF fighters who also offered training. He selected a mixed martial artist, heavy on boxing who had developed a side-style for use by claw-equipped Novas. It was not what he wanted, but that wasn’t the point.

Boxing would suit her aggression, and Grace could benefit both from that and the Claw-fu. He actually called it Clawmundo, but Darion preferred Claw-fu. Maybe the choice would tip her off even further, but that did not concern him. The chances of her finding him any time soon were minimal, even if she realized there was someone observing every facet of her life, personal and professional alike.

After sending the request and making an opening offer, he rotated his seat toward a bank of monitors which showed voice-reader lines. These were links with various agents around the world. They would only move if someone spoke, and each one was backed up by voice-recognition and patterning software so the system could immediately detect if someone was impersonating them with anything less than perfection.

“This is Starling to agent silver. You online, silver?” The voice which would emerge on the other end was not his own. In truth not a word of his ever left this sealed room. The machines were programmed with incredible advanced voice recognition programs, and they reproduced his words in a variety of different tones. That was a necessary step when dealing with Novas. Just pissing about with the waveform wasn’t enough when there were Novas who could tell by the taste of a sound who was speaking it.

There was a pause. After a moment, a softly modulated voice answered, “Here, Starling. No more information to upload. Target is asleep for now.”

“I require you to send an information packet to Mímir. Are you ready to receive?”

“One moment, Starling. I’m enhancing encryption protocols on this channel.” A few moments passed, and Darion brought up some other screens to show him what was happening on the stream. “Ready to receive, Starling.”

Darion brought up the information with his VI, ran it through his usual collection of encryption and security software, and then sent it to silver. “Send that immediately.”

Mímir was a partner of sorts in the information game. He was an old friend, too. And Darion wanted to talk.

“Packet received, Starling. I’ll communicate ASAP. Returning to observation.”

The line went quiet.

Darion lay back in his seat, surrounded on all sides by screens and glowing lights, just thinking. It was nearly that time of year again, the anniversary of the death of Miya and their son, little Togo who liked playing with his wooden truck, and the anniversary of his eruption.

Behind his eyes, the chainsaw roared. He remembered the look on the face of the boy, the sweat running down his angular face, the panic as he strained against bonds that his quantum powered muscles should have ripped in moments, and found them stalwart against him. That was when the boy’s father started begging. Darion might have paused if not for that. But when he heard that voice, so arrogant just moments before, breaking, when he heard him begging, his hand moved almost of its own accord, revving the saw and brandishing it. Then was the time of red ruin, of blood and screams whose echoes deafened after the passage of years.

A loud ping grabbed his attention. Darion rotated his seat to face another screen. There was an incoming call. These were separate from his agent links, and run through different channels. Darion clicked connect. “This is Starling. What can I do for you?”

“It’s Geryon. I want to know who poisoned Puck yesterday.”

Darion smiled. His identity as ‘Starling’ was pretty watertight. The only people who knew his other identity were the ones who helped him get set up, and all of those people had a vested interest in keeping that a secret. Mímir was one of those people. Geryon was not. The only thing most Terats knew about Starling – and Mímir for that matter – was that they were Terats and their services were available to everyone. There was value in that, especially in these times of dangerous politics where faction lines were getting thicker every day.

“That’s a hot topic right now but I’m afraid I don’t have solid answers. Information is coming in by the hour and I’m paying at my highest rate for anything substantive. I can bring you up to speed on the current situation and keep you updated if you have my usual fee on hand.”

He heard a disgusted snort. “You nickel-and-diming me, Starling?”

“That’s the short version. I’m a professional, James Booth. I don’t do things for free and right now I’ve got nothing on my desk that you can help me with.” For a moment he considered asking him to train Autumn, but that was asking for trouble. If she wanted to seek out the Teragen she could do so, but he wasn’t going to drop Geryon – of all people – on her doorstep without a damn good reason, most likely involving an irritated Proteus strike team. The funny thing was that if he had asked that, Geryon would have been in a much better mood.

“Done,” was the reply, followed by an incoming funds transfer request.

After a few moments, Darion brought up the file on the poisoning incident, encrypted a copy and prepared to download it. A lot of people wanted to know who poisoned Puck. Most of the requests he was receiving came from outside the Teragen, of course, and after a conference on the matter he and his fellows had decided that this was not sensitive info, and fine for dissemination.

“As you’re aware, Puck’s placing the blame on sources inside The Primacy, which seems a high probability given recent encounters between Scrambler and The Mirror Queen. An attack from Utopian sources is secondary, but OpNet traffic related to it seems confused, so if it was Utopia it’s a special project outside the usual chain of command. Team Tomorrow certainly weren’t involved, and Proteus isn’t under suspicion at this time.”

“Shrapnel’s shutting me out on this one,” Geryon said, irritable. “Has anyone ‘fessed up to it?”

Darion could practically hear Geryon cracking his knuckles. He might not be close to Puck, but Puck was a Nova child, a son of the Nursery, and as righteous a Terat as any other. That meant it was stomping time when someone tried to ice him. “Scrambler’s swearing off, of course, but that doesn’t mean one of his friends didn’t take it upon themselves to act. There are several obscure but possible perpetrators if you’re looking for individuals to question. The Primacy picked up a serial killer going by the handle Strychnine. His M.O. is predictable, with a name like that. I have sources looking into his movements as we speak.”

The download completed. “Is that all in this file?”

“It is. The document you just received is exactly what you paid for: all the collated data up to this point. You’re entitled to an update once every twelve hours, but it’s up to you to collect. I won’t call you, you call me.” Most of what Darion knew about the information game he learned from his pal Mímir, and the first lesson was to make sure everybody came to you, not the other way round. The rest he learned from Synapse, who was one of the other people who knew his real identity and a big part of ‘Starling’ remaining a mystery. When Synapse said ‘sorry, I can’t figure out who this guy is’ everyone assumed said guy was demonstrably amazing, rather than think Synapse was branching out and building a Teragen-wide information network. The best thing was that he never had to lie. Synapse had shown Darion, in painstaking detail, how to make himself untraceable when interacting with the OpNet. And the bits he couldn’t deal with, Synapse quietly sorted out on his own and let ‘Starling’ have the credit.

“Hey, Starling,” Geryon said. “It says here you don’t know what was used to poison him.”

“That’s true. We have options, and the leading contenders are in the appendices. Whatever it is it was Nova-tailored, Puck’s extremely resilient to such toxins. Whoever put him down went to effort to make sure it worked. The current issue is we don’t know if the intent was to kill him or not. It could be that the poisoner underestimated his resistances, or that their actual objective was oblique. It’s possible that the attack on Puck was an attempt to gain access to files in the Exalt! building while he was unconscious. In that eventuality, it’s most likely this was either a Proteus or Utopia op.”

“Then I’ll give this a good read and get hoofing. I’ll hit you back with anything I find out, just in case you missed something.” He sounded almost jovial, but Geryon always did when the option to kick someone or something in the face was presented to him.

“I appreciate your cooperation. I’ll be looking forward to your update.”

“Just before I go, though, I’m kinda curious. I know you’re a Terat, whoever you are. Why you so scared of showing your face?”

Darion arched his fingers again, resting his elbows on the arms of his chair. “It’s not fear, Mr. Booth, it’s a choice. The Teragen is swamped by party politics which I do not play, but if you knew my face you would begin to make assumptions which could damage our business relationship. We’re both dedicated to making a future for the One Race. You do it by rearranging the faces of our enemies. I do it by making sure you have the information you need to pick the right face. For a fee, of course,” Darion said, smiling, and knowing how much that would needle Geryon. He was like Chang, a philosophical radical.

There was a disgusted snort, and then the line went dead.

While he had been talking his automated systems had received and processed a call from Mímir. The information packet Darion sent to him included a request to see him in person. The call back included a place and a time, and a vid file.

Darion unpacked and loaded it, and watched in dumb amazement. It was compiled a few days ago, and showed his daughter at a recent music festival. She was kissing one of Lucrezia.

“You have got to be shitting me.”

***

Darion Mográine perched on a railing, listening to the steady drip, drip of water from the old stone above him, trying not to pick up on the smell. The downside of wanting to meet a Harvester-turned-independent information broker was that he was very likely to choose a sewer to meet in.

Ibiza’s sewers were as pleasant as any other sewer in any other part of the world. The stone was green with mildew and brown with other things. Grey water ran directly underneath him, burbling on its merry way to a local treatment plant. Behind him was a platform with a grated floor and a red valve on the wall which controlled the sewer gate directly below. Two small sets of metal stairs led down to stone ledges which followed the line of the walls to a junction and then disappeared around the corner.

His daughter was on his mind. Darion couldn’t stop thinking about that image of her lip-locking with Lucrezia. Honestly he wasn’t sure what to think. It was a poorly-kept secret that Autumn was his daughter. The liquid silver eye, limited telekinesis and general super humanity were a bit of a giveaway. Part of him needled every time he thought of those images, now rendered in loving detail, locked inside his flawless memory like a painting in an art gallery. He wanted to go to Lucrezia and demand she back off, insist that she leave his daughter the hell alone. It was one thing to take his sword for her schemes, but this… this was something else.

But he knew he would not do that. It wasn’t an option.

Like it or not, this was an era of factionalism, and not even the comparatively neat factionalism of nation against nation. There’s was an awkward, messy battle of ideologies, centred in the Nova population and spiralling out to suck in the entire world. Autumn Jade Tomson (or maybe one day Mográine) was going to end up on somebody’s side. He’d rather she was on his than on someone else’s. And if she was going to be on his side, being recruited by Lucrezia was a whole hell of a lot better than being grabbed by Scrambler or anybody else. There was anger in her, and power. It wasn’t hard to make a deadly tool out of those two qualities. And if someone does that, I’ll be forced to make them regret it.

The chainsaw roared in his hands. The boy in chains stared at him, sweating. The boy’s parents screamed, knowing what was coming.

It was the sound of heavy footsteps which broke him from his reverie.

Darion watched as Targan came loping around the corner. His massive frame barely fit the wide stone ledge. He walked on all fours, ten feet of red and orange mottled skin, hard ridged bone, and sharp edges. Four sets of jet black eyes adorned his face in two clumps of four, with a terrible trilobed mouth between and below them. His head was massive, armoured, and utterly inhuman.

As he looked Darion’s way, his eight eyes locked on him. Targan’s eyes could sense, predict and interpret movement with incredible precision. He was second only to Darion in that regard, but Darion cheated. Targan had tricks of his own, though. He was strong and tough, but he was also fast, and when he ran his body stored kinetic energy until he collided with something, and released the energy in a burst of raw force that could shatter concrete and dent steel. The further and faster he went, the bigger the bang at the end. Darion dubbed it the Impact Bomb.

Targan reared up on his back legs. He was wearing a black suit and tie, with a white undershirt. It seemed an absurd dress on that massive frame, but who was he to argue?

“Darion,” Targan said, his voice a bubbling rumble, like that of a volcano preparing to erupt. He flexed his claws.

“Targan. Lovely place you’ve picked. Is there a particular reason why you want to force me to shower when I go home?”

“Privacy,” was the answer. His ears twitched, turning this way and that. “Most Terats are too clean to pay attention to the world beneath their feet. It is convenient.”

Darion nodded. “It’s nice to see you again, old pal.”

Targan gave no answer. He was like that. He was better known as Mímir these days, but nobody knew it. Ostensibly he was a former Harvester now factionless after a horrific argument with Leviathan which involved body parts lost on both sides. Targan had been Darion’s companion in the days before the Teragen, his aid and his friend while he hunted the globe for the Terat family that destroyed his life. It had been Targan, in the end, who clapped the boy in chains, who set up the drip of Mox to keep his powers shut off, who set up the OpNet feed and encrypted the feed to make sure they couldn’t be found.

Neither of them were strangers to vengeance. “I got your last message,” Darion said. “Lucrezia’s moving on my daughter?”

Targan’s eyes shifted again, moving separately so as to study his movements, to see the subtle muscle twitches under the skin. “Yes.”

“How long’s it been going on for?”

“One month, give or take. It’s hard to track Lucrezia unless she acts in her ‘adopted’ shape.”

That was true enough. Evolved Terats all had their quirks. Shrapnel and Leviathan smashed things. Lucrezia was everywhere. It used to be that they thought she needed to keep her copies within a certain distance of each other, like a psychic string that could only be extended so far in one direction. But eventually they debunked that theory after she was observed being active at both poles simultaneously. She could have been luring Autumn in for months by using a single or even multiple clones, sliding through shapes as needed to set up and arrange ‘chance’ meetings or dramatic coincidences. That was one of Lucrezia’s favourite tricks. Two clones would be arguing about something, or start a fight, or whatever, setting the stage for a third to make contact with her target. Once she even attempted to violently arrest herself to force her target to play the role of prince charming.

Darion folded his arms across his chest. “Thanks for bringing this to me.”

No answer. Targan just watched him. He had never been one to waste words. Darion met him after signing up with DeVries under his female alter ego. The world thought he died on the night of his eruptions, and back then it was to his advantage to let them go on thinking that. Targan was a DeVries specialist, a hunter and expert at find/retrieve missions with the physical abilities to take on just about anything baselines and most Novas could throw at him. Darion went to him with his needs and eventually broke down in floods of feminine tears, begging him for help. All he got was a rumbling, ‘Yes’.

And that was the start of a beautiful friendship, Darion thought wryly. Not that there was much beautiful about Targan. He was a savage avatar, as true a monster as anyone could dream of. And he didn’t like having his time wasted. I should probably get to why I asked him here.

“Targan,” Darion said, “what do you think about the Anavasi?”

“There’s not much data yet. Don’t have an opinion. I respect Chang for her philosophical purity, but that doesn’t mean she’s a leader. Time will tell.”

“You thought about signing up? There’d be room in the gig for you, I’m sure of it.”

Targan’s eyes adjusted again, and his ears twitched. “No.”

Darion chuckled and rolled backward off his railing. He put down a single finger to guide him over onto his feet. “Come on, Targan. Don’t you get bored sitting around in the sewers menacing mice? I mean, I always figured that was why Leviathan and company started playing that tunnel run game.”

“Then you are wrong,” he replied. “And I do not get bored.”

“Okay, maybe not, but isn’t it more fun having friends?”

“I have enough. Geth visits from time to time. Sin-Eater came to see me last week, about the same issue, in fact. This merge between her and Chang is intriguing.”

Darion nodded. “Geth’s doing recruitment for Sin-Eater?” Targan nodded. It made sense. Geth was a freaky insect guy, but he was about as likeable as such a creature could ever be. He sure as hell never insulted anybody. The last time Darion spent much time around him he was treated to an almost poetic appraisal of his manly looks and the way the light shone on his hair and eyes. And flattery will get you results. If Sin-Eater’s not going to do the work herself, there can’t be many better than Geth to go make nice with the birds and the bees.

The next question was obvious. “Why not sign up, then? Your two pals are. You know what Chang proposes, right? What she’s been working on with Shiv and Meh’Lindi and company?” That was a rhetorical question, and Targan never answered those. “Don’t you reckon you have something to add on that front?”

“Perhaps I do,” Targan answered. “I’ll observe, and consider.” He dropped down on all fours again. Darion never felt entirely comfortable when he saw his friend like that. It was hard not to feel like a gazelle on the open plain.

“You could always go back to The Harvesters,” Darion said, smirking.

“The Harvesters,” Targan said, and his sonorous, bubbling voice was filled with dark contempt. “A gaggle of cowards who hide from their nature, else hide behind it. One half begs for a cure to their condition, the other contents itself to hate and be hated. They are uninteresting.”

And didn’t Leviathan just love that? Reports were sketchy, but by all accounts it was that blunt appraisal which led to his row with Leviathan. After that he retreated from conventional Terat society, in a manner very similar to what Chang did after her fallout with Scrambler. It was sometime after that Synapse approached him about expanding and improving on his information business, and Darion was brought into the fold on Targan’s advice.

“Lucrezia has planted your sword on Pastor,” Targan’s words came out of nowhere, but Darion showed no surprise.

“Pastor? Weird choice. Any idea why?”

“No.”

Pastor was a fairly weak member of the Pandaimonion, a running boy for half a dozen more powerful and more popular Terats, eager to prove himself to Narcosis above all else. Most likely he would end up in the Cult of Mal inside a year, and probably in the Kabal. He was too weak-willed to ever be someone that mattered beyond his role in someone else’s plans. And maybe that was the point of picking him. Lucrezia was not a hyper genius, but she was very good at misdirection and had the sort of cunning one expected out of the biblical Satan. Comparable arse, too. It sure makes Chang go funny in the head.

“Either way, I guess it means I’ll have my sword back soon. Thanks for the heads up.”

It had the sound of an end of talking, but Targan did not move a muscle. After a few moments he reached up and adjusted his tie, but he still stood there, waiting.

Darion stepped up onto the railing again, and sat down where he was before. “You can see it, can’t you? That I’m holding back.”

“Yes.”

He was. The real reason he wanted to see Targan was something altogether simpler, and mundane. All of this other stuff was shop talk, useful information for the everyday Darion that the world knew well. He sat upon the rail, lost in thoughts. When he spoke his tone was meditative. “Would you believe I came seeking moral advice?”

There was a pause, then a resounding, “No.” The word echoed off the walls and bounced around him. Targen’s eight black eyes watched him, studied him, the way they always did. His ‘predator’s stare’ as Prudence christened it.

“Well, sucks to be you, because I did. I feel like you’re the only one I can come to for this. I consider you a… friend. We’ve been through a lot together.” He studied Targan now, but for a while he said nothing. His ears, high up on his head, twitched.

“We assisted one another in matters of vengeance,” Targan intoned. “’Friend’ is an acceptable term.”

Darion felt a weight he had not understood was there lift from his heart. There were few people alive who knew his past, and fewer he trusted to know it. Odd that one of them was an information broker. Secrets weighed a lot, he found. It helped to have someone to share the load.

“Targan, what does a man do when he serves two masters, owes a lot to both, but has to pick between one or the other? What’s the right thing to do?”

He was quiet for some time after that. Targan watched him, and he watched Targan watching him. It was impossible to read that face. The many changes that had transformed Targan from whoever he was as a baseline had robbed his face of some of the muscles needed to make expressions, and his voice was a near constant in its depth and sonorous tone, it betrayed almost no emotion. All that ever really changed was the volume, unless he roared, and that was a sound which few people heard and lived to tell of.

“Novas have no master,” Targan said. “Serve yourself, Starling, as once you did as the wolf of the battlefield.” He began to walk away, his powerful shoulders rippling with every step. “Kill one master. Serve the other. Or kill both, and hunt again. Faced with your decision, I know what choice I made.”

[WhiteRain]

***

Two days later – 28^th May

Darion let out a sharp kiai shout and brought the sword down in a shining arc, slicing Snow’s head cleanly in two from brow to chin. Not that it stopped her from talking.

“Don’t you think it’s fascinating that we can develop these kinds of social conventions? I mean, we can completely redefine the meaning of violence inside a social context.” Her eyes rolled independently of each other. One half of her mouth smiled, while the other went on talking. Her normally sweet and child-like voice was a hoarse, inhuman rasp.

Darion raised his sword, slowly lowered it and made a ceremonial flick as if to shake blood from the steel. Snow had reacted smoothly enough that he had not so much as nicked her skin. He straightened up, turned the blade and slid it back into the sheath at his hip. He was wearing a dark robe lined in gold, and tabi socks with wooden sandals.

The two halves of Snow’s head flapped obscenely for a moment, then slid smoothly back together with a soft, bony crack.

“You’re getting better at that,” Darion observed, lowering the centre of his balance and preparing for another cut. It felt good to have his sword back. There were others, of course, and sharper ones at that, but this sword had a weight of history to it, and an even greater weight of memories.

“Practice makes perfect!” Snow’s voice was bright and girlish again now that her head was reformed. “Chang was totally right to suggest this. It’s very interesting. My thought processes aren’t even disturbed by you doing that. The funny thing is, while my head’s whole I feel like the seat of my consciousness is in my cranium, but it clearly isn’t. Meh’Lindi’s going to examine me and see how my biology’s shifted. I think I’m a distributed consciousness, the same way Shiv or the Alchemist are.”

Darion let out another kiai, and this time drew his sword into a horizontal cut. Snow’s flesh parted and sealed behind the blade so smoothly that it did not even create friction on the steel. Again he straightened, flicked the blade, and sheathed it. “Distributed intelligences?”

Snow rubbed her belly where the blade had passed through.

“Did I cut you?”

“No, I closed up on the sword a bit too fast and touched the steel on its way out. It’s cold! Anyway, distributed intelligences are usually terms used in artificial intelligence, like when an AI has sub-processors and stuff. In this meaning it’s more like your brain’s spread out through your whole body. Cut the head off and it makes no difference because you can think with your little finger if it comes down to it. Meh’Lindi reckons The Alchemist can survive if even a cell of her is intact, because every cell of her contains every other bit of her and she can regenerate from anything.”

“So she doesn’t ever actually die when we think she does?”

“No. It looks like she’s dead, but every cell of her body is self-contained and alive, so it’s just a matter of time before those cells multiply and replace the damaged ‘dead’ cells that are making up her outer appearance. But it’s most likely that she needs a certain number of cells working in cohesion to create what we perceive as a mind, which is why her recollection of being ‘dead’ is so hazy. It’s not that she’s getting a glimpse of the afterlife; it’s that her cells aren’t capable of processing sensory input properly or forming accessible memories from what they get. She’s completely alive and awake through the entire thing; it’s just that her existence is too simple to really call it ‘life’.”

Darion performed another draw-and-cut, straightened up. “Wait, wait wait wait.” He turned to Snow. “Are you telling me that The Alchemist has a brain? I find that quite hard to believe, having met the woman.”

Snow stamped her foot. It was one of the cutest things Darion had seen in recent days. “If I had something I could throw at you–“

“–I’d dodge it and it’d probably be thrown with enough force to go through that wall,” Darion said, nodding at the wall behind him, “and result in me frowning at you and you being very embarrassed.”

Snow’s shoulders sagged a little. “Yeah. You’re right. That’s exactly how it’d go.”

“Sure did the last time.”

He moved away from her and began a full kata, cutting in one direction before turning on his heel to cut behind him, each move as fluid and smooth as a dream made flesh. The cuts were simple and effective. That was what he liked most about katana training. There was nothing showy.

After his meeting with Targan, Darion took the initiative and popped in on Pastor. The genius of Lucrezia’s choice only hit him when he broached the subject. Pastor was by nature a treacherous little shit. He was always seeking to curry favour with someone else, specifically someone not associated with Chang. When he came by Darion’s beloved sword, his thought was to think of who he could shop it to for maximum favour. So when Darion confronted him he denied it, right up until Darion found the sword and confronted him directly. That was when things became complicated.

In the aftermath of recovering his sword, Lucrezia went on the warpath, dropping accusations as firing them from orbit from a shotgun, implying just about everyone Pastor was even peripherally associated with was behind the initial theft. And Darion – being completely honest – had to admit that it looked exactly like Pastor was put up to it by somebody else.

He came to the end of his kata, bowed to his dead shadow opponents, flicked their phantom blood from his sword, and sheathed it once more.

Snow clapped. “That was awesome.”

Darion smiled over at her. “I’m just glad to have my sword back.”

He headed over to her, stepping off the rush mat floor. His training room was decked out in a very traditionally Japanese style, with folding screens along the back wall, covered paper lanterns and sliding doors, with the rice paper walls decorated by images of shadowy forests at night and plains under the moonlit sky. Chang did the painting. It was minimalist, yet detailed to the finest of levels, and utterly fitting. Darion knelt on a separate mat off to the side of the training floor, beside a kettle of warm rice wine.

Snow was kneeling already, clad in a red shirt with black line work all over it, with her oil-spill hair trapped against her neck by her usual flat grey collar. She was an exotic beauty to say the least, an explosion of energy and colour that just seemed right for the girl who was always so full of ideas and so determined to find a way to express herself. “So what you up to now?” She asked, pouring some sake for both of them.

Darion took up his cup and sipped the warm wine, savouring every moment. “I’m going down to the ice rink. Want to come?”

“Hell yes! When you going?”

“Not yet.”

Miya, he thought. Togo. It was the anniversary of his eruption today, of their deaths. And the anniversary of other deaths, too. Best to keep all one’s regrets on one special day, I guess. He sighed. Miya was in his dreams again, and the boy again. The boy and his screaming parents, watching Darion rev up the diamond-tooth chainsaw. Oh, the joys of an eidetic memory.

It was the blood he could never forget. The smell of it was cloying, and it sprayed everywhere. He intended that, of course. He’d been shaking when it was done. But when he left the cargo container they’d converted for his purpose, Targan had just been there on all fours, watching him in that silent way he did. That was a decade ago. Targan never had commented on what Darion did that day.

“Something’s on your mind,” Snow said. “Your eyes are all shiny.”

“That’s because they’re silver, dear.”

“Don’t play dumb with me,” she snapped, then gave a flick of her head as she marshalled her emotions. She had an angry streak, especially if she felt someone was insulting her intelligence. “What’s on your mind?”

“Just thinking about the future,” he said, though in truth he was thinking about the exact opposite. “About where we’re going, as a people, if we even are a people. You know, your pet topic.”

Snow’s face lit up, her ruby red lips widening in a smile. “You so totally aren’t.”

“You wouldn’t be calling me a liar, would you?” Darion put on a look of shock, and drained his wine cup. “I have to admit, I feel somewhat hard done by. Seriously, it does bother me. All this shit about Novas being capable of anything, and half the time it seems like we can’t get ‘anything’ done.”

Snow made a gagging sound. “I get so sick of hearing Terats say we’re capable of anything. It’s all I fucking hear from Narcosis’s pals and the Cult of Mal and it makes me want to crush their heads into strawberry pulp. Which isn’t very community-minded, I know, but we’ve all got our foibles right? But it’s just as silly as when baselines say it, and it’s so totally counterproductive to our long-term survival.”

Darion chuckled and poured himself more sake. “Is that so? I’ve always thought of it as being optimistic.”

“Nope. It’s self-delusion at worst and blind optimism at best, and bullshit either way. Societies are formed based on limitations and requirement of community to overcome them. See humans and food production. More people working together can generate more food by working in unison, thus feeding everyone. There’s a tangible benefit to working together, and thus a society begins to spring up. You get this, right?”

“Certainly do, I did Sociology in university. True story,” he said, and toasted in her direction. Snow tapped cups with him, and he drank half of his cup. The wine was good. He would have to ask The Alchemist to cook up some special brew for him.

“Okay, then, check this,” Snow said, with a twinkle in her dark eyes. “If we individually have no limits, we have no need for a society. I mean, isn’t that obvious? That’s why all of this ‘Novas can do anything’ talk is self-defeating and is demonstrably bullshit. Look at the Teragen. We’re forming a proto-society right here, based on environmental pressures which threaten our survival as a species.”

“You know, you could just say ‘Utopia’ and get to the point quicker,” Darion said, draining his wine cup and standing up. “Keep talking, I’m just going to get changed.” He untied his sword from his belt and went to lay it on the altar where it belonged.

“Actually that’d miss the point. A lot of us talk like if we get rid of Utopia we’ll have no limits on our development, when really Utopia are a good thing because they’re a definable environmental factor which has shaped the early development of Nova culture. Without them we’d be nothing but baselines with super powers. If we didn’t have Utopia we’d need to invent them, or some other sort of threat to our existence.”

“Not according the Null Manifesto.” Darion’s tone was mild as he activated the alarms and sensors which would help protect his sword. Then he went behind a screen and started stripping off. Snow was far enough across the room that he was reasonably certain she would resort to her X-ray vision to ogle him rather than just lengthen her legs to peek over the top. He rarely contributed much to these rants of hers. Really Snow just wanted to talk to somebody who would listen rather than smirk indulgently or pretend they had thought about these issues in half the detail she had. Most Terats were starry-eyed on Nova potential, and few had ever sat down and begun to work through the details, let alone thought on how to address the legion of issues facing them once they were past Utopia.

“The Null Manifesto missed the mark by such a wide margin that I think it hit the next star along from Sol,” Snow said, “not that I don’t like what it says. But it says it all wrong. Broadly speaking it proposes anarchy, but as it turns out Novas aren’t anarchic creatures. There’s no evidence whatsoever that any of us bend towards anarchy, save the rarest individuals and nobody likes those guys.”

Darion laughed out loud. She was right. Anarchists were fun to talk to, but nobody in the Teragen actually liked having them around. They were too unreliable, and more and more they needed people to pull their weight. He pulled on a black shirt with white laces and tight jeans.

“As a society, we trend towards grouping around the most powerful individual in our vicinity. We have Mal, the Aberrants have Sophia Rousseau, and Utopia has Pax. Does that sound anarchic to you? The Teragen would need to dissolve down to its separate cells for us to even begin a case for anarchy, but we’re growing together more tightly over time, so there’s even less of an argument for it. Basically I just think Mal got it wrong. He reckoned Terats would go one way but we went the other. The thing I find funniest is that Chang gets mocked for this faux ‘court’ thing we like to do around her, but every indication suggests that she’s not far off.”

Darion emerged from behind his folding screen, flicking strands of silver hair down his back. He raised his hand and gave a surge of quantum, gripping his trenchcoat from across the room. It flew to him and he spun, sliding into it as he spun and continuing to walk without missing a beat.

Snow drained her wine cup and put it down as she rose to join him. “A Nova nation would most likely be a quantum-based monarchy not too dissimilar to what Einherjar’s putting together in the Congo, a variant on tribalism – which is basically what we have now – or maybe, just maybe, an actual workable meritocracy. That’s my personal hope. Meritocracies are cool,” Snow said, and stuck her tongue out at Darion when he frowned at her. Just like her hair, it was multi-coloured, in an artistic flow from the tip running back into her mouth.

Good kid, he thought. We’re going to need Novas like her if we make it out of the next decade. It seemed like a big ‘if’ at times. People like him existed to make sure it happened, regardless of their own fate. “Meritocracy, huh?”

“They’re great in theory. Humans could never make it work, but Novas can. Just depends on how our society is made up in the end. We bring so much to the table individually that it’s hard to judge without knowing exactly who’s involved. I’ve got loads of models based on known Teragen membership. It’s kind of amazing when you extrapolate what happens if you put Geryon, Scripture, Narcosis, and Clarion in the same society for ten years, without Mal.” She giggled. “It always ends up in an ideological war that wipes out the entire Nova population. Which isn’t funny in the slightest but I always imagine it ending up with Geryon and Scripture standing in the middle of the wasteland shouting ‘no, you!’ back and forth.”

Darion smiled. That was funny, actually. Though he doubted such a thing could ever happen. Jeremiah Scripture liked to play nicey-nice, but being Starling had allowed him to learn some of the secrets of his elders. One of them was that Scripture’s enemies had a habit of being turned into pillars of salt from a continent away. An angelic voice he might have, but people tended to forget that angels were God’s army, and that one of them was the fellow whose terrible brass play would signal the end of all things. On the other hand, Clarion could radicalize anybody given enough time.

Snow continued to ramble on as they headed out. Past the sliding door there was a small set of other rooms. His information hub was extremely well-hidden in the boiler room, behind several secret doors, but other than that he actually lived pretty modestly. All the better to be ignored.

After he ushered Snow out he set his various alarms and other security measures and closed the door, then headed down the long set of stone stairs to the street outside his apartment. His bike, a sleek custom job which mixed black and chrome, was waiting for him at the roadside. There were no other cars parked nearby. His apartment’s position was nothing special, he never saw the need. Sure he was a Nova and attracted Nova watchers, but so long as Chang Zha-Yang made her home on the island and other, flashier, more famous Novas zipped in and out of the place on weekend breaks he remained mostly unmolested.

Darion had chosen to live in Ibiza after his revenge was finished. Trite as it sounded, after so many years feeling dead inside, he wanted to settle somewhere that was full of life, and there was nowhere on earth more full of life than Ibiza in the Nova age. It was an easy place for a good-looking but ultimately unremarkable Nova to be forgotten. These days Darion was best known for his role in a couple of South Korean music videos and from a couple of martial arts roles he filled in the Hong Kong movie industry. It turned out that silver hair and eyes looked pretty damn sinister if shot with a preponderance of darkness and carefully positioned candles. To this day he was impressed by just how evil he looked in that first movie. Darion spoke Japanese and a few dialects of Chinese, so he was a good fit for the foreigner role, and it was always fun to shoot fight scenes. There were always a few offers on his plate, but he usually turned them down.

There were fireworks over Ibiza tonight, for no real reason. Why not? A couple of Pandas were having a birthday party out on one of the beaches, but the fireworks were on the other side of the island. The light show coming up from their beach was altogether more eerie and spectacular. The whole western sky was shimmering in hues of red and gold, and it seemed like naked figures were dancing in the lights. Male figures, for the most part. He could feel the quantum waves in the light, trying to forcibly grab his attention and fix him in place to stare and admire. It rolled off him like water from a duck’s back. “I’m better,” he said, and headed for his bike.

Snow was watching the sky, rapt. “Like, a better dancer?”

“That’d be the one.” Darion slipped into the saddle and took his driving gloves out of his outside pocket. He patted the inside pocket, making sure his phone and data assistant – folded up, of course – were in their place. Neither Darion Mográine nor Starling could afford to be without those. “You coming or what? I’ve only got the rink for an hour or so.”

“Yeah, I’m coming,” Snow said, tearing her eyes away from the sky with difficulty. She slid onto the bike behind him, laced her arms around his waist and nuzzled into his back.

Darion gunned the engine and roared into the night.

***

He had been so bad on the ice back then. Miya took him to the ice rink on one of their first dates. She moved like a swan in water, elegant and effortless, he slipped and slid and fell over, and she laughed.

Darion couldn’t remember his pre-eruption memories as well. It seemed that an eidetic memory wasn’t retroactive, at least not for him. He could remember everything from his eruption night, though, with perfect clarity. The smell of blood, the sound of cracking bones, of interior walls breaking like paper, the laughter and screams. The taunts. The smirks.

I wiped those smirks off your faces, didn’t I? Not that it helped. He would see them until the day he died, as fresh as if their wearers were alive and breathing. Every now and again he even put out feelers, just to make sure. Once you knew The Alchemist, death took on a rather different aspect. She would be a horrifying Nova to pick for an enemy, though it would take the blackest heart to find room for hate towards Cyndi Carter.

He pulled his bike in to the curb, slowing down and then pulling a sudden power slide to bring it to a stop. There were people taking pictures of him already, though he suspected it was more for Snow than him. She was the movie star, thanks to her roles in The Alchemist’s recent Pantheon Productions releases. Darion had always shied away from any major roles in those movies, though he did step in to provide his martial arts expertise one time, when The Alchemist wanted to shoot an artsy fight scene. The end result of his crisp, cat-quick sequence was… somewhat garbled. Effective, though.

“Why are we stopping?” Snow asked from behind him.

“Hotdog stand,” Darion said, nodding at the stand on the street corner across the road.

“Oh good. We can run it over.”

“Go buy me one, slave.”

He felt a sudden, jarring pain in his side and doubled up. Snow was very good at making a poke in the ribs a memorable experience. He let out his breath slowly. “What was that, friend dear?” Snow said. She did get off the bike, though, and looked over at the hotdog stand with obvious disapproval. “I should so insist on sex for this.”

“You’re a bit jailbaity, I’m afraid,” Darion said, wincing.

She shrugged. “Chang’s got a bigger cock anyway.” It sounded so obscene, coming from those young, soft lips. He supposed she was legal in most parts of the world, though, so it wasn’t too bad.

“Bigger is not always better. Though I admit, her reputation is a positive one.”

Snow cartwheeled between the onrushing cars, twirled and danced, to the delight of the pedestrians and the panic of the motorists. She was lucky that didn’t cause a pile up. But then, she probably didn’t care, either.

Darion rolled his head and felt his neck click. He had no business feeling high-minded about Snow and sex. She wasn’t a girl. She looked young, but even then she looked sixteen, seventeen, which was mostly woman. She could look much younger, and child roles were her speciality in the movies, but that didn’t mean she was a child. He pondered for a moment, wondering what it was that bothered him.

You tended to get better at self-analysis when you were around Chang for any length of time. It was either that or get used to her turning up in your mental playground like some psychological Godzilla bent on obliterating all of your carefully built up illusions.

After only a minute or two, he figured he was attaching onto her as a daughter figure. Maybe I should go female and play mother. He hadn’t been in his woman-shape for some time. Chang thought it unhealthy, and she might be right. But the years had associated many painful memories with that form. It was impossible not to think if he wore it.

He remembered charging the frontlines of a baseline military unit. Darion – as a woman, using the call sign of ‘Starling’ – rode on Targan’s back, as if the elder Nova were some sort of beast of war. Their charge was like something out of antiquity, and the baseline response was pure terror. Darion flipped off Targan’s back when he collided. The Impact Bomb flattened half of the unit. And then they were among them, Starling with her twin katana, Targan with teeth and rending claws.

Darion remembered moving amongst them, dancing, dancing, with his blades a-whirl amid the storm of dust and mud and death. The soldiers went down, each a cherry blossom in the fall, never to rise. He shook his head. I had to kill far too many. Is that what makes you sad, Miya?

It wasn’t regret which held him, though. Maybe that was the bleakest part of all of it. He would do the exact same things all over again, even knowing how it would turn out. Honour demanded it. Not many Novas understood honour, and even fewer Terats. Chang gets it, though, he thought, and wondered if one day he might talk to her about his past. If it came out early, and to the wrong people, he might well die into the bargain. The Teragen clung together, like any radicals of the impression that they were being persecuted. If they learned that Darion Mográine murdered three of their number – and a Nova child into the bargain – then he would have some very angry people knocking his door down.

Targan would never be one of them, though. That meant something.

“Hotdog,” Snow said, coming out of a twirl to stand before him while the cars honked angrily. She offered him the bun. “Why do you want this anyway? I can smell the… ugh from here. I think my hair is wilting.” When he took the bun she stroked her multi-coloured hair, and lifted a few locks to check them. She rippled and shifted the colours into a new pattern.

“Let’s call it nostalgia,” Darion replied.

Miya bought him one after his ice rink disaster. He’d been so embarrassed and was determined to get skating lessons, but he kept asking her about how she made it look so easy. He remembered telling a joke, but he couldn’t remember what it was. It made her laugh, though, and she kissed him. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then started chewing up his hot dog.

“I’ve never seen you like this before,” Snow said. “I wish you’d tell me what’s on your mind. It feels really mean to string me along without telling me.”

Darion shrugged. “You don’t have to come to the ice rink if you don’t want. I’d just like a little company this year is all.”

Her eyes narrowed infinitesimally. “You do this every year?”

“Ever since I erupted,” he said.

Snow’s eyes lit up. “It’s your eruption day? Oh, wow! That’s so awesome. I celebrate mine, too. Though I have cake. And bunnies. I don’t remember much of what happened, though. The first thing I really remember is you finding me up on the mountainside. It’s weird, though. I’m dead certain that I erupted on August nineteenth, at twenty seven minutes past nine in the morning. I know a baseline attacked me, too. I can always smell his breath. Whisky and tobacco,” she said, her tone light and whimsical. “He had a beard, too. I hate beards because of him. You never have a beard. I figure he must have done something bad. I mean, we don’t erupt over nothing, right?”

“Well, there was that guy who erupted because someone threw a lemon pie at him,” Darion said. “Though I don’t think we talk about him in polite society.”

Snow laughed. “You are so right. I forgot about that. And Lotus Infinite says she erupted while meditating. That’s so awesome. It’s good to know it’s not trauma all the way down, you know?”

Darion gave a little salute. “Sir, yes sir, I am in agreement with you, sir.” He finished off his hotdog and handed the paper back to Snow. She ate it and slipped onto the back of the bike. Then she spat it back out. “Hotdog-flavoured?”

“God, so revolting,” she said. “You’re pretty but you have no taste at all.”

“You’re just picky because you hang around with Meh’Lindi and Chang. You ever tried that ground glass salad Chang came up with? She told me about it one time. It sounded like something you feed suspected terrorists.” He gunned the engine.

“Nah, it’s gorgeous. Meh’Lindi’s improved the recipe, though. Got a better nose. You heat the glass just so that it melts a little, treat it with cinnamon and nutmeg, it’s like really hard icing sugar. Just… you have to eat it to appreciate it.”

“I’ll pass, thank you. My digestive system is still upset about those drinks I put through it last week.” He kept the engine turning over, but didn’t pull out. Instead he looked over his shoulder. “Do you hate them? Baselines, I mean.”

Snow went quiet for a few moments. “No. You mean because of the man who attacked me?”

“And that. Not like they don’t give us other reasons from time to time. Sterilization and such.”

She blew a raspberry at him. “Like you’d know.”

“Hey, being perfect’s hard. Don’t blame me.”

“Anyway, still no. I know why they did it. I read too much. I know too many things. I can see it from too many angles. In the end I agree with Chang; they’re irrelevant. Not for the reasons most Terats will say, though. We can sort of learn from Humans, but we sort of can’t at the same time. The social pressures that shape Nova society – when we get one – aren’t the same ones that have historically shaped Human societies. We’re individually more capable, we don’t age and cycle in the same way, we breed differently, our maturation periods operate on an entirely different principle,” Snow shrugged. “I mean, they’re annoying when they try and kill us and sterilize us, don’t get me wrong. I feel we’ve got enough working against us as it stands just going off basic Nova nature. But hate them? Nah. They’re not worth it. I save hate for things that matter.”

Darion nodded, feeling relieved. A lot of Terats seemed to free up a lot of time for hate. Before he joined the Teragen, Darion had been the same, so he refused to criticize them for that. But it gratified him to see some younger Terats being more even-handed. Of course Snow was peculiarly well-educated, and that could have influenced her attitudes as much as her choice of mentors. Ostensibly Meh’Lindi was her mentor, but she spent a lot of time with Chang, Lucrezia and The Alchemist, too. He supposed he counted, but they never talked Teras. “Like what?”

“Oh. Well that puts me on the spot, doesn’t it? I’m not sure I really do hate anybody. It’s a powerful word, not one to throw around lazily. There’s a lot of people I don’t like, though, and a lot of things which annoy me. Bunnies annoy me, mostly because they’re so cute and I want to own every bunny in the world so I can watch them wiffle their noses. It’s self-evident that no Nova nation can succeed without bunnies.”

Darion nodded and kicked the stand up. “Good to know.”

“Of course then there are the things which make me angry,” she said, and sighed. “I’m pretty unstable, really. I try to rationalize it but I get so damn angry. And I’m so strong. I try to think about it the way Chang says. What signals are being sent by my node, what does this hint about my true nature, that sort of thing, but I think the first thing I’m going to do in chrysalis is fix that. Just rewire my node so it doesn’t make me angry the way it does. Maybe turn my skin iridescent, or give myself a mouth like Meh’Lindi. Her mouth is so sexy. She kisses like nobody else.”

Darion put one foot down and turned right round in the saddle to stare at her.

She looked up at him innocently. “What?”

He turned back round. “Meh’Lindi, kissogram. Could happen. In one of the seven circles of hell.”

***

The ice rink was empty. He had spent a fair chunk of money to rent it out for the hour, just so he could go through this yearly ritual in the peace he preferred. He was sitting down by the ice, looking out over it and trying to remember how Miya looked back then. It was gone to impressions and shadows, though.

Snow squeezed past him, barefoot. There was a sharp, bony snap, and her feet violently reshaped. The skin split, and razor-edged bone skates emerged from within. The ripped skin flapped and brushed on the ice as she began to glide across it. She sighed. “This is awesome. I don’t skate much. I might start, though.”

He could tell. Snow possessed the unnatural grace which let many Novas excel at physical actions they were untrained for. He had seen Chang perform gymnastics – of all things – and put even the greatest of baselines to shame. But he could outdo her, not because he was more graceful – he wasn’t even close – but because he knew the techniques. And if there was one thing Darion Mográine was qualitatively good at, it was dancing. There were hundreds of Novas who could blind you with displays of martial excellence, and most of them backed it up with quantum tricks Darion did not have. There weren’t as many dancers, and of them, very few specialized in ice skating.

Darion did.

He laced up his skates and stepped out onto the ice, leaving his trenchcoat on one of the front benches.

His movements were smooth as dream, a beauty that could have been born full from heaven. Snow stopped to stare as he went spinning past her, focused on his own dance.

Darion danced this every year, this dance of loss and longing. Even though he had an audience this time, it felt as though he were alone, because in most ways that mattered he was alone. Nobody but him emerged from the ruins of that old Japanese house, and nobody but him remembered the horrors of that night, or felt the cut of the life that was destroyed in those torturous hours. But the only sound was that of his skates slicing ice, of his even breathing. Snow did not breathe at all.

All of that and more was played out in the open expressions of his performance, every spin and jump was a high point of the nightmare, brought out in great twists and jerks of his body language that seemed like they ought to throw off his balance, yet somehow they just led into the next perfect movement.

He came to a slow stop in the centre of the rink, looking up into the shadowy rafters up above. He could almost feel her there, watching sadly from the darkness. Miya.

Darion lowered his head, and felt the queer heat of his silver tears on his cheeks.

“S-Should I have seen that?” Snow’s voice was a whisper. It was thunderous in the silence.

He turned towards her, and wiped away his tears. “Why not?”

“It felt… really personal.” She stood before him, on her bone skates, hugging herself. For once Snow looked awkward and unconfident, as if she didn’t know what to make of what she’d seen.

“It was,” Darion said, and left it at that.

For almost a minute they said nothing. There was just the sound of the wind in the rafters and the quiet creak of old wood settling. Darion stood in the centre of the rink, staring at Snow with silver tears drying on his cheeks. Snow stood near the sideboards, hugging herself and watching him, the flaps of skin from her bone skates trailing over the ice like veils of silk.

“I can’t figure you out,” Snow said.

Darion grinned. “That’s alright. Nobody else can, either.”

“But I’m smarter than they are. I know everything. Or I will if you give me a bit.” She sounded so young when she said that.

He laughed. “Haven’t you figured out what my major Nova power is, yet?”

“Complete cheaty control over the forces of momentum and absolute understanding of your own physicality and the effects it has on the environment around you?”

“Nah, that’s just in the press release. My real power is being mature, gorgeous and mysterious. And very cool.”

Snow’s face scrunched up into an enraged little grimace. She stamped her foot, and her skate slashed deep into the ice. “I need something to throw at you!”

Darion looked around. He shrugged. “Sorry. Ice rink. They clean after hours every day. Everything else is nailed down.”

“You’re such an ass.”

“That’s my other power. It’s to counteract the overabundance of charm. I talked to Meh’Lindi about it; she said that if I didn’t have these two powers in perfect synchrony I’d create some sort of charm vortex which would result in nobody else on planet earth ever getting laid.”

It was better to let the moment slide away into laughter and familiar relations. His sexual exploits were greatly overstated in truth. He’d been through a few of the Pandaimonion’s stalwarts and allowed Lucrezia to buy favours from him now and again. Honestly it was hard to settle for less after an evening with four of her. Not that he ever lost sight of the fact he was locking lips with a Terat of the second stage. There was something scary in that. They all felt… strange. Not as strange as Chang, mind. Not many people felt as strange as Chang.

Darion set off again, falling naturally into a pattern which followed the curves of the rink with long, smooth strokes. Snow joined him after a couple of minutes.

“You make it look really easy.”

“No,” he said. “You make it look easy. I make it look good.” Darion laughed and stepped into a spin, turned through into another.

Snow just smiled at him. “Yeah. You do. Can I ask you a question?”

“Go right ahead. Can’t guarantee an answer,” Darion said, turning and skating onward.

“Why do you stay with Chang?”

That one brought him up short. He turned and skidded to a stop, caught Snow by the waist as she went by and spun her about before setting her off on a spin she didn’t intend but ended up as a graceful triple spin accompanied by Snow’s laughter.

“You first,” he said. “What’s a monstrous Nova teenager doing hanging about with the Teragen’s number one gender-confusing artist?”

“Save for the cock?” Snow stuck her multi-coloured tongue out at him. “Why do you think?”

Darion shrugged. “Philosophy, I always figured. But there’s no shortage of that around in the Teragen. Scripture’s got enough to choke on. Sin-Eater’s a good choice for the more depraved – which you are – and you’ve gotta love Shrapnel, Scrambler and pals.”

Snow stuck her tongue out again. “Snow, campaigner for human extinction? No thanks. Monsters don’t have to just destroy everything. Isn’t that what Chang’s trying to do?”

“Ah. You like the idea of fluffy monsters,” Darion said, and took off after her. “You’re quite the romantic.”

She made a face. “I don’t like calling it ‘monster’. It’s such a limiting and limited idea. Historically the idea of ‘monsters’ has just been a repository of human fears. A lot of quote-unquote ‘real’ monsters are simply fears given form, like ghosts or zombies or the medusa, and various sorts of vampire. Trolls are another good one, or pretty much anything involving shadows. Fears of death, mostly, fears of the unknown, that sort of thing. I get the principle. Teras is a dive into the unknown, it’s a fear that’s with us all every day, the fear of what we’ll become and what happens if we get it wrong and all that. But that’s the thing, you know?”

Snow came to a stop and held out her hand as Darion went past her. He took it and spun around her, pirouetted twice with one leg extended and then dropped low into a wide-armed bow, sliding backwards away from her.

“You’re really right. You do make it look good.”

Darion rose and went back to simply skating. “It’s all about technique.”

“Yeah, it is. That’s sort of what I’m getting at. Dancing about in the dark going ‘boo’ at baselines just means we’re defining ourselves by their interpretation of us, and even worse, by their interpretation of their own fears. And that interpretation is – in fact – limited at best because they’re still writing books about it after several thousand years. You get it? The Teragen’s supposed to be about working out what it means to be Nova and going beyond humanity – it’s transhumanism through and through using quantum powers as the medium instead of technology – but about a third of the movement are chaining themselves down. I get the theory, but it’s really flawed. Even worse, and easily the biggest problem with Leviathan or even Geryon-style monsters are that they must necessarily be ejected from a Nova state.”

Her words followed him around the rink, a mix of heartfelt fears for the future hidden under political theory, and that genuine warmth and hope for the Nova race that seemed to burn in her heart with the heat of a thousand suns. Snow loved being a Nova, and what it meant to be a Nova, and what they could all achieve if only they could stack the deck just right and make it all turn out.

And then there was the mindfuck at the end.

Darion planted his skate and skidded to a stop, throwing up a dusting of ice. He looked back at her, on the other side of the rink. “Could you run that one by me again?”

Snow shrugged. “It’s sort of simple if you think about it. If they define themselves through fear, what are they going to do when surrounded by other Novas and nothing else? It’s like… like a soldier who’s come back from an endless war with nobody left to fight. If you wake up every day, look out at the world and feel it hating you back and you think ‘this is the life for me’,” she shook her head, “then what the fuck are you going to do when people want to love you instead? And how can humans and Novas ever coexist when a significant sub-faction of us defines ourselves by scaring the shit out of baselines? Leviathan was always honest. He wanted to wipe baselines out. Then there’s fucking nutcases like Lash who get a kick out of melting baselines down and fusing them together. Does that sound like a future? Is that what we are? Vicious, sadistic beasts celebrating our cruelty? Fuck, Darion. If that’s what Novas are… fuck us. Either we gotta be better than that, or we gotta get ourselves extinct quick sharp.”

He considered her words for a few moments, and chuckled. “Fuck us.” He had thought things like that a hundred times over back in the day. Back when he was on the trail. “I never thought about it in that kind of detail.”

“Chang has,” she said, her voice becoming warm and full of love. “That’s why I’m with her and Meh’Lindi and the others. That’s why I love her and them and all of you. I want to be that thing which is Nova and not necessarily a monster, which is a thing to be afraid of but can be itself without fear. I don’t want to feel like I have to lash out to fucking prove to them that I’m a monster. I should know that in my heart, and be glorious and monstrous and incredible even if I’m all on my own in a room with the blinds down and nothing to do but dinner and a movie. What about you?”

Darion turned so he was skating backwards across the ice. He found himself remembering a night years ago when he came to Chang after listening to her sing. What’s the point of building anything when it’s all so easy to destroy? He ground his teeth together. Why are you painting and sculpting when one flex of a Nova muscle can ruin everything.

Chang took him by the hand as if he were a child, and lead him to a pedestal on which there stood a sculpture she had made that very day. Its shape had been so exquisite, so fine and flawless of form, that it burned itself into his retina like a laser. The image was that of a warrior at rest, sitting and thinking with his sword laid down at his feet.

Darion had cried then, cried silent tears of cold liquid silver.

He remembered her eyes shining in the tears when they splashed on the floor. Orange and yellow they were, and they made it seem as if his tears were aflame. “Because if nobody creates, then we would not be here, and you would not be crying.”

Darion was silent for two long, lazy revolutions around the rink. Snow watched him intently. Finally, he shrugged and said, “She gave me hope.” And let me keep the statue, too.

Snow smiled girlishly, caught up and jumped at him. Maybe she intended to bear him to the ice, but he caught her lightly by the waist, turned and spun her between his legs, letting her slide down so low that her hair trailed below her. He smiled.

“Wow,” she said.

Then he lifted her up into the air and twirled, before putting her gently back down and pushing her off.

“Oh,” came a warm, feminine voice from the side, “you make a girl’s heart go all a-flutter, Darion. We might get jealous.”

Four of Lucrezia were sitting in the front row, leaning on the sideboard and watching him and Snow. None were alike, all were beautiful, and all had a look on their faces which brought to mind foxes on the trail of a rabbit.

Snow skated over, hopped up and kissed one of her on the lips. “Hey, Zia. What you doing here?”

“Oh, I should probably be asking you two that. Is this a dangerous liaison I’ve stumbled upon?” She said, walking one hand down the sideboards.

Darion skated to a pause nearby. “It sure is now.”

Four sets of gorgeous, liquid black eyes lit up. “Darion, you do know how to flatter a girl.”

[WhiteRain]

***

He did not like this. Lucrezia had never disturbed him before, and of late she was doing nothing at random. Chang was all but pining for her, and he knew Lucrezia yearned for her wife as much as the other way round.

What are you up to?

Darion was sitting in a chair just off the ice, with one of Lucrezia beside him. His skates were still on. The other three of her had masterfully lured Snow away. She had him all to herself. And he did not like it one bit. There was mischief in her eyes, a slight hint of knowing in her smile.

“So, how’s the wife?”

“Wife?”

Lucrezia’s flesh rippled, and in a moment that would haunt him for the rest of his mortal days, he found himself sitting beside a perfect lifelike simulacrum of Miya Takamoto. It was her, too, complete with the way the once-Lucrezia settled into her chair, the look of restrained love in her soft dark eyes.

Darion couldn’t face her. “That was cruel. Even for you.”

He heard the sound of her shifting shape again. “Stylish though,” she said, with her own voice again, “and I’m all about style. You are such a secretive man. All these years and I never even knew you were married.”

“What changed? How did you find out?”

Lucrezia smiled at him. “Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me. Something that I think you’re very happy about. I mean, it’s not like you can kill me to keep it from getting out.”

Darion rose. “Want to hit the ice? I have the sudden urge to skate myself up a storm.”

She reshaped her feet into skates, in an altogether smoother and more elegant manner than Snow had earlier in the evening. When she took to the ice it was with a mixture of unnatural grace and practiced ability that was altogether different than Snow’s mere balance. Darion found himself almost wishing she was wearing his wife’s shape again, so he could dance again, just one more time. Damn you. Damn you right to hell.

Terror was coiling in him now. He found his mind racing as he tried to figure out how much she knew. There was only one possible answer: Too much. The smile was still there, the eyes, the body language; it was all laughing at him. But he wouldn’t give anything away. Lucrezia was half a dominatrix. She liked her power plays. A lot of them were fun. But not this one and he knew better than to fall for it and give anything away. She knew something but that did not tell him what she knew.

It was like she read his mind. Maybe she did. As they circled each other on the ice, their skates cutting fine lines in the surface, she flowed and rippled back into Miya’s form. “Is that why you come here every year, beloved?” She had the perfect inflection, the exact mannerisms. Even the way she skated had changed, becoming less seductive and more athletic. Miya had been a champion in her teenage years and an Olympic hopeful before she broke her ankle. This Miya even favoured the correct leg. It was horrifying, and terrifying, to see it. “Do you still mourn us? Still miss us?”

“Obviously,” Darion replied. “You’re not making friends here, Lucrezia. And you might be making a deadly enemy.”

She put a hand to her bosom, and the look of hurt in her eyes was agony. He only ever saw it once, and that was when Miya heard her father died in a yachting accident. “My love, what have I done that has offended you so?”

“Don’t you dare,” Darion cried, pointing at her. “Not this. This is not something you do. This is a line not to be crossed.”

“Are not Novas the infinite kami of our world, my love,” she said, repeating words Miya said when they argued about Novas years ago. “And if that is so, what lines are there that they cannot cross?”

“Lucrezia…”

“Your secrets lie bare. The honourable thing to do is not to hiss and spit, but to bow your head, and bear the news with dignity.”

He felt punched in the gut. There were new tears on his cheeks. “This… is not that secret,” Darion said. “Not many people know, but it’s not that great a secret. Almost everyone knows this is the day I erupted.”

“Oh, this isn’t,” Lucrezia said with his dead wife’s delicate voice, “but what you did to avenge me is. Or should I say ‘was’?”

Darion planted his skates and skidded to a halt, staring at her in disbelief. “You’re lying.”

The image of his wife rippled and flowed into the far more beautiful visage that Lucrezia called her own. “Always. But not about this.” She skated over to him. “So now you have a choice. You can tell me your side of the story, or I can pass this exciting news onto the deceased old friends and see how long it takes from them to get one out of you.”

He folded his arms across his chest. She wasn’t faking. “If you tell me how you found out.”

Lucrezia slid down slowly onto the ice, as if to lie down to sleep, and jammed one foot-skate into the ground to bring her to a stop beside him. “Simple. I listened to you and Targan chatting down below. Oh, don’t be surprised, I’ve been around, just busy. And I’ve had my eye on you ever since I pulled the sword stunt. Wasn’t hard to liquefy, flow down a drain, and just stay that way, go with the flow as it were. Once I saw you I just schlucked up out of the water and clung to the bottom of the drainage ditch. I don’t smell of anything when I’m that way so Targan couldn’t pick me out, and I wasn’t moving either so there was no noise. It gave me some ideas, inspiration. I put all thirty of me to work cracking this one. I’m pretty sure your secret’s still safe. I had to cross reference a whole bunch of things on the OpNet and a few random things you’ve said over the years got put into perspective. Might want to do a little spring cleaning concerning ‘Starling’. You do make a very sexy woman, though. We should do lesbians some time. Now, spill.”

Darion looked up past the rows of chairs. “Snow-“

“Seduced and busy with other things right now,” Lucrezia said. “She won’t hear a thing, I promise. Nobody will. There are twenty of me in and around this area, keeping a very close eye on who’s about and what they’re listening to. Speaking of Snow, do you think we can trust her?”

Darion nodded, and built up some pace, beginning to make slow rounds of the rink. “She’s very taken with Chang. Snow’s young, bright, intelligent, stupidly well-read for a girl of any age, but impressionable for all that. Exactly the kind of girl Chang should never be allowed to meet, in other words. She’ll be on our side when all’s said and done, I’m sure of it. Besides, she pisses other Terats off all the time. Isn’t that one of the basic requirements for being Chang’s pal?”

“I thought the same. But I’ve noticed a few people courting her, and Narcosis has been trying to make up. She’s a very persuasive woman, and doesn’t like to be denied her desires.”

Darion shook his head. “That boat flew after the last sugar trap. Snow resents being treated like a child. Chang’s never once tried to use her as a weapon. No matter what Narcosis does, she can’t erase that truth.”

“I guess you’re right. Well? I’m listening.” She propped her head up on one elbow.

He sighed. “You know what happened. Three Terats decided to make an example out of some monkeys during a stop off in Japan. My family were the example, with me as the cherry on top.” Darion took a deep breath. “His name was Warlord. He raped Miya to death. Her name was Venus Domina. She held me in bondage and made me watch. And their son was called Revelation, and he drove my son insane with his voice. That’s enough detail I think. I was… not happy.”

“You joined Devries, as an entirely yummy female Darion, while letting the world think you were dead.”

“It was easy. They burned the house down on the way out. I’d erupted and disappeared before the ambulances even arrived. It turned out there was a goddamn burglar in the upstairs bedroom while all that crap was going on. He died in the fire. So even though I vanished, they found a male body, burned beyond all recognition.” He laughed. “How’s that for fate being on your side?”

Lucrezia nodded. “That is quite remarkable.”

“I joined Devries to find the bastards who murdered my family and take revenge. It was all I cared about. My sword is actually Miya’s sword, her family sword, and now mine by a process of elimination. She was the last of her family line. I know you don’t really care, but it means something to me.”

“Yes, I gathered that much. Thank you for being understanding.”

“I try,” he shrugged. “Targan helped me hunt them down. Finding people was his speciality back then. We parted ways once I’d learned what I needed.” There was no sense in throwing his old friend under the bus. Lucrezia couldn’t know how integral Targan had been in completing his vengeance. “What I’d learned was enough. I fought in war after war, using all the money to dig up any scrap of information that would lead me to them. And eventually I hit pay dirt. Venus Domina had set up shop in an S & M club in Italy. I figured the rest of the family would be down there but they weren’t. The son was, though. And he was the one I started with.”

“Chainsawed him in half,” Lucrezia said, still smiling a little.

It felt oddly peaceful, recounting the deeds. Darion had never talked about them with anyone in anything like detail. “I bought a special diamond-tooth chainsaw for the occasion. I knew his specs, he wasn’t that tough but he was tougher than any baseline and some Novas. And I didn’t want it to go wrong. He was young, and stupid and arrogant. He saw me as another lay, and tried to use his little voice on me. I played along, let him get my clothes off, have a little grope of my tits, and then I stuck with the mox and beat the shit out of him. He was seventeen, healthy, but he was no fighter. By then I’d mastered three martial arts. The little shit didn’t stand a chance. I tossed him out a window. That felt good.

“I took him down to the docks, to a pre-arranged location, chained him up and drip-fed Mox to keep him down. Then I contacted his mother, and told her in no uncertain terms to get her father on the line. I wore a mask so they had no idea. When they were both on the line,” he smiled, “they looked so cocky. They thought their son was going to break free. Turns out they played games like this in the past. But they stopped smiling when I turned on the chainsaw. I didn’t start until they were both begging, and I didn’t stop until they’d both screamed themselves hoarse.” His fists clenched. “I won’t say it didn’t feel good. I wanted them to hurt like I’d been hurt. I wanted them to know the pain they caused.”

Lucrezia was watching him, fascinated. “You wanted to torture them, not just kill them.”

“There was a method to it, but more than anything else I wanted them to suffer. So yes, torture. I kept the mask on. I didn’t want them to know why at that point. I just stared at them on the blood-spattered screen and listened to them swear to rip my guts out and feed them to me, and under the mask I was grinning like some sort of psychopath. It felt good to watch them in tears impotently threatening me. The irony was beautiful. It was poetry. I even composed a few poems based on it. Jesus, those were morbid.”

“Well, now you’ve said it, I don’t have to. You went back to war after that, yes?”

Darion nodded. “I needed more money, and more time. I knew the Teragen would motivate to try and find the person who did this thing, and so I had to bury the evidence and hide my tracks. That wasn’t too hard,” he said. Especially not with Targan doing most of the heavy lifting while pretending to be helping his Terat friends track me. Targan joined up with the Harvesters shortly before Darion tracked Revelation down. The timing was perfect.

“So I lost myself fighting other people’s wars for a while. The money was good, and I had it in my contract that I wanted no publicity, no marketing. I took a hefty pay cut for that. Anna wants her people to be marketed because she can make a lot more out of them that way. The extra security came out of what would have been my standard pay packet. That arrangement suited me fine. I banked up, waited a few years, and went looking for Venus and Warlord.”

“Narcosis missed her, you know. She was quite the figure in the Pandaimonion back then.”

Darion nodded. “So I’ve learned. I captured her in New York, and dealt with her in Egypt. It was a similar deal to her son. I snuck in close, got her with the Mox, and then transported her. All pre-arranged, all very neat.”

“What did you do to her?” Lucrezia’s voice was very soft.

A little smile crossed his face. “I made her beg for her life. I made her beg for her life while Warlord watched, and listened to her beg. And I made him tell her it would be okay, just like I did to Miya while she lay dying after he was done with her. I made him tell Venus Domina it would all be okay… and then blew her brains out with a magnum. And mid-rant, while he was swearing who-knows-what, I gave him a date, a time, a place, and took off my mask, so he could see the face of the man who had come back from the dead to kill him.”

Lucrezia chuckled. “How very theatrical. Forgive me, I understand it’s serious.”

“No, no, by all means. You’re completely right. That was the point. It was calculated, Lucrezia. To this day I can’t forget what I did to Revelation. I can’t forget much of anything, to be honest, but that more than anything else. I don’t regret it, though. I’d do the same thing a thousand times, knowing what I do now. That’s not real regret.”

She lay on her back now, looking up at the roof. “And you reckoned Warlord would do as you expected?”

“I knew he would want to kill me himself. I knew he’d be surprised. He turned up. I picked an oil rig off the US coast for our final fight. That was the hardest, longest fight of my life. Warlord was stronger than me, but not faster, tougher, but not smarter, more powerful, but not patient. I ran circles round him for a week, laying traps, striking from the shadows. We nearly killed each other a dozen times. By the end of it the rig was falling to pieces around us and all the baselines had evacuated or died. It was insanity. Fire and dust and rust, and blood and broken bones. I wore him out in the end.”

The fight flashed through his mind, a medley of pain and creative aggression. He remembered being grabbed and tossed off a catwalk into the hold, crashing off a container, bouncing off the concrete floor. That led to the end. A long, drawn-out fight, with Darion giving fifty for every one he took and feeling those single blows more than Warlord felt any of his efforts. Right up until he used the momentum from one of Warlord’s punches to dislodge a container full of barrels onto him. The man was too tired to get up.

Darion recounted it all in dispassionate tones, recounting the sweat, the blood, the death in the air. “He didn’t beg, in the end. He said that he wished my wife was alive so he could fuck her to death again. I put down a little tape recorder that let him hear his son and his wife’s final moments, his own begging, his own tears. My last vengeance. That broke him. He wept, until I wrapped the chain around his throat and choked him to death.”

Lucrezia gave a body-wide, liquid ripple. She was semi-fluid by that point, but solidified as the recounting ended. “My, my, you are not a man to make an enemy of, are you?”

He let out a long, deep sigh. “I guess not. Honestly I feel tired just talking about it. Vengeance… it’s the oldest reason to kill people, and the worst. For three lives, I fought in nine wars and killed eighty people. It should have been a third as many wars and a sixth as many people. I still can’t claim regret. I know I’d do it all over again. I’ve said as much and I mean it. But it is what it is, and so many people died for my revenge. It had to be done but I’m not proud that I did it. So now you know it all.” Except for the bits involving Targan, Starling, and Synapse. “What now?”

She melted into a pool of liquid latex that then rose up in a rippling pillar, and reformed standing. Chang often did that, and they both made it look sexy. She was smiling again.

“I already told you, Darion. Your secret’s safe with me, and you should know that I understand,” she said, locking eyes with him. He could feel a genuine heat there, an intensity of emotion that she rarely let anybody see. “If someone took Chang from me, I think I’d burn the world. That’s how you felt for Miya. But not how she felt for you. If you’re wondering how I was able to impersonate her, I figured out how to in the research. It’s a strange thing, becoming someone else. I really do, you know. Those words I said, they were an old response, weren’t they? That thing about us being ‘infinite Kami’?”

Darion nodded. “She was a Shintoist. Everything was kami for her. She used to tell me not to hit the TV because if I did the kami would be angry and no TV we ever bought would work again.

He stepped past her and got moving again. “Thank you for understanding, at least. I suppose you’ll use this against me?”

“Oh, naturally, but only if I have to,” Lucrezia said, beginning to follow. “It’s time to choose your side, Darion. I like you, so I won’t use what I know to harm you. But if you ever do anything against Chang, I will burn you. I will burn… you.”

Darion felt his heart leap. Speaking of people not to have as your enemy. “Don’t worry. I’ve never been Chang’s enemy. I never would be.”

Lucrezia caught up to him, took him by the hands and led him on a brief dance across the ice. “But are you her friend? Or are your attentions split?”

Goddammit this woman’s everywhere. He left that untouched. After that she moved onto other matters. She said that the Anavasi were rising, and that soon there would be a meeting of all their prospective future members. The day was coming when the Pandaimonion and Anavasi had to part ways, and she wanted Darion to help keep things orderly when the meeting happened.

She primed him, prepped him. He listened. They danced as they talked. It was comforting to just talk business, nice and respectfully.

Finally, Lucrezia went to the edge of the rink with two long, lazy strokes and without losing speed hit the side. She dissolved, flowing over the edge and pouring up the steps, and washed away into the shadows.

Darion stripped off his shirt once she was gone and danced alone on the ice for a while, just to let off steam and finish paying his respects. Then he left the ice and bowed to the rink.

In the silence remaining, Darion went into the pocket of his trenchcoat and recovered his phone. He hit speed dial.

He received an answer phone message. “You’ve reached Count Raoul Orzais. I’m afraid that I may be on Safari right now and so can’t take your call. Leave a message after the beep.”

Darion took a deep breath and let it out in a long, slow sigh. The phone beeped. “Count,” he said. “Look, something’s come up. I’m afraid our arrangement is going to have to be cancelled. No negotiation. I’ll send you my up to date report, and that will be the last.” He hung up.

Raising his head, Darion saw a Lucrezia’s slender shape watching him from the shadows at the top exit. He nodded, and she pushed off the wall and walked away. And so the die is cast, he thought to himself. And my side is chosen. Long live the queen.

[WhiteRain]

MEH’LINDI 28^th May

Meh’Lindi’s lair was dark, as it was always dark, and quiet, as it was always quiet. Many people were surprised by how quiet she was in the massive shape she largely thought of as her natural form. They never expected the massive maw in her lower torso to speak in whispers.

She towered, twenty feet tall at the shoulder, a mass of chitin that in her upper torso seemed like metal, and in her lower body seemed more like flesh. She was taur-like, her lower torso consisting of four massive insectile legs jutting from a body mass wider than a train carriage with a huge, fanged maw stretched across the front of it. Her humanoid torso sprouted from just above that terrible mouth with its long purple tongue, and she maintained a curved, almost delicate figure with long, slender arms tipped by hands with delicate fingers. The only scrap of genuine flesh on her was her lips and lower jaw, which in this form alone looked the same as a human’s. They were kissable lips, according to Chang, and framed by curving horns which sprouted from the back curves of her head. Other horns curved away behind her from the top of her head, in place of hair. Above the mouth she seemed to have no eyes, just curving, interlocking chitin plates that shone like metal in the right light. Her eyes were distributed through the chitin surface. She could see as well with her fingers as with her head.

Shiv followed behind her, making far more noise as she shuffled along than Meh’Lindi did. Meh’Lindi did not turn to her when she spoke. “You are ready, then?”

“I’ve been practicing,” Shiv said. “I’m not as precise as you are, though. I find it hard to get the right vocal chords every time. The sound always comes out different.”

That was no surprise. Shiv had been blind since her eruption, and her body was dramatically changed. Meh’Lindi had multiple bone-deep medical scans to look at and an encyclopaedic knowledge of biology. Her studies specialized in post-eruption mutations. They were her one true claim to fame. “Our audio tests show you get the best waveform using the cross wound pattern. It probably won’t sound the best to your own ears but it will record better than the others.”

“We’ll go for that one, then.” There was a hint of doubt in her voice, but on this she would acquiesce.

Meh’Lindi moved past a series of pillars, towards a pool of light tucked away in a wide alcove. Here she had set up their special little Christmas tree and the recording equipment for this little collaboration. As they approached, Meh’Lindi scented Snow on the air. She listened, and looked up. Her eyes pierced the darkness.

Snow was clinging to the vaulted roof above, reduced to a semi-liquid mass of flesh and bone, with her clothing dangling from her mass.

“Snow,” Meh’Lindi said. “Hello.”

As they passed under her, Snow fell down and landed beside them with a wet slapping sound. Her brilliant multi-coloured hair was visible in the rippling mass. All the details were there. Her fine features, her lips, her breasts, her limbs. But they moved unnaturally, impossibly, like skin and bone alike were reduced to the consistency of pudding. As she shifted, her face stretched this way and that, like a rubber mask being pulled in different directions. She oozed along behind them, quiet but for the sounds of her body and the soft dragging of cloth behind her. Meh’Lindi preferred quiet.

Snow’s shapeshifting paradigm was an interesting one. Over the years Meh’Lindi had observed that shifters all possessed some form of limiting ‘logic’ to their ability which usually reflected in their physical structure. For whatever reason, she seemed incapable of turning ‘into’ something else. She could just warp what she had beyond all logic and reason, and if she pushed to the greatest extent, she could burst forth from her pretty skin as whatever monstrous beast filled her mind. But even then it was partial. An arm might shred, her face might split, her chest might erupt outward, but she would always be distinctly and definably Snow. Her hair almost never went away.

Meh’Lindi strode up onto the platform. The light glinted on her shoulders and reflected in sparkles and points of bright light.

Shiv stood before her, bent back as always, her throat bared and her ruby red lips parted. She was waiting, filled with anticipation. Meh’Lindi could smell it.

She savoured the scent for a time, remembering how fear used to tantalize her senses. Leviathan used to laugh about it. He loved it best when the baselines soiled themselves. Run, rabbit, run, Meh’Lindi thought. She was a good hunter. Once she followed a man through three miles of sewer, always a little behind, never catching up, drawing out his terror until she corralled him into a dead end and consumed him while he screamed and begged for mercy.

Good days, she thought, but childish, and ill-conceived. Fun, but foolish. Like university all over again. The baseline named Willow Jackson was a fool at university, too. When Meh’Lindi tore free of that husk, it seemed she rolled the clock back at the same time.

Meh’Lindi reached down. There was a scraping sound and her chitin plates slid over one another, while the bone telescoped, stretching her arm down towards her friend. Her claws hovered over Shiv’s neck, gently brushing her pale, swan-like throat.

Shiv swallowed. Her breath was coming quick now.

“Cease breathing,” Meh’Lindi said. Shiv obeyed.

Meh’Lindi stilled her hand. The time for foreplay was done. She stiffened two fingers, and stabbed downward, puncturing that soft, pale flesh and digging deep into Shiv’s throat.

What people thought of as ‘chords’ were more accurately vocal folds, paired membranes that vibrated as air passed over them in order to form sounds. She dug deep into the larynx, and found the folds. Blood poured from Shiv’s parted lips and from the wounds in her throat. She let out a hideous, hoarse gasp.

Meh’Lindi moved her fingers with the deft accuracy of a surgeon, precise beyond human capability. She stroked her finger across the folds at specific places, and they ripped, weeping fresh blood down Shiv’s throat. It splurted from her parted lips and her choked voice gained a new, ravaged timbre.

Snow observed, still half-melted. Her every movement created a mixed sound of crackling, soft flesh and bone.

Meh’Lindi pulled her fingers out of Shiv’s throat, moved her hand to one side, and jammed them in just inside the shoulder blades. She dug down, ripping through flesh and past bone, carving underneath the vocal apparatus and severing Shiv’s spinal column. The sounds she made were like nothing human. Her body went into spasms.

With a great sound of tearing flesh and cracking bone, Meh’Lindi wrenched Shiv’s head from her body. She held it up before her, and watched the blood fall from the stump of Shiv’s neck, onto Meh’Lindi’s outstretched hand and then down towards the floor.

She opened her huge torso mouth and extended her wide purple tongue, and tasted the blood. Her heart quickened. The scents reached her nostrils and stirred her blood. Part of my will always hunger for this, she knew, and moved Shiv’s head to hover above her human-seeming mouth. She opened up, wider than a human mouth should ever have been able to, and drank the remaining blood as it fell into her mouth.

It stopped soon enough, though. Suckling the blood from her other hand, Meh’Lindi moved to the Christmas tree.

Shiv’s lips were moving, forming words. Meh’Lindi studied her lips. Her husk once learned to lip read, because she had a brother who could not speak.

“Do I still taste good?” Shiv was saying.

Meh’Lindi let out a queer sound, a laugh born of whispers that disappeared swiftly. “People always do. Now keep your mouth closed, or else you’ll mess this up.”

She rolled her shoulders, and with a cacophony of scraping chitin and lengthening bone, Meh’Lindi grew up to her full thirty foot height. The tree came up only to the sternum of her upper torso. She remembered grabbing a train in her hands. It had hit her on the tracks, but in this shape she was close to invincible, and it harmed her not at all while derailing itself. It was the driver she remembered best, the terrified look in his eyes as her torso mouth gaped, and his scream when she bit the front carriage near in half, swallowing it whole. The other Harvesters thought that was hilarious. She remembered Geth picking over the twisted ruin and complimenting her on the sharpness of her teeth, the timing of her movements. He called it poetry in motion.

Some days she thought she loved Geth. Not in a physical way, of course. She loved him as a person, if she did at all. At the least he was one of her best friends. She invited him to be here to see this, since he was friendly with Shiv as well, but he had apologized in his typically effusive manner and said he was required to run errands for the Demon Queen.

Meh’Lindi gripped the top of the tree and began to carefully slot Shiv’s head onto it. The tree was a sophisticated artificial lung, its technology hidden so cunningly that nobody could have guessed it was anything other than it appeared. Chang requisitioned it especially from one of her contacts in Japan after Meh’Lindi proposed her and Shiv’s little collaboration. It was a marvel, though tricky to use.

She carefully slid Shiv’s head onto the tree’s tip, inserting the necessary tubes and wires. “Snow, dear, could you turn it on?”

There was a sharp cracking sound, and a spar of bone ripped out of Snow’s mass. It flexed and moved, then darted to the wall and touched a pad near the floor. Lights blossomed up the length of the tree, as the fiber-optics woven through each branch began to glow and the baubles shone. Meh’Lindi heard the hidden machinery begin to turn over, drawing in air from the environment to pump up into Shiv’s head.

Shiv’s blood-stained lips parted, and a little gout of gore blossomed forth, bubbled for a moment, then burst and dripped down her chin before falling in thick rivulets onto the upper branches. She took a ravaged breath, her beautiful voice now a cracked and broken ruin. “You know, I could get used to this. It’s quite peaceful.”

Meh’Lindi laughed. “Any time. Your blood’s delicious. I thought you said it was difficult to suppress your healing factor, though?”

“Very. All the better reason to practice, don’t you think?”

“A fair and valid point.”

Meh’Lindi moved to the control panels, shrinking down to interact with them. She constructed everything in her lair to work with her true form, using a mixture of controls designed for her huge three-fingered hands and floor pressure panels that needed to be touched in proper sequence. Nobody other than her or a talented shapeshifter could adequately operate any of her equipment, and even then they would need to work out the completely unintuitive and custom-built interface software she had designed.

She had a natural ability to follow the passage of hours, accurate enough that a watch was completely unnecessary. It was almost time for them to go live.

Graphs and figures came up, showing traffic at the various mirror sites that they were going to be broadcasting onto. “It seems Utopia is interfering,” she said. “Synapse, are you listening?”

“Oh… hell… yeeeeeeeeeeeah,” came a distinctive man’s voice. Synapse always sounded happy, though Meh’Lindi suspected it was mostly a front. She used to correspond with him frequently back in her pre-Pandaimonion, post-Harvester days, back when she saw her fake friends melting away like snow in summer, and the real iron friendships shone through bright and strong. There was rage in Synapse, bubbling away under the smiling holograms and easy laughter. Besides, it was easy to snarl and rage and scream while having a computer interpret your snarls as giggles. Meh’Lindi could do that herself and she wasn’t even a Cyberkinetic.

“Quieter.”

Synapse repeated his greeting, this time at a whisper. It sounded almost sinister that way.

“Much better,” she answered, in a proper whisper. She input a series of commands, beginning a series of uplinks and checking the various floating cameras as she brought them online and input their initial position commands. Several of their chosen sites began to go dark. “Could you politely inform the hackers that this is a public event, and we in the Teragen do not appreciate their attempts to monopolize our uplink?”

There was a cackle. He repeated it as a whisper. “Sorry. I keep forgetting to be quiet. Do you want me to flash up that message on their screens?”

“That would be ideal. How much time will you need?”

He answered after only a few seconds. “Oh shite. They’ve got one of Team Twit on this. You know, this’d be an awful lot easier if you didn’t have The Alchemist do her – admittedly hilarious – death cast the other week. They really don’t want Novas doing the death dance mambo on the OpNet. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why.”

“Nor I,” Meh’Lindi whispered, and began to run sound checks on the cameras.

“How is it going?” Shiv asked.

“Numbers are good,” Meh’Lindi replied. “Camera five isn’t moving quite right, though. Signals are all strong, imaging is coming through fine. They’re picking up my voice well enough. Just need a certain gentleman who may or may not be a figment of our collective imagination to pull through for us.”

“I heard that!” Synapse said from one of the console speakers. “Give me a second, this guy’s actually good.”

She observed the OpNet feeds, watching some flash up and others go down. The traffic at the sites was multiplying as they approached the chosen time. She counted the seconds in her head, wondering if Synapse would pull through. They had sunk a lot of time and resources into this display. It was Meh’Lindi’s brain child in truth, but Shiv took the basic skeleton she came up with and advanced it considerably.

On the dot of eight pm, Synapse said, “Got him. You’re all green. I’ll keep an eye on your streams while you’re broadcasting. This guy isn’t giving up and I could do with a workout.”

Meh’Lindi inputted the instructions for the floating cameras, brought up a series of three dimensional interfaces so she could see what each was displaying, and then went live.

Her thoughts switched to tracking the feeds from the cameras, adjusting the camera angles and the paths that followed as they panned about the tree. Snow, still a melted sludge of hair and flesh and bone, was visible in some angles. She had moved Shiv’s decapitated corpse so it lay just against the platform. A good addition, Meh’Lindi thought. I should have thought of that myself.

Shiv’s head remained silent for now. Meh’Lindi panned and moved the cameras for ten seconds before feeding in the music, a soft piano and acoustic guitar rhythm that Chang composed and performed for them. From the first notes, Meh’Lindi felt a stirring in her heart, which soon settled into a haunting sense of peace, like that of a darkened graveyard underneath a full moon.

The music was so beautiful that she almost froze up, but somehow Shiv – whose sense of hearing was sharper by far than hers – kept her focus. Her bloodied lips parted, and in her ravaged voice she began to sing ‘Silent Night’.

It was a performance of contrasts, of beauty and horror, of peace and violence, of innocence and perversion. With trembling fingers, Meh’Lindi moved the cameras to pick up on every little thing, from the blood staining the fiber-optic tree branches to the gaping rent in Shiv’s body, to the queer rippling movements that Snow made. She kept herself out of sight and out of shot. That was her place.

[WhiteRain]

***

Ten minutes later the performance was done in its entirety, the streams were shut down, and Synapse was thanked for his assistance. Meh’Lindi turned off the lights and tossed Shiv’s head down onto the floor.

Meh’Lindi compressed inward, sucked in her enlarged lower torso and retracting her rear set of legs. The chitin covering her head thinned and receded, revealing her yellow and red eyes. As her head cracked and crunched down to a normal size, a wash of lustrous black hair fell down her back. Before long her entire lower torso was gone, tightening into perfectly formed but chitin-plated buttocks. The changed front legs became humanoid, proportioned accordingly, while her massive mouth lost its teeth and became her vagina.

Her mouth, so soft and womanly in her true form, opened, gaped, and with a gunshot crack opened over-wide. The membranes of skin that ran along the length of her jawbone tore, and inch-long fangs emerged from above and below to click neatly together. It was as soft and womanly as she ever got.

Shiv’s head was rolling as flesh boiled out of her neck stump. Snow had solidified and was performing some gymnastic stretches, clothed now in black trousers and a black shirt with a complex mass of red lines on it. “That was so cool. Is that what you were talking about the other day?”

“Yes,” Meh’Lindi said. Her voice was now a guttural, animalistic growl inside of the soft, feminine whisper of her natural form.

Snow went and crouched over Shiv’s reforming body, and poked her semi-solid flesh. She giggled. “She feels like marshmallows.”

“Thank you for that,” Shiv said. “But you can address such comments to me.”

A few moments later, her body was solid again, and she twitched her new-formed fingers. She rose, liquid leather boiling from her cleavage.

Meh’Lindi smiled in the darkness. She never felt quite right when there was light in her lair. The scent of blood from Shiv’s discarded body gave the air a pleasant tang. Running her pointed tongue along the back of her teeth, she stood over Shiv’s discarded and headless body. Lunch, she thought with satisfaction. It’s been a while. All of a sudden she found herself salivating.

There was the sound of bone and leather creaking as one was distorted and the other tightened. Shiv let out a soft gasp. “There we are. All better. I thank you for your assistance, Meh’Lindi. I don’t think I could have done this without you.”

“That is why they call it a collaboration, I think,” she replied.

Meh’Lindi turned away from Shiv’s body to give herself a little more room to change, and reached within. This body was a sort of ‘hub’, an anchor point that her other shapes were plugged into. She needed to return to it in order to reach any of the others.

Her chest tensed, then heaved and ripped open as her ribs unfurled. She rolled her arms up out of her way as her ribs flexed and moved independently of each other, and lengthened. Meh’Lindi dropped down onto them as they became the legs of her new body, while her arms thickened and her hands warped into pincers. Her head angled up until her neck snapped and settled on a new orientation. Her legs angled up over her back, bending, melding together and hardening into a stinger. Muscles formed in new places, and her toxin sacs formed and filled with virulent poisons and acids. Her face stretched forwards and mandibles unfurled from her mouth.

“Ah, you remembered,” Shiv said.

“I forget very little,” Meh’Lindi replied. Her voice was different again, now, resonating, almost robotic. She wheeled about, snatched up Shiv’s body and tossed it onto her back. Her rib-legs served as a natural cage, keeping it from falling off as she moved about. This form was the one she liked best for lifting and carrying. It never felt like she needed to put in any effort. “You have the vial I presume?”

“If you would, Snow,” Shiv said, dropping to one knee.

Snow stuck her hand deep into Shiv’s cleavage, sinking it in almost to the shoulder, and rummaged around. “I-Is that a surfboard?”

“Yes. The vial should be nearby.”

“Okay I’ve got one. How big are we looking for?”

“There is only one within my confines at this time.”

Snow pulled her arm out, causing Shiv’s bountiful breasts to bounce as they ‘kissed’ against Snow’s fingers.

“Bring the vial to me,” Meh’Lindi said.

Snow clambered up onto her back and held the vial against the tip of her stinger and then, under Meh’Lindi’s careful instruction, found the venom sacs and stepped on the correct one firmly. A fine dribble of her paralytic venom came pouring out, and Snow then jumped off and put the vial back into Shiv’s cleavage. “What you need that for?”

“Cyndi asked for a sample. To swallow, no doubt, it may be that she hasn’t been able to replicate it perfectly.”

“She would not,” Meh’Lindi said. “It’s an extremely complex compound, as are any such chemicals that are able to affect a Nova metabolism. I hope she has joy of it. I know I did.”

In her scorpion form, Meh’Lindi accompanied Shiv to the elevator and bid her farewell, before returning to the lair, Shiv’s corpse bouncing merrily along on her back. She headed straight for her work area, accessed through an automatic doorway built to her larger self’s proportions and – unfortunately – requiring an equivalent body mass to trigger.

She handed Shiv’s corpse off to Snow before contracting to her humanoid shape and swelling up to her natural state. There was a rather unladylike amount of pleasure involved in the growth of her vagina into that gigantic, toothed maw. Freud would have a field day, no doubt, she thought with some amusement as the final changes snapped into place and she rolled her wrists, just to test the joints and accustom herself to the new proportions.

A number of red lights flicked on along the door’s sides and they focused on her with a dozen beams, scanning for biometrics and various measurements that the basic security system required in order to open up.

With the sound of gears turning and locks unbolting, the door split in half, and pulled into the floor and roof. Over the years, Meh’Lindi had developed a fairly simple security system, one that would confound almost any non-cyberkinetic (who cheated). She simply designed all of her equipment to be operated specifically by a being of her proportions.

“Put Shiv’s body on the table down there, would you?”

“Is this your kitchen?” Snow said, in a tone of awe. “This whole place is huge.”

“Yes.”

Meh’Lindi built it to have enough room for four of her, and so as to put space between her kitchen and her computer system. There was also a second door which led to her larder. She kept a separate one from the stores in the Bar & Grill up above, with whole animals lined up on hooks for when she was in the mood for a treat.

She moved to stand before her computer, pushing out a secondary pair of arms even as she folded up the primary pair until her fingers touched her shoulders. She balled them into fists, then grimaced and pushed out with her elbows. The arms let out a sound like glass cracking, then split in half and unfolded into huge mantis blades. Meh’Lindi let out a whispery gasp of delight, as all of those delightful predatory instincts surged in her breast. Her blades grew and extended to their full size and sharpness, while her former hands became the extra joint needed to support them.

The blades slotted into specially designed sheathes, while she planted her four feet on pressure plates, and moved in a specific pattern to unlock and activate the system.

With a soft hum the computer turned on, a dozen different screens blinking to life and a huge, wall-like holographic interface flicked up in front of her.

“Holy shit,” Snow exclaimed. “I’ve never seen this place. Or this computer. It’s awesome. Chang always said you sunk most of your money into this thing.”

“An exaggeration,” Meh’Lindi whispered. “Have you put Shiv’s body on the counter yet?”

“Yes. It is three times my height, you know. Had to extend my legs a bunch.”

Meh’Lindi brought up a number of files and began some quick data entry, sprouting a third and then fourth set of arms. They flickered across the air, typing on virtual keyboards at superhuman speeds. Most people didn’t even know she could have more than two arms in this shape, let along eight, but she had no need of them save when at work, and she always worked alone. “Give me a few minutes. I just need to update a few files.”

“What’s ‘unspecified energy source’ mean?”

She glanced down. Snow had extended her neck up to look over her shoulder. It was a serpent twenty foot long, four times the length of her body.

“Something that appears to be the basis of Qi Meng, I learned of it listening to Coraline Boehm speaking with Chang. They use some sort of energy to ‘clean’ their nodes of taint, to use their own terminology. It occurs to me that if we could find some way to harness it, we could greatly improve the Teras process.”

“What do you mean?”

“In order to develop chrysalis we are required to channel enormous amounts of quantum through our nodes and at regular intervals. This leads inevitably to taint accumulation. The formation of chrysalis is anything but a guarantee, after all. However, if what I understand of this energy is accurate, we might be able to use it to wring out the failed chrysalis – the taint – and thus remove one of the severe bumps in the road. It is a work in progress. Puck is assisting me in expanding my perceptions in an appropriate manner. I can now – I think – perceive the energy in question. I’m hoping that he can assist me further.”

“Why him?”

“He’s the smartest person available.”

“More so than Chang?”

“Far more, though he hates to hear it. Honestly he makes her – and me – seem dull and witless in comparison. However he has not the same scientific knowledge. I’m hoping that if I can run my theories through him he can bounce back truths. A little like a sounding board. I’m treading in untrod waters here, Snow, and I have the chance to make a scientific breakthrough that will change the course of Nova history forever. Suffice it to say, I’m trying to be careful in my enthusiasm. Whatever this energy is, it doesn’t play well with our Nodes. I thought at first that perhaps we were harnessing it in order to display certain ‘supernatural’ abilities, Telepathy and such other esoteric effects. However, looking over some of my old notes it seems that’s not so. I am wondering, though, if perhaps baseline psychics do harness it.”

“Baseline psychics?” Snow laughed. “You don’t believe in them do you? They’re all charlatans.”

“This is the Nova age, Snow. I’d be a bigger fool than Caestus Pax if I didn’t re-evaluate a few things. It’s an avenue of exploration, at least, and I’m sure Puck can find me a ‘reputable’ psychic for our examination. Anything we learn is vital at this stage.” She added a few notes from her observations around Ibiza, mostly centred on the patterns she could sense in the energy, the places where it seemed to be ‘thicker’ or ‘thinner’ and suchlike. There was no sense to be made of the data yet, but that was the nature of new data. Once she had enough, Meh’Lindi was confident she could begin making something perceptible out of it.

The other files were less fascinating. One was further details on the art project she had just completed with Shiv. The last was basic accounting. Mathematics was one of Meh’Lindi’s specialities, to the point that she never even installed basic computational software on her system. She could do it better than any computer, even one that cost close to a billion US dollars to put together, all told.

After a few minutes she reabsorbed her additional arms and unplugged her mantis blades. The computer immediately began shutting down.

“Now,” Meh’Lindi said. “To lunch.” She smiled down at Snow.

She was looking up at her queerly, having retracted her neck.

“Can I help?”

“Just… don’t move for a second.”

Meh’Lindi watched quietly. Snow regarded her enormity with a critical eye. Before long she raised her right arm and turned it this way and that. Then, with a gunshot crack, her arm snapped backwards at the elbow.

Her hand turned next, until the wrist broke, and Snow’s other arm followed suit. She sighed and smiled, moving her arms around far beyond the range of motion they should have been able to accomplish. Then she bowed her slender body backwards until she was resting on her hands.

Snow’s knees and ankles snapped next, and all four limbs became a crackling mass of flesh and reforming bone. Her whole body began to surge and pulse larger, as she grew slowly to match Meh’Lindi’s monstrous proportions, the backwards bow of her torso greatly enlarged and her limbs stretched long to lift her up to her mentor’s towering height.

She flexed her legs and arms, bending lower and then extending to her full height, testing the new limits of her form. Snow turned slowly around, shrugging off what scraps of clothing remained clinging to her widely changed body. Her head was still upside down, with a divine smile plastered across her lips. After a moment she rotated it until her neck snapped, and kept going until it was the right way round. She tossed her head so her hair fell the right way, and her smile became a grin. Then the membranes of her cheeks stretched and violently ripped, so her mouth became a homage of sorts to Meh’Lindi’s own, though lacking her rending teeth.

“What do you think?” Snow’s fingers moved around on the floor, exploring and adjusting in to her body’s new centre of balance and their role as a second pair of feet. Her skin seemed thin and taut on her, almost translucent, as if something were about to burst forth from her nubile body.

“My opinion is not important,” Meh’Lindi replied, though she very much liked the aesthetic. It was made by having Snow invert her torso. Without that it would have seemed rather plain. But with it, her buttocks facing down and breasts – tautly stretched though they were – facing upwards, there was something alien and impossible about it that went beyond a simple change in proportion.

“But I’m interested in your opinion,” Snow said, gyrating her changed body in a bizarre manner. Were her torso the right way round it would have been like a cat arching its spine.

Meh’Lindi chuckled as she pulled down the spice rack above her counter top. “I am a scientist. I prefer to avoid opinions where I can. They’re treacherous by nature. I’m curious; do you feel that you must change in that manner?”

“Oh no,” Snow said. “I could just flow seamlessly from shape to shape,” Snow said. “I even did once or twice so I could be a dragon like in the books. But I like snapping myself. I like the way it sounds, the way it looks, the way it feels. I can still be a dragon, only it’s one that’s just underneath the surface, half-ripped free of my flesh and bending the rest into its shape.” She smiled. “Yeah, that’s the way for me. Don’t you feel the same way? Does it hurt when you change?”

“No,” Meh’Lindi replied. She knew it did not hurt Snow. In truth there were very few Novas who experienced pain when using their quantum abilities unless as a side effect of taint or because they preferred it that way. Her own body was primed to change, and doing so was as pleasant as a morning stretch used to be back when she slept. Snow’s delight was altogether more visceral, and more pleasurable in aspect. But the girl was a hedonist at heart, so it made sense she would view her powers through a pleasurable lens as well. Her choice of method was a natural outgrowth of those desires, increasing the sensations for every change she went through.

Not that I don’t have my moments, Meh’Lindi thought, opening and closing her lower maw.

She ran her three-fingered hands over the vinegar rack, and picked out her favourite, a mix of crushed garlic and sweet rice vinegar. The bottle was designed a bit like a dropper, so that she had absolute control over the amount which came out. “Could you strip the corpse, please.”

Snow’s breasts stretched out and reshaped into manipulative tentacles that swiftly ripped away the leather from Shiv’s body, leaving it in tatters on the floor.

Meh’Lindi put a drop of vinegar on each of the body’s nipples, and carefully directed the flow to follow the under curve of the breast as opposed to the swell. She placed a pillow under the torso’s shoulders so that it angled up a little, and poured a carefully measured amount of vinegar into the gaping V-shaped hole where her head had once been. She spent a few moments taking in the new fragrance, as the blood and vinegar mixed in the air. “Can you smell that, Snow?”

“Yeah, it’s different. So is that how you used to eat people?”

She looked down at her student. “What, chase them into a corner and then salt and pepper them? No, this came much later. We didn’t do it for pleasure back then. Well, some of us did, but they were Leviathan’s friends, and I didn’t talk to them very much. I did it to prove a point, I suppose.”

Meh’Lindi’s pepper mills and salt shakers were exacting, so precise that they allowed only a single grain out at a time. Her sense of taste was so developed that she could pick out every grain even in a fully-cooked meal, and the design of her recipes had changed to match those exacting standards. She poured salt from two shakers to speed the process up, counting each grain as it fell and forming neat patterns on Shiv’s thighs and belly and breasts. After that she poured a few more traces of vinegar so the salt and vinegar would mix. After that came the other spices, applied in exacting quantities in the right locations.

“Do we cook her?”

“No,” Meh’Lindi said, with a whispery chuckle. “Human flesh is best eaten raw. We should leave her for a short while, though, so the spices can mingle with her blood in the neck area and with the vinegar mix elsewhere.”

It was hard not to think back to her Harvester days, watching the fragrant corpse on her counter. They were good days for the most part.

Snow turned her head to look at her, her weirdly angled neck crackling as she did. “You mentioned chasing people into a corner? Did you really do that? I’ve heard rumours but-“

“Yes,” Meh’Lindi said, in her whispery voice, speaking with her lower mouth while the other remained closed and smiling. “Most of what you’ve heard about Leviathan is true so long as it involves kidnapping, torturing or killing baselines. He hides his hate behind japes, coarse humour and requests for Narcosis to custom make T-Shirts in his size, but Leviathan loathed humanity with a passion. You know his name derives from the bible, I presume?”

“Yeah. The description in the bible looks way more messed up than Leviathan does. Did. Wonder what he’ll look like after his chrysalis?”

“Who knows?” Meh’Lindi said. “Nothing on earth is his equal— a creature without fear. He looks down on all that are haughty; he is king over all that are proud. So the bible says, anyway. That is I think largely how Leviathan viewed himself, as the opposite to and enemy of Humanity. It certainly reflects in his behaviour and in his doctrine. Not a healthy way of thinking, in my view.”

“But you went along with it anyway,” Snow said, in that tone which was not quite criticism but badly wanted to be.

Meh’Lindi laughed. “Not quite. My friends did, and I went along with them. I was always more in Zia’s camp. Almost all of the smarter Harvesters were. Leviathan is many things, but a genius he isn’t. It’s difficult to follow someone when every decision he takes seems so foolish. My friends, though…” she gave a shrug. “I wouldn’t call it peer pressure; that would be offensive both to them and a lie to the dead. But I only got involve in their little games because I was asked to by my friends. I did enjoy them.”

“I’ve heard about the sewer hunts.”

“Yes. Those were the simplest. It was a real game. Leviathan or another Harvester would kidnap some baseline – usually an enemy of the Teragen – and drop them in the sewers. I often did that in my scorpion form. We prized keeping them awake during the process and not so many of us were good at that part. Leviathan has a paralyzing slime which covers his body. I have my stinger and its venoms. Back then all I had was acid, the paralytic, and neurotoxin, and none of them worked on Novas. Oddly I was ideal for the job, though a giant scorpion woman walking on her ribs did raise the odd eyebrow on the occasions when I was spotted. And the odd scream, too. Anyway, the baseline would be dropped in the centre of the sewer network. They then had a five minute headstart before the hunt began. If they could get to the surface before we caught them, we let them go. If not…”

“You didn’t?” Snow offered helpfully.

“No. We didn’t.” She liked her human lips, recalling the taste of her first kill in that game. The other Harvesters threw a party when she returned. It was like being homecoming queen again. The comparisons were probably deliberate.

Snow frowned. “Your friends, do we know them?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“We do not talk anymore.”

“Oh. Who are they?”

Meh’Lindi smiled indulgently. Snow never did seem to run out of questions. “Their names were – or are – Juliette and Skinthinner. We were a sort of ‘girl’s group’, me, Skinthinner and Juliette. We had a gimmick; we could all look human-ish. A big rarity in the Harvesters, that. Some of them actually looked down on Juliette and ‘Thinner for that, but not me because I weigh so heavily on the ‘ish’ part of that phrase. ‘Thinner could mimic perfectly, Juliette was pretty damn close unless you saw her from the right angle. You’ve seen my approximation. Dress me up right and stick shades and a veil on me and don’t let me talk and it works just fine,” Meh’Lindi’s human lips developed a full, warm smile as she remembered the hours of careful preparation the three of them used to go through for any of those wild excursions. “We were sort of like vampires in the old stories, sans the daylight problem. ‘Thinner used to ‘wear’ her human skin, she wove it out of her body and ripped it off like paper. Juliette was a little different, she burst out of it. We loved to try and seduce some baselines and change in front of them.” She shook her head and gave a whispery sigh, like a breath of wind. “I know how childish it sounds, but there was sound theory behind it. Juliette and Skinthinner were both vain as baselines, and their looks mattered even as changed as they were. They wanted to redefine how they viewed their new selves. We didn’t – usually – kill anyone. Leviathan helped change that, though. I can’t even pretend that I stopped enjoying the game, then. But it became boring. There was excitement in not knowing how we would respond to them or them to us. Once we went into it planning to kill them regardless,” she raised her hands and let them drop. “It wasn’t fair.”

Snow giggled in an entirely girlish way. “That’s the weirdest thing to say.”

“I’ve always believed in fairness, Snow. The rules of the sewer game were stacked against the baselines, but they were strict and even. If they were smart enough, they could evade us and escape. We lost the game a couple of times when a hunter became overly sadistic and didn’t go for the throat. After that though, Leviathan started rigging the game, sealing all the exits. It wasn’t fair, and I stopped playing. Skinthinner didn’t, though. She was superb at it.”

Snow moved around to get a better look at her, angling her neck weirdly to look upwards. “What happened to them?”

“I don’t know,” she said, sadly, remembering the way Skinthinner used to smile, the way Juliette laughed, both in flesh and out of it. “They could be dead now. We haven’t talked in years. They did not take my leaving well. Leviathan… he is a good leader for the dispossessed and the angry, but he leads only by making them feel as angry as he. Skinthinner and Juliette began to view humanity as something to be purged. I felt different. There’s no… discussion to be had with beliefs like that, no argument that can sway. They viewed me as a traitor. They said things that were hurtful. But I miss them just the same.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do not be. It was a sacrifice I made for Teras. One of many. To be sorry is to imply that it was unnecessary or even unfortunate, when it was neither. I could not have become who I am, who I am supposed to be, and kept them as friends. But I hope that maybe they will join us one day. Wearing their skins they could easily have been models. I’m sure Chang would let them explore that part of themselves. My hands are stained with blood, just as theirs are.” She looked at her hands, then, thinking about Lady Macbeth and the way she kept scrubbing. The difference was that Meh’Lindi felt no guilt. At least, no more guilt than a baseline butcher did for cutting the heads off chickens.

“Come,” she said, patting Snow on the chest. “Our food should be ready now.”

[WhiteRain]

***

Meh’Lindi carved a little out of Shiv’s thigh and offered the clump of flesh to Snow.

The Nova’s chest, pointing up towards the ceiling, fluttered, and then with a great surge it burst open into a vertical toothed maw. One of her breast tentacles snatched the flesh and deposited it into her new mouth. She chewed.

“Wow. That is good. Feels a bit slimy, though,” Snow said. “Maybe you could warm her up a little?”

That was easily arranged. After setting Shiv’s body on a rack and warming it over the stove they tucked in once again, and spoke of Teras and philosophy and their paths. It wasn’t long before Snow began to share her fears about the entire principle of the Monster path. Meh’Lindi had been waiting for this. She’d noticed it building in Snow months ago when they talked. She let her talk, tearing off one of Shiv’s delicate hands and putting it between her lower mouth’s teeth. She bit slowly, tasting the raw flesh and bone and congealed blood. The breast meat was better by far, seasoned and vinegared and salted.

“Do you think I’m right, Meh’Lindi?” Snow said eventually. She never sounded more like a girl than when they had their mentor to student talks. She viewed many Terats as her mentor, in truth, but Meh’Lindi most of all. At least everyone let Meh’Lindi take the credit, though it seemed Snow spent as much time talking with Chang as with her about these matters. “Is there something wrong with the path of the Monster?”

Meh’lindi fed part of Shiv’s leg into her main mouth and bit down. The seasoning was just right, and Shiv’s flesh was soft and succulent. A little bit of buttock had come off, and that was divine. No surprises there, Meh’Lindi thought. “There may be merit in your feelings.”

“I need a bit more than that,” Snow said, a little sulkily.

“I’m not the philosopher, Snow. That is Chang’s place. I walk my path and don’t worry about that of others. I am a scientist. I deal in the harder facts rather than the subtleties. You know I have my doubts about Leviathan, but he’s now a Terat of the third stage, or will be when he finally comes out, and I’m not even of the second. What right do I have to criticize the philosophy which got him there? Let Chang level the criticisms. They are beings that you and I can barely understand at this point. I think I may change that before long, though.”

“You think you’re nearly ready?”

Meh’Lindi nodded. “Though it’s hard to tell such a thing, I do feel almost ready. Regardless, I’m going nowhere until I’ve made some progress on this new energy source. Who knows, maybe that’s what I need to trigger the process? It could change everything we believe about the chrysalis process, and for the better. It’s within my paradigm, too. Teras is all about learning, in the end.”

“Lindi, if you’ve got no criticisms of Leviathan, why did you leave the Harvesters?” Snow asked, rotating her head and looking up at Meh’Lindi. Her vertical torso mouth gaped open.

Meh’Lindi wishboned Shiv’s legs, and there was a violent snap from the hips, and with a twist and jerk she pulled Shiv’s whole left leg off. She twisted and ripped the leg in half below the knee, and fed the thigh and buttock into Snow’s chomping teeth.

“It was time to,” she said, tossing the rest of the leg into her own mouth and crunching down. She tasted the delicious mix of spices and sweet flesh, savoured the crunch of bone and the luscious marrow. “I am not… what Leviathan wants us to be. I’ve hunted baselines. Killed them, eaten them. I like the taste of human flesh, actually. But ‘because I can’ is not a good answer, and ‘because I want to’ is no better. If the path of the monster is about being no better than an animal,” she shrugged with her upper torso. “It’s no good. The whole pull of the Null Manifesto is the call to a greater awareness, to a greater state of being. Maybe it’s my limited baseline ignorance showing, but lurking about in sewers brooding about humanity’s downfall just doesn’t seem all that great to me.”

“I think you’re better than an animal,” Snow said, her tone reassuring.

Meh’Lindi chuckled. “I require no affirmation, Snow. There is a reason I dwell here and do not mix with the others so often. Solitude suits me well. What I am is not what I could have been. I’ve not killed somebody who wasn’t severely asking for it in five years. What more can be asked of a Nova in these trying times?”

“Who’d you eat?” Snow ripped Shiv’s other leg off with her tentacles and began to eat it.

“Some fools who broke into my lair and attempted to access my data. Utopians I suspect. That was the old lair. I moved location after that. They were fun, though. I decided to have a good old fashioned stalk, went scorpion on them, and chased them around the lair for an hour or so until they were too tired to fight back. Fear does actually make them taste better.”

They finished Shiv’s carcass off between them, and returned to the main lair, Snow walking on her altered hands and feet, Meh’Lindi striding on her four powerful legs. She would wash up later. “Did you like your first taste of human – sot of – flesh?”

“I did, actually. Wonder if The Harvesters still do those sewer games?”

“They do, though they’re more aimless than ever without Leviathan there to direct traffic. If you’re really interested in exploring the hunting instinct I’d suggest seeking out Targan, at least until Leviathan returns to us.”

Snow stretched her neck to look down the length of her body at Meh’Lindi. She was frowning. “I don’t know the name.”

“Few people do. He doesn’t play well with others. Targan was kicked out of The Harvesters after a ferocious fight with Leviathan. He lives alone. At last check he was in France. He doesn’t seek out company but I’ve been told he’s polite enough if it seeks out him. That one was always half an animal, but he reminded me more of a lion than a hyena. I think that’s why he ended up clashing with Leviathan. An odd fellow, though. You’d probably like him. He’s very intelligent and well read, one of those strange beasts who straddled Zia’s group and Leviathan’s but got along with neither. And no I’m not the same. Zia is a good friend of mine, and remained so even after my split. He’s the one I was sharing most of my research notes with, and he loaned me a hefty chunk of capital to get my first lair set up.”

Snow retracted her neck.

“Keep your neck extended,” Meh’Lindi said. “I think it fits.”

She extended it again, and grinned at her. “That’s an opinion.”

“Hardly,” Meh’Lindi replied, in a haughty whisper, “it’s based on observation and the collection of data.”

“You’re just using scientific terminology to hide the fact it’s a value judgement.”

“Which of us has the PH.D?”

Snow stuck her tongue out at her.

“That’s what I thought.” It felt oddly nice to share such inane banter. That was how she used to talk with her friends. Not that she was without friends now, but they were a different sort. For the most part it felt like only Shiv and Chang really understood. Many of the rest were still of the Pandaimonion at heart, wedded to the idea of beauty beyond dreams and wealth to go with it. Disagreement with Leviathan or not, Meh’Lindi sought to go beyond her humanity in as physical and brutal a way as possible, yet with a minimum of violence. There’s always Geth, she thought. Though he’s usually busy these days.

“So,” Snow said, “what do you think a Monster really is, then? What are you and me aiming for? Sometimes I’m not sure.”

Meh’Lindi moved between the dim pillars of her lair, scraping her claws over the stone. She could see perfectly in the dark. “Your basic premise that the path’s basis on human perspective is a weakness had definite merit. It does limit how we express ourselves. But only if you – as a Terat – are spectacularly unimaginative,” she said, her voice as soft as a breeze. “Humans perceive the monster as malicious and vindictive because they are incapable of perceiving the natural world as being anything other than an extension of and centred upon themselves. When they bring that bias into Teras and become Monsters, you can see where they’re going astray. The idea that a creature might view a human being with grand indifference is incomprehensible to the cultural psyche from which most of us have grown. Yet there is hope. Observe the true horror of the works of H. P. Lovecraft. You have read them I assume?”

Snow bobbed her upside-down head. When she spoke it was with the gaping maw in her chest. It gained a bubbly edge. “One afternoon,” she said. “He never wrote much, but what he did was interesting stuff. Even Chang said so, in that incredibly backhanded way which involved pointing out every error he made in the process.”

“What, then, is the horror at the heart of his work?”

“That humanity is irrelevant, that all of the horrible stuff that’s happening is just a… well… accident, really. The Cthulhu creatures are doing their own thing and people can’t do anything to stop them. There’s no ‘battle’ no ‘fight’, all that is already over, the end is coming inevitably. It’s all just a clock winding down, really. The moment anybody sees the true scope of what’s happening they can’t handle it, and what they can’t handle is the moment of perception where they see a universe that views them with complete indifference.”

Meh’Lindi nodded. “It’s the indifference which is the horror. Lovecraft’s great old ones warp reality even in their dreams, and the things they dream have no place in them for humanity. They are not vindictive, Cthulhu and his ilk; they simply don’t care. They don’t care because their needs, desires and concerns are unutterably alien to the human mind.” She held up one of her own three-fingered, chitin-plated hands, observing the delicacy of her fingers, the perfection of the claws at the end. “That is what a Monster should aim to become, in my view. Not some vindictive beast playing out the tired horrors of human imagination, but something which simply does not care about their existence. The problem lies in the steps needed to place one’s psyche in that arena. That is where the bloody mutilations and gauche murder enters the equation. We begin as human, with the potential to be other. Through action and thought we seek to change body and mind into that indifferent other. That is the step which causes the… friction which concerns you.”

“Do you think you’ve found a better way?”

“I would not be with Chang if I did not believe so. Teras is about self-expression. She seeks to find alternate methods of self-expression that do not involve ripping baselines apart for fun. I believe we have made progress, she and I. Time will tell. But why can we not explore our indifference through artistic mediums? Why can we not learn of ourselves by painting and in sculpture and dance and music? I don’t see any fundamental reason why it’s impossible. In this I suppose I am my own test subject.”

Meh’Lindi stopped moving. She could feel a vibration in the floor, the lift descending. She turned in that direction, a spider in her web, wondering at the rippling of a strand.

“What’s up?” Snow asked.

“We have a new guest.”

A moment later, Meh’Lindi picked up a voice humming a tune. Lucrezia.

She felt an odd sort of dread at that recognition. Everybody knew she was up to something. There was something to all this ‘Anavasi’ talk that Shiv had begun to spread, and nobody could miss the frenzy of activity from Lucrezia once that word began to be bandied about. Meh’Lindi hoped it would blow over her. Politics were never her arena.

Before long, Lucrezia appeared. She was in ‘her’ form, mid-sized, dark haired and dark eyed, with a seductive air about her and squeezed into PVC. She regarded them both and smiled. “Well, isn’t this a regular monster’s ball? Have I ever told you how gloomy this place is? You should spin more of that web of yours and pretend to be Shelob.”

Meh’Lindi gave a whispery chuckle. “We were talking about my hunting days before. They’re behind me for the most part.” She felt an instant suspicion at that. Snow was a genius, but possessed all the tact and cunning of a lamp post. Lucrezia was less intelligent than either of them, but more than smart enough to send Snow on with instructions to ‘prime’ Meh’Lindi with certain topics. “It’s interesting that you’d bring that up.”

“Oh, it’s hard not to have those thoughts around you. I mean, you have such big teeth,” she said, flicking her tongue over her own teeth as she said the word. “Shall I join you girls up there? I do feel awfully vulnerable down here. I’m a walking damsel in distress, and my oh-so stretchable wife is nowhere around to rescue me.”

“By all means, join us,” Meh’Lindi said. Lucrezia was creaking and stretching before she finished talking.

Her skin turned to latex and she lost her shape completely, swelling out and out into an amorphous mass forty feet high, which tightened into a pillar and then refined down into a spider-legged shape with ten circular mouths and flickering tentacles. She was still vertically-oriented, a pillar of teeth and mouths and tentacles rather than a simple monolith. She remained shining latex, not bothering to present a veneer of flesh. “Is that better?” She said.

“Your time with Sin-Eater is rubbing off, I see,” Meh’Lindi said.

“I think you look pretty,” Snow offered.

“Thank you, Snow, you at least know how to speak to a lady.”

“What brings you here, Lucrezia? Does Chang have need of me?”

“Oh yes,” the Lucrezia-thing answered, “though she doesn’t know it quite yet. She’s going to have sore need of you very soon, Meh’Lindi. I hope you’ll help.”

Meh’Lindi snorted. “You’ll get what you want regardless. There’s no need for games with me, Lucrezia. I know how this will play out and I’ve no desire to have it sugar coated.”

“Oh, you should learn to enjoy the game, darling. My wife certainly does. Wouldn’t you like to think about what I’m up to and what I’m doing?”

“No.”

“I do!” Snow said brightly. Then her neck drooped a little and she looked at Meh’Lindi guiltily. “Should I not have said that?”

Meh’Lindi laughed. “You can be an utter fool at times, Snow. Follow your own instinct. There’s no need to worry about my opinion.”

The three of them moved amongst the pillars, each of them a monstrous beast, an almost biblical horror brought to life in sound and vision, half-hidden in the swallowing darkness of Meh’Lindi’s lair. Lucrezia spoke of a meeting that was to come, when all The Anavasi would meet to discuss and share their thoughts on the future they would all be building.

“I require you to speak on Chang’s behalf on the matter of leadership in particular,” Lucrezia said. “It will be hotly contested. There are several candidates being discussed that are not my wife and I wish for all of them to fail.”

“Who’s being considered?” Snow asked.

“Darrik Reynolds, of all people,” Lucrezia said, disgust apparent in her tone, “and Puck who is a more reasonable but in many ways a far worse choice.”

Meh’Lindi regarded her curiously. “Why worse?”

“I’ve spent some time as one of his Exalt! minions, and I think I can predict that as it grows there will be further conflict between him and the Teragen. He hasn’t pissed off the Cult of Mal yet, but when Clarion actually pays attention to what he’s doing he’ll be outraged. Puck is doing what the Cult claims to do for Novas for baselines. We won’t be wanting that sort of attention.”

“You make a good argument,” Meh’Lindi said, now ascending one of the pillars and looking down on her student and sometimes friend. “Why not speak on the matter yourself?”

The Lucrezia thing rippled its many mouths and thrashed its tentacles. “I am Chang’s wife. I’m biased. You, though, you’re biased too, of course, but you’re just a student and you’re also Snow’s teacher. Snow is liked by – at last count – ninety nine point nine per cent of every living thing that’s encountered her. It gives you good credit, shall we say?”

Snow rippled her body and gnashed her teeth in delight. “Take that, point one per cent!”

“You are respected, Meh’Lindi, in ways that I as a former and current stripper, accused prostitute, acknowledge arch-manipulator and – let us not forget – wife of Chang Zha-Yang will never be. In addition you remain the real poster child for Chang’s efforts to reach out to the more monstrous of our number; you are a sign of the times, as it were. Accordingly your voice carries in ways mine will not. The first rule of being a manipulative bitch is this: know when your voice is the one to use, or when to have your message issue from another’s throat.”

Meh’Lindi shrugged. It didn’t seem like much, and she trusted Lucrezia’s judgements on such matters. She understood the need for the urging, too. She never liked speaking in public and would most likely have kept quiet without the prod. As it stood, she could prepare a speech or something ahead of time. “As you wish, though I don’t know exactly why you want Chang in this position. I doubt Chang cares all that much.”

Lucrezia was no longer capable of anything approaching a recognizable expression, but the way she thrashed her tentacles was filled with irritation. “I have been manoeuvring for this moment for a long time, Meh’Lindi, and I’m not having it ruined up by some jumped up trollops scampering out from under Narcosis’s skirt. My wife never makes half as much of herself as she should, but she wouldn’t be half the person she is if she did. So that leaves it to us, her lovers and her friends respectively, to make sure she stands up to be counted.”

Meh’Lindi leapt from her pillar and landed on the ground with a heavy thud. “As you wish, though I wonder if Chang will thank you for this.”

“It’s not her thanks I’m after.”

No. But what are you after, I wonder? She knew better than to probe for that. There was a limit to frankness, and that limit was set by exactly how much Lucrezia needed to say to get what she wanted. Meh’Lindi and Snow were both safe. They would keep Lucrezia’s secrets and both of them were loyal to Chang. Not that anything she had said would surprise anybody if they did share it.

“There is… one other piece of business I wanted to ask you about. Related, but unnecessary,” she said, “but I’ve done my research and, well, I hate wasting my time. Want me to share?”

Meh’Lindi sensed some tension in Snow, then. That was how to tell that this was the set up part of their engagement. Lucrezia would never give anything away. “You can if you want. I am hardly going to stop up my ears.”

“Would you like to see your friends again?”

Meh’Lindi did not quite freeze, but she slowed down for several moments, and moved behind a pillar, putting it between her and Lucrezia. She peaked out from around it. “Now how did you learn about them?”

“Half of the Harvesters are hanging around with Sin-Eater now, remember?” Lucrezia said. “I’m Sin-Eater’s new favouritest person, number one on the guest list, at least until things are sorted out with Chang. Wasn’t hard to find a few of your old associates and learn what you got up to with the girls.”

“They are with Sin-Eater?”

“No. But that’s how I learned of their existence. They’re not doing very well, in truth,” she said, and her twisted voice sounded almost delicate.

Meh’Lindi felt a most uncomfortable wrench in her chest at those words. “I see.”

“You don’t want the gory details?” Lucrezia asked, like a cat at play with a mouse. “Not curious?”

“I am,” she admitted. “Snow,” she said, “can we be alone for this talk?”

Snow turned towards her, and for a moment seemed almost hurt, but then she nodded. “Okay. Can I come back after she’s gone?”

“Better not,” Meh’Lindi whispered. “I will need some time to think. But soon. Try and find Targan, put a little of what we talked about into practice.”

“Oh, okay!” That brightened her up again. She headed off towards the elevator, shrinking down but keeping the same twisted shape.

Meh’Lindi studied Lucrezia’s writhing form and waited until she heard the elevator rise before speaking again. “Speak, then.”

What followed would have been a tale out of her nightmares if she still dreamed to have nightmares. Lucrezia related the story with her usual mixture of coyness, dry humour and subtle or not-so subtle mockery. Both of them stayed true to Leviathan right up to the battle with Glory. Skinthinner vanished after that, her faith broken, so to speak. Juliette was crippled, her back broken by Caestus Pax with a single blow, even in her transformed state.

Skinthinner went to ground amongst the baseline herd, using her sort-of shapeshifting ability – she could form whatever skin she liked – to go unnoticed. But she was far gone from humanity, and didn’t dare go back to the Teragen. The defeat broke her. To prevent discovery she spiralled down, deeper and deeper into the bowels of human society, and deeper still after a collision with Utopia that nearly saw her captured. Now she lurked amongst the refuse, the homeless and the drug-addicted, where nobody would look.

Juliette only got angrier after her injury. With the splintering of The Harvesters she was one of the ones that didn’t go to Sin-Eater, staying in the sewers waiting for Leviathan to come back and lead them to crack the earth. Leaderless and lost, she was kidnapping random people, murdering them in the sewers of Venice and going through old motions that had lost their meaning. Or so Lucrezia said.

“I cannot believe this tale,” Meh’Lindi said when it was done.

Lucrezia rippled liquidly. “I can give you the addresses if you want to go and see for yourself, all sneaky-like. It’s not hard to pretend to be a heroin addict. I got to see plenty of Skinthinner. Juliette was harder to get to, but not impossible when you’ve got Geth around.”

She was shaken more than she could say, or even really understand. “It does not matter,” she whispered. “Their… misfortunes are no business of mine.”

“Unless you want them to be,” Lucrezia said, holding on ‘want’ just a second longer than was natural, so that it hung large in Meh’Lindi’s mind.

“Explain yourself.”

“I could bring them into the fold. Skinthinner’s not really in any position to argue. She’s addicted to amp wells now. Sad to see a proud Harvester turned into… well, that. And Juliette,” she gave another of those rhythmic ripples, “I always get my way. She’ll come if I ask nicely enough. They both miss you though they don’t want to say it. Skinthinner’s got no friends anymore and nobody’s looking for her. She’ll be picked off by Utopia before too long, else lose her way and go mad from taint accumulation. Juliette’s got no future and she knows it. Glory broke The Harvesters’ spine when she beat Leviathan to a pulp. She’s just an angry beast screeching in the dark. Seems like a perfect target for our outreach program. But she’s your friend, and I didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes.”

Oh no, of course not, Meh’Lindi thought, regarding her coldly. I know this game well enough. She would owe Lucrezia for this. Of course she would. Oh, she would never say it, she had no need to. But it would be there, just the same. Lucrezia would be the one who saved her friends when nobody else was willing to.

She asked for time to think. Lucrezia sucked back down to her human form and exchanged a few pleasantries, talked about their Opcast and how much she enjoyed Shiv’s singing. Through that she ensured that she left on a pleasant note.

In the aftermath, Meh’Lindi stood for a time in the centre of her lair, just thinking. Then she returned to her human form and walked through the now colossal chamber to a side door which led to an empty room that was also built to a huge proportion, and moved into its centre.

Meh’Lindi’s body swelled, her chitin plates stretching and warping as the flesh beneath expanded in all directions. She grew, swiftly becoming spherical. Her neck retracted, her head was sucked back into her growing mass until her face alone was apparent, and that just an impression upon her surface. Her limbs crackled and thickened, then stretched out with sudden violence until they hit the walls. Her hands and feet clenched into the stone and lifted her, walking her up as she swelled and swelled almost to fill the space she was in. Eventually she settled, smooth and flawless and round, suspended in the air, forty feet in diameter. Only her former limbs broke her curvature, but the real changes happened within.

Miles of biological material were wound through her structure, a webway designed to increase the efficiency and speed of her thought patterns, her magnificent mind, swelled to fill her body and the chamber.

Her raging emotions settled, as she rationalized through all of her emotional responses in moments and discarded them for what they were. In this shape she considered her history, her old friends and her new, and pondered whether it was worth seeking out her past and trying to bring it into her present, whether there was merit or value in such an attempt.

It was surprisingly difficult to work through it. She spent a day suspended in that shape, just thinking about that one topic. But in the end she retracted her limbs, shrank down once again into her human form and returned to her true shape, and sent a message to Lucrezia. It consisted of only two words.

‘Do it.’

[WhiteRain]

LUCREZIA 30^th May

The night was getting old, but Lucrezia still felt young. She’d taken Chang out for a ride, lights out, what the biker fraternity sometimes referred to as a demon ride. There was some distant memory in her that recalled doing that before shedding her husk. The memory was like a beast flashing by a chink in a doorway, though, only half-seen and half-comprehended. She never got anything from before. Guess I must have been a biker chick or something.

Only that contradicted what she thought she knew. More likely, the woman she had been simply liked riding motorbikes.

For whatever reason, Chang was staying away from the Rainbow Room tonight. She wasn’t been as talkative as usual. Something was on her mind though she denied it. They had returned to a property owned by Lucrezia, a pleasure house in Ibiza where she often went to table dance even now. Some nights she was every dancer in the club, though nobody knew it. A lot of shapechangers were terrible at changing their body language, but she wasn’t one of them. The club employed more Nova strippers than anywhere else in the world, mostly because there weren’t that many of them out there. Most of her kind was uppity about the trade, they thought it beneath them. Lucrezia thought they were fools. It always seemed insane to her that Novas – of all beings – would be undone by being naked. Beings of godlike beauty, impossible grace, incomprehensible stamina and things besides, and they found their confidence shaken if their clothes were off and someone was looking at them.

Nudity, my only weakness, she thought, laughing at the absurdity. It was one thing to just not want to do that, but being self-conscious? That was ludicrous.

Prudence was on the tables tonight, playing nice. Four of Lucrezia were there as well, in her long-time personas of the dancers Katie, Eleanor, Jeannette and Claudia.

Most of the clientele were normal Novas. Tentacles put them off. Her nature did allow her to pull off some quite impossible contortions, even though her best tricks used tentacles. I should have asked Cyndi, she thought. Stretchable dancers are always best on the poles. The Alchemist liked dancing sometimes, though she relied more on sex appeal and her powers than technique. Pru and Snow had been studying under Lucrezia for a few months and were growing good.

“My love? What amuses you?” Chang was studying her from across the room, her eyes shining blue and red in the dimness. This was one of Lucrezia’s private rooms above the strip club, heavily sound proofed, with mood lighting only. Chang preferred things quiet and dim. She had a few things in common with Meh’Lindi that way.

“Oh, just laughing at one of many absurdities,” Lucrezia said, strutting across the room to Chang and putting her arms around her neck. “So, beloved, what do you have in mind for the rest of our evening?” She traced her fingers down and stroked at Chang’s shaft underneath her clothes. “I’ve missed you.”

“Perhaps as much as I’ve missed you,” Chang said. Her four voices resonated in the quiet. “It has been weeks since I saw hide or hair of you.”

Lucrezia gave her ass a shake. “And we both know how much you miss my hide. Do you want it bigger?” She leaned in and ran her nose up Chang’s neck, flooding her skin with quantum so as to set her wife’s nerves afire. It dragged a full-throated moan from her. “Fuller?” She slid her long tongue out and wrapped it right around her wife’s throat. Chang gasped. “Rounder?”

Chang shuddered, and then mastered herself. “Soon, Lucrezia. Perhaps we can just touch one another, familiarize ourselves again.”

Lucrezia laughed. “You think I’ve forgotten even one inch – or one mile – of you? You think you’ve been out of my thoughts for one moment? And I know you haven’t forgotten me. Nobody does.”

“I’m not sure. It’s been such a long time.”

There was something up here. Lucrezia could feel it. It was an undercurrent running through three of Chang’s voices. Suspicion, she realized, with shock. Genuine suspicion, too. Not the playful kind. She couldn’t… Not a wisp of her doubt entered her body language or her voice though. She showed only her wish to seduce and have. “Well your cock sure remembers me, and all three of your nipples are so stiff I expect them to start stretching any moment. Want to make a bed for us?”

She was resisting properly now, though. Chang’s resistance was not like that of other Novas. It wasn’t a lustful shudder reduced to a satisfying but controlled tremble. It was like walls of iron rising from the ground, enclosing her in a fortress of the mind. It unnerved Lucrezia even after all these years with her. “No,” she said.

Lucrezia unwound her arms from Chang’s neck. “You’re being no fun.”

“Why did you abandon me for all this time?” There was an eerie lack of accusation in Chang’s voices.

It’s like she already has the answer. She knew to be careful about lying around Chang. Lucrezia had tested the limits. In moments of rare inspiration she could sometimes get one past her. But she was getting unnerved now. Lucrezia collected herself. Need to think clearly. She can’t know. “I’ve been busy, beloved. Believe me when I say it’s been hard for me too. Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to get satisfaction when I’m away? We both know I need it, and I need it much more than you. I’ve had to take what little food I can get,” she said, pouting. “Don’t you want to wine and dine me?”

There was no judgement in those glowing eyes. Just cold calculation and consideration.

Lucrezia put her hands on her hips. “Chang, you’re being really clingy here. It’s just three weeks. Okay, nineteen days. We’re not joined at the hip.”

“We have no need to be. There are thirty of you.”

“Yes, and all of me has been busy.”

Chang smiled. “Doing what, pray tell?”

Lucrezia felt a chill run through all of her liquid insides. No. Fucking. Way. “Stuff. Private stuff. No-“ she caught herself.

“Nothing to do with me?”

“I’m not putting up with this, Chang. If you want to be a bitch, fine, but I’m going downstairs to dance.”

Lucrezia headed for the door.

“I know that you have been visiting friends and associates in the Pandaimonion, The Harvesters, the Casablancas, even some Terats who barely speak to anyone but who have irregular contact with me for purely artistic reasons. I know that your ‘stuff’ concerns my somewhat ironic queendom and this ‘Anavasi’ meme that Shiv has been spreading. I gather that you are orchestrating some sort of meeting wherein you intend for those dissatisfied with Narcosis and those interested in my message to declare themselves. I know that you have been rather desperate to ensure that I know nothing of these events.”

Lucrezia looked over her shoulder at Chang, pausing. Chang raised her hands. “You have grown contemptuous of me, Lucrezia. The mistake was taking your eye off my location, and a little ignorance on your part. I did not choose this place by accident.”

“What do you mean?”

Chang smiled. “I have more tricks than you know.” She raised her right hand and clicked her fingers.

Lucrezia felt the quantum pulse, and for a moment there was complete silence in the room. Then she heard voices. Her own voice, speaking words she spoke twenty minutes past as clearly as if she were there doing it now.

“… I won’t give her a choice,” she was saying. “It’s time for the Anavasi to rise, and Chang’s the one to lead us. The only way to get her to do this is to pin her down from every side at once, and I’m going to make sure it happens. You’re a crucial part of that.”

The person who answered was Targan. Lucrezia clenched her fists, stunned at her wife’s power. Since fucking when could she do this? Fear, raw and simple, flooded her being. This was what it was like, she remembered, when you opposed someone of the third stage. You learned as if for the first time what Novas could be, and how much power they could wield.

Targan answered in his usual rumbling, steady tone. She remembered the way his eyes studied her, following her every movement. “I have not yet agreed to join your movement.”

“I know,” Lucrezia answered. “But you’re going to. You wouldn’t have come here otherwise.”

“I was curious.”

“And you’ll stay.”

A pause, and then a soft, “Yes. You do not want me to appear at the meeting?”

“No, I need you to run a little interference for us. You do information. I want to pay you to release a little to Scrambler.”

“Intriguing,” he answered. She remembered him prowling around her, keeping her eyes on her at every moment, the predator circling his prey. “Your proposal is quite irregular. Go on.”

“Four of Scrambler’s accounts are going to be frozen by Pandaimonion Terats. I won’t tell you which ones. It’s in retaliation for various things that have happened between the two groups since Scrambler’s attack on the crèche, accusations and such. It’s a simple power play.”

“How do you know this?”

“Let’s just say that I do, hmm?”

Chang lowered her hand. The voices faded. “You really are fearless, beloved. What would Scrambler do if he knew how badly you were playing him all this time?”

No, no no, no, Lucrezia backed up against the door. She was half tempted to liquefy and melt away through the cracks, but then she remembered there weren’t any. Fucking sound-proofing!

Chang went on as casually as if she were discussing the weather. “There remains, however, one issue about which I am uncertain.”

There was an edge to that voice which filled Lucrezia with an entirely mortal terror. She tried to get out of the room before Chang could continue, but just as she put her hand on the doorknob to wrench it open, the question caught up and froze her in place.

“When did you tell Scrambler about the crèche?”

Lucrezia stopped dead in her tracks. She blinked, knowing Chang could hear her doing it, knowing she would interpret what the reaction meant. How could she know? Lucrezia swallowed. All across the world, her copies paused in their actions. Some broke off conversation. Others stopped in the middle of sex. Some just ceased walking. Those below in the club fell off their poles. And all as one turned to look at Chang, whether she was separated from them by hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles or by a mere dozen meters. Lucrezia’s entire being resonated with disbelief and shock. I was so careful. “I told him nothing.”

“A truth,” Chang said, in a tone that made Lucrezia’s heart soar, but then she went on. “But it hides a lie. Perhaps you did not come before him and tell him what he wished to know, but you ensured that the information made its way to Scrambler. Of this I have no doubt.”

Lucrezia closed her eyes, and felt the trap spring closed around her. She ground her teeth and lowered her head. After a few moments she gathered herself and looked up to face the music.

Her wife was standing there, glorious, her glowing eyes regarding her with cool consideration, the right bright red like a stop light, and the left eye blazing icy blue. The white raindrop under her right eye seemed more like a tear than ever. A hundred lies, a thousand, came to Lucrezia’s lips, but none escaped.

“How did you know?” She asked, and across the world the rest of her returned to their business, giving dismissals where needed to allay the concerns of those around them. Almost uniformly she said she felt like someone just walked over her grave, relying on the sympathy that such a thought invoked to prevent them questioning harder. The dancers below laughed and said they were off-colour today. “When did you know?”

“I only realized in the last day or so. Your recent conversations have not been very guarded. I’ve been touring all your favourite silent spots for weeks, catching what I can of your business in Ibiza. Oh, you’ve been clever and subtle, but seeing how things have panned out and listening to the many conversations my… adherents, shall we call them, have been having has put things into perspective. You forgot that those you manipulate have far looser tongues than you do. But the real lie, the big lie, was eluding me even though I knew there was something wrong. Really it was right there in front of me, though I must admit it was Puck that finally got me thinking on the right lines. I suppose I should take that as no surprise. It seems his primary power these days is being an inspiration to others.”

“Puck?” Lucrezia felt beaten around the head. He wouldn’t have betrayed me. He’s too smart for that. Okay I poisoned him but he’ll understand.

“When I went to see him he mentioned that you’d visited him, and asked if you passed that along. You misrepresented my opinion of Jeremiah Scripture to him and he was rather interested to know why one of his top five favourite people in the world distrusted his number one. I fear he found the resulting conversation rather distressing.”

Lucrezia shook his head. “In case you hadn’t noticed that’s a pattern with you.”

Chang shrugged. “The truth always distresses those who are not ready to hear it. Doesn’t it?”

“Stop,” Lucrezia said.

Chang didn’t. “Of course you did not pass along his request. It was such a minor thing, and I could not fathom why you would not tell me he wished to speak with me. It’s not like you to forget a detail. The only logical explanation was that you did not want me to know you had even spoken to him. So I began to wonder. And what things I wondered. For a while I wasn’t thinking in the right time frame, though. Then Sakura sent me a rather random OpNet message asking me about progress on the crèche and it caught me just when I was thinking about Puck’s poisoning… and it hit me, like a bolt of lightning.” She shook her head in that way she did, that way which said she was wondering how she could have ever missed it.

Lucrezia was moving a little bit closer, now. She felt like she was caught in a whirlpool, unable to escape. “What did?”

“Why on earth did you want to spend so much time in the crèche? You had no purpose there; you are no architect, no builder.” Chang’s tone remained mild, conversational, lacking in judgment. “Why then were there six of you in the crèche at all times, especially after all our talks of trying to keep it hidden? One copy of you I can see for social reasons. But six copies, and sometimes more than that, spread conveniently around to cover most of the crèche? What purpose could you possibly have had?”

Lucrezia was shaking now. Would Chang gain that look in her eyes, the one that turned warriors to quivering children? Would she look upon her with distain? “Sakura was pregnant, I-“

“Was well aware that she could take care of herself,” Chang said, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Triplets or no, Sakura’s body is designed for the carrying and birthing of children. I’ll admit that she’s a magnetic personality and it’s clear you like her, but that does not explain the diffusion of your bodies. What were you doing, watching paint dry?” She spread her arms. “The conclusion is simple. You were expecting something to happen, and did not want to take the chance of missing it. But if that were so, why would you not have Shiv or Meh’Lindi there at all times? You are a shape shifter, yes, but no fighter. Anybody who launched on attack on that facility would have come prepped for combat with Novas. You would have been swiftly overcome no matter what form you unleashed. In addition, you only began to have so many of you in the crèche a week before the attack. A peculiar timing, all would agree, given that construction was yet to be completed.”

She was losing control of this. “Sakura needed company, she likes being around people,” it was a desperate stab. It didn’t work.

“Indeed? Then how is it that Sakura remains inside the crèche overseeing its construction alone? As we’ve both witnessed, you’ve got manpower to spare. Now, when the chicken has fled the coop, only one of you remains within. And the conversations I’ve overheard have nothing to do with diverting Scrambler’s attention from the crèche. It’s almost as if it’s dropped off your radar, as if the facility is of no more relevance to your plans.”

“That’s not so, I-“

“Are lying,” Chang said.

“I was helping with the decorating. Back then Sakura-“

“Game over, Lucrezia,” she said, and for a moment her four voices were full of scorching fury.

For once, Lucrezia was speechless. She put a hand to her head and ran it through her silky, shoulder length hair. Chang’s bright eyes were on her still, but she could not face that glowing gaze. She looked around the room, feeling frustrated and angry. Her voice came out small and broken. “Sakura… wasn’t meant to be there.”

“Go on.”

“I told Alex, not Scrambler.”

Chang nodded. “Alex… Vigilance’s pet gate-maker, I believe.”

“That’s him. I met him at a QNA meeting nine months ago. I figured it might come in handy, and sure enough it did. He’s pretty free with his quantum, all considered, and always up for a good time. He helped me get a copy into Exalt!” She smiled, thinking back to their little scheme. “He quite liked playing house for a while and pretending to be baseline, especially since we were both gay and pretending to be man and wife. Eventually I heard he was in touch with Scrambler. I probed. Carefully, of course, just to find out how close they were. Turns out they saw each other frequently. Post-Chicago, Scrambler was doing a lot of the recruiting for The Primacy and Vigilance, gobbling up angry Terats from all over the Teragen. You know what he’s like even more than I do.” She gave an elegant shrug. “I mean, why not? He’s a good speaker when he wants to be, passionate about his causes, charismatic. He seduced you.”

“I recall the occasion,” Chang said. At that moment her buttocks swelled out, warping and growing until they formed the frame of a bed, and her flesh rippled into silk and wood and springs. “Come,” she said. “You are tense.” She sat, and patted her lap. “Let me touch you while we talk.”

Lucrezia approached, nervous, but Chang stretched her arms out long and wrapped around Lucrezia’s waist. She extended them further still until she rested one palm on each of her breasts, and squeezed gently as she pulled her across the room to her. Lucrezia put up no resistance as Chang sat her down in her lap. Her arms uncoiled, and she stroked Lucrezia’s hair. “You’re not angry?” Lucrezia asked.

“That remains to be seen,” Chang replied. “Continue with your explanation. You said Sakura was not meant to be there?”

Not even a little bit. “I thought she’d spend most of her time in the Congo. I mean… we’re Terats. Who trusts us?”

“Our friends,” Chang said softly.

Lucrezia took a deep breath, but her wife continued to stroke her hair. It helped to calm her. “I never meant to betray her. Sort of. Things just didn’t go right. Once the crèche was up and nearly running she wanted to oversee it and make sure everything was just perfect. I tried to get her to go once or twice, but it was obvious she wouldn’t. Even if I spilled my guts she would have stayed. She wouldn’t have understood. And I saw how she was around you. The girl’s too canny by half. If I tried to explain too much she would have unravelled me. So I just made niceties and worked around her. I needed there to be more of me.”

“So you put her at risk in your scheme.”

Lucrezia threw up a hand, her lip curled in distaste. “Nobody in The Primacy would threaten the life of a Nova child. They’re racial supremacists! It’d be pretty fucking stupid of them to kill a second generation, don’t you think? If Scrambler hurt her Shrapnel and Geryon would have run a competition to see who could skin him alive fastest. The problem was when that fucking shield turned up. She almost stopped Scrambler getting to me.”

Chang rested her head against Lucrezia’s shoulder. She sighed. “I see.” She moved her hand from Lucrezia’s head to hold her round the waist again.

Lucrezia sighed. It did not feel good to come clean. Not in the slightest. “I let slip about the crèche to Alex about ten days before the attack. I had a couple of copies keeping an eye on The Primacy, and I knew he was getting antsy about you. He would have needed time to do some information hunting of his own, so I had one of my bodies give him a lead to the construction company we were using. It was easy for him to piece together what was going on after that. But I couldn’t be sure when he’d come. The day of your interview was most likely, I made damn sure he knew about that, but I couldn’t be certain. I had to make sure he grabbed me first.”

“Why?” Chang asked, and her voices were no stronger than a bare breath of wind. Lucrezia read her like an open book now. She knew exactly why, but she wanted to hear it from Lucrezia’s own mouth.

“Because you wait,” Lucrezia said, and the word contained years of frustration, it came out half as criticism, half as desperation. “You wait and you wait and you wait. Times come and go and you do nothing, you watch and listen and wait. For what? I’ve asked you this thirty times, is it? Forty? But you still sit here, waiting, watching and listening with your steepled fingers and your glowing eyes and your… your you.” She wished she had her wife’s tongue. That sounded so bad. She rose and partly liquefied, so that she flowed through Chang’s fingers and stepped free.

Chang bristled a little. When she spoke two of her voices had a defensive twinge. “I was thinking. Considering options.”

Lucrezia turned to glare at her. “Considering options? For god’s sake, Chang! When will there be a better opportunity to break away? How could you ever get one? Sin-Eater-“

“I am considering-“

“Stop interrupting me!” Lucrezia clenched her fists. Chang closed her mouth and regarded her placidly, unmoved by the scream. “You are so maddening sometimes. Do you even care that I’m upset?” Chang kept her mouth closed and laced her fingers in her lap. Thinking. Considering. Waiting. You never stop, my love. “You were considering Sin-Eater’s offer. I ask you: What better possible chance could you have to break away from Narcosis?”

Chang said nothing. She watched, unblinking, her eyes blazing in the half-darkness.

Lucrezia began to feel nervous. She had seen that look on Chang’s face only once before. It was when Scrambler had her tied to a chair and was beating her to death, and she had decided to go to her death with silence, smiling at him through the blows. “Say something,” she said to her. “Please?”

After a few seconds that felt very long, she did. “There is some merit to what you say, and it had not escaped my notice. That does not mean that I agree that breaking away is necessary.”

“Then you are wrong. I love you so much, Chang, but on this you are wrong and you’ve always been wrong. Ordinarily I would be up for discussion and debate but on this you are clearly wrong and I am clearly right. So I decided to make you act. Nobody can do that, or so they say. You’re so stubborn. But I know something they don’t. I know where your limit is.” She trembled, and jabbed her finger at her own chest. “Me.”

All across the world, Lucrezia’s copies found their way to private places. Normally she could keep emotions to one body or another, but not this. Her feeling of betrayal was so abject, her pain so total, that it seeped through her in her entirety and filled up all of her to bursting. She cried in a dozen bodies, and hugged her knees to her chest with others, deaf to calls of concern from people who thought she was someone else or simply did not and could not understand how unimportant they were to her. The only person who mattered was sitting there on the bed, looking at her, and her glowing eyes were full of pain.

Lucrezia didn’t dare reach out. “I used your love against you. Because I knew you would act. You wouldn’t let this slide by. Scrambler could beat you to death and you’d laugh it off. But if he laid a hand on me you would rise like a phoenix from the fire and burn him and his world to ash. Once you decided to act, to defend your position, the rest would come. All I needed to do was make things happen. Put Scrambler out of the way so you took your attention from him, and put the Anavasi right in front of your nose. Same urge to act, different topic of focus. I knew it would work. You’re like… you’re like an avalanche. The mountainside seems so stable, as immutable as time itself. But it only takes the right pebble to move, and then it all comes crashing down. All I’ve done was swap the body it lands on. That’s you, Chang. Once you begin to move nothing can stop you. You’ll roll over anything and anyone who gets in your way until you get to wherever you’re going. I knew I was the right pebble, the only pebble that could force you to act. And I’m sorry.”

Chang’s eyes seemed to dim for a moment. They shifted colour, the right eye became shining white, brighter than the rain drop tattooed underneath, and her left eye became brilliant violet. Even as the glow resumed, Chang lowered her head. Her fingers twitched. “That was ill-done, my love. It was cruel.”

Lucrezia dropped to her knees in front of Chang and took her hands in her own. For a moment Chang resisted, but then she relented. “It was. But you had to act. And you were not going to. We both know it. You were going to sit there and wait until the chance went by. Because you were never going to realize that Narcosis doesn’t give a damn about you or what you’re doing, and that no matter what or when or how you decide to leave, she will oppose you.”

Chang looked up, meeting Lucrezia’s eyes again. “Yes.”

“You cannot leave without making enemies and losing friends. And that’s the chance you’re waiting for.”

For a few moments Chang was silent. Then she whispered, in an echoing voice, “Yes.”

Lucrezia stroked Chang’s cheek. There were tears running down them now, and it broke her heart. “You’re a good person, my love. You don’t want to cause pain. But sometimes it’s just not that simple.” She kissed her tears away.

Chang did not sniffle. She cried in dignified silence. That’s you, isn’t it? Always classy, no matter what those idiots say.

“I feel like The Mathematician sometimes. Pedro… he barely talks anymore, you know. It used to be that he was always talking, always fluttering and panicking, filling our ears with warnings of dooms near-missed. So few of us listened to him,” Chang said, shaking her head. “Gods it must be maddening. To know, and to be ignored, and to watch over and over again as you are proven right and are still ignored, your forewarnings forgotten.”

Lucrezia frowned. “You can see the future?”

“Not yet. I think I might be able to eventually, through my control over sound. Just as I can drag the past back to me, I feel I may one day hear the future. It’s just a theory. I’ve not succeeded yet.” There was a soft sucking sound, and her tears were reabsorbed into her skin, leaving it perfect once more. “But I know history. I know how things repeat. I’ve been looking, seeking a way to break the vengeful cycle that so often begins with splintering factions… and I have nothing. All of my power, all of my knowledge, and it avails me nothing! It avails me nothing now, when it matters most. I went to Pedro and asked him if this was the right thing to do, but he didn’t even answer. Does that mean something?” She was not crying anymore, but her voices were out of sync, and full of fear.

“I don’t know.” Lucrezia ran a hand through her own hair. “I’m just your trophy wife. You’re the brains.”

Chang managed the ghost of a smile. “Do not sell yourself short. Not to me. Especially not now, when you have played with me and all and sundry like assorted toys in your box.”

Lucrezia rolled her shoulders back, thrusting out her breasts with pride. She smacked herself on the arse. “What can I say? I’m amazing.”

Chang nodded.

Lucrezia sat before her again, looking up at Chang, suddenly nostalgic. The series of events which brought them together – Chang the brilliant, visionary artist and Lucrezia the vain, beautiful puppeteer – and they seemed impossible. Something from a storybook, where the princess finds her perfect love and her whole world explodes. You made me someone worth being, Chang, she thought. She said, “You make me feel ugly sometimes, you know.”

“That seems a stupid thing to feel, given the evidence of your eyes.” Chang regarded her. “But you are not lying. Why would you feel such a thing?”

“Because you love me,” Lucrezia said. “I’ve just betrayed you, flat out betrayed you. I can think of maybe three Terats who wouldn’t want to skin me alive in your position.”

Chang looked away. She shrugged. “I know something they do not.”

“What?”

“What ‘love’ actually is,” she replied, turning to look on Lucrezia again. All traces of fury and grief were gone from her gaze. It was lust and love there now, intermingled and united. “I love you, Lucrezia. Not the mundane ‘love’ that most baselines refer to, where what they love is a surface impression formed by an image put forth to maximize mating potential. I love you truly, and I love everything you are. It’s easy to die for somebody that you love, but I wonder how many people love someone enough to betray them for their benefit, and risk the sacrifice of everything they had gained from their lover. Not many, I think. I understand why you did this thing and… you may not be wrong. But even if you were, I could not do anything but love you. That is, unless you were willing to let me be angry.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I have a submissive streak in me, Lucrezia. You have always been the dominant one. If you want forgiveness… take it. My body cannot resist you. And my mind,” she smiled, and kissed her softly on the shoulder, “my mind will always forgive you, instantly and forever. Perhaps one day you will undo me, perhaps you will prove to be my Apostle. But I will love you even as you kill me.”

A spasm went through Lucrezia’s entire being at that idea. Being anything like Marcel DeLormier was a horror too great to conceive of.

“But not yet,” Chang said, caressing her hair. “Not yet.”

She felt it, then, as her body swelled and new duplicates formed from her, and her mind grew temporarily. The sheath of chrysalis pieced together in her mind, so close to completion, so near and so perfect. She bore Chang to the bed, four, five, six and then seven of her, crawling on and over her beloved, touching, kissing, commanding her to change and warp to her desires. She rolled her bare back and clambered free of her flesh, splitting and separating.

This is us, she realized, as if seeing it for the first time. This is me. Lesser beings begged for forgiveness. If she wanted it… she took it.

That night was the first time Lucrezia ever took forgiveness from her wife, the first time she ever dared try to take anything. It would not be the last, either. She made an occasion of this taking, of this grand understanding of herself of their relationship.

Lucrezia kept Chang all to herself for four days.

[Quantum Fire]

End of Thread..

XP: 4 Standard, 2 Baseline, 4 Nova

Major Plot advancement and roleplaying