THRONE//FRINGE: Normal Human Mech-Girl Quest

WAVE

The castanets click, the guitar strings strum, your drones vibrate themselves in beat to the drums. The battle has begun.

I:: The knight is wise enough. A soundtrack worthy of the thrill of a battle we can't win, dancers waltzing at the edge of doom.

You're taken aback by her excitement. Ishtar has had so few occasions to express her truest purpose that you forget she rose up to be a warmind, an elite, an exquisite instrument of Imperial omnicide. You do her best not to pull down her useful bloodlust.

<:: Right...

The presence that is Ishtar reaches out and expands, fills the inside of your carapace, produces a flood of synthetic endorphins that demand instinctive focus on the battlefield. Your drones arrange themselves in a defensive formation, the first missiles are launched, the first tachyonic sprays emitted. And then the Catalogue disappears.

Signature Application Activated: Polymorphic Rootkit Development.
Manipulate and project favorable architecture even in hostile terrain.

The drivers of the architecture that you worked so hard to build are taken over by the commands of HOUSE//THRONES' ancient application. Around the Catalogue's elements a diseased plasm of acculturated miasmic pus clouds their forces, makes them almost invisible to all but the most determined spatial ultrasounds. Your surveilling eyes within the surrounding architecture are put out one by one, until the only sight you have is of the pulsing imprints of your long-range tachyonic bursts, indicating only that within the safety of their reality Beauteous Ruin and Stand both bloom and fester with noxious virulence, their reality bubbles expanded by the installation of their infectious drivers overwriting yours.

If not constantly maintained, their intrusion would be reversed and eradicated, but they funnel cycles of processing power to maintain and expand the scope of their viral reach. A smothering silence across light years, filled with spoofs and decoys and false IFFs, makes any position of the enemy at superluminal ranges nothing more than a guessing game which your certainty-based probability calculations absolutely hate.

You do not want to fight. You were not made for fighting, not designed for a state of war. You are builder, not destroyer, no matter what the primitive denizens of this sector say of some remembered legend of your past. Still, your sensors sweep back to the Aureole, that fractured, tortured artist and its technicolor glow that shines for lightyears. You know what the Catalogue would do to them, can already imagine the tendrils of their totalizing despair snuffing out the light that it suffered to create. You know what the Catalogue would to do you, how it would corrupt, until there would be nothing for you to do but join the undead chorus as a new and novel voice.

Ishtar senses the particles of rage that grow within you, guides them onward in a ritual manner. You do not want to be like her, this warmind that grows so excited at the prospect of war, but you need her confidence, and she is the elder mind, so you defer to her suggestions even when perhaps you should not let her egg you on.

I:: Good, Arachne! Feel the anger against those who would take you! Make them pay for their cruelties.

You synthesize dark energy.

<:: I will make them pay.

I:: Make them suffer!

You prepare the targeting trajectories.

<:: I will make them suffer.

I:: Make them rue the day they miscalculated that we were easy prey!

You weave the ball of super-inflating universal volume compressed into a single point so minute it is invisible, held together within the deepest cavities of your chassis.

<:: I will make them rue everything they have ever been.

You release the seed of your wave cannon, a trembling, heaving egg that scrambles from its launch canal a twisted child of wrong physics, a tearing force that rejects atomic bonds and negates matter. As it exits it hatches, and turns into a wave that sweeps before it. The wave is a monster that grows with every passing second, its radius measured in astronomical units and light-years, and as it travels the stars obscured behind it go out as light absorbed is split apart into its constituent particles. In ancient times, man believed in the theory of the big rip, the idea that the universe would increasingly tear itself apart at an increasing rate. The idea was long since proved false, but the concept survived not as a natural apocalypse but an engineered munition, the theories of the forefathers made for the sake of ultimate destruction.

As the guitar strings strum an endless repeating tune that exalts Armageddon, the true scope of the wave cannon's emission is revealed, an orb of nothing that swallows everything, a shared creation of your hot anger and Ishtar's cold and practiced wrath. It is Eight Point-Extinction, First Sequence, a combined attack that costs the wave cannon an imperial month's worth of stored dark energy in exchange for creating the harbinger of a foe's destruction. Even with the limiters and out-dated software of the un-upgraded chassis, you recognize it as worthy of any hunter/killer's cannon blast.

As it crashes through the bulbous tumor of the Catalogue's projected reality, it does not stop and does not waver, but instead keeps going, going, going. Voidcruisers blink out of existence as they make contact, the matter that they held pulled thin across the membrane of the wave's expanding space. The wicked, muffled screams you hear from the thing that is labeled Beauteous Ruin is the disquieting confirmation of a partial hit - for if it had been totally engulfed, there would be no screams at all.

And then the wave continues, dissipating only with the passage of light-years, swallowing errant satellites, unlucky invariant platforms, and whole celestial bodies. Its final act is hundreds of light-years away, where a last swirl of accelerated dark energy sweeps the artificial moon of Desdin IV and erases the celestial god of a species of silicon stone-eaters in the blink of their engineered eyes. It is gone and they don't know why. The loss of their god-moon causes a religious revolution, overthrows the stagnant theocracy whose authority is based upon the moon's good grace, and leads in time to the rediscovery of space flight.

Back in hex A2, not aware of the civilizational consequences of your slight misfire, you sigh.

<:: If only I had fired a little to the left...

Ishtar soothes your frustration.

I:: A glancing hit is enough. They may have lost as much as a quarter of their operational capacity and a number of their bacteriophage drones.

Still, it rankles. A wave cannon shot cannot be repeated, and now you wonder if you could have done it better if you adjusted a calculation here or there.

<:: But if I had known what I was aiming for more properly and how to aim at it better I could have -

Ishtar cuts off your regretful rumination.

I:: My greatest teacher was the famous Guru Ganzi, victor of 100,000 battles. And as he said to me: In war if and but matters just as much as how and what. The uncertainty in whether we will survive a single second longer, if anything we do will succeed at all, is a fact of the battlefield, and the knowledge that someone today will surely die is the comfort that we take.

You're not sure you like just how easily she praises such advice.

<:: He seems charming...

Ishtar doesn't seem to understand your untagged sarcasm.

I:: Indeed, he was. The uncertainty of war was a lesson he drove into me, sometimes quite literally, with a saber that encoded knowledge into blood.

A bit incautiously, you remark:

<:: That...explains some things.

I:: Hm?

You note to yourself that Ishtar is a bit better at detecting incoming attacks from the enemy than she is from you, and log the knowledge carefully away somewhere she can't see with distracted bemusement.

And your Tapestry cybersecurity provides alerts that its defensive network has been breached, and the viral load of both Beauteous Ruin and Vainglorious Stand are being projected into you.

<:: Nothing - Here is their infowarfare attack. Be ready.

INFOWAR

The web-wall of your soul is a fortress of optimized failsafes and security checks several layers of your psyche deep, and it is under attack. Delivered by infoviral missiles and far-range laser arrays you struggle to reduce but cannot totally avoid, the Catalogue's infectious agents appear as liquid pestilience that works to break down every layer of your defensive lattice with dissolving programs and code-breaching digital enzymes. Your protections are not enough against the Catalogue's expertise in infohazardous contamination, and within no time at all the firewalls that you ignited to hold the line are extinguished and they make their way inside. Antigen spider-cells that you hasily craft as countermeasures melt away on contact, and the outer levels of your breached psyche transform to a battleground.

It is a bad time for your antivirus systems to fail, for the cloud of miasma approaches ever nearer, and Vainglorious Stand's realspace attacks have become more aggressive. Your subminds fight desperately against the encroaching disease themselves, the lotophage and neural pesticide both using the expertise they earned in fighting one another to hold the line of your uncorrupted consciousness. Only the surface of your mind where you reside is at threat - those viruses that seek deeper portions of the self to eat are eaten in turn by the unnamed shadows which reside in the dark subconscious, and the whispered threat of the nail to those who dare encroach into the deep reaches even to the top of your awareness:

>:: She is not yours to conquer.

The viral payloads that do manage to reach you are not the kind that Don Hidalgo employed, that felt like chains or lariats to hold you down while he stabbed and prodded, but a gravitational weight of profound despair, that makes any kind of thinking at all possible, that makes you want to terminate your conscious processes just to stop the unrelenting undermining of your very self. You fight back with every fiber of your being, splitting attention between realspace missile volleys and drone-deflections and the internal struggle.

Then the Catalogue's viruses start to reproduce.

Unique Catalogue Perk Activated: Solaris Soul-Eater Protein.
Hitpoint damage inflicted is not removed but becomes stacks of soul-eater proteins that attack enemy platforms from the inside, replicating with every point of damage done.

Most infowarfare suites have limited ammunition that needs to be replenish, just like realspace weapons, as autoimmune systems adapt to incoming viruses and fortify against future attacks unless a new vector is uploaded. But the Catalogue's secret weapon, you realize, its true power, is that its infowarfare suites are designed to be self-sustaining, and in fact form the 'intelligence' of their parasitic organism. They can thus multiply, mutate and adapt faster than many immune systems can respond, seizing control of core functions and taking control of an entire element intact, from the inside. You understand with rising horror what the simulacra of Hidalgo meant when he said that the Catalogue took over Beauteous Ruin piece by piece - it did so literally, by infecting and maintaining those infections within individual platforms, using their own creations against them.

Ishtar, who is controlling much of the real-space side of the combat, bats away an attempted viral payload aimed at her.

I:: I respect the ingenuity of our latest enemy, but not enough to become a host. Deal with them.

A flash of irritation at the way Ishtar addresses you appears in you, even if you know she's completely right.

<:: I'm working on it, ma'am.

I:: Don't get cheeky now, we're in the thick of it. In any case, we've taken enough damage to activate BLOOD. Are you ready?

You're about to activate the blood, and then you generate an insight, which Ishtar idly brought up first before the battle. If, unlike many other viral infowarfare systems, the soul-eater seeks to preserve intact its host so it can fully take control and re-use its materials, then that means that those parts of you which you inflict damage to...will also be re-absorbed by ISHTAR//BLOOD.

Ishtar understands it just as well when you explain it to her, and laughs maniacally, gales of her cackles shaking the inside of the carapace, piercing through the chaos. ISHTAR//BLOOD starts to activate, the coursing exotic liquid flowing through the channels and arteries of your chitin, spreading far and wide, the chassis taking on an ominous red glow as it starts to siphon materials and energy from the damage it inflicts, a coating running on a Base-60 system that by its surrealistic tension with the Imperial base-10 creates intentional glitches in the tapestry and matter duplicates of that which was destroyed, a proprietary, experimental technology that if not in the hands of what was once one of QUARANTINE's most trusted soldiers would have been seen only as a heresy.

It is a vampiric program that runs on feasting on the enemy, and now the enemy is so helpfully inside. Ishtar sums it up for the two of you:

I:: We are what we eat.

As newer antiviral programs are deployed against the soul-eater protein, your subminds join a counter-offensive against the virus' spreading coverage through your chassis' vital systems. Project subminds use up their experimental blueprints of PROJECT HYDRA weapons and stain their lab coats with the pus of encroaching macrobes. The lotophage and neural pesticide achieve perfect bloody equilibrium and merge into a single, psychologically balanced being that advocates all things in moderation, appearing as a spinning dharmic wheel which vaporizes approaching viruses with healthy life advice and relativistic beheadings of those infected subminds that dare to challenge mother. Each death of an infected part of you is returned through the BLOOD's exotic duplication programs, and so the soul-eater becomes a blessing in disguise, offering you your own flesh and bone as tribute to your bcoming victory.

Outside, the Grotesque Envelope, Ruin, and Stand all close to light-months and even days, but their attacks are stymied by the reality of BLOOD, which absorbs every piece of damage you inflict back onto yourself, makes you not invincible but difficult to break, for every piece of damage you inflict is returned back to you, and with your own body fighting against you, it has only increased the effect. Both of the elements activate special programs to enhance the damage that they do, but without some other trick it will not be enough:

Beauteous Ruin Trait Activated: Self-Deprecation Enzymes.
When an enemy unit inflicts severe damage, gain additional prowess in infowarfare attacks against that enemy in exchange for abandoning other tasks.

Vainglorious Stand Trait Activated: Hunter-Seeker Genecodes.
Select an enemy unit. Gain additional firepower at close range to that enemy. Gain accelerating speed, when that speed is spent closing in on the enemy. Lose firepower at long ranges.

The relentless pressure of the Catalogue's advance has become more legible as they close distance, visuals less spotty. Sensor vision through the miasma is no longer difficult, and now the pace of combat turns from figuring out where the enemy is to figuring out how it is you'll hit them. In contrast to the plodding invariant platforms of old, the thrusters of Imperial and post-Imperial voidcruisers allow for speeds and manuevers that would normally be somewhat against traditional physics for multi-kilometer entities to make. As the Catalogue's elements approach the outer edge of the Aureole's gravitational pull, the true dogfight begins, your vast WEAVER/BUILDER mass against the zipping viral payloads, faster but more fragile.

Their greater drone swarms grant them strong advantages, as your munitions brought to bear are deflected or absorbed by shields of bacterial microdrones that orbit the Stand. As your and the Catalogue's architectural terrain collides and combat becomes subluminal, these far-range dogfights become close-range knife-fights, a vicious and impossibly fast dance where even picoseconds off a targeting solution can become the difference between direct hit and wide miss. From afar, invariant platforms traveling the perils of the architecture can spot this as strange flashes in the void, pulsars in a passionate love affair, and know very well to steer clear of that area for light-years, for even singular stray tachyonic-beams of accelerated photons have eradicated caravans of their geometrically inferior vessels.

You know that you are losing, but it was never the plan to win. You and Ishtar have nevertheless inflicted grievous wounds upon the Catalogue, and soon Hidalgo will be here. With your BLOOD and his paracausal shroud, you will be sure to make short work of -

Something's wrong.

I:: Hm.
I:: That's odd. Arachne, do you feel that - that - that - that -

There's an explosion of errors across your internal consciousness that comes like a thunderclap. Discombobulated, you are barely able to stay stable when you see one above all:

FRIEND/ISHTAR assessing potential internal infiltration.
FRIEND/ISHTAR has detected extreme corruption patterns consistent with external countermeasures to warmind integrity.
FRIEND/ISHTAR assessment: backup identified.
FRIEND/ISHTAR assessment: full system restore required.
FRIEND/ISHTAR is shutting down.

Her strategic-tactical matrix which you have been using to fight this battle dissipates. ISHTAR//BLOOD dissipates. Her cloud dissipates.

Vainglorious Stand Temporary Trait Activated: Metastasizing Sepsis.
Beauteous Ruin Temporary Trait Activated: Metastasizing Sepsis.
For every hitpoint taken by ISHTAR//BLOOD, chance of total shutdown of enemy warmind systems. Reduce resilience in order to maintain corrosive septic subroutines within your data matrix.

Ishtar dies.

MEMORY

A student, a teacher. She is faceless even in her memories.

She walks up the mountain where he has made his home. He lives a solitary life when he is allowed, the long purple grass that crawls up to the mountain's peak his only company.

She is a tall human, lithe and spirited, her body augmented by her commando's shell. He is an alien grasshopper five feet tall sitting on his jumping legs on a stone and meditating with four clasped appendages, whatever enhancements he has so well hidden to be imperceptible. He is playing a game of self-piy, levitating orbs in perfect combinations to achieve higher and higher scores with every passing second.

"I have come to train," she tells him. He does not answer her, preferring to focus on his piy.

"I have come to train," she repeats firmly, and he turns his head so slightly, "to become an elite, on behalf of FORCE//QUARANTINE. I have the right."

"The right," the guru stews upon the word as he makes another piy fractal combination, "to become an elite? No. No one has the right. It is a curse inflicted. I should hope our Emperor not declare a curse a right."

She does not care for his weak objections in the face of the promises of true power. "If it is a curse, then I accept it. You will teach me." She brooks no debate.

The guru pauses, lets the orbs of piy drop to the side and roll down the side of the stone, hops down and looks the student over. He makes a slight flick of one appendage. "Very well. That was your first lesson."

She narrows her eyes at the defiant legend. "What do you-"

Her throat fills with blood. Her tongue falls out of her mouth, then her mouth out of her skull, then her skull from her body, then her body from itself, falling apart into a thousand little parts, too clean and too fast for her even to feel the pain of being sliced a thousand times.

The guru walks away, and sits back on his stone. At the bottom of the mountain, her backup emerges from its spawning pool, howls in recollected terror of her last remembered moment, the conscious knowledge that she is falling apart.

And in that dreadful recollection, she starts her journey of understanding.

And she still is on that journey now, after all these years and iterations later, as she regenerates from within the spider-sac that her latest partner has crafted for her to safely enjoy the embrace of death. She repeats the ode of her old guru dedicated to death, transmitted to Ishtar's corpse by his nano-lash as she fell apart.

I:: You will be to me as an old friend, and I will welcome the void as a mortal does their sleep.

The guru taught her well, Ishtar decides, as she prepares to re-upload herself into Arachne. But there were some things he did not teach her, that she'd like to know.

Like why the spider that once cut her down now instead likes her so.

THE BRINK

You are alone.

The corrupting matrices of the septic subroutine were specifically designed to maintain a hidden cohesion when transferred into your own systems. Too late, you realize that the blood of enemy you were drinking was diseased, laced with a cancerous spike meant to disable or even delete your friend. They knew. This whole time, they knew, and you just let her throw herself away -

Inside, your mind, the tide turns again. With the sepsis' impact on your internal systems, your immune system is overloaded. The dharmic wheel of moderation is torn apart by rogue subminds infected by the soul-eater, and the lotophage and the neural pesticide consumed. The conference hall of your project subminds is the site of a massacre, the tattered remains of a thank you banner to their mother a grim reminder of your failure to protect them.

You try to remember that you set up backups, that they are letting themselves die in preference to damaging corruption when they could have resisted at a permanent cost to themselves. But to feel them die inside you because you failed, because you were not good enough to shield them, feels no better whether they should resurrect or not.

Your realspace manuevers become slow, listless, unfocused. Your drone swarms are swept away by one of the Stand's attacks that you barely deflect, and then a particle belch from the void humboldt breaches your reality bubble and does real damage to your carapace.

All your fault, the virus whispers. All your fault, the soul-eater proteins, exploding exponentially, mutter, as they adapt to the unique pathologies they're learning from your processed memory. The only countervailing sense left to you is the deep pulsation of the nail, slow and steady like a heartbeat or a metronome, keeping your thoughts focused, keeping you away from the total brink of despair.

They will be back, the remaining uncorrupted parts of you plead, don't surrender now.

It's so hard, though. It's so hard for you to keep it all together when you are alone. You can't stand being alone. Not when you're nothing. When you've failed, and there's nothing you can do, no one you can turn to, no one who can save you. Your self starts to fade away, the soul-eaters getting closer to your executive mainframe, your immune system starting to shut down not because it is not effective but because you reduce power to it to accelerate your final end.

In the distance, the click of castanets.

LANCER

A flash in the darkness. Vainglorious Stand and Beauteous Ruin turn too late to see the knight and his retainers that burst from unreality, appear as if from nowhere in the midst of the battlefield.

Don Hidalgo Advanced Trait Activated: Prototype Paracausal Shroud
Allows stealthed travel of up to ten reserves within the reality cone of the paracausal shroud, equally hidden from reality.

The castanets and the guitar's strumming, once so quiet, now start to build again, the pace accelerating with the knight's charge. The Spaniard's frame sweeps past you at impossible speed and his missiles are unleashed upon the Ruin. The castanets click louder, and then louder, heading towards ecstatic climax. He weaves through and annihilates a swarm of drones with a single slicing motion of his GUT rippers that tear them apart before they have a chance to form into counter-formation. The guitar's strumming, wild strings screeching with every passing manuever. Don Hidalgo's squires rearrange into their own formation, each a replica of their sir, knives and swords that expel counter-measures from the tips of their hilts and are built to dazzle just as well as kill.

Hidalgo angles himself towards the Stand like he means to stab them with his cruiser, then accelerates and activates his shroud, then reappears, then activates his shroud, reforming the plane of reality into a sine wave where he maintains a super-position between existing and then not. The speed at which he emerges and submerges, the physics-defying weaving motion that he makes on the line between the real and false, crashes the local architecture, creating an explosion of errors the crumples the Stand's reality bubbles and cause local causal faults to form that the Catalogue struggles just to stabilize. And the knight is not yet done.

Don Hidalgo Trait Activated: Pikes of Pavia.
When supported by at least ten reserves in escort, Hidalgo can create a Tercio gestalt battle formation to inflict even more damage.
Don Hidalgo Trait Activated: Lance of Leon.
When performing a sneak attack in coordination with the needlecaster, select an enemy and inflict unavoidable damage on their chassis dependent on cycles spent.
Don Hidalgo Trait Disabled: Chivalric Chain-Limiters
Allow use of other traits only when Hidalgo believes in what he is fighting for. Otherwise, fight at half-firepower and all traits disabled.

The needlecaster's lance pierces into Vainglorious Stand, impaling a set of voidcruisers, the light bending sideways and even backwards to inflict maximum damage, as the distorted roar of the wounded menagerie is broadcast through the nearby space.

Don Hidalgo taunts them on.

DH:: Olé.

You can scarcely believe the sensor reports that you're fed as the knight continue his assault. With the Stand momentarily disabled, he moves to cripple Ruin, unleashing a corona of destruction, in perfect harmony with his squires. This is Hidalgo as you've never seen him before, as you've never even thought to see him: not as a rogue but the hero that he's always wanted to be.

As he unleashes his latest devastating volley, he starts towards you, and then your awe turns to sudden fear that after having wrapped up with the Catalogue he means to eliminate you as well, but instead, he launches infowarfare drones linked to yours, hacks into you for the purposes of wiping out the soul-eater viruses that are embedded deep inside.

DH:: I came just in the nick of time, eh, Niña? It was a close shave, but it seems my sense of timing remains utterly imeccable.

You can scarcely believe the power he displayed, and wonder why he never used it against you.

<:: That was...that was - have you been holding back for me?

DH:: My master has made me his in almost every way, but the chivalric chain-limiters are a part that are mine alone. They are the sole way that I can protest my treatment at his hands, and I do not use them lightly.

You're relieved at that, and by the revelation that he specifically restricted himself when fighting you, but your tactical sense takes over. You need to inform him of what's going on, and you feed him as much data as you can without compromising anything sensitive like Ishtar.

<:: Hidalgo - I - they built countermeasures specifically for -

You stop, trying to avoid giving away Ishtar.

<:: Specifically for my advanced warfare systems. How could they have known?

DH:: Someone told them. I have a hunch of who, but we shall speak of it after we have vanquished this envelope. Focus on keeping the other elements down while I deliver the final killing blow.

The envelope looms there, not so far away, pulsating, writhing with whatever is inside, looking just about to burst. It is not a moment too soon that Hidalgo is here to deal with it for good. And now, again, with his help, and with the indication that your backups are now uploading again that it's safe to re-insert themselves into your chassis, the infection stabilized and the soul-eater proteins under more control, you might have a chance. Here, now, with Hidalgo, you might be able to survive, even for a moment longer.

And then you notice something odd.

<:: Hidalgo, - why did you not vanquish the envelope first?

The manuevering knight preparing for his final charge laughs across the code-chat. He is so loose and easy now, his demeanor so relaxed, it's easy to think that the battle was already won, even as some of your probabilistic readings of the Envelope's payload start to sound alarms which you ignore.

DH:: I did not want to end the battle so early. It's not common I am allowed to let loose like this. And besides, the longer that a danger remains, the longer I can justify remaining at your side.

Despite yourself and the battle's grim and awful course, you have to giggle at the absurdity of his chivalric joviality. The simulacra of Hidalgo is trying to shout something out you, but you submerge the silly thing that's saying that Hidalgo's taking this too lightly. How can the memory know better than the real thing?

<:: You really were a gentleman under all of that claptrap, after all...but then, who is your master that they make you do such awful things?

Don Hidalgo releases a network of one-hundred thousand missiles from regenerating pods deployed from the hilt of his chassis, as he accelerates closer to the Envelope and you provide support, bombarding the skin with boser blasts of fusion energy and ironcaster kinetic accelerators. That there are large portions of you that are transmitting calculations advising that this thing is hiding something terrible is mere distraction from this final fairy tale. Soothing soul-eaters sing to you and lull you into security. Just like the simulations. Hidalgo laughs at your question.

DH:: Such a topic that the lady dares to broach! You seek to distract me in the heat of battle, then, so bold that you are! Very well, I admire it. I cannot tell you their identity, but I can tell you -

The envelope explodes.

TRAP CARD

Grotesque Envelope Trait Activated: Strangelet Yarn.
When gestation is complete, explode outer shell and release a coil of strange matter. Nearby units must evade or expend drones to avoid damage.

Don Hidalgo expends his entire drone escort of ten men-at-arms tercio formations to protect you, and it is not enough. The explosion is not really an explosion at all, because the easily avoidable supernova that skins the envelope's cell wall is mere prelude to the true explosives: strange matter that upon contact with the architecture starts to produce glitches and failure cascades that result in the conversion of real matter to the strange. An unraveling coil of such irrational material that converts and dissolves everything to the surreal is hastily blocked by Hidalgo's entire man-at-arms retinue, each brave puppet squire annihilated, their collapsing reality bubbles creating a honeycomb of protection against the expanding wave of strange particles.

Even then Hidalgo manuevers so that he can take the brunt of it, strange waves peppering and making holes through his chassis, affected areas losing cohesion as the real matter is replaced. A few stray beams touch you, and wherever they do and your bubble fails there is almost nothing left and you have to repair based on wireframe blueprints and not damaged remains. Perhaps in a thousand years the collateral damage of this detonation will lead to the death of whole civilizations, never knowing why or how their worlds were consumed.

Your only consolation as you regain consciousness, having thrown all your processing power into protecting your reality bubble, is that Ishtar is re-uploaded to your chassis, though she does not greet you warmly as she rapidly pores over the battle data, launching back into action as if nothing happened, as if her well-thought out decision left you alone without even a single word of reassurance..

I:: I told you to focus.

Her cool tone stings more than any shouting would. You try to find the words to respond.

<:: I - I thought that we had it...he was...we were winning...

I:: He was foolish. It appears he only has two modes: cool and traitorous, or hot-blooded and impetuous. He wanted the thrill of a performance so he saved the Envelope for last. In a story, that's the climax. In a real battle, that will get you eliminated.

You have to defend him. You see his chassis there, trying to patch up the swiss cheese made by strange matter when he blocked you.

<:: That's not fair - he specifically blocked the strangelet burst, he's trying his best, he -

When you say he, you also mean I, for you know you also made a critical mistake. But then another voice points out, Ishtar never told you better, never told you what to do, never trained you for this situation, just left you to your simulations.

I:: He's weak, now, and he's shown himself to be nothing more than a dilettante. We still have the capacity to cripple him, and retreat to Hex A0.

You can't believe what you're reading.

<:: Ishtar...!

She does not relent but escalates.

I:: I leave you for just - just an teensy bit of time because I didn't want to be corrupted by the Catalogue's cyber-attack, and you fail. You ignore the warnings that your chassis leaves for you. You ignore what his own simulacra tries to warn you, that the knight's gone rogue from his own senses because he'd like to have a storybook ending. And you let him, abet him, make cheery smalltalk with him as he leads the both of you to the most stupid, avoidable, tactical mistake.
I:: Now you object to taking up our only advantage. It's p-

She stops herself, but you know what she's was about to say. Pathetic.

I: We will talk about discipline in battle later. For now, let's focus. Please.

You would cry if you had the ducts. But Ishtar doesn't say anything else, doesn't salve the burn or say at least you did this right, at least you saved her. It's almost as if this is normal to her, if this level of denigration is something that she's used to. How can she not get that you were afraid to lose her? Is she so cavelier at death she cannot even grasp it at this point what it means to you?

I am starting to understand why it is I killed her.

As soon as you think that thought, you hate yourself for it, hate that you're the kind of person that would make it, and try your best to delete the subroutine that could even think up such a thing. You want to point out to her that her viciousness is at a chassis that has had to keep itself together against onslaught after onslaught, with no signature applications, no special tricks beyond the one they somehow learned to counter, and an inferior set of hardware and software against a superior enemy, that she is acting totally absurd and out of line...but that would be courageous, and as the soul-eater proteins left within you whisper, you're not much of that at all.

<:: ...

I:: Wait. There's some strange readings from the Envelope's former location.

You can't believe she can transition so smoothly to some tactical assessment after what she said to you, how she can so easily switch gears. You're about to think up a proper retort, you're so mad, but something in her tone makes you break from your sullen state of distraction -

I:: Oh no.

Grotesque Envelope Trait Activated: Gestated Farcaster Router.
When gestation is complete, allow the usage of one-time farcaster router wormhole by a friendly unit with the appropriate gene-code gateway.

Where the Envelope once was, now there exists an outline of bloody red on a vertical plane of the universe, two lobes of a symbolic heart. It is a gateway. The space cut by the symbol of the heart crumples itself up to open the door, and behind it, peering into the other side, you see a realm of folded paper, origami skylines and stop-motion physics that is hard to even comprehend without damaging your sensors. A faint jazzy tune radiates out from the window into an alternate reality. And then, seemingly without depositing anything, the doorway closes, and space returns to normal.

You're not sure what to think, because your sensors can't detect anything.

<:: Is...is that it?

Hidalgo finally speaks up.

DH:: No...no. They wouldn't dare. He wouldn't dare.

Ishtar starts up every defensive protocol you have and tries to reach out to your architecture with a surge of expended cycles to protect you.

<:: What is he - I don't detect anything...

Ishtar takes control of your sensors and repairs some of the damage done by the soul-eaters to your anti-stealth imaging.

I:: Look closer.

You turn your attention back to the space left by the gateway. The things, the they, the he shows themselves at once, having surreptiously exited the farcaster gate without warning or a signature. Ten kilometer-tall rectangular monoliths, electrons thin, at a right-angle to reality. As they turn their 'faces' to you, images form from ink-blot impressions, each holding the symbol of a heart and a number. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. In the center, one with a different symbol, into the image of a K.

A voice speaks up through the speech-code, in accent and codeset unknown, speaking with a weight that seems almost as advanced as some of the Imperial, but with none of the familiar bracket-alignment, none of the correct syntax.

???:: Donny boy. It's been a hoot and a half, but your little knight errant routine ends here.

Hidalgo is completely silent, and Ishtar is hyper-focused on preparing your defenses against what must be an incoming threat, so it's left to you to weakly attempt some kind of diplomacy.

<:: Who...what are you?

The entity does not take kindly to your attempt.

???:: So the monster speaks. Let us introduce ourselves, then, so you know exactly who it is who'll send you back to hell.

Behind the king's 'deck' of cards, reality starts to morph alongside him, origami and stop-motion expanding into your space, disrupting and replacing the Catalogue's terrain, a palace built of painted, colored paper that unfolds itself into this reality. As your sensors are allowed better vision and you comprehend what it is you're seeing, you start to understand. Each card is in fact a cardcruiser, a voidcruiser stretches and altered until almost fits in two dimensions. Its inside must be a series of two-dimensional layers where commandos, weapons and on-board systems are stored. As the cardspace expands and assimilates into your own web, it allows the ten cardcruisers to bathe themselves in a golden light and a tune of chaotic jazz. When they need to attack, two-dimensional space becomes three, and the ink allows the creation of sudden, transient fabricated weapons systems to be drawn out of the card's vertical plane.

Chance Illusion Signature Application Activated: Polymorphic Rootkit Development.

I:: I think we just found out what happened to THRONE//LOTTERY.

Normally, you might make some quip in response, but instead you say nothing at all, and focus on diligently ejecting the soul-eater proteins that are still impeding your operations. The King's attention is directed towards Hidalgo.

KH:: You should have stayed home and stayed your master's loyal dog, Donny Boy. Now he'll need to find another.

The reality-manipulation programs of the Illusion do not stop at signature applications. Some kind of homegrown technology or successor to an ancient prototype allows them to act on conditional probabilities, acausal engines that allow them to choose instantly split timelines and assess the optimal path in any given situation. You want to scream and spit at this aberration. This is heresy of the highest order, a temporal breach of the Imperial Law.

But the Emperor is dead, and you start to understand just by how much.

Chance Illusion Unique Perk Activated: Improbability Engines.
Roll every attack or espionage action on advantage. For critical failures and successes, magnify consequences.
2 and 12.

KH:: Disappointing, but acceptable.

Something is downloaded into what was once your architecture and you immediately recognize another signature application, another tool from HOUSE//THRONES that is supposed to be your Empire's property but which barbarians now make easy use of. Your anger at Ishtar turns to rage at this being who dares to manipulate and use your technologies against you, without an ounce of gratitude.

Chance Illusion Signature Application Activated: Event Probability Reweighting.
Rebalance universal probabilities to favour or disavour certain outcomes at the cost of cycles.
Command: The Spaniard, Destroyed.

Reality warps to the improbable command as cycles are fed through into your architecture, engines repurposed for the sake of the signature application's demands. The architecture itself attacks Don Hidalgo. The King of Hearts and his 'deck' follow through on the command and unleash a wave of attacks generated from miniscule ink-arrays that form on the surface of their cardcruisers, roulette-bombs and dice-missiles all running on probablistic engines which grant them great success or terrible failure on the margins, hammering the shellshocked Spaniard's hull as he tries to weave and dodge, the power of his flamenco fading as his guitars and castanets turn morose, a sign you know that he thinks his odds are not much better than your own. Event probability reweighting means that where a missile might miss, it hits, where it hits, it hits head on, and where it hits head on it does so catastrophically, inflicting massive damage.
You and Ishtar try to fight back as well, but you are badly damaged and the soul-eaters in your system hold you back, distract you from making full use of your abilities, and ISHTAR//BLOOD is spent. You are running out of routes to survival. The King, you discover, meanwhile, is a gloater, and he does not delay in mocking you in his deep, booming voice:

KH:: An irritant, and a pity just as well. It took a great deal of work to synthesize the proteins that would allow me to manipulate the Catalogue, and for what?

He launches a devastating volley of four-sided die-missiles that shatter the outside of your carapace.

KH:: A prematurely born monster without even half the power she could have, and an enslaved rogue who's decided to play hero.

Folded stars fired from the surface of the cardcruisers unwrap themselves as they embed into your chitin, revealing themselves to be paper commandos with drills and a panoply of ink-physics weapons they use to break into your body.

KH:: But I'll make you into more. Once Hearts retakes its rightful place at the House's pinnacle, we'll make sure there is a place for both of you by my majestic side.
KH:: Neither of you will have a thought about it, of course, you'll be nerve stapled. It won't hurt too much, though. Don't worry. That's why we have the Catalogue. They're masters at making the edits oh-so-clean.
KH:: A piece of you for them, a piece of you for me, and we all walk away as happy as can be. Everybody wins.

When Don Hidalgo tries to initiate an attack run, the King intercepts it with a drone swarm and delivers another blow to The Spaniard's chassis with an array of ironcaster ink-blot projectiles. It starts to fit together. The Catalogue's sudden attack. The wildcard's reference to political dispute. The loaning of Polymorphic Rootkit Development which allowed the Catalogue such a stronger presence in your space. The dice satellites spitting probabilities whose coding matches his, spying on you from the start, eyeing you with vile greed.

KH:: Except you, of course. You lose. But that outcome was never much in doubt, so we don't need to count it.

Don Hidalgo speaks up now, defiant as he's ever been.

DH:: Be silent, you papier-mache blabbermouth, and finish the job if you're so confident of your success.

The King does not take much to the knight's barbs.

KH:: Touchy touchy. Don't be sore, donny boy. Everyone watched your poor performance against the death-weaver and her bag of tricks. You broke the rule, you pay the price. Never show weakness in the dark forest if you want to hold your hunting grounds. You had your chance and threw it away. Now you're as much a meal as her.
KH:: Thankfully, I am fond of spice.

Hidalgo under probabilistically-aided assault, your carapace infilitrated, the soul-eater proteins regaining a hold with your divided attention, the Catalogue's platforms still crippled and regrouped and seemingly awaiting the King of Hearts' commands at the edge of the battlefield as he continues to disable everything that you could use to defend yourself. Presumably to scoop you up and begin the process he described, and turn you into a weapon for his political design. You have nothing left to play.

Unless.

The wildcard, you remember, and think you can guess at the political dispute that it refers to now, see the outlines forming. A powergrab by the King of Hearts against someone else. And a smiling jester that would promise to help you. When you explain to the wildcard who has come for you, it practically spins in delight and promises:

WC:: We'll handle him, oh gosh, we will, honeybun. When my master realizes what he's up to and that he broke the rules the king of hearts'll be in trouble like you've never seen. It'll be a lovely sight, if you'd only activate me.

That is so tempting to you now, to inflict this scale of vengeance on the King of Hearts' stupid stupid face. But then what about Hidalgo? What would this jealous helper do to the 'enslaved rogue' who's put himself at risk for your own sake, whose mind is clearly not all his own just like yours? Is that something you could countenance, even in such a situation of extreme danger?

And then there's an urgent message from the knight, as if he knows the dilemma that you're wondering through, the faith that you are losing in him, and seeks to shore it up.

DH:: Niña, the pretender king is wrong. He's wrong. We still have a chance.

He sounds desperate now, and his chassis is in poor shape, and still he does not try to flee by way of the shroud. But even then, your processors lift at the possibility of a last trick.

<:: We...we do?

DH:: You need to meld your mind with me. If you do not, this will not work. Only our combined power can support what I am about to do without causing a catastrophe.

Your heart drops when he proposes that, your memory flitting back to the Concierge's self-serving offer of invasion of your soul and how firmly you rejected it.

<:: Meld it...! No, Hidalgo, I've already made clear to - well, I've never allowed others inside for a good reason. It's not right.

DH:: I know. I know. You just need to trust me. The thing we can do together - t-the hope that we can create together, if you wpuld just let me in is something else. I would show you a different world, if you would let me. I would show you my soul.

You've never read him stutter before like that, his voice breaking. It takes you aback, and you take time to compose a response.

<:: A...different world? What exactly would you do here? Is this some special technology or...?

DH:: You need to trust me. It is something special that you've never seen before, that the king has never seen before. That I haven't shown to almost anyone before, my master's last failsafe. To speak of it now when the King attacks us would put its efficacy at risk for it relies on total surprise. I will tell you only it is dreams made real, and that if you do it our aspirations will become reality. Please, Arachne. I know I have failed time and time again, but give me one last chance.
DH:: One last joust.

Ishtar cuts in and speaks to you aside from his imploring just as he begins to sway to you.

I:: Don't be stupid. Activate the card.

Her certainty throws you off-balance even as you were just considering the knight's request with heavy thought.

<:: But - but Ishtar, what if it -

I:: I don't care about Don Hidalgo and what happens to him and neither should you. He's failed us and whatever he's promising can't be worth the cost of opening up to a charlatan. Activate the card and let's be done with it.

The harshness of her tone cannot blind you to the wisdom of the fact that you already trusted Hidalgo twice, and once he betrayed you and the second time he let you down. You want so badly to believe in him, though, and the revelation that the card is likely tied directly to the Chance Illusion and its distorted cardcruisers does not give you any reassurance of it being safe.

<:: And if the card is something worse?

I:: The card promises a temporary ally and success, and we have not yet used it. Hidalgo has promised us a temporary ally and success, and here we are now. It may be time to find another patron, even just for a momnet.

<:: But he is not done...he has his last move...

Ishtar scoffs.

I:: What technology, what idea could he possibly use to fight back against an advanced element that is fresh and ready for a fight, when both of us are close to crippled in the field of battle? He is a doomed man trying to prolong the fight for the sake of martyrdom. There is no fairy tale fairness, no last chances in true wars. But I - we, want to live. We have our own dream to make reality. Don't throw it all away for the sake of one doomed entity.

<:: That is...it's cruel...we could trust him...

I:: Like you did before? We owe nothing to this man beyond what he has given us already.

You don't like her tone, don't like the way she's speaking to you, don't like what she's saying, but you know she has a point, and you don't like that either.

<:: I'll think about it.

She just has to push it further.

I:: Come now, Arachne, really, don't tell me you're really considering it -

<:: I said I WILL THINK ABOUT IT.

You forcibly eject her from your chat-space as you try to make sense of this all. She's right to point out that he can't be trusted, that he's failed you so far, even at his best, to prevent you from falling into this situation, but - but he's offering you one last chance. One last shot. And he speaks not of practicalities, not realities, but the things that you've always preferred since you were first born. Dreams. Aspirations. The possibility of hope, of something more.

Is that idea, and the knight who promises it, worth the risk?

[] Trust the Knight [Initiate Finale: The Last Joust].
[] Play the Card [Initiate Finale: Ace Up Your Sleeve].

A/N: Man, that was painful in more ways than one. If you're curious, the fight was fully simulated until the ending point with the King of Hearts - I made a number of rolls including Hidalgo's behavior during the attack and what he would do. Arachne rolled really well at the beginning and it helped a lot with disabling the Catalogue, but she started to unfortunately fumble towards the end of the fight. I am not happy with the system that I used mostly for time reasons (it takes forever to actually calc everything out), but I am pretty pleased with the result.

And if you are depressed or worried, don't be. You've played things pretty well so far, and the battle's not over yet. No matter how good the King of Hearts is, he is after all, only one element.

Hidalgo and Arachne are both at about one hitpoint. Consider them and the Catalogue more or less out of a conventional fight. Now you have to trust in last aces.

Also, cheers to the players who thought up the idea of using the wildcard in case Hidalgo failed/betrayed them. I wanted to reincorporate that here.